Leaders of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday the agency would pursue companies who misuse artificial intelligence to violate laws against discrimination or be deceptive. Reuters reports: In a congressional hearing, FTC Chair Lina Khan and Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya were asked about concerns that recent innovation in artificial intelligence, which can be used to produce high quality deep fakes, could be used to make more effective scams or otherwise violate laws. Bedoya said companies using algorithms or artificial intelligence were not allowed to violate civil rights laws or break rules against unfair and deceptive acts. "It's not okay to say that your algorithm is a black box" and you can't explain it, he said.

Khan agreed the newest versions of AI could be used to turbocharge fraud and scams and any wrongdoing would "should put them on the hook for FTC action." Slaughter noted that the agency had throughout its 100 year history had to adapt to changing technologies and indicated that adapting to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools were no different. The commission is organized to have five members but currently has three, all of whom are Democrats.

At Google I/O on May 10th, Google will launch its first foldable smartphone, "challenging Samsung's market-leading foldable phone business," reports CNBC. From the report: The Pixel Fold, known internally by the codename "Felix," will have the "most durable hinge on a foldable" phone, according to the documents. It will cost upward of $1,700 and compete with Samsung's $1,799 Galaxy Z Fold 4. Google plans to market the Pixel Fold as water-resistant and pocket-sized, with an outside screen that measures 5.8 inches across, according to the documents. Photos viewed by CNBC show that the phone will open like a book to reveal a small tablet-sized 7.6-inch screen, the same size as the display on Samsung's competitor. It weighs 10oz, slightly heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4, but it has a larger battery that Google says will last for 24 hours, or up to 72 hours in a low power mode.

The Pixel Fold is powered by Google's Tensor G2 chip, according to the documents. That's the same processor that launched in the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones last year.

The global excitement around ChatGPT, and the haste to copy it, resembles the introduction of an Apple product. Everyone is stoked to try it, and other tech companies are working late nights to reverse engineer it. This time, Apple is nowhere to be found. Has the speed of it all caught the world's most influential tech company by surprise? From a report: Microsoft has poured $10 billion into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and reconfigured how it builds server farms to accommodate more of Nvidia's class-leading processors for training artificial intelligence. Alphabet's Google has made responding to ChatGPT a top priority. Amazon has also jumped into the fray with its cloud division. That's four of the world's top seven most valuable companies, and yet, the most valuable of them all seems to have no ready answer for what's coming. Bloomberg reported on an internal AI summit Apple held in February, when machine learning and other deployments of the tech across Apple products were discussed, but there was no hint of anything in the genre of generative AI.

AI in Apple products today is like irrigation for its walled garden, essential and helpful for an increasing number of functions, but ultimately it's the hardware fruit that Apple sells. Generative AI could come in like a tidal wave. Apple, by all appearances, squandered the lead it established since becoming the first big tech company to make an AI-powered voice assistant. Siri was clearly flawed from the start, but it looks ancient by the standards of ChatGPT. To compete in this new AI race, companies need massive, bespoke computational clusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Cloud services are not Apple's strongest suit right now, as its chief for that division is leaving, and iCloud has been the subject of lament in this very newsletter. The company is investing significant resources in the augmented-reality headset we expect to debut in June and the long-mooted, capital-intensive automotive initiative.

Reddit has long been a forum for discussion on a huge variety of topics, and companies like Google and OpenAI have been using it in their A.I. projects. From a report: Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit's array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit's conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry's next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it.

The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network's vast selection of person-to-person conversations. "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. "But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free." The move marks one of the first significant examples of a social network's charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren't likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors -- automated duplicates to Reddit's conversations.

After placing an early bet on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft has another secret weapon in its arsenal: its own artificial intelligence chip for powering the large-language models responsible for understanding and generating humanlike language. The Information: The software giant has been developing the chip, internally code-named Athena, since as early as 2019, according to two people with direct knowledge of the project. The chips are already available to a small group of Microsoft and OpenAI employees, who are testing the technology, one of them said. Microsoft is hoping the chip will perform better than what it currently buys from other vendors, saving it time and money on its costly AI efforts. Other prominent tech companies, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, also make their own in-house chips for AI. The chips -- which are designed for training software such as large-language models, along with supporting inference, when the models use the intelligence they acquire in training to respond to new data -- could also relieve a shortage of the specialized computers that can handle the processing needed for AI software. That shortage, reflecting the fact that primarily just one company, Nvidia, makes such chips, is felt across tech. It has forced Microsoft to ration its computers for some internal teams, The Information has reported.

