On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. From a report: Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company's mission isn't to build just any AI -- its mission is to build AI that's open source and "trustworthy," according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the head of Mozilla.ai. "Working on trustworthy AI for almost five years, I've constantly felt a mix of excitement and anxiety," he told TechCrunch in an email interview. "The last month or two of rapid-fire big tech AI announcements has been no different. Really exciting new tech is emerging -- new tools that have immediately sparked artists, founders ... all kinds of people to do new things. The anxiety comes when you realize almost no one is looking at the guardrails."

Surman was referring to the rash of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have worrisome real-world implications. At release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be prompted to write malware, identify exploits in open source code and create phishing websites that looked similar to well-trafficked sites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, has been co-opted to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes and ultra-graphic depictions of violence. The creators of these models say that they're taking steps to curb abuse. But Mozilla felt that not enough was being done. "We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, hoping other industry players with more AI expertise would step up to build more trustworthy tech," Surman said. "They haven't. So we decided mid-last year we needed to do it ourselves -- and to find like-minded partners to do it alongside us. We then set out to find someone with the right mix of academic and industry AI experience to lead it." Funded by a $30 million seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla.ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation -- much like the Mozilla Corporation (the org responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's VC fund). Its managing director is Moez Draief, who previously was the chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and the global chief scientist at consulting company Capgemini.

In the 1970s, Bob Metcalfe helped develop the primary technology that lets you send email or connect with a printer over an office network. From a report: In June 1972, Bob Metcalfe, a 26-year-old engineer fresh out of graduate school, joined a new research lab in Palo Alto, Calif., as it set out to build something that few people could even imagine: a personal computer. After another engineer gave up the job, Dr. Metcalfe was asked to build a technology that could connect the desktop machines across an office and send information between them. The result was Ethernet, a computer networking technology that would one day become an industry standard. For decades, it has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe.

For his work on Ethernet, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced on Wednesday that Dr. Metcalfe, 76, would receive this year's Turing Award. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. When Dr. Metcalfe arrived at the Palo Alto Research Center -- a division of Xerox nicknamed PARC -- the first thing he did was connect the lab to the Arpanet, the wide-area network that later morphed into the modern internet. The Arpanet transmitted information among about 20 academic and corporate labs across the country. But as PARC researchers designed their personal computer, called the Alto, they realized they needed a network technology that could connect personal computers and other devices within an office, not over long distances. Further reading: Ethernet Creator Makes the Inventors Hall of Fame (2007).

Google defended its use of "history-off chats" for many internal communications, denying the US government's allegation that it intentionally destroyed evidence needed in an antitrust case. The history-off setting causes messages to be automatically deleted within 24 hours. Ars Technica reports: The US government and 21 states last month asked a court to sanction Google for allegedly using the auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence and accused Google of falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices on chats subject to a legal hold. Google opposed the motion for sanctions on Friday in a filing (PDF) in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Google said it uses a "tiered approach" for preserving chats. "When there is litigation, Google instructs employees on legal hold not to use messaging apps like Google Chat to discuss the subjects at issue in the litigation and, if they must, to switch their settings to 'history on' for chats regarding the subjects at issue in the litigation, so that any such messages are preserved," the Google filing said.

Google said the government plaintiffs "contend that the Federal Rules specifically mandate that Google should have applied a forced history on setting for all custodians for all chats created while the custodian was on legal hold, regardless of the possible relevance of the message to the litigation." But federal rules only require "reasonable steps to preserve" information, Google pointed out. "Google's vast preservation efforts here -- and specifically its methodology with respect to history-off chats -- were 'reasonable steps' under the Rule," Google argued. Google said the US and state attorneys general "have not been denied access to material information needed to prosecute these cases and they have offered no evidence that Google intentionally destroyed such evidence." Google also argued that the objections came too late, alleging that the government knew before litigation began "that there was a subset of chats not automatically retained." "Plaintiffs' motions are barred at the outset because they were on notice of Google's approach to chats for years, yet did not object until well after the close of discovery. Those tactics should not be countenanced," Google told the court.

