Researchers at Northwestern University have successfully achieved quantum teleportation over a standard fiber optic cable carrying regular internet traffic, demonstrating that quantum and classical communication can coexist on existing infrastructure. The research has been published in the journal Optica. TechSpot reports: Nobody thought it would be possible to achieve this, according to Professor Prem Kumar, who led the study. "Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiber optic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level." "By performing a destructive measurement on two photons -- one carrying a quantum state and one entangled with another photon -- the quantum state is transferred onto the remaining photon, which can be very far away," said Jordan Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in Kumar's laboratory and the paper's first author. "The photon itself does not have to be sent over long distances, but its state still ends up encoded onto the distant photon."

Prior to this study, many researchers were skeptical about the feasibility of quantum teleportation in cables carrying classic communications. The concern was that the entangled photons would be overwhelmed by the millions of other light particles present in the fiber optic cables. However, Kumar and his team were able to devise a solution. Through extensive studies of light scattering within fiber optic cables, the researchers identified a less crowded wavelength of light to place their photons. They also implemented special filters to reduce noise from regular Internet traffic. Kumar explained that he and his team conducted a meticulous analysis of light scattering patterns and strategically positioned their photons at a critical point where the scattering effect was minimized.

To validate their method, the team set up a 30-kilometer-long (18.6 miles) fiber optic cable with a photon at each end. They simultaneously transmitted quantum information and high-speed Internet traffic through the cable. The quality of the quantum information was measured at the receiving end while executing the teleportation protocol by making quantum measurements at the mid-point. The results showed that the quantum information was successfully transmitted, even in the presence of busy internet traffic.

Vietnam's Decree 147 mandates social media users on platforms like Facebook and TikTok to verify their identities and requires tech companies to store and share user data with authorities upon request, sparking concerns over increased censorship, self-censorship, and threats to free expression. Furthermore, the decree imposes restrictions on gaming time for minors and limits livestreaming to verified accounts. It becomes effective on Christmas Day. The Guardian reports: Decree 147, as it is known, builds on a 2018 cybersecurity law that was sharply criticized by the US, EU and internet freedom advocates who said it mimics China's repressive internet censorship. [...] Critics say that decree 147 will also expose dissidents who post anonymously to the risk of arrest. "Many people work quietly but effectively in advancing the universal values of human rights," Ho Chi Minh City-based blogger and rights activist Nguyen Hoang Vi told AFP.

She warned that the new decree "may encourage self-censorship, where people avoid expressing dissenting views to protect their safety -- ultimately harming the overall development of democratic values" in the country. Le Quang Tu Do, of the ministry of information and communications (MIC), told state media that decree 147 would "regulate behavior in order to maintain social order, national security, and national sovereignty in cyberspace." [...]

Human Rights Watch is calling on the government to repeal the "draconian" new decree. "Vietnam's new Decree 147 and its other cybersecurity laws neither protect the public from any genuine security concerns nor respect fundamental human rights," said Patricia Gossman, HRW's associate Asia director. "Because the Vietnamese police treat any criticism of the Communist party of Vietnam as a national security matter, this decree will provide them with yet another tool to suppress dissent."

Sweden has accused China of denying a request for Swedish prosecutors to board a Chinese ship that has been linked to the cutting of two undersea cables in the Baltic despite Beijing pledging "cooperation" with regional authorities. From a report: The Yi Peng 3 left the waters it had been anchored in since last month on Saturday -- despite an ongoing investigation. The ship was tracked sailing over the two fibre-optic cables, one between Sweden and Lithuania, and the other linking Helsinki and Germany, at around the time that they were cut on 17 and 18 November in Swedish territorial waters close to the Swedish islands of Gotland and Oland.

For more than a month afterwards it was anchored in the Kattegat strait between Sweden and Denmark where it was being observed by multiple countries and was boarded by Swedish police and other authorities last week. The ship tracking site VesselFinder showed the Yi Peng 3 heading north out of the strait on Saturday and on Monday China confirmed the ship had left in order to "ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of the crew." The Swedish foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said on Monday that China had not cooperated with Sweden's request to allow Swedish prosecutors onboard.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Department of Justice's list of solutions for fixing Google's illegal antitrust behavior and restoring competition in the search engine market started with forcing the company to sell Chrome, and late Friday night, Google responded with a list of its own.

