Google Bard is getting support for Extensions today, incorporating essential apps like Google Maps, YouTube, Hotels, and Flights to simplify data retrieval and accelerate the creative process. Android Police reports: This integration ensures that users can seamlessly amalgamate data from myriad sources, thereby accelerating your creative process or just making it easier to accomplish basic tasks across the board. These tools were originally teased at I/O before their wider release today. The company posted an excellent explainer of how this works on its YouTube channel.

With today's update, you can now sync Bard with your Gmail, Docs, and Drive. This capability ensures that the AI collaborates with your personal content, making data retrieval and summarization more fluid. With the enhancement of the Google It button, Bard's responses can be cross-checked with Google Search, instilling greater trust in AI-generated data. Additionally, conversations initiated by others via Bard can be continued in your account, emphasizing collaborative creativity. You can learn more about Google Bard Extensions here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Controversial UK legislation that brings in a new regime of content moderation rules for online platforms and services -- establishing the comms watchdog Ofcom as the main Internet regulator -- has been passed by parliament today, paving the way for Royal Assent and the Online Safety Bill becoming law in the coming days. Speaking during the bill's final stages in the House of Lords, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay reiterated that the government's intention for the legislation is "to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, particularly for children." Following affirmative votes as peers considered some last stage amendments he added that attention now moves "very swiftly to Ofcom who stand ready to implement this -- and do so swiftly."

The legislation empowers Ofcom to levy fines of up to 10% (or up to 18 million pounds whichever is higher) of annual turnover for violations of the regime. The Online Safety (nee Harms) Bill has been years in the making as UK policymakers have grappled with how to response to a range of online safety concerns. In 2019 these efforts manifested as a white paper with a focus on rules for tackling illegal content (such as terrorism and CSAM) but also an ambition to address a broad sweep of online activity that might be considered harmful, such as violent content and the incitement of violence; encouraging suicide; disinformation; cyber bullying; and adult material being accessed by children. The effort then morphed into a bill that was finally published in May 2021. [...]

In a brief statement the UK's new web content sheriff gave no hint of the complex challenges that lie ahead -- merely welcoming the bill's passage through parliament and stating that it stands ready to implement the new rulebook. "Today is a major milestone in the mission to create a safer life online for children and adults in the UK. Everyone at Ofcom feels privileged to be entrusted with this important role, and we're ready to start implementing these new laws," said Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom's CEO. "Very soon after the Bill receives Royal Assent, we'll consult on the first set of standards that we'll expect tech firms to meet in tackling illegal online harms, including child sexual exploitation, fraud and terrorism." Beyond specific issues of concern, there is over-arching general worry over the scale of the regulatory burden the legislation will apply to the UK's digital economy -- since the rules apply not only to major social media platforms; scores of far smaller and less well resourced online services must also comply or risk big penalties.

European governments have "systematically" shrunk their railways and starved them of funding while pouring money into expanding their road network, a report has found. The Guardian: The length of motorways in Europe grew 60% between 1995 and 2020 while railways shrank 6.5%, according to research from the German thinktanks Wuppertal Institute and T3 Transportation. For every $1 governments spent building railways, they spent $1.7 building roads. "This is a political choice," said Lorelei Limousin, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, which commissioned the report. "We see the consequences today with the climate, but also with people who have been left without an alternative solution to cars."

The report found the EU, Norway, Switzerland and the UK spent $1.6tn between 1995 and 2018 to extend their roads -- but just $0.99tn to extend their rail networks. In the four years that followed (2018-21), the average gap in investment in rail and road decreased from 66% to 34%. During that time, seven countries invested more in rail than roads -- Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the UK -- while the rest spent more on roads than rail.

Agility Robotics is wrapping up construction of a factory in Salem, Oregon, where it plans to mass produce its first line of humanoid robots, called Digit. Each robot has two legs and two arms and is engineered to maneuver freely and work alongside humans in warehouses and factories. CNBC reports: The 70,000-square-foot facility, which the company is calling the "RoboFab," is the first of its kind, according to Damion Shelton, co-founder and CEO of Agility Robotics. COO Aindrea Campbell, who was formerly Apple's senior director of iPad operations and an engineering manager at Ford, told CNBC that the facility will have a 10,000 unit annual max capacity when it's fully built out and will employ more than 500 people. For now, though, Agility Robotics is focused on the installation and testing of its first production lines.