Google said its November 2019 disclosures in an ESI (Electronically Stored Information) questionnaire "show that the distinction between 'on-the-record' and other chats was apparent to anyone who wanted to pursue the matter from the outset of DOJ's investigation. For instance, the ESI Questionnaire response specifies that chat 'messages are generally retained for a period of 30 days if they have been marked on-the-record, and potentially longer if on-the-record messages are on legal hold.'" Google also said, "it is no secret how Google's Chat product operates" because it's a publicly available product and the Google Chat website explains the history-off feature. The Justice Department's motion last month said things happened very differently. "Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours" for nearly four years, the government motion said, continuing [...].

After five years attempting to make Intel into a competitor for Nvidia and AMD in the realm of discrete graphics for gamers and beyond -- with limited success -- Raja Koduri is leaving Intel to form his own generative AI startup. The Verge reports: Intel hired him away from AMD in 2017, where he was similarly in charge of the entire graphics division, and it was an exciting get at the time! Not only had Intel poached a chief architect who'd just gone on sabbatical but Intel also revealed that it did so because it wanted to build discrete graphics cards for the first time in (what would turn out to be) 20 years. Koduri had previously been poached for similarly exciting projects, too -- Apple hired him away from AMD ahead of an impressive string of graphics improvements, and then AMD brought him back again in 2013.

Intel has yet to bring real competition to the discrete graphics card space as of Koduri's departure. [...] But the company has a long GPU roadmap, so it's possible things get better and more competitive in subsequent gens. It took a lot longer than five years for Nvidia and AMD to make it that far. By the time Koduri left, he wasn't just in charge of graphics but also Intel's "accelerated computing" initiatives, including things like a crypto chip.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Sang Yup Lee, Hyundai's head of design, reiterated the company's commitment to buttons at the introduction of the new Hyundai Kona. As reported by CarsGuide, for the Korean automaker, it's a decision rooted in safety concerns. "We have used the physical buttons quite significantly the last few years. For me, the safety-related buttons have to be a hard key," said Lee. It's a design call that makes a lot of sense. In some modern vehicles, adjusting things like the volume or climate control settings can require diving into menus on a touch screen, or using your eyes to find a touch control on the dash. In comparison, the tactile feedback of real buttons, dials, and switches lets drivers keep their eyes on the road instead.

"When you're driving, it's hard to control it. This is why when it's a hard key it's easy to sense and feel it," said Lee. As far as he is concerned, physical controls are a necessity for anything that could impact safety. Hence the physical buttons and dials for items like the HVAC system and volume control. Lee hinted that while this is a priority for Hyundai today, things may change in future. In particular, the company will likely look at using touch controls more heavily when autonomous driving becomes mainstream. "When it comes to Level 4 autonomous driving, then we'll have everything soft key," said Lee.

Photography and camera gear review site DPReview, writing in a blog post: After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year. The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content. Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we're grateful for the communities that formed around the site. Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you'll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.

Google says it's ready to let the public use its generative AI chatbot,Bard. The company will grant tens of thousands of users access to the bot in a gradual rollout that starting Tuesday. From a report: Google says people will use the chatbot, which will be available online and as a mobile app, for things like generating ideas ("Bard, how do I keep my plants alive?"), researching ideas (in combination with Search), and drafting first drafts of letters, invites, or proposals. Google originally announced Bard February 6, alongside some generative AI search functions and developer tools. On March 14, it announced that it will integrate generative AI features across the apps in its Workspace productivity suite. But today marks the first time that Google has released a generative AI chatbot powered by a large language model to the public. Google says the bot is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time.

The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears. From a report: The BBC seems to be the first UK media organisation to issue the guidance - and only the second in the world after Denmark's public service broadcaster. The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. [...] The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing.