Instead of breaking off Chrome, Android, or Google Play as the DOJ's filing considers, Google's proposed fixes aim at the payments it makes to companies like Apple and Mozilla for exclusive, prioritized placement of its services, its licensing deals with companies that make Android phones, and contracts with wireless carriers. They don't address a DOJ suggestion about possibly forcing Google to share its valuable search data with other companies to help their products catch up.

Lilium, once a darling in the nascent industry of electric aircraft that raised more than $1 billion before going public, has ceased operations and laid off about 1,000 workers after efforts to gain financing and exit insolvency failed. From a report: Lilium co-founder and CEO Patrick Nathen confirmed on LinkedIn that the 10-year-old company had stopped operating. "After 10 years and 10 months, it is a sad fact that Lilium has ceased operations. The company that Daniel, Sebastian, Matthias and I founded can no longer pursue our shared belief in more environmentally friendly aviation. This is heartbreaking and the timing feels painfully ironic," wrote Nathen. The layoffs cover the bulk of the company's workforce and come a few days after about 200 workers were let go, according to a regulatory filing on December 16.

Meta plans to add displays to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as next year, Financial Times reports, as the US tech giant accelerates its plans to build lightweight headsets that can usurp the smartphone as consumers' main computing device. Financial Times: The $1.5tn social media group is planning to add a screen inside the $300 sunglasses it makes and sells in partnership with eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, according to people familiar with the plans. The updated Ray-Bans could be released as early as the second half of 2025, the people said. The small display would be likely to be used to show notifications or responses from Meta's virtual assistant.

The move comes as Meta pushes further into wearable devices and what chief executive Mark Zuckerberg hopes will be the next computing platform, as rivals such as Apple, Google and Snap also race to develop their own similar products.

A U.S. judge has ruled that Israeli spyware maker NSO Group breached hacking laws by using WhatsApp to infect devices with its Pegasus spyware. From a report: In a historic ruling on Friday, a Northern California federal judge held NSO Group liable for targeting the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users, violating state and federal hacking laws as well as WhatsApp's terms of service, which prohibit the use of the messaging platform for malicious purposes.

The ruling comes five years after Meta-owned WhatsApp sued NSO Group, alleging the spyware outfit had exploited an audio-calling vulnerability in the messaging platform to install its Pegasus spyware on unsuspecting users' devices. WhatsApp said that more than 100 human rights defenders, journalists and "other members of civil society" were targeted by the malware, along with government officials and diplomats. In her ruling, Judge Phyllis Hamilton said NSO did not dispute that it "must have reverse-engineered and/or decompiled the WhatsApp software" to install its Pegasus spyware on devices, but raised questions about whether it had done so before agreeing to WhatsApp's terms of service.

Honda sketched plans for a drawn-out deal that amounts to a takeover of Nissan in all but name, as Japan's automakers struggle to keep up in an increasingly competitive global car industry. From a report: The two announced a tentative agreement Monday to set up a joint holding company that will aim to list shares in August 2026. While their executives called the transaction a merger, Honda will take the lead in forming the new entity and nominate a majority of its directors.

Nissan's partner Mitsubishi may also participate in the deal. Honda and Nissan both are having trouble contending with ascendant domestic automakers in China, which surpassed Japan as the world's largest car-exporting nation last year and is pulling further ahead in 2024. Honda Chief Executive Officer Toshihiro Mibe spoke to the level of level of difficulty ahead for the companies when he said during a press conference that their goal is to be competitive by 2030.

Silicon Valley is betting the farm on AI. Data centers are straining power grids. Model training costs are heading toward billions. Yet across the software industry, AI revenue remains theoretical. From a report: Hyperscalers -- combined with Meta and Oracle -- plan to spend $292 billion on AI infrastructure by 2025 -- an 88% increase since 2023. Two-thirds of software companies, however, still report decelerating growth in 2024.