In addition to the company's long-rumored mixed reality headset, Apple is expected to launch new MacBooks, as well as a "major" update to the Apple Watch's watchOS software at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. All told, WWDC 2023 could end up being one of Apple's "biggest product launch events ever," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The Verge reports: Let's start with the Macs. Gurman doesn't explicitly say which macOS-powered computers Apple could announce in June, but lists around half a dozen devices it currently plans to release this year or early 2024. There's an all new 15-inch MacBook Air, an updated 13-inch MacBook Air, and new 13-inch and "high-end" MacBook Pros. Meanwhile on the Mac side Apple still needs to replace its last Intel-powered device, the Mac Pro, with an Apple Silicon model, and it also reportedly has plans to refresh its all-in-one 24-inch iMac.

Bloomberg's report notes that "at least some of the new laptops" will make an appearance. The bad news is that none are likely to run Apple's next-generation M3 chips, and will instead ship with M2-era processors. Apple apparently also has a couple of new Mac Studio computers in development, but Bloomberg is less clear on when they could launch.

Over on the software side, which is WWDC's traditional focus, watchOS will reportedly receive a "major" update that includes a revamped interface. Otherwise, we could be in for a relatively quiet show on the operating system front as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS are not expected to receive major updates this year. Gurman does say that work to allow sideloading on iOS to comply with upcoming EU legislation is ongoing.

In a special report for CBS News' 60 Minutes, Google CEO Sundar Pichai shares his concerns about artificial intelligence and why the company is choosing to not release advanced models of its AI chatbot. From the report: When Google filed for its initial public offering in 2004, its founders wrote that the company's guiding principle, "Don't be evil" was meant to help ensure it did good things for the world, even if it had to forgo some short term gains. The phrase remains in Google's code of conduct. Pichai told 60 Minutes he is being responsible by not releasing advanced models of Bard, in part, so society can get acclimated to the technology, and the company can develop further safety layers.

One of the things Pichai told 60 Minutes that keeps him up at night is Google's AI technology being deployed in harmful ways. Google's chatbot, Bard, has built in safety filters to help combat the threat of malevolent users. Pichai said the company will need to constantly update the system's algorithms to combat disinformation campaigns and detect deepfakes, computer generated images that appear to be real. As Pichai noted in his 60 Minutes interview, consumer AI technology is in its infancy. He believes now is the right time for governments to get involved.

"There has to be regulation. You're going to need laws ... there have to be consequences for creating deep fake videos which cause harm to society," Pichai said. "Anybody who has worked with AI for a while ... realize[s] this is something so different and so deep that, we would need societal regulations to think about how to adapt." Adaptation that is already happening around us with technology that Pichai believes, "will be more capable "anything we've ever seen before." Soon it will be up to society to decide how it's used and whether to abide by Alphabet's code of conduct and, "Do the right thing."

The humble and familiar barcode -- a staple on consumer packaging for nearly 50 years -- will soon be replaced with a more robust and muscular successor that offers far more information about the product inside. Axios reports: In a worldwide push called "Sunrise 2027," the retail industry is transitioning from the standard 12-digit barcode -- that square of vertical lines that's printed on a package and makes it go "beep" at the checkout scanner -- to a two-dimensional web-enabled version. The effort is being orchestrated by GS1 US, the nonprofit standards organization that oversees the barcode world. In the United States, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes will be supplanted by a new 2D type, with information encoded on both the horizontal and vertical axes. By 2027, only the 2D barcodes will be accepted at registers globally.

The new "2D" barcodes will unlock reams of online extras (for consumers) and revolutionize inventory management (for retailers). Scanning them may tell us the field where something was grown, the factory where a garment was sewn, the sustainability practices of the company that made it -- or the washing instructions. [...] Stores will be able to respond immediately to product recalls, identifying faulty items and removing them from shelves. They'll be able to flag foods that are approaching their sell-by date -- and offer discounts before they expire. Consumers will gain online access to a trove of useful data -- everything from ingredients, recipes and potential allergens to promotional offers and information about how to recycle the product.

