An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Commercial Earth-observation companies collect an unprecedented volume of images and data every single day, but purchasing even a single satellite image can be cumbersome and time-intensive. SkyFi, a two-year-old startup, is looking to change that with an app and API that makes ordering a satellite image as easy as a click of a few buttons on a smartphone or computer. SkyFi doesn't build or operate satellites; instead, it partners with over a dozen companies to deliver various kinds of satellite images -- including optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and hyperspectral -- directly to the customer via a web and mobile app. A SkyFi user can task a satellite to capture a specific image or choose from a library of previously captured images. Some of SkyFi's partners include public companies like Satellogic, as well as newer startups like Umbra and Pixxel.

The startup is taking a very 21st-century approach to the Earth observation industry. SkyFi co-founders Bill Perkins and Luke Fischer emphasize that their company is focused on user experience and creating a seamless purchasing process for the consumer, contrasted sharply with what Fischer called "business models based on the '80s and '90s." "We're very customer-focused," Bill Perkins said on the TerraWatch Space podcast. "The industry is science-focused and product-focused."

The startup is targeting three types of customers: individual consumers; large enterprise customers, from verticals spanning agriculture, mining, finance, insurance and more; and U.S. government and defense customers. SkyFi's solution is appealing even these latter customers, who may have plenty of experience working with satellite companies already and could afford the high costs in the traditional marketplace. "Even though we have companies that are multibillion dollar corporations using our platform that could afford to have a multimillion dollar contract year with [any] public satellite company, they're being more cost conscious and that's where this offering of SkyFi comes in," Fischer said. "There is no and will never be a 'contact sales' button on SkyFi," Fischer said. "Because it just was ruining the industry." "I think of SkyFi as the Netflix of the geospatial world, where I think of Umbra, Satellogic and Maxar as the movie studios of the world," Fischer said. "I just want them to produce great content and put it on the platform."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Then, at some point, someone at Microsoft must have gotten fed up with rushing their .rar operations the way I have for 20 years and thought, there must be a better way. And so, under the subheading of "Reducing toil," we have a few helpful UI updates, then casually and apropos of nothing, this:

"In addition... We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."

Ford is reversing course on AM radio. From a report: In a tweet today, CEO Jim Farley announced the company was backing off its decision to release new vehicles without AM radio broadcast capabilities. Instead, all 2024 Ford and Lincoln models will be able to tune in to AM radio. And for the two electric vehicles released without AM radio capabilities, a software update would be pushed to restore it. The announcement came after Farley said he spoke with policy leaders on the "importance of AM broadcast radio as a part of the emergency alert system." A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation in Washington last week that would require automakers to keep AM radio in all their vehicles. The bill was proposed in response to an increasing number of vehicles coming out without the first-generation radio broadcast technology.

Microsoft is adding a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11. Much like the Copilot sidebars we've seen in Edge, Office apps, and even GitHub, Windows Copilot will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs. From a report: "Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant," explains Panos Panay, Microsoft's head of Windows and devices. "It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps."

The Windows Copilot can summarize content you're viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. It looks very similar to the dialog box that's found in Bing Chat, so you can ask it general questions and things you might usually ask a search engine. It won't directly replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar and is a separate Copilot button alongside it instead, much like how Cortana had its own dedicated space on the taskbar in Windows 10. Windows Copilot is a "personal assistant," according to Microsoft, which sounds a lot like how Microsoft described Cortana as a "personal productivity assistant."

The European Union and the United States are set to step up cooperation on artificial intelligence with a view to establishing minimum standards before legislation enters force, the EU's tech chief Margrethe Vestager said on Tuesday. From a report: The European Union's AI Act could be the world's first comprehensive legislation governing the technology, with new rules on facial recognition and biometric surveillance, but EU governments and lawmakers still need to agree a common text. Vestager, a vice-president of the European Commission, told a briefing on Tuesday that process might be completed by the end of the year.