Semiconductor stocks have surged 43% year-to-date on AI expectations, while the software index IGV is up 30%. Microsoft, despite its OpenAI investment, has underperformed the IGV by 19% since ChatGPT's release. Microsoft's AI revenue run rate is 3% of total revenue, according to estimates by investment bank Jefferies. Snowflake expects immaterial AI contribution in fiscal 2025. Salesforce isn't factoring in material contribution from new AI products into FY25 guidance. Adobe's Firefly AI, launched in March 2023, hasn't accelerated revenue.

Alphabet's Waymo robotaxis are providing "hundreds of thousands of driverless rides each month," reports the Washington Post. But as the robotaxi service expands in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, some passengers "have found that traveling by robotaxi can make riders into sitting ducks for a new form of public harassment." The Washington Post spoke with four Waymo passengers, three of them women, who said they experienced harassment or what felt like threats to their safety from people who followed, obstructed or attempted to enter a driverless vehicle they were riding in...

Elliot, a tech worker in San Francisco, recalled in a phone interview a "scary" situation during a Waymo ride late one night in October. A pedestrian tried to enter the driverless vehicle as it waited at a red light. "Go away," Elliot yelled at the man as he knocked on the window before briefly flashing what looked like a knife, video of the incident viewed by The Post showed... In the moment, Elliot said, he wished someone could have "slammed on the gas and gotten away from this guy," adding that Waymo should change how its vehicles respond in such situations...

Madelline, a 25-year-old restaurant server in San Francisco, said that during a recent Waymo ride at around 2 a.m., the driverless vehicle had to stop after two drivers ahead began yelling at each other and throwing things out of their cars in what appeared to be a road rage dispute. The two cars blocked an intersection and one person got out of one of the vehicles. "I was definitely panicking a little bit," Madelline said, as her car waited for the road to clear instead of turning off as a human driver might do... She would like to have more control over a robotaxi's route but still prefers Waymo rides to using Uber or Lyft, whose drivers sometimes make her uncomfortable...

In September, Amina V. was on her way to a hair appointment when a man stepped in front of her robotaxi and the car stalled in the middle of the street. She already had been recording herself in the Waymo, so she turned the camera to capture the man hitting on her while her car stood frozen in San Francisco's Soma neighborhood.
And one Saturday night at 10:30 p.m., a tech worker named Stephanie took a driverless Waymo robotaxi with her sister, and reports confronting "several young men close to the robotaxi honking and yelling, 'Hey, ladies — you guys are hot.' If she or another human had been driving, it would have been easy to reroute the car to avoid leading the pursuers to her home. But she was scared and didn't know how to change the robot's path. She called 911, but a dispatcher said they couldn't send a police car to a moving vehicle, Stephanie recalled... [S]he said the other car gave up the chase when the Waymo was a minute from her house. She and her sister arrived home safely, though terrified. Stephanie didn't catch the car's license plate number, which the 911 dispatcher requested after her ride concluded. Waymo vehicles, like other driverless cars in development, use multiple cameras to help make sense of the world around them. But when she later asked the company for the car's video footage, hoping it had captured the license plate, Waymo declined to provide it, she said.

She would like closer coordination between Waymo and first responders and says she is now unsure about self-driving rides after dark. "I would feel safe taking it during the day," Stephanie said. But "at night, maybe I'm safer having someone else in the car just in case something happens."
A Waymo spokesperson told the Washington Post that their support agents will stay on the line with riders who call in about incidents like this, also working with law enforcement as appropriate — but the agents can't change the vehicle's specific route. (The Post adds that Waymo passengers "can tell a vehicle to pull over or change its next stop or destination using the Waymo app, or ask a support agent to make similar changes.")

"Drones collided, fell from the sky and hit a little boy after 'technical difficulties' during a holiday show..." reports the Orlando Sentinel.

They note that a press release from the city said the 8 p.m. show was then cancelled: The company behind the drones, Sky Elements, was in its second year of the contract with the city, the release said. Sky Elements said they operate drone shows throughout the country with millions of viewers annually and are committed to maintaining FAA safety regulations, the company said in a statement released Sunday afternoon. The organization wished for a "speedy recovery" of those impacted by Saturday's show at Lake Eola, the statement said. "The well-being of our audience is our utmost priority, and we regret any distress or inconvenience caused," the statement said. "We are diligently working with the FAA and City of Orlando officials to determine the cause and are committed to establishing a clear picture of what transpired."