Funded by DCVC and Playground Global among venture investors, Agility Robotics beat would-be competitors to the punch, including Tesla with its Optimus initiative, by completing development of production prototype humanoid robots and standing up a factory where it can mass produce them. Shelton told CNBC that his team developed Digit with a human form factor so that the robots can lift, sort and maneuver while staying balanced, and so they could operate in environments where steps or other structures could otherwise limit the use of robotics. The robots are powered with rechargeable lithium ion batteries.

One thing Digit lacks is a five-fingered hand -- instead, the robot's hands look more like a claw or mitten. [...] Digit can traverse stairs, crouch into tight spaces, unload containers and move materials onto or off of a pallet or a conveyor, then help to sort and divide material onto other pallets, according to Agility. The company plans to put the robots to use transporting materials around its own factory, Campbell said. Agility's preferred partners will be first to receive the robots next year, and the company is only selling -- not renting or leasing -- the systems in the near term.

Meta is ending support for two first party original Oculus Quest launch titles next year without explanation. UploadVR reports: The company sent out emails to all owners of Bogo and Dead And Buried II on Friday to inform them that these apps will "end services" and "no longer be supported" after 15 March 2024, five years after they launched. The Meta Quest platform policies require developers to give customers at least 180 days notice before shutting down an app, so this appears to be Meta complying with its own policy.

Bogo was a free virtual pet app designed as a demo of Oculus Quest's wireless room scale tracking and hand controllers. It's one of the few VR apps that adapts to the size of your playspace, keeping the interactable area reachable for small rooms while encouraging physical walking for those with larger rooms. Bernie Yee, a former Meta manager who hired and led the 'Oculus REX' team that developed Bogo (as well as Dreamdeck, Toybox, First Contact, and First Steps), lamented the death of Bogo on X, tagging Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth to ask that it be preserved on App Lab. Yee was let go in the first wave of layoffs in November last year, alongside multiple of the REX team. [...] While Meta hasn't commented on the decision, the use of now-obsolete SDKs and the lack of a team to update the app likely contributed to the decision to kill it, but it's not clear why it couldn't have been demoted to App Lab.

Dead and Buried II on the other hand was a $20 multiplayer shooter - one of the first FPS games available on the Oculus Quest. It launched with two game modes, a team vs team 'Shootout' and a free-for-all 'Deathmatch'. An update just under a year later added three new modes: a 1vs1 'Quickdraw' mode and two co-op modes, Survival and Horde. Given Dead and Buried II is a multiplayer title, Meta may be sunsetting so it no longer has to maintain the servers and related online services, as it also did with the much more popular Echo Arena back in August.

Under an agreement announced Monday, Joby Aviation will build hundreds of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in the same Ohio river valley where the Wright brothers pioneered human flight. The Associated Press reports: Joby's decision to locate its first scaled manufacturing facility at a 140-acre (57-hectare) site at Dayton International Airport delivers on two decades of groundwork laid by the state's leaders, Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said. Importantly, the site is near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratories. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, lived and worked in Dayton. In 1910, they opened the first U.S. airplane factory there. To connect the historical dots, Joby's formal announcement Monday took place at Orville Wright's home, Hawthorn Hill, and concluded with a ceremonial flypast of a replica of the Wright Model B Flyer.

Joby's production aircraft is designed to transport a pilot and four passengers at speeds of up to 200 miles (321.87 kilometers) per hour, with a maximum range of 100 miles (160.93 kilometers). Its quiet noise profile is barely audible against the backdrop of most cities, the company said. The plan is to place them in aerial ridesharing networks beginning in 2025. The $500 million project is supported by up to $325 million in incentives from the state of Ohio, its JobsOhio economic development office and local government. With the funds, Joby plans to build an Ohio facility capable of delivering up to 500 aircraft a year and creating 2,000 jobs. The U.S. Department of Energy has invited Joby to apply for a loan to support development of the facility as a clean energy project.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department on Monday objected to removing the public from the court during some discussions of how Google prices online advertising, one of the issues at the heart of the antitrust trial under way in Washington. The government is seeking to show that Alphabet's Google broke antitrust law to maintain its dominance in online search. The search dominance led to fast-increasing advertising revenues that made Google a $1 trillion company. [Throughout the trial, Google's defense is that its high market share reflects the quality of its product rather than any illegal actions to build monopolies in some aspects of its business.]