In an email to staff on Sunday, it said: "The decision is based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security. If the device is a BBC corporate device, and you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted from the BBC corporate mobile device." Staff with the app on a personal phone that they also use for work have been asked to contact the corporation's Information Security team for further discussions, while it reviews concerns around TikTok. Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of journalism industry trade publication the Press Gazette, said it would be interesting to see what other media organizations decide to do. He told the BBC: "I suspect everyone's chief technical officer will be looking at this very closely. Until now, news organizations have been very keen to use TikTok, because it's been one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for news publishers over the last year, and it's been a good source of audience and traffic. So most of the talk in the news media has been around encouraging TikTok rather than banning it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the enduring legacies of the '90s browser wars has been an outsize attention to how Microsoft handles default app settings in Windows, especially browser settings. The company plans to make it more straightforward to change your app defaults in future versions of Windows 11, according to a new blog post that outlines a "principled approach to app pinning and app defaults in Windows."

The company's principled approach is a combination of broad, vague platitudes ("we will ensure people who use Windows are in control of changes to their pins and their defaults") and new developer features. A future version of Windows 11 will offer a consistent "deep link URI" for apps so they can send users to the right place in the Settings app for changing app defaults. Microsoft will also add a pop-up notification that should be used when newly installed apps want to pin themselves to your Taskbar, rather than either pinning themselves by default or getting lost somewhere in your Start menu.

These new features will be added to Windows "in the coming months," starting in the Dev channel Windows Insider Preview builds. Though Microsoft frames these changes as a way to make changing default apps easier and more consistent, they also serve as a gentle rebuke to developers who handle things differently.

Indian authorities severed mobile internet access and text messaging for a second day Sunday across Punjab, a state of about 27 million people, as officials sought to capture a Sikh separatist and braced for potential unrest. The Washington Post reports: The statewide ban -- which crippled most smartphone services except for voice calls and some SMS text messages -- marked one of the broadest shutdowns in recent years in India, a country that has increasingly deployed the law enforcement tactic, which digital rights activists call draconian and ineffective. The Punjab government, led by the opposition Aam Admi Party, initially announced a 24-hour ban starting midday Saturday as its security forces launched a sprawling operation to arrest the fugitive Amritpal Singh, then extended the ban Sunday for another 24 hours.

Singh, a 30-year-old preacher, has been a popular figure within a separatist movement that seeks to establish a sovereign state in Punjab called Khalistan for followers of the Sikh religion. He rocketed to nationwide notoriety in February after his supporters stormed a police station to free one of his jailed supporters. The Khalistan movement is outlawed in India and considered a top national security threat by officials, but the movement has sympathizers across Punjab state, which is majority Sikh, and among members of the large Sikh diaspora who have settled in countries such as Canada and Britain. In a bid to forestall unrest and curtail what it called "fake news," Punjab authorities blocked mobile internet service beginning at noon Saturday, shortly after they failed to apprehend Singh as he drove through central Punjab with a cavalcade of supporters. Officials were probably also motivated by a desire to deprive Singh's supporters of social media, which they briefly used Saturday to seek help and organize their ranks.

Singh was still on the run as of late Sunday, and the 4G blackout remained in effect. Three Punjab residents who spoke to The Washington Post said life had been disrupted since midday Saturday. Only essential text messages, such as confirmation codes for bank transfers, were trickling through. Wired internet services were not affected. "My entire business is dependent on internet," said Mohammad Ibrahim, who accepts QR code-based payments at his two clothing shops in a village outside of Ludhiana and also sells garments online. "Since yesterday, I've felt crippled."

Twitch announced plans to lay off 400 employees at the company. It comes just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch's business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon's plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units.

"Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2018, Pixel phones gained a built-in screenshot editor called "Markup" with the release of Android 9.0 Pie. The tool pops up whenever you take a screenshot, and tapping the app's pen icon gives you access to tools like crop and a few colored drawing pens. That's very handy assuming Google's Markup tool actually does what it says, but a new vulnerability points out the edits made by this tool weren't actually destructive! It's possible to uncrop or unredact Pixel screenshots taken during the past four years.