The show is in its third year, often drawing crowds of roughly 25,000, according to the city. But there has never been an incident before. The Federal Aviation Administration regulates drones and light shows and permitted the Holiday Drone Show at Lake Eola on Saturday. Now they are investigating the incident which they said began as drones collided and fell into the crowd at the park, spokesperson Kristen Alsop said in an email... Eyewitness videos on social media show multiple green and red drones falling from the sky.
The mother of the 7-year-old boy hit by a falling drone told a local TV station that the holiday show "ended in nightmares," adding that it happened just days before Christmas. She believes big-audience drone light shows need more safety precautions. "This should not happen. No family should be going through this." She added on Facebook that her 7-year-old son is now "going into emergency heart surgery off of just trying to watch a drone show."

She adds that the city of Orlando and the drone company behind the light show "really have some explaining to do." Responding to comments on Facebook, she posted two hours ago: "Thank you everyone. He is still in surgery."

A demonstration "race" between a (human) F1 race car driver Daniil Kvyat and an autonomous vehicle was just staged by the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League.

Describing the league and the "man vs. machine" showdown, Ars Technica writes, "Say goodbye to the human driver and hello to 95 kilograms of computers and a whole suite of sensors." But again, racing is hard, and replacing humans doesn't change that. The people who run and participate in A2RL are aware of this, and while many organizations have made it a sport of overselling AI, A2RL is up-front about the limitations of the current state of the technology. One example of the technology's current shortcomings: The vehicles can't swerve back and forth to warm up the tires. Giovanni Pau, Team Principal of TII Racing, stated during a press briefing regarding the AI system built for racing, "We don't have human intuition. So basically, that is one of the main challenges to drive this type of car. It's impossible today to do a correct grip estimation. A thing my friend Daniil (Kvyat) can do in a nanosecond...."

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) develops the hardware and software stack for all the vehicles. Hardware-wise, the eight teams receive the same technology. When it comes to software, the teams need to build out their own system on TII's software stack to get the vehicles to navigate the tracks. In April, four teams raced on the track in Abu Dhabi. As we've noted before, how the vehicles navigate the tracks and world around them isn't actually AI. It's programmed responses to an environment; these vehicles are not learning on their own. Frankly, most of what is called "AI" in the real world is also not AI.

Vehicles driven by the systems still need years of research to come close to the effectiveness of a human beyond the wheel. Kvyat has been working with A2RL since the beginning. In that time, the former F1 driver has been helping engineers understand how to bring the vehicle closer to their limit. The speed continues to increase as the development progresses. Initially, the vehicles were three to five minutes slower than Kvyat around a lap; now, they are about eight seconds behind. That's a lifetime in a real human-to-human race, but an impressive amount of development for vehicles with 90 kg of computer hardware crammed into the cockpit of a super formula car. Currently, the vehicles are capable of recreating 90-95 percent of the speed of a human driver, according to Pau. Those capabilities are reduced when a human driver is also on the track, particularly for safety reasons....

The "race" was to be held ahead of the season finale of the Super Formula season... The A2RL vehicle took off approximately 22 seconds ahead of Kvyat, but the race ended before the practice lap was completed. Cameras missed the event, but the A2RL car lost traction and ended up tail-first into a wall...

Khurram Hassan, commercial director of A2RL, told Ars that the cold tires on the cold track caused a loss of traction.

A series of drone sightings over U.S. military bases "has renewed concerns that the U.S. doesn't have clear government-wide policy for how to deal with unauthorized incursions that could potentially pose a national security threat," reports CNN: "We're one year past Langley drone incursions and almost two years past the PRC spy balloon. Why don't we have a single [point of contact] who is responsible for coordination across all organizations in the government to address this?" the recently retired head of US Northern Command and NORAD, Gen. Glen VanHerck, told CNN. "Instead, everybody's pointing their fingers at each other saying it's not our responsibility...." Over a period of six days earlier this month, there were six instances of unmanned aerial systems, or drones, entering the airspace of the Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton in California, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN, adding that they posed "no threat to installation operations and no impact to air and ground operations." There have also been incidents in the last month at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey; Naval Weapons Station Earle, New Jersey; and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. A Chinese citizen, who is a lawful permanent resident of the US, was recently arrested in connection to the California incident.