David Dahlquist, speaking for the government, pointed to a document that was redacted that had a short back and forth about Google's pricing for search advertising. Dahlquist then argued to Judge Amit Mehta, who will decide the case, that information like the tidbit in the document should not be redacted. "This satisfies public interest because it's at the core of the DOJ case against Google," he said. Speaking for Google, John Schmidtlein urged that all discussions of pricing be in a closed session, which means the public and reporters must leave the courtroom. [...]

Case in point was testimony given early Monday by a Verizon executive, Brian Higgins, about the company's decision to always pre-install Google's Chrome browser with Google search on its mobile phones. After about 30 minutes of testimony, Higgins' testimony was closed for the next two hours. It's possible that he was asked about Google's payments to Verizon but the public will never know. Those payments -- which the government said are $10 billion annually to mobile carriers and others -- helped the California-based tech giant win powerful default positions on smartphones and elsewhere.

Google Domains has registered its last domain. From a report: Google announced in July that the service was getting shut down and that it had struck a deal with Squarespace to sell off the existing customer base. Part of that transition process means winding down the existing Google Domains functionality. 9to5Google was the first site to notice that you can no longer buy a domain through the service while it waits for the Google Grim Reaper to arrive. Google Domain's homepage has a notice explaining that this all apparently went down a few days ago, saying, "On September 7, 2023 Squarespace acquired all domain registrations and related customer accounts from Google Domains. Customers and domains will be transitioned over the next few months." You can still manage existing domains on Google Domains, but that's it.

Windows blog: Today we are beginning to roll out an update for the Paint app to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels (version 11.2308.18.0 or higher). With this update, we are introducing support for layers and transparency! You can now add, remove, and manage layers on the canvas to create richer and more complex digital art. With layers, you can stack shapes, text, and other image elements on top of each other. To get started, click on the new Layers button in the toolbar, which will open a panel on the side of the canvas. This is where you can add new layers to the canvas. Try changing the order of layers in this panel to see how the order of stacked image elements on the canvas changes. You can also show or hide and duplicate individual layers or merge layers together.

We are adding support for transparency as well, including the ability to open and save transparent PNGs! When working with a single layer, you will notice a checkerboard pattern on the canvas indicating the portions of the image that are transparent. Erasing any content from the canvas now truly erases the content instead of painting the area white. When working with multiple layers, if you erase content on one layer, you will reveal the content in layers underneath.

Apple on Monday rolled out iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, HomePod 17 and watchOS 10, the latest operating system versions for all its devices minus the Mac lineup. iOS 17: iOS 17 expands on last year's Lock Screen updates with the addition of interactive widgets and StandBy, a new feature that turns the iPhone into a mini home hub when it is charging. You can now see voicemail transcriptions in real time, and leave video messages in FaceTime. FaceTime also now works on the Apple TV with tvOS 17. With NameDrop, exchanging contacts is as simple as touching two phones together, and Messages has been overhauled with new safety features and updates to the way that stickers work. Autocorrect is better than ever, Spotlight search has been improved, private browsing in Safari is more secure with Face ID lock, and there's now a mood tracking feature in the Health app. Passwords can be shared in iCloud Keychain and AirTags can be shared among family members too, plus there are new features for the AirPods Pro. Apple has also added updates to Siri, Mail, Reminders, Notes, Home, and more. tvOS 17: In tvOS 17, Apple has added a FaceTime app for FaceTime calls on a larger screen. The feature works through an iPhone or iPad running iOS 17/iPadOS 17, with the iOS device serving as the camera and the TV serving as the display. With a Split View option, you can place your FaceTime call on one side of the TV and a TV show or game on the other side for SharePlay experiences. [...] Other new features include Dolby Vision 8.1 support, an enhance dialogue option to make it easier to hear what's being said over music and effects, and support for third-party VPN apps.

Panos Panay, the chief product officer at Microsoft leading Windows development and the company's Surface line, is leaving Microsoft. From a report: In an announcement on Monday, Microsoft told employees: "After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft." Panay first joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager. After overseeing the company's Surface line, Panay became the company's chief product officer in 2018, where he led the development of Windows 11.