The bug was discovered by Simon Aarons and is dubbed "Acropalypse," or more formally CVE-2023-21036. There's a proof-of-concept app that can unredact Pixel screenshots at acropalypse.app, and it works! There's also a good technical write-up here by Aarons' collaborator, David Buchanan. The basic gist of the problem is that Google's screenshot editor overwrites the original screenshot file with your new edited screenshot, but it does not truncate or recompress that file in any way. If your edited screenshot has a smaller file size than the original -- that's very easy to do with the crop tool -- you end up with a PNG with a bunch of hidden junk data at the end of it. That junk data is made up of the end bits of your original screenshot, and it's actually possible to recover that data. While the bug was fixed in the March 2023 security update for Pixel devices, it doesn't solve the problem, notes Ars. "There's still the matter of the last four years of Pixel screenshots that are out there and possibly full of hidden data that people didn't realize they were sharing."

A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta's security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case. From the report: The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece. It demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation.

The simultaneous tapping of the target's phone by the national intelligence service and the way she was hacked indicate that the spy service and whoever implanted the spyware, known as Predator, were working hand in hand. The latest case comes as elections approach in Greece, which has been rocked by a mounting wiretapping and illegal spyware scandal since last year, raising accusations that the government has abused the powers of its spy agency for illicit purposes. The Predator spyware that infected the device is marketed by an Athens-based company and has been exported from Greece with the government's blessing, in possible breach of European Union laws that consider such products potential weapons, The New York Times found in December. The Greek government has denied using Predator and has legislated against the use of spyware, which it has called "illegal."

After almost 17 years online, file-hosting veteran Zippyshare will shut down at the end of the month. TorrentFreak: Founded in 2006, Zippyshare was known for its free, no-nonsense, no-frills approach to storing files online. Having changed very little over the years, Zippyshare's operators say the platform is now a dinosaur that costs too much to run in a world where ad-blocking is widespread. Zippyshare said, "Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam. I guess all the competing file storage service companies on the market look better, offer better performance and more features. No one needs a dinosaur like us anymore."

Microsoft is preparing to launch a new app store for games on iPhones and Android smartphones as soon as next year if its $75bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard is cleared by regulators, according to the head of its Xbox business. From a report: New rules requiring Apple and Google to open up their mobile platforms to app stores owned and operated by other companies are expected to come into force from March 2024 under the EU's Digital Markets Act. "We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play," said Phil Spencer, chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, in an interview ahead of this week's annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "Today, we can't do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up."

Microsoft is fighting with regulators in the US, Europe and UK, which have all raised concerns about the potential impact on competition from the owner of the Xbox console buying the developer of Call of Duty, one of the world's most popular games franchises. PlayStation maker Sony has been a vocal opponent of the deal. However, Spencer argues the deal can boost competition in what he called the "largest platform people play on" -- smartphones -- where Apple and Google currently operate what some antitrust authorities have called a "duopoly" over distribution of games and other apps. [...] While acknowledging it was hard to predict exactly when Microsoft will be able to launch its own store, Spencer said it would be "pretty trivial" for Microsoft to adapt its Xbox and Game Pass apps to sell games and subscriptions on mobile devices. Microsoft's current lack of mobile games was an "obvious hole in our capability" that it needed Activision Blizzard to fill, he added.

A new study from the Department of Defense revealed that military pilots and ground crews experienced higher rates of certain cancers compared to the general population. Axios: Earlier military studies had not indicated that aviators were at higher risk, though the data has long been sought by those who raised alarm about the rates of cancer they observed among air and ground crew members, according to AP, which first reported the study. The study examined cancer rates among nearly 900,000 air and ground crew from 1992 to 2017. Overall -- compared to the general population after adjusting for age, sex and race -- aircrews saw a 24% higher rate of cancer of all types while ground crews saw a 3% higher rate of cancer of all types. However, both air and ground crews saw "lower or similar" cancer mortality rates for all cancer types compared to the general population.

Gizmodo reports that Amazon "is thinking about releasing a web browser, a boring-sounding project that could have massive implications." The company has sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, including which features would "convince you to download and try" a "new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon...."