The drone incidents are "a problem that has been brewing for over a decade and we have basically failed to address it," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Rob Spalding, who previously served as the chief China strategist for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council. It's unclear what specifically the drones could be doing — the intent could be anything from attempting to gather intelligence on the base or testing its defenses and response time, to gaining a better understanding of how the bases work, or they could simply be harmless hobbyists flying drones too close to restricted areas... Despite the incursions and the risk they could pose, officials say there is no coordinated policy to determine what agency leads the response to such activity, or how to determine where the drones originate.

CNN reported this week that government agencies have struggled to keep pace with the development of drones and drone technology, particularly by adversaries like China, though legislation is being discussed and the Pentagon just recently released its strategy for countering unmanned systems... The two heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Jack Reed and Roger Wicker, sounded the alarm in a Washington Post op-ed at the beginning of 2024 that the US "lacks adequate drone detection capability" and that agencies "lack clear lines of authority about which agency is responsible for stopping these incursions."

Military installations have the authority to protect themselves and respond to threats, but a former senior military official said that if the drone enters the airspace and subsequently leaves, determining where the drone originated from and what it was doing can be difficult. Military law enforcement typically coordinates with civilian law enforcement off base in that instance, the former official said, but are often limited in what they can do given laws that restrict intelligence collection within US borders. But sources also said the lack of ability to do more also stems at times from a failure to prioritize defense against this kind of activity within the US. The topic is "such a relatively new phenomenon that the law has not caught up and the agencies have not adapted quickly enough," [said one Senate aide familiar with discussions on drone defense and policy].
"The need for Congressional action was made clear in a joint statement this week from the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigations and Federal Aviation Administration," according to the article.

"The agencies said they 'urge Congress to enact counter-UAS legislation when it reconvenes that would extend and expand existing counter-drone authorities to identify and mitigate any threat that may emerge.'"

The Associated Press reports that in Albania (population: 2,402,113), "children comprise the largest group of TikTok users in the country, according to domestic researchers."

But "Albania's prime minister said Saturday the government will shut down the video service TikTok for one year, blaming it for inciting violence and bullying, especially among children" after "the stabbing death of a teenager in mid-November by another teen after a quarrel that started on TikTok." There has been increasing concern from Albanian parents after reports of children taking knives and other objects to school to use in quarrels or cases of bullying promoted by stories they see on TikTok. TikTok's operations in China, where its parent company is based, are different, "promoting how to better study, how to preserve nature ... and so on," according to Rama. Albania is too small a country to impose on TikTok a change of its algorithm so that it does not promote "the reproduction of the unending hell of the language of hatred, violence, bullying and so on," Rama's office wrote in an email response to The Associated Press' request for comment. Rama's office said that in China TikTok "prevents children from being sucked into this abyss."
TikTok told the Associated Press it "found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have in fact confirmed videos leading up to this incident were being posted on another platform, not TikTok...."

Monday long-time Slashdot reader denelson83 wrote: The crowdsourced, widely-used map database OpenStreetMap has had a hardware failure at its upstream ISP in Amsterdam and has been put into a protective read-only mode to avoid loss or corruption of data. .
The outage had started Sunday December 15 at 4:00AM (GMT/UTC), but by Tuesday they'd posted a final update: Our new ISP is up and running and we have started migrating our servers across to it. If all goes smoothly we hope to have all services back up and running this evening...

We have dual redundant links via separate physical hardware from our side to our Tier 1 ISP. We unexpectedly discovered their equipment is a single point failure. Their extended outage is an extreme disappointment to us.

We are an extremely small team. The OSMF budget is tiny and we could definitely use more help. Real world experience... Ironically we signed a contract with a new ISP in the last few days. Install is on-going (fibre runs, modules & patching) and we expect to run old and new side-by-side for 6 months. Significantly better resilience (redundant ISP side equipment, VRRP both ways, multiple upstream peers... 2x diverse 10G fibre links).
OpenStreetMap celebrated its 20th anniversary in August, with a TechCrunch profile reminding readers the site gives developers "geographic data and maps so they can rely a little less on the proprietary incumbents in the space," reports TechCrunch, adding "Yes, that mostly means Google."