Saturday the San Francisco Chronicle published a joint opinion piece from MIT professor Carlo Ratti (who directs an MIT digital lab exploring the collection of digital data about urban life) and John Rossant (founder of the collaborative data-sharing platform CoMotion).

Together they penned a warning about a future filled with robotaxis. "Their convenience could seduce us into vastly overusing our cars. The result? An artificial-intelligence-powered nightmare of traffic, technically perfect but awful for our cities." Why do we believe this? Because it has already come to pass with ride-sharing. In the 2010s, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one of us serves as the director, was at the forefront of using Big Data to study how ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. The findings appeared to be astonishing: With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses. This utopian vision was not only compelling but within reach.

After publishing our results, we started the first collaboration between MIT and Uber to research a then-new product: Uber Pool (now rebranded UberX Share), a service that allows riders to share cars when heading to similar destinations for a lower cost. Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Our research was technically right, but we had not taken into account changes in human behavior. Cars are more convenient and comfortable than walking, buses and subways — and that is why they are so popular. Make them even cheaper through ride-sharing and people are coaxed away from those other forms of transit. This dynamic became clear in the data a few years later: On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced. We were proud of our contribution to ride-sharing but dismayed to see the results of a 2018 study that found that Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation.

As robotaxis are on the cusp of proliferating across the world, we are about to repeat the same mistake, but at a far greater scale... [W]e cannot let a shiny new piece of technology drive us into an epic traffic jam of our own making. The best way to make urban mobility accessible, efficient and green is not about new technologies — neither self-driving cars nor electric ones — but old ones. Buses, subways, bikes and our own two feet are cleaner, cheaper and more efficient than anything Silicon Valley has dreamt up... Autonomous technology could, for example, allow cities to offer more buses, shuttles and other forms of public transit around the clock. That's because the availability of on-demand AVs could assure "last-mile" connections between homes and transit stops. It could also be a godsend for older people and those with disabilities. However, any scale-up of AVs should be counterbalanced with investments in mass transit and improvements in walkability.

Above all, we must put in place smart regulatory and tax regimes that allow all sustainable mobility modes — including autonomous services — to scale safely and intelligently. They should include, for example, congestion fees to discourage overuse of individual vehicles.

"Here is another radical replacement for the traditional combustion engine," writes long-time Slashdot reader Inzkeeper. "Check out the Astron Aerospace H2 Starfire Omega 1... an ICE engine with a turbine configuration."

The company "is claiming that it is a viable alternative to EVs," reports TopSpeed: Astron have showcased a 3D rendering of their engine which helps to understand this extremely complicated new powerplant in all of its glory. They also showed a functioning prototype which gives us a glimpse into how the engine could potentially function... The company claims that it weighs an absolutely mind-boggling 35 pounds yet produces horsepower in the region of 160 and about 170 pound-feet of torque. These are insane figures. The Omega 1 boasts an alleged 60 percent efficiency, which is absurd if true given that piston engines rarely ever top 40 percent efficiency. On top of this, Omega 1 can run on any kind of combustible fuel, meaning that hydrogen could easily be used to reduce emissions so close to zero that it's negligible.
HotCars adds that "According to Astron Aerospace, the engine idles at 1,000 rpm and redlines at an incredible 25,000 rpm — much higher than all the other rotaries we've seen. This is thanks to the circular movement, rather than the epitrochoidal movement used for Reuleaux triangle rotaries." The awesome thing about this engine is that it is stackable, meaning two of them will make 320 hp and 340 lb-ft, three will produce 480 hp and 510 lb-ft, etc... Astron Aerospace also stated that due to the design, the engine is easily scalable for other applications — for instance, marine engines. According to them and one of their renders, a larger version can easily reach 4,500 hp...

[I]t is not only more efficient than the equivalent piston engine — 80% compared to a mere 34% — but the engine is also much smaller and lighter. This translates to better fuel economy and a lighter overall vehicle. The engine is air-cooled as well, which means there aren't any additional radiators or other cooling systems needed to keep the engine working. Air-cooled may sound a bit old-fashioned, but in this case, it simplifies the whole package. The maintenance on such an engine would also be minimal, with Astron Aerospace claiming 60,000 miles further usage over a typical piston engine before maintenance is required.