GS1 US just released a "barcode capabilities test kit" to help retailers evaluate their readiness for the 2D transition. We can expect to start seeing more products printed with 2D barcodes (or both types, as the transition moves forward) fairly soon.

DuckDuckGo announced a new tool called DuckAssist that "automatically pulls and summarizes information from Wikipedia in response to certain questions," reports The Verge. From the report: DuckAssist's beta is live on the search engine right now -- but only through DuckDuckGo's mobile apps and browser extensions. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, says the company will add it to the web-based search engine if the trial "goes well." When you enter a question that DuckAssist can help with, you'll see a box that says "I can check to see if Wikipedia has relevant info on this topic, just ask" at the very top of your search results. Hit the blue "Ask" button, and you'll get an AI-generated answer using summarized information from Wikipedia. If DuckAssist has already answered a question once before, that response will automatically appear, which means you won't have to "ask" it the same thing multiple times.

While the tool's built upon language models from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and the Google-backed Anthropic, Weinberg says it'll retain the same focus on privacy as DuckDuckGo. According to the announcement, DuckAssist won't share any personally identifiable information with OpenAI and Anthropic, and neither company will use your anonymous questions to train their models. DuckDuckGo says the feature uses the "most recent full Wikipedia download available," which is around a few weeks old, so it might not be able to help if you're searching for something later than that. However, the company plans to update this in the future, as well as add more sources for DuckAssist to draw from.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the U.S. Department of Justice: Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) -- to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents' free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.

The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.

The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."

Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said regulators may need to impose a limit on using so-called stablecoins for payments as policy makers try to balance the need for innovation with its accompanying concerns. From a report: Cunliffe raised the prospect that rapid innovation in payment systems could bring new risks for customers and financial markets as a whole. "While, from a public policy perspective, we want competition and innovation in payments we need to guard against rapid, disruptive change that does not allow the financial system time to adjust and could therefore threaten financial stability," Cunliffe said Monday in a text of remarks at an event hosted by fintech industry body Innovate Finance. Regulators would need to decide "whether there should be limits, initially at any rate, on stablecoins used for payments." Stablecoins, which are currently issued by non-bank businesses, are pegged to the value of an asset. They are designed to maintain a stable value, unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, while using ledger technology to record and transfer ownership. Cunliffe noted that "so far their use has been confined to facilitating trading and other transactions in the world of crypto assets," but that there were proposals to use them for other, broader payment purposes. "Stablecoins offer the possibility of greater efficiency and functionality in payments," Cunliffe said. But they currently do not fit into any regulatory framework, unlike the existing payments systems and money issued by commercial banks.

Google is sprinting to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one. From a report: Google's employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine on its devices. For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology. Google's reaction to the Samsung threat was "panic," according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times. The new features, under the project name Magi, are being created by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company's current service, attempting to anticipate users' needs.

The Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry organization representing technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, has voiced concerns over a recent amendment to India's IT rules, saying the changes grant the local government expansive content removal authority without implementing adequate procedural safeguards. From a report: India recently updated its IT rules, barring social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter from disseminating false or misleading information about the government's business affairs. Under the new regulations, these firms must rely on New Delhi's own fact-checking unit to verify claims. The amendments lack the "sufficient procedural safeguards" to protect people's fundamental rights to access information, said Jeff Paine, Managing Director of AIC in a statement Monday.

There's a new problem with driverless test vehicles. Wired obtain records from San Francisco's public transit agency for about six months showing that driverless cars testing on city streets "resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays" for the city's "Muni" buses. And "that data likely doesn't reflect the true scale of the problem," Wired argues, since "a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow."

Some examples from the article: - On January 22, a Cruise at a green light wouldn't budge, preventing a San Francisco light-rail train from moving for nearly 16 minutes. As the train driver headed out to investigate, a passenger said, "Nobody in there, huh?" Over a span of 10 minutes, the driver chatted with passengers, checked with managers over the radio, and walked around the motionless Cruise vehicle. Someone wearing a reflective vest and holding a tablet eventually got into the Cruise and drove it away...