OpenStreetMap starts with "publicly available and donated aerial imagery and maps, sourced from governments and private organizations such as Microsoft" — then makes them better: Today, OpenStreetMap claims more than 10 million contributors who map out and fine-tune everything from streets and buildings, to rivers, canyons and everything else that constitutes our built and natural environments... Contributors can manually add and edit data through OpenStreetMap's editing tools, and they can even venture out into the wild and map a whole new area by themselves using GPS, which is useful if a new street crops up, for example...

OpenStreetMap's Open Database License allows any third-party to use its data with the appropriate attribution (though this attribution doesn't always happen). This includes big-name corporations such as Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox, through a who's who of tech companies, including Uber and Strava... More recently, the Overture Maps Foundation — an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and TomTom — has leaned heavily on OpenStreetMap data as part of its own efforts to build a viable alternative to Google's walled mapping garden.
The article notes that OpenStreetMap is now overseen by the U.K.-based nonprofit OpenStreetMap Foundation (supported mainly by donations and memberships), with just one employee — a system engineer — "and a handful of contractors who provide administrative and accounting support."

In August its original founder Steve Coast, returned to the site for a special blog post on its 20th anniversary: OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you're interested in... The story isn't so much about the data and technology, and it never was. It's the people... OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all. It managed to sidestep almost all the problems that Wikipedia has by virtue of only representing facts not opinions. The project itself is remarkable. And it's wonderful that so many are in love with it.
"Two decades ago, I knew that a wiki map of the world would work," Coast writes. "It seemed obvious in light of the success of Wikipedia and Linux..."

On Thursday New Jersey lawmakers passed a resolution "calling on the federal government to conduct a 'rigorous and ongoing' investigation into the drone sightings in the state," reports the Associated Press: Meanwhile, federal and local authorities are warning against pointing lasers at suspected drones, because aircraft pilots are being hit in the eyes more often. Authorities also said they are concerned people might fire weapons at manned aircraft that they have mistaken for drones...

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said Monday that the federal government has yet to identify any public safety or national security risks. "There are more than 1 million drones that are lawfully registered with the Federal Aviation Administration here in the United States," Kirby said. "And there are thousands of commercial, hobbyist and law enforcement drones that are lawfully in the sky on any given day. That is the ecosystem that we are dealing with." The federal government has deployed personnel and advanced technology to investigate the reports in New Jersey and other states, and is evaluating each tip reported by citizens, he said. About 100 of the more than 5,000 drone sightings reported to the FBI in recent weeks were deemed credible enough to warrant more investigation, according to a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense.

Speculation has raged online, with some expressing concerns the drones could be part of a nefarious plot by foreign agents or clandestine operations by the U.S. government. Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said it's unlikely the drones are engaged in intelligence gathering, given how loud and bright they are. He repeated Tuesday that the drones being reported are not being operated by the Department of Defense. Asked whether military contractors might be operating drones in the New Jersey area, Ryder rebuffed the notion, saying there are "no military operations, no military drone or experiment operations in this corridor." Ryder said additional drone-detecting technology was being moved to some military installations, including the Picatinny Arsenal...

U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, said he has heard nothing to support the notion that the government is hiding anything. He said a lack of faith in institutions is playing a key part in the saga.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: With a few keystrokes, anyone can ask an artificial intelligence (AI) program such as ChatGPT to write them a term paper, a rap song, or a play. But don't expect William Shakespeare's originality. A new study finds such output remains derivative -- at least for now. [...] [O]bjectively testing this creativity has been tricky. Scientists have generally taken two tacks. One is to use another computer program to search for signs of plagiarism -- though a lack of plagiarism does not necessarily equal creativity. The other approach is to have humans judge the AI output themselves, rating factors such as fluency and originality. But that's subjective and time intensive. So Ximing Lu, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, and colleagues created a program featuring both objectivity and a bit of nuance.