The disadvantage of this engine is that it hasn't yet been thoroughly tested in real-world conditions. Astron Aerospace has patented the engine and has a working prototype but has found no investors to begin mass testing and production. The engine needs to be worked hard to flesh out any potential weak points and new materials need to be used to cope with the internal stresses and wear.

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms. Now, the company is announcing ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites.

Since the acquisition, the company has improved on the original software in a number of ways, including by now allowing the ability to add blog-wide catchall accounts instead of only per-author. It also introduced the ability to add a "follow me" block to help visitors follow your profile and a "followers" block to show off your followers, noted Automattic design engineer Matt Wiebe, in a post on X... For the time being, the software supports self-hosted WordPress blogs, but Wiebe teased that support for WordPress.com blogs was "coming soon."
Last year Automattic's CEO Matt Mullenweg announced Tumblr would add support for ActivityPub, the article adds. "But more recently, Mullenweg told us he's been investigating not only ActivityPub, but also other protocols like Nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol."

At 103 miles/kWh (or 0.6 kWh/100 km), the new "muc22" car built by students from the Technical University of Munich "is 25 times more efficient than any EV on sale..." writes Ars Technica. "For those who think in terms of miles per gallon, it's the equivalent of traveling 3,815 miles on a single gallon of gas.

The car has a top speed of just 26 mph (42 km/h) — and without a driver it weighs just 374 lbs (170 kg): In a six-day test at Munich airport, it set a new distance record on a single charge (for a non-solar EV): 1,599 miles (2,574 km), with less battery capacity than many plug-in hybrids — just 15.5 kWh...

The airflow-optimized shape has faired-in rear wheels and a drag coefficient of just 0.159; more importantly, though, it has a pretty tiny frontal area (it's only 39.4 inches/1,000 mm tall and 47.2 inches/1,200 mm wide)... [F]or this record run, muc22 made do with just 400 W — that's 268 times less powerful than the least-powerful EV on sale today, the Mazda MX-30... The record run took place in an empty hangar at Munich Airport, obviating any interference from the weather. The previous record stood at 999 miles (1,609 km), but the team of seven drivers reached that distance after just four days, and since the battery wasn't empty yet, the car kept going.
Thanks to Slashdot reader FrankOVD for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Firefly Aerospace just set a new responsive-launch record. The company's Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday (Sept. 14) at 10:28 p.m. EDT (7:28 p.m. local California time; 0228 GMT on Sept. 15), kicking off a mission for the U.S. Space Force called Victus Nox. The rocket roared off the pad just 27 hours after the U.S. Space Force gave the order -- less time than on any previous national security mission. The wheels for Victus Nox (Latin for "conquer the night") began turning in September 2022, when the Space Force awarded contracts to Texas-based Firefly and Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary headquartered in the Los Angeles area that built the mission's payload.

On Aug. 30 of this year, Firefly and Millennium entered the mission's "hot standby" phase, a six-month period during which they could receive a launch-alert notice at any time. After receipt of that notice, Millennium and Firefly would have 60 hours to get the satellite from Millennium's Southern California facilities to Vandenberg, fuel it up and mate it to the Alpha rocket's payload adapter. The alert came through recently, and the mission teams hit their ambitious timeline. "Upon activation, the space vehicle was transported 165 miles [266 kilometers] from Millennium's El Segundo facility to Vandenberg Space Force Base where it was tested, fueled and mated to the launch adapter in just under 58 hours, significantly faster than the typical timeline of weeks or months," Space Force officials said in the emailed statement.

The teams then had to wait for the launch order, which would give them Victus Nox's orbital requirements. They would then have just 24 hours to update Alpha's trajectory and guidance software, encapsulate the satellite in its payload fairing, get the payload to the pad, mate it to Alpha and get the rocket ready to launch, Firefly wrote in a statement. The teams managed that task as well. They were ready to launch as soon as the first window opened, which was 27 hours after the Space Force gave the order. Victus Nox's speed goals didn't end with the successful liftoff. The teams now aim to get the satellite up and running within 48 hours of its deployment. The report notes that the previous response-launch record for a U.S. national security mission was 21 days, which was set in June 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Imperial College is developing a rocket thruster called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster) that is so small that it can only be fabricated using techniques originally designed for making silicon chips. The entire thruster chip is about the length of a fingernail, with the combustion chamber and nozzle only measuring 1 mm long. It also requires only 20 watts of electric current to operate and in a test campaign generated 1.25 millinewtons of thrust at a specific impulse of 185 seconds on a sustained basis. To put that into perspective, that's half a billion times less thrust than the engines used on the Space Shuttle.

