A radio station in Alabama has been forced to temporarily shut down after thieves stole a 200ft radio tower. The Guardian reports: WJLX, a station in Jasper, Alabama, was ordered to go off air by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after thieves took the station's AM tower last week, the Guardian first learned. "In all my years of being in the business, around the business, everything like that, I have never seen anything like this," WJLX's general manager, Brett Elmore, told the Guardian. "You don't hear of a 200ft tower being stolen," he added.

Elmore said the theft was first discovered last week by a landscaping crew that regularly manages the area nearby the tower, WBRC reported. "They called me and said the tower was gone. And I said, 'What do you mean, the tower is gone?'" Elmore said. The radio tower was previously located in a wooded area, behind a local poultry plant. Elmore said that thieves had cut the tower's wires and somehow removed it. Thieves also stole the station's AM transmitter from a nearby building.

For the small radio station, the theft has had a significant impact. Elmore said the station's property was not insured. Replacing the tower could cost the station anywhere between $100,000 to $150,000, which is "more money than we have," Elmore said. The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft. While WJLX still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed to operate its FM transmitter while the AM station is off the air. "I had a guy from Virginia call yesterday and say, 'You know, I think a helicopter grabbed [the tower],'" Elmore said. He's hoping that surveillance video from the nearby poultry plant or witnesses nearby can help figure out who stole the station's tower.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has argued for years that developers who don't want to abide by its rules for native iOS apps can always write web apps. It has done so in its platform guidelines, in congressional testimony, and in court. Web developers, for their part, maintain that Safari and its underlying WebKit engine still lack the technical capabilities to allow web apps to compete with native apps on iOS hardware. To this day, it's argued, the fruit cart's laggardly implementation of Push Notifications remains subpar.

The enforcement of Europe's Digital Markets Act was expected to change that -- to promote competition held back by gatekeepers. But Apple, in a policy change critics have called "malicious compliance," appears to be putting web apps at an even greater disadvantage under the guise of compliance with European law. In the second beta release of iOS 17.4, which incorporates code to accommodate Europe's Digital Markets Act, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been demoted from standalone apps that use the whole screen to shortcuts that open within the default browser. This appears to solely affect users in the European Union, though your mileage may vary. Concerns about this demotion of PWAs surfaced earlier this month, with the release of the initial iOS 17.4 beta. As noted by Open Web Advocacy -- a group that has lobbied to make the web platform more capable -- "sites installed to the home screen failed to launch in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead."

The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday it is immediately outlawing scam robocalls featuring fake, AI-created voices, cracking down on so-called "deepfake" technology that experts say could undermine election security or supercharge fraud. From a report: The unanimous FCC vote extends anti-robocall rules to cover AI deepfake calls by recognizing those voices as "artificial" under a federal law governing telemarketing and robocalling. The FCC's move gives state attorneys general more legal tools to pursue illegal robocallers that use AI-generated voices to impersonate celebrities, politicians and close family members, the FCC said.

IDC, in a press release: A new forecast from IDC shows shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) PCs -- personal computers with specific system-on-a-chip (SoC) capabilities designed to run generative AI tasks locally -- growing from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to more than 167 million in 2027. By the end of the forecast, IDC expects AI PCs will represent nearly 60% of all PC shipments worldwide. [...] Until recently, running an AI task locally on a PC was done on the central processing unit (CPU), the graphics processing unit (GPU), or a combination of the two. However, this can have a negative impact on the PC's performance and battery life because these chips are not optimized to run AI efficiently. PC silicon vendors have now introduced AI-specific silicon to their SoCs called neural processing units (NPUs) that run these tasks more efficiently.

To date, IDC has identified three types of NPU-enabled AI PCs:
1. Hardware-enabled AI PCs include an NPU that offers less than 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) performance and typically enables specific AI features within apps to run locally. Qualcomm, Apple, AMD, and Intel are all shipping chips in this category today.

2. Next-generation AI PCs include an NPU with 40 to 60 TOPS performance and an AI-first operating system (OS) that enables persistent and pervasive AI capabilities in the OS and apps. Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel have all announced future chips for this category, with delivery expected to begin in 2024. Microsoft is expected to roll out major updates (and updated system specifications) to Windows 11 to take advantage of these high-TOPS NPUs.