Called DJ Search, it collects pieces of text of a minimum length from whatever the AI outputs and searches for them in large online databases. DJ Search doesn't just look for identical matches; it also scans for strings whose words have similar meanings. To evaluate the meaning of a word or phrase, the program itself relies on a separate AI algorithm that produces a set of numbers called an "embedding," which roughly represents the contexts in which words are typically found. Synonymous words have numerically close embeddings. For example, phrases that swap "anticipation" and "excitement" are considered matches. After removing all matches, the program calculates the ratio of the remaining words to the original document length, which should give an estimate of how much of the AI's output is novel. The program conducts this process for various string lengths (the study uses a minimum of five words) and combines the ratios into one index of linguistic novelty. (The team calls it a "creativity index," but creativity requires both novelty and quality -- random gibberish is novel but not creative.)

The researchers compared the linguistic novelty of published novels, poetry, and speeches with works written by recent LLMs. Humans outscored AIs by about 80% in poetry, 100% in novels, and 150% in speeches, the researchers report in a preprint posted on OpenReview and currently under peer review. Although DJ Search was designed for comparing people and machines, it can also be used to compare two or more humanmade works. For example, Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel The Hunger Games scored 35% higher in linguistic originality than Stephenie Meyer's 2005 hit Twilight. (You can try the tool online.)

The rise of AI has rendered traditional CAPTCHA tests increasingly ineffective, as bots can now "[solve] these puzzles in milliseconds using artificial intelligence (AI)," reports The Conversation. "How ironic. The tools designed to prove we're human are now obstructing us more than the machines they're supposed to be keeping at bay." The report warns that the imminent arrival of AI agents -- software programs designed to autonomously interact with websites on our behalf -- will further complicate matters. From the report: Developers are continually coming up with new ways to verify humans. Some systems, like Google's ReCaptcha v3 (introduced in 2018), don't ask you to solve puzzles anymore. Instead, they watch how you interact with a website. Do you move your cursor naturally? Do you type like a person? Humans have subtle, imperfect behaviors that bots still struggle to mimic. Not everyone likes ReCaptcha v3 because it raises privacy issues -- plus the web company needs to assess user scores to determine who is a bot, and the bots can beat the system anyway. There are alternatives that use similar logic, such as "slider" puzzles that ask users to move jigsaw pieces around, but these too can be overcome.

Some websites are now turning to biometrics to verify humans, such as fingerprint scans or voice recognition, while face ID is also a possibility. Biometrics are harder for bots to fake, but they come with their own problems -- privacy concerns, expensive tech and limited access for some users, say because they can't afford the relevant smartphone or can't speak because of a disability. The imminent arrival of AI agents will add another layer of complexity. It will mean we increasingly want bots to visit sites and do things on our behalf, so web companies will need to start distinguishing between "good" bots and "bad" bots. This area still needs a lot more consideration, but digital authentication certificates are proposed as one possible solution.

In sum, Captcha is no longer the simple, reliable tool it once was. AI has forced us to rethink how we verify people online, and it's only going to get more challenging as these systems get smarter. Whatever becomes the next technological standard, it's going to have to be easy to use for humans, but one step ahead of the bad actors. So the next time you find yourself clicking on blurry traffic lights and getting infuriated, remember you're part of a bigger fight. The future of proving humanity is still being written, and the bots won't be giving up any time soon.

Dell CEO Michael Dell has acknowledged delays in corporate adoption of AI-enabled PCs but remains confident in their eventual widespread uptake, citing his four decades of industry experience with technology transitions.

The PC maker's chief executive told Fortune that while the current refresh cycle is "definitely delayed," adoption is inevitable once sufficient features drive customer demand. Meanwhile, Dell's infrastructure division saw 80% revenue growth last quarter from AI-server sales. The company is supplying servers for xAI's Colossus supercomputer project in Memphis and sees opportunities in "sovereign AI" systems for nations seeking technological independence. "Pick a country ranked by GDP, the [top] 49 other than the U.S., they all need one," Dell said.

Google has reduced its senior management positions by 10% as part of an ongoing efficiency initiative, CEO Sundar Pichai announced during a company-wide meeting earlier this week.

The restructuring affected managers, directors, and vice presidents, with some roles eliminated and others converted to non-management positions, a Google spokesperson told BusinessInsider. The move follows Google's January 2023 layoff of 12,000 employees and Pichai's September 2022 goal to improve company efficiency by 20%.