The survey asked a variety of questions. Most telling was the last question: "Imagine that there is a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon available to do. Select which of the following you would most like to know more about." The survey went on to list topics such as privacy, syncing passwords across devices, and shopping features.... Users were asked to rate the importance of features including text to speech, extensions, the availability to sync data across desktop and mobile devices, and — notably — blocking third party cookies.

Amazon seems to be seriously considering a web browser of its own, and it comes at a time when it would have an unusual impact on the advertising business. The ad industry is bracing for cataclysmic change as Google moves closer to killing third-party cookies in Chrome, the world's most popular web browser, which would kneecap one of the primary ways businesses track consumers for ads.... Part of what makes Amazon so attractive to marketers is the fact that the company sits on a treasure trove of data about what consumers are buying and what their shopping habits are like. If Amazon could match that information with the data collection that comes from a web browser, it could tip the scales of internet advertising in favor of the retail giant.
One thing Amazon asked users is whethered they'd be convinced to download and try a browser if it offered "AI-enabled tab, history, and bookmarks management to automatically sort these into categories for quick search and retrieval."

Rest of World reports on viral teenage pranks at conveyor-belt sushi chain restaurants across Japan, which snowballed into a societal phenomenon that social media users and the Japanese press have named "sushi terrorism."

It began January 9th when a video showed a customer adding a pile of wasabi onto sushi on a conveyor belt. Another video shows a giggling teenager touching sushi on a conveyor belt at the sushi chain Sushiro after first licking that finger. The stock of the parent company that owns that sushi chain drops nearly 5%. It's not over. At a Nagoya branch of Kura Sushi, a 21-year-old customer grabs sushi from the conveyor belt, cramming it into his mouth and chasing it down with a swig from the communal soy sauce bottle. The incident is filmed by his two younger friends, one of whom posts the clip online. The same day, Sushiro's operating company announces it will limit conveyor belts and move to ordering by touch screen.
Concerns continued at other sushi chains. ("Kura Sushi says it's installing surveillance cameras equipped with AI to monitor customers' behavior and catch sushi terrorists. A day later, Choushimaru announces it will switch entirely to an iPad-based ordering system by April 26.") Sushiro also moves to ordering by touch screen and promises to limit conveyor belts.

The story's dramatic conclusion? Nagoya police arrest the 19-year-old man who allegedly posted the soy-sauce-swigging video from Kura Sushi, along with his two "co-conspirators." Nagoya police declare they are holding all three sushi terrorists on suspicion of "forcible obstruction of business." The crime would carry a maximum penalty of three years in prison, if they're convicted.

The Brazilian government is studying whether to regulate Internet platforms with content that earns revenue such as advertising, its secretary for digital policies, Joao Brant, said on Friday. Reuters reports: The idea would be for a regulator to hold such platforms, not consumers, accountable for monetized content, Brant told Reuters. Another goal is "to prevent the networks from being used for the dissemination and promotion of crimes and illegal content" especially after the riots by supporters of former far-right President JairBolsonaro in Brasilia in January, fueled by misinformation about the election he lost in October.

Brant said President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government also intends to make companies responsible for stopping misinformation, hate speech and other crimes on their social media platforms. Platforms would not be held responsible for content individually, but for how diligent they are in protecting the "digital environment," he said in an interview. Brant did not detail what the regulatory body would look like, but said the government wants to regulate monetized content and prevent the platforms from spreading misinformation.

New Zealand will ban TikTok on devices with access to the parliamentary network because of cybersecurity concerns, a government official said on Friday. CNBC reports: TikTok will be banned on all devices with access to New Zealand's parliamentary network by the end of March, said Parliamentary Service Chief Executive Rafael Gonzalez-Montero. Gonzalez-Montero, in an email to Reuters, said the decision was taken after advice from cybersecurity experts and discussions within government and with other countries.

"Based on this information the Service has determined that the risks are not acceptable in the current New Zealand Parliamentary environment," he said. Special arrangements can be made for those who require the app to do their jobs, he added.