3. Advanced AI PCs are PCs that offer more than 60 TOPS of NPU performance. While no silicon vendors have announced such products, IDC expects them to appear in the coming years. This IDC forecast does not include advanced AI PCs, but they will be incorporated into future updates. Michael Dell, commenting on X: This is correct and might be underestimating it. AI PCs are coming fast and Dell is ready.

Mozilla, which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found. Fortune: Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust. "We want to offer an alternative for people to have better products," says Baker, who wants to draw more attention to policies, products and processes to challenge business models built on fueling outrage. "What are the connections between this global malaise and how humans are engaging with each other and technology?"

Chambers says she plans to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO. Prior to being recruited to the Mozilla board three years ago, Chambers says she was feeling "pretty disillusioned" about society because of the influence of money in politics and the growing power of the tech giants. "I was confused about what to do and this felt like a genuine way to make an impact." Chambers says she won't be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. "I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession," says Chambers.

Google has renamed its AI assistant to "Gemini" and unveiled a paid subscription tier offering. The $19.99/month "Gemini Advanced" includes a more powerful AI model and cloud storage integration, targeting users seeking advanced content creation and complex query resolution. Google is also leveraging its Android user base by making Gemini the default digital assistant, aiming to replicate the success of its billion-user products.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working on a type of agent software to automate complex tasks by taking over a users' device, The Information reported on Wednesday, citing a person with knowledge on the matter. The agent software will handle web-based tasks such as gathering public data about a set of companies, creating itineraries or booking flight tickets, according to the report, opens new tab. The new assistants -- often called "agents" -- promise to perform more complex personal and work tasks when commanded to by a human, without needing close supervision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe: William Straus, like many others, saw the videos in recent days of people behind the wheel of a Tesla in Autopilot mode, sporting their new Apple Vision Pro headsets and typing on an invisible keyboard. "They're all over the Internet, these idiots driving Teslas with their hands up in the air," the state representative said. Some claimed their video was staged. No matter: Straus wants to make it illegal. The Legislature's transportation committee on Wednesday approved language that would ban the use of the new virtual reality headset, or other similar technologies, while behind the wheel in Massachusetts.

Straus, the committee's House chair, said he crafted language with his staff over Monday night and Tuesday morning, and added it to an existing proposal that would, among other things, bar drivers from recording or broadcasting themselves while behind the wheel. That it advanced out of committee less than 48 hours later qualifies as light speed by Beacon Hill standards. (The bill must still pass the full House and Senate.) [...]

"This is absolutely the correct time to wall this off," said Straus, a Mattapoisett Democrat. "People who operate motor vehicles already have too many distractions." Straus' proposal would explicitly not allow drivers to wear, hold, or "otherwise utilize or interact with a spatial computer," or an augmented reality or mixed reality device. It also would ban drivers from viewing any video, images or text unrelated to operating or navigating the car, be it displayed on a screen or "otherwise worn as a headset or elsewhere on the operator's body." Motorists would face the same fines they do now for using their phone to text while driving: $100 for a first violation, $250 for a second violation and $500 for every violation after that. The driver in the viral video posted on YouTube and linked above said that it was a "skit" that he had made with friends and that he wasn't arrested. "[I] was in the right place at the right time," he told Gizmodo. "That's why we filmed the police."

One of Waymo's driverless vehicles struck a cyclist in San Francisco on February 6th, causing minor injuries. "It was the latest incident in the city at a time when tensions around autonomous vehicles are particularly high after a driverless Cruise vehicle injured a pedestrian," reports The Verge. From the report: The incident, which was first reported by Reuters, occurred at 3:02PM on February 6th at the intersection of 17th and Mississippi streets in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. A Google Maps Street View of the intersection shows a flat, well-lit area surrounded by warehouses with unprotected bike lanes on both streets. Police officers arriving at the scene found an autonomous vehicle had struck a cyclist, who only reported "non-life threatening injuries," according to Eve Laokwansathitaya, public information officer with SFPD.

A passenger in the Waymo vehicle at the time of the crash was uninjured. The incident remains under investigation, Laokwansathitaya noted. Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina had more details to share. The Waymo vehicle was stopped at a four-way stop, as an oncoming large truck began to turn into the intersection. The vehicle waited until it was its turn and then also began to proceed through the intersection, failing to notice the cyclist who was traveling behind the truck.