"That would still leave one if not two years then to come into effect, which means that we need something to bridge that period of time," she said. Vestager said AI would be one area of focus at the fourth ministerial-level meeting of the Trade and Technology Council (TTC) in Sweden on May 30-31, with discussions on generative AI algorithms that produce new text, visual or sound content, such as ChatGPT. "There is a shared sense of urgency. In order to make the most of this technology, guard rails are needed," she said. "Can we discuss what we can expect companies to do as a minimum before legislation kicks in?"

The online stock-photo marketplace Shutterstock announced Tuesday it would acquire Giphy from Meta Platforms for $53 million, a significant loss for Meta, which acquired Giphy in 2020 for $315 million. From a report: The acquisition is an all-cash deal, and in an investor presentation, Shutterstock said it would maintain its full-year revenue guidance. The acquisition would add "minimal revenue in 2023," Shutterstock noted. The deal is expected to close in June. Shutterstock's shares rose nearly 2% in morning trading Tuesday. U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority had ordered Meta to divest Giphy in 2022, citing potential anti-competitive effects. The CMA disclosed it was probing the deal in June 2020. Giphy, which is a platform for searching for and using animated images in messaging apps, was well-integrated into Meta's ecosystem, and had been an acquisition target for the social-media company years before Meta acquired it in 2020.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, writing at Financial Times: While some have tried to reduce this moment to just a competitive AI race, we see it as so much more than that. At Google, we've been bringing AI into our products and services for over a decade and making them available to our users. We care deeply about this. Yet, what matters even more is the race to build AI responsibly and make sure that as a society we get it right. We're approaching this in three ways. First, by boldly pursuing innovations to make AI more helpful to everyone. We're continuing to use AI to significantly improve our products -- from Google Search and Gmail to Android and Maps. These advances mean that drivers across Europe can now find more fuel-efficient routes; tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are helped to communicate in their new homes; flood forecasting tools are able to predict floods further in advance. Google DeepMind's work on AlphaFold, in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, resulted in a groundbreaking understanding of over 200mn catalogued proteins known to science, opening up new healthcare possibilities.

Our focus is also on enabling others outside of our company to innovate with AI, whether through our cloud offerings and APIs, or with new initiatives like the Google for Startups Growth program, which supports European entrepreneurs using AI to benefit people's health and wellbeing. We're launching a social innovation fund on AI to help social enterprises solve some of Europe's most pressing challenges. Second, we are making sure we develop and deploy the technology responsibly, reflecting our deep commitment to earning the trust of our users. That's why we published AI principles in 2018, rooted in a belief that AI should be developed to benefit society while avoiding harmful applications. We have many examples of putting those principles into practice, such as building in guardrails to limit misuse of our Universal Translator. This experimental AI video dubbing service helps experts translate a speaker's voice and match their lip movements. It holds enormous potential for increasing learning comprehension but we know the risks it could pose in the hands of bad actors and so have made it accessible to authorised partners only. As AI evolves, so does our approach: this month we announced we'll provide ways to identify when we've used it to generate content in our services.

Climate litigation poses a financial risk to fossil fuel companies because it lowers the share price of big polluters, research has found. From a report: A study to be published on Tuesday by LSE's Grantham Research Institute examines how the stock market reacts to news that a fresh climate lawsuit has been filed or a corporation has lost its case. The researchers hope their work will encourage lenders, financial regulators and governments to consider the effect of climate litigation when making investment decisions in a warmer future, and ultimately drive greener corporate behaviour.

The study, which is currently being peer reviewed, analysed 108 climate crisis lawsuits around the world between 2005 and 2021 against 98 companies listed in the US and Europe. It found that the filing of a new case or a court decision against a company reduced its expected value by an average of 0.41%. The stock market responded most strongly in the days after cases against carbon majors, which include the world's largest energy, utility and materials firms, cutting the relative value of those companies by an average of 0.57% after a case was filed and by 1.5% after an unfavourable judgment. Although modest, the researchers conclude that the drop in the value of big polluters is statistically significant and therefore down to the legal challenges.

According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok filed a lawsuit against Montana claiming the state's law banning the app violates the First Amendment. Engadget reports: "Montana's ban abridges freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment, violates the U.S. Constitution in multiple other respects, and is preempted by federal law," the lawsuit reads. The law prohibits the ByteDance-owned platform from operating in the state, as well as preventing Apple's and Google's app stores from listing the TikTok app for download. Although it isn't clear how Montana plans to enforce the ban, it states that violations will tally fines of $10,000 per day. However, individual TikTok users won't be charged. The lawsuit comes just days after a group of content creators sued the state for similar reasons. "Montana has no authority to enact laws advancing what it believes should be the United States' foreign policy or its national security interests, nor may Montana ban an entire forum for communication based on its perceptions that some speech shared through that forum, though protected by the First Amendment, is dangerous," the suit states. "Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes."

schwit1 shares a report from The Daily Beast: U.C. Berkeley has failed to disclose to the U.S. government massive Chinese state funding for a highly sensitive $240 million joint tech venture in China that has been running for the last eight years. The Californian university has not registered with the U.S. government that it received huge financial support from the city of Shenzhen for a tech project inside China, which also included partnerships with Chinese companies that have since been sanctioned by the U.S. or accused of complicity in human rights abuses.

The university has failed to declare a $220 million investment from the municipal government of Shenzhen to build a research campus in China. A Berkeley spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the university had yet to declare the investment -- announced in 2018 -- because the campus is still under construction. However, a former Department of Education official who used to help manage the department's foreign gifts and contracts disclosure program said that investment agreements must be disclosed within six months of signing, not when they are fully executed. Berkeley admitted that it had also failed to disclose to the U.S. government a $19 million contract in 2016 with Tsinghua University, which is controlled by the Chinese government's Ministry of Education.

The project's Chinese backers promised lavish funding, state-of-the-art equipment, and smart Ph.D. students for Berkeley academics researching national security-sensitive technologies, according to contract documents exclusively obtained by The Daily Beast. After the project got underway, Berkeley researchers granted Chinese officials private tours of their cutting-edge U.S. semiconductor facilities and gave "priority commercialization rights" for intellectual properties (IP) they produced to Chinese government-backed funds. A Berkeley spokesman said that Berkeley only pursued fundamental research through TBSI, meaning that all research projects were eventually publicly published and accessible to all; it did not conduct any proprietary research that exclusively benefited a Chinese entity. Still, Berkeley's ties to the Chinese government and sanctioned Chinese companies are sure to raise eyebrows in Washington, where U.S. policymakers are increasingly concerned about the outflow of U.S. technology to China, especially those with military applications.

WhatsApp users will now be able to edit messages within 15 minutes of hitting send. Reuters reports: "For the moments when you make a mistake or simply change your mind, you can now edit your sent messages on WhatsApp," the Meta Platforms Inc-owned messaging app said in a blog post on Monday.

The function can be accessed by long-pressing the message and choosing "edit" in the drop-down menu. The modified message will carry the label "edited", without showing edit history.

Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages -- a tenfold increase on what's currently available. It's a significant step toward preserving languages that are at risk of disappearing, the company says. From a repprt: Meta is releasing its models to the public via the code hosting service GitHub. It claims that making them open source will help developers working in different languages to build new speech applications -- like messaging services that understand everyone, or virtual-reality systems that can be used in any language. There are around 7,000 languages in the world, but existing speech recognition models cover only about 100 of them comprehensively. This is because these kinds of models tend to require huge amounts of labeled training data, which is available for only a small number of languages, including English, Spanish, and Chinese. Meta researchers got around this problem by retraining an existing AI model developed by the company in 2020 that is able to learn speech patterns from audio without requiring large amounts of labeled data, such as transcripts.

Intel on Monday provided a handful of new details on a chip for artificial intelligence (AI) computing it plans to introduce in 2025 as it shifts strategy to compete against Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. From a report: At a supercomputing conference in Germany on Monday, Intel said its forthcoming "Falcon Shores" chip will have 288 gigabytes of memory and support 8-bit floating point computation. Those technical specifications are important as artificial intelligence models similar to services like ChatGPT have exploded in size, and businesses are looking for more powerful chips to run them.

The details are also among the first to trickle out as Intel carries out a strategy shift to catch up to Nvidia, which leads the market in chips for AI, and AMD, which is expected to challenge Nvidia's position with a chip called the MI300. Intel, by contrast, has essentially no market share after its would-be Nvidia competitor, a chip called Ponte Vecchio, suffered years of delays. Intel on Monday said it has nearly completed shipments for Argonne National Lab's Aurora supercomputer based on Ponte Vecchio, which Intel claims has better performance than Nvidia's latest AI chip, the H100. But Intel's Falcon Shores follow-on chip won't be to market until 2025, when Nvidia will likely have another chip of its own out.

President Joe Biden moved to lock in his first Democratic majority at the Federal Communications Commission, naming veteran government lawyer Anna Gomez to an open seat and proposing to extend the service of two current commissioners. From a report: The appointments poise the FCC, after more than two years of partisan deadlock under a Democratic chairwoman, to act on the party's priorities, including restoring net neutrality regulations. Such rules bar broadband providers from interfering with web traffic and were gutted by Republicans during the administration of President Donald Trump.

All three nominees, announced by the White House on Monday, need Senate confirmation. In addition to Gomez, Biden proposed a second five-year term for Democrat Geoffrey Starks, who otherwise would need to leave the agency at the end of the year. Biden also proposed another term for Republican Brendan Carr, who has been on the commission since 2017. Gomez's arrival would bring the agency to its full strength of five commissioners for the first time since January 2021, when Trump's Republican chairman departed, leaving the 2-to-2 split. An earlier Biden nominee withdrew amid opposition from Senate Republicans. FCC commissioners serve staggered five-year terms, and no more than three can be members of the president's party.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being tapped to address the impacts of climate change. From a report: Google's latest announcement is one example. Countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America can now use its AI-enabled platform that displays flood forecasts. Starting Monday, governments, aid organizations and people in 60 countries across these regions are able to access Google's flood prediction information up to seven days in advance of an incoming flood.

Initially launched in 2021, Flood Hub displays forecasts for riverine floods -- or floods that take place when streams or rivers overflow their banks and into surrounding areas -- showing when and where they are likely to occur. Human-caused climate change can cause these kinds of floods to become larger or more frequent than they used to be, per the EPA. Regions with high percentages of population vulnerable to flood risk -- like the Netherlands, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as well as Myanmar, which was just struck by Cyclone Mocha -- are now on Google's list of forecastable places. It can also be used in parts of the Central American "dry corridor" in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala -- where climate change and conflict collide.

Amazon will face a record 18 shareholder resolutions at its annual meeting this week, with outside groups urging the company to disclose more about its treatment of employees and more closely tie executive compensation to performance. From a report: Major shareholder advisory firms recommend investors approve calls for assessments of Amazon employees' working conditions and freedom to organize, as well as the risks posed by the company's sales of surveillance products. Between them, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis are urging investors to support five resolutions brought by outside shareholders.

The two firms say shareholders should block the re-election of director Judith McGrath, chair of the board's leadership and compensation committee, and recommends a no vote on a symbolic measure to ratify Amazon's executive pay. The company's annual meeting of shareholders, held virtually since the beginning of the pandemic, is scheduled for Wednesday. The shareholder resolutions and say-on-pay votes are nonbinding. Investors delivered a rebuke to Amazon in 2022 over its pay practices, only narrowly approving salaries amid concerns about big stock grants awarded to top executives regardless of how well the company performed in subsequent years. The board conducted outreach with major investors following that vote but didn't adjust its plans, which Glass Lewis called "significantly concerning."

Facebook owner Meta was hit by a record $1.3 billion European Union privacy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users' data to the US after regulators said it failed to protect personal information from the prying eyes of American security services. Bloomberg News: The social network giant's continued data transfers to the US didn't address "the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms" of people whose data was being transfered across the Atlantic, according to a decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission announced on Monday. On top of the fine, which eclipses a $806 million EU privacy penalty previously doled out to Amazon, Meta was given five months to "suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US" and six months to stop "the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US" of transferred personal EU data. A data-transfers ban for Meta was widely expected and once prompted the US firm to threaten a total withdrawal from the EU. But its impact has now been muted by the transition phase given in the decision and the prospect of a new EU-US data flows agreement that could already be operational by the middle of this year.

"Google Chrome will now check for typos in your URLs and display suggested websites based on what it thinks you meant," reports the Verge.

From Google's announcement: When you type a website into the Chrome address bar, it will now detect URL typos and suggest websites based on the corrections. This increases accessibility for people with dyslexia, language learners, and anyone who makes typos by making it easier to get to previously visited websites despite spelling errors. This feature is now available on Chrome desktop and will roll out to mobile in the coming months.
It was one of several new and recently launched features Google touted as part of Thursday's Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Google also announced its Lookout app (which provides audio cues for low-vision users) can now provide descriptions of images on web pages "powered by an advanced visual language model developed by Google DeepMind." And Chrome on Android recently updated its TalkBack screen reader so tab switching now also offers a tab grid with additional features like tab groups, bulk tab actions and reordering.

Google Colab hosts free cloud-based "executable documents" that, among other things, let you write and run code in your browser (in dozens of languages, including Python).

Over 7 million people, including students, already use Colab, according to a recent post on Google's blog, "and now it's getting even better with advances in AI [with] features like code completions, natural language to code generation and even a code-assisting chatbot."

Google says it will "dramatically increase programming speed, quality, and comprehension." Our first features will focus on code generation. Natural language to code generation helps you generate larger blocks of code, writing whole functions from comments or prompts. [For example: "import data.csv as a dataframe."] The goal here is to reduce the need for writing repetitive code, so you can focus on the more interesting parts of programming and data science. Eligible users in Colab will see a new "Generate" button in their notebooks, allowing them to enter any text prompt to generate code.

For eligible paid users, as you type, you'll see autocomplete suggestions.

We're also bringing the helpfulness of a chatbot directly into Colab. Soon, you'll be able to ask questions directly in Colab like, "How do I import data from Google Sheets?" or "How do I filter a Pandas DataFrame?"

Anyone with an internet connection can access Colab, and use it free of charge... Access to these features will roll out gradually in the coming months, starting with our paid subscribers in the U.S. and then expanding into the free-of-charge tier.
It's powered by Google's "next generation" machine-learning language model PaLM 2 (announced earlier this month), which "excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog." Colab will use Codey, a family of code models built on PaLM 2... fine-tuned on a large dataset of high quality, permissively licensed code from external sources to improve performance on coding tasks. Plus, the versions of Codey being used to power Colab have been customized especially for Python and for Colab-specific uses.

Time magazine once described Lauren Weinstein as an internet-policy expert and privacy advocate. Also a long-time Slashdot reader, he now brings this cautionary blog post "to share with you an example of what Google account recovery failure means to the people involved..."

In this case it's a 90-year-old woman who "For at least the last decade... was just using the stored password to login and check her email," according to an email Weinstein received: When her ancient iPad finally died, she tried to add the gmail account to her new replacement iPad. However, she couldn't remember the password in order to login.... I don't know if you've ever attempted to contact a human being at google tech support, but it's pretty much impossible. They also don't seem to have an exception mechanism for cases like this.

So she had to abandon hopes of viewing the google photos of her (now deceased) beloved pet, her contacts, her email subscriptions, reminders, calendar entries, etc... [I]t's difficult to know what to say to someone like this when she asks "what can we do now" and there are no options... It's tough to explain that your treasured photos can't be retrieved because you're not the sort of user that Google had in mind.
Weinstein adds "this is by no means the worst such case I've seen — not even close, unfortunately." I've been discussing these issues with Google for many years. I've suggested "ombudspeople", account escalation and appeal procedures that ordinary people could understand, and many other concepts. They've all basically hit the brick wall of Google suggesting that at their scale, nothing can be done about such "edge" cases.
Here's Google's page for providing an alternate recovery email address and phone number. Unfortunately, the 90-year-old woman's account "was created so long ago that she didn't need to provide any 'recovery' contacts at that time," according to the email, "or she may have used a landline phone number that's long been cancelled now..."