- On September 30, 2022, a Muni light-rail train, or streetcar, that was full of celebrating baseball fans began driving from a station into an intersection. An empty Cruise robotaxi at a stop sign to the train's left then also drove forward... It was seven minutes before the driverless car cleared the track and the train started again, drawing cheers from riders...

- On January 21, a Muni bus with a couple of riders aboard had lost six minutes because a Cruise was lingering across an intersection crowded by police and fire vehicles, video shows. While other cars maneuvered past, the Cruise did not. "I have one of those autonomous cars in front of me, so I'm stuck," the driver radioed. "I could make this turn on Sixth Avenue if this car wasn't in front of me...."

- In November, one light-rail passenger called it quits after waiting nearly six minutes for a Cruise driverless car in front to move. "There's nobody in the car," the driver told the person as they stepped off the train.

- [After a white Waymo SUV stopped in the middle of the road, Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp] says one of the company's roadside assistance crews arrived within 11 minutes of being dispatched to drive the SUV, clearing the blockage about 15 minutes after it began. Karp declined to elaborate on why the remote responder's guidance failed but said engineers have since introduced an unspecified change that allows addressing "these rare situations faster and with more flexibility...."

"The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known," reports the Washington Post, "boosting lies about Ukraine's military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.

"The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says." That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article. "Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning," said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1 percent claim was likely exaggerated or misleading.

The undated analysis of Russia's effectiveness at boosting propaganda on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram and other social media platforms cites activity in late 2022 and was apparently presented to U.S. military leaders in recent months. It is part of a trove of documents circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. Air National Guard technician Jack Teixeira was charged Friday with taking and transmitting the classified papers, charges for which he faces 15 years in prison...

Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.
The leaked document was apparently prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Europe Command, which directs American military activities in Europe. "It refers to signals intelligence, which includes eavesdropping, but does not cite sources for its conclusions," the Post reports, describing the document as offering "a rare candid assessment by U.S. intelligence of Russian disinformation operations."

The assessment concludes that foreign bots "view, 'like,' subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists." And the document says a Russian center's disinformation network — working directly for Russia's presidential administration — was still working on improvements as recently as late 2022 and expected to improve its ability to "promote pro-Russian narratives abroad." After Russia's 2016 efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, social media companies stepped up their attempts to verify users, including through phone numbers. Russia responded, in at least one case, by buying SIM cards in bulk, which worked until companies spotted the pattern, employees said. The Russians have now turned to front companies that can acquire less detectable phone numbers, the document says.

A separate top-secret document from the same Discord trove summarized six specific influence campaigns that were operational or planned for later this year by a new Russian organization, the Center for Special Operations in Cyberspace. The new group is mainly targeting Ukraine's regional allies, that document said. Those campaigns included one designed to spread the idea that U.S. officials were hiding vaccine side effects, intended to stoke divisions in the West.

"The fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards," argues FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough (while adding that Firefox, "through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold.")

"Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally." Part of Google's official rationale for the deprecation is the following line: "There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG-XL." Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem," let us remark that it's easy to gauge the response of the "entire ecosystem" when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said "ecosystem." In relation to Google's overwhelming power, the average web user might as well be a microbe. In supposedly gauging what the "ecosystem" wants, all Google is really doing is asking itself what Google wants...

While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue — its use of nonfree JavaScript — we're told that the issue regarding JPEG-XL's removal is the second-most "starred" issue in the history of the Chromium project, the nominally free basis for the Google Chrome browser. Chromium users came out of the woodwork to plead with Google not to make this decision. It made it anyway, not bothering to respond to users' concerns. We're not sure what metric it's using to gauge the interest of the "entire ecosystem," but it seems users have given JPEG-XL a strong show of support. In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format.

As the response to JPEG-XL's deprecation has shown, our rallying together and telling Google we want something isn't liable to get it to change its mind. It will keep on wanting what it wants: control; we'll keep on wanting what we want: freedom.

Only, the situation isn't hopeless. At the present moment, not even Google can stop us from creating the web communities that we want to see: pages that don't run huge chunks of malicious, nonfree code on our computers. We have the power to choose what we run or do not run in our browsers. Browsers like GNU IceCat (and extensions like LibreJS and JShelter> ) help with that. Google also can't prevent us from exploring networks beyond the web like Gemini. What our community can do is rally support behind those free browsers that choose to support JPEG-XL and similar formats, letting the big G know that even if we're smaller than it, we won't be bossed around.