"The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle's path," Ilina said. "When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision." After the incident, Waymo contacted the police, but the cyclist left on their own, reporting only "minor scratches," Ilina added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: While the world awaits closing arguments later this year in the US government's antitrust case over Google's search dominance, a California judge has dismissed a lawsuit from 26 Google users who claimed that Google's default search agreement with Apple violates antitrust law and has ruined everyone's search results. Users had argued (PDF) that Google struck a deal making its search engine the default on Apple's Safari web browser specifically to keep Apple from competing in the general search market. These payments to Apple, users alleged, have "stunted innovation" and "deprived" users of "quality, service, and privacy that they otherwise would have enjoyed but for Google's anticompetitive conduct." They also allege that it created a world where users have fewer choices, enabling Google to prefer its own advertisers, which users said caused an "annoying and damaging distortion" of search results.

In an order (PDF) granting the tech companies' motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita Lin said that users did not present enough evidence to support claims for relief. Lin dismissed some claims with prejudice but gave leave to amend others, allowing users another chance to keep their case -- now twice-dismissed -- at least partially alive. Under Lin's order, users will not be able to amend claims that Google and Apple executives allegedly sealed the default search deal on the condition that Apple would not create its own general search engine through "private, secret, and clandestine personal meetings." Because plaintiffs showed no evidence pinpointing exactly when Apple allegedly agreed to stay out of the general search market, these meetings, Lin reasoned, could just as easily indicate "rational, legal business behavior," rather than an "illegal conspiracy."

Users attempted to argue that Google and Apple intentionally hid these facts from the public, but Lin wrote that their "conclusory and vague allegations that defendants 'secretly conducted meetings' and 'engaged in conduct to obfuscate internal communications' are plainly insufficient." Sharing bystander photos documenting Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook meeting at a restaurant with a manila folder tucked under Pichai's elbow did not help users' case. Lin was also not moved by users demonstrating that Google has a history of destroying evidence, because "they put forth no specific factual allegations that defendants did so in this case." However, users will have 30 days to amend currently "inadequately" alleged claims that "Google's exclusive default agreement, under which Apple set Google as the default search engine for its Safari web browser, foreclosed competition in the general search services market in the United States," Lin wrote. If users miss that deadline, the case will be tossed with no opportunities to further amend claims.

The Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Volt Typhoon has been living in the networks of some critical industries for "at least five years," (non-paywalled link) according to a joint cybersecurity advisory issued by the US and its allies on Wednesday. From a report: The compromised environments are in the continental US and elsewhere, including Guam, the advisory said. It was published by US agencies and their security counterparts in Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. The report comes a week after US officials announced an operation to disrupt Volt Typhoon by deleting malware from thousands of internet-connected devices the group had hijacked to gain access to the networks in critical parts of the economy. Among the sectors targeted were communications, energy, transportation and water systems.

Apple has released a new open-source AI model, called "MGIE," that can edit images based on natural language instructions. From a report: MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret user commands and perform pixel-level manipulations. The model can handle various editing aspects, such as Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. MGIE is the result of a collaboration between Apple and researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The model was presented in a paper accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024, one of the top venues for AI research. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of MGIE in improving automatic metrics and human evaluation, all while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

MGIE is based on the idea of using MLLMs, which are powerful AI models that can process both text and images, to enhance instruction-based image editing. MLLMs have shown remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation, but they have not been widely applied to image editing tasks. MGIE integrates MLLMs into the image editing process in two ways: First, it uses MLLMs to derive expressive instructions from user input. These instructions are concise and clear and provide explicit guidance for the editing process. For example, given the input "make the sky more blue," MGIE can produce the instruction "increase the saturation of the sky region by 20%."

Apple is building prototypes of at least two iPhones that fold widthwise like a clamshell, The Information reported Wednesday. From the report: If Apple ends up launching a foldable iPhone, it would be one of the biggest hardware design changes in the product's history. The foldable iPhones are in early development and aren't on the company's mass production plans for 2024 or 2025, the person said. Apple recently approached at least one manufacturer in Asia for components related to two foldable iPhones of different sizes, they said. The products could be canceled if they don't meet Apple's standards, they said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's prescient bets and aggressive investments in AI have propelled the software giant to become the world's most valuable company. Yet Satya Nadella, its typically reserved chief executive, couldn't resist landing a gloved jab at the rest of the industry. "We have the best model today ... even with all the hoopla, one year after, GPT4 is better," Nadella said at a company event in Mumbai on Wednesday. "We