However, the party trick of the ICE-Cube Thruster is that it uses ordinary water as its propellant, which is about as non-explosive and non-flammable as you can get. Onboard electric current creates electrolysis to break down the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is fed into the combustion chamber to ignite, generating thrust to maneuver the CubeSat. Using water is not only very green, it also reduces payload because no pressurization is needed to store it, so storage and handling systems can be lighter and simpler. However, fabricating the combustion chamber and nozzle for the thruster in what is essentially two dimensions required taking a page from microelectronics by using the Micro-Electrical Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technique normally employed for machining silicon wafers for processors to sub-micrometer tolerances.

Honda's new Motocompacto is a throwback all-electric ridable inspired by the short-lived scooter of the '80s. Engadget reports: The vehicle, folded up, resembles one of those Costco folding tables but with little aluminum wheels poking out the bottom. To transform it into a scooter, you extend the handlebars, seats and back wheel, and ride away on something vaguely approximating a bike. (To give you some perspective on the design, this thing is just over three feet long.)

Honda says its aluminum frame and wheels keep it "lightweight" but at 41 pounds it's firmly in the same weight class as regular e-bikes, and with a range of "up to 12 miles," it's not getting you very far either. After its 12-mile range is used up, it can be re-juiced in 3.5 hours, which is a considerable amount of time, but at least it comes with an on-board charger ready for you to plug into a 110V outlet. It'll be available starting in November priced "under $995" exclusively on Honda's website and at Honda and Acura dealers.

The cloud-based system the Air Force is co-developing with Canada to enable instantaneous combat data-sharing is just about ready for prime time, although the looming threat of a budget gap may slow its global deployment. The Drive reports: Cloud-based command-and-control (CBC2), a pillar of the service's Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), will hit initial operating capability roughly on schedule next month, Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, integrating program officer for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, told The War Zone and other outlets this week at the Air, Space, and Cyber conference near Washington, D.C. It's headed to three unspecified base locations within the first half of 2024, Cropsey said, with others to follow at "more scale" as what's anticipated to be a five-year rollout plan gets underway. [...] CBC2 is designed to replace the hardware-based Battle Control System-Fixed, which provides command-and-control for Canada and the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii. Officially made a program in 2022, CBC2 is "a set of microservice applications," according to an Air Force release, that can take in more than 750 radar feeds and deliver them to a single user interface. "The system then allows operators to create machine-generated courses of action to help shorten the tactical C2 kill chain and send a desired effect via machine-to-machine connections," the release adds.

In addition to delivering data faster and streamlining communication, CBC2 will build in new artificial intelligence elements. A January Government Accountability Office report states that it will build upon Pathfinder, an AI-empowered prototype that ingests "data that would in the past have been ... left on the cutting room floor," as North American Aerospace Defense Command chief Gen. Glen VanHerck put it in remarks reported by C4ISRNet. A September 2020 paper (PDF) from the Canada Institute described Pathfinder as "giving new life to old sensors" for NORAD's defense. "In a recent demonstration," the paper stated, "The Pathfinder system was tied to Federal Aviation Administration radars, and without any modification to the radars themselves, consistently demonstrated an ability to effectively detect and track very small unmanned aircraft, previously thought to be beyond the capability of the system."

According to The Information, Google is nearing the release of Gemini, its conversational artificial intelligence software intended to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 model. Reuters reports: For Google, the stakes of Gemini's launch are high. Google has intensified investments in generative AI this year as it plays catch-up after Microsoft-backed OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT last year took the tech world by storm. Gemini is a collection of large-language models that power everything from chatbots to features that either summarize text or generate original text based on what users want to read like email drafts, music lyrics, or news stories, the report said. It is also expected to help software engineers write code and generate original images based on what users ask to see.

Google is currently giving developers access to a relatively large version of Gemini, but not the largest version it is developing which would be more on par with GPT-4, the report said. The search and advertising giant plans to make Gemini available to companies through its Google Cloud Vertex AI service.