The Washington Post found a new tranche of "top-secret intelligence documents" on Discord, and based on them reported Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of at least two additional Chinese spy balloons.

Based on the classified documents, the Post also reports that "questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February." The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year, called Killeen-23 by U.S. intelligence agencies, carried a raft of sensors and antennas the U.S. government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to a document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

Another balloon flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in a previously unreported incident, and a third crashed in the South China Sea, a second top-secret document stated, though it did not provide specific information for launch dates.... [Chinese spy balloon] Bulger-21 carried sophisticated surveillance equipment and circumnavigated the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, the NGA document states. Accardo-21 carried similar equipment as well as a "foil-lined gimbaled" sensor, it says....

Annotating what appear to be detailed photos of the balloon that flew over the United States, presumably taken from a U-2 spy plane, intelligence analysts assessed that it could generate enough power to operate "any" surveillance and reconnaissance technology, including a type of radar that can see at night and through clouds and thin materials [including tarps].... China's military has operated a vast surveillance balloon project for several years, partly out of Hainan province off China's south coast, U.S. officials have previously told The Post.

But the NGA document is notable as much for what it doesn't say, reflecting the government's possible lack of insight, at least in mid-February, into the balloons' capabilities... The lack of detailed conclusions about the balloon's surveillance capabilities raises questions about the decision to let it fly over the United States before shooting it down, an action the Defense Department justified at the time as an opportunity to collect additional intelligence.
The Post also reports that another leaked document (relying on intercepted communications) assessed that within the Chinese military the balloon surveillance program lacked "strong leadership" oversight.

Virginia Norwood, an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for more than 50 years, has died at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 96. The New York Times reports: Her death was announced by the United States Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellite program relies on her invention. Her daughter, Naomi Norwood, said her mother was found dead in her bed on the morning of March 27. The Landsat satellites, speeding 438 miles above the surface, orbit the earth every 99 minutes and have captured a complete image of the planet every 16 days since 1972. These images have provided powerful visual evidence of climate change, deforestation and other shifts affecting the planet's well-being.

Ms. Norwood, a physicist, was the person primarily responsible for designing and championing the scanner that made the program possible. NASA has called her "the mother of Landsat." At the dawn of the era of space exploration in the 1950s and '60s, she was working at Hughes Aircraft Company developing instruments. One of a small group of women in a male-dominated industry, she stood out more for her acumen. "She said, 'I was kind of known as the person who could solve impossible problems,'" Naomi Norwood told NASA for a video on its website. "So people would bring things to her, even pieces of other projects." [...]

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities, but always based on Ms. Norwood's original concept. The Landsat program has mapped changes in the planet brought on by climate change and by human actions. They include the near disappearance of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the evolving shape of the Mississippi Delta, and the deforestation and increasing agricultural use of land in Turkey and Brazil.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the "year of efficiency" at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company's work force. At the same time, some of Meta's top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv. The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a bad bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees at Meta, which not long ago was one of the most desirable workplaces in Silicon Valley, face an increasingly precarious future. The company's stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg has said on his Facebook page, are coming this month. Some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said. "So many of the employees feel like they're in limbo right now," said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. "They're saying it's 'Hunger Games' meets 'Lord of the Flies,' where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management."

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is not the only big tech company that has hit the brakes on spending. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, shed office space, dropped perks and pulled back from experimental initiatives. But Meta appears to face the most challenges. Last year, the company reported consecutive quarters of declining revenue -- a first since it became a public company in 2012.

Back in 2021, Samsung brought SmartThings to Android Auto. Google is now opening the door for more smart home/Internet of Things (IoT) apps on Android Auto and Automotive. 9to5Google reports: Android Auto today supports media and mapping/navigation apps. Google is now "enabling developers to bring [IoT] apps to cars." This might include controlling home security and doors from a touchscreen UI rather than having to rely on voice commands (assuming Google Assistant supports your home ecosystem). Google offers driving-optimized templates in the Android for Cars App Library, with testing via the Automotive OS emulator for Android Automotive OS and the DHU for Android Auto. Expect a consistent grid-based layout throughout apps. In fact, "drivers of cars using Android Auto can now download IOT apps developed with the Android for Cars App Library immediately from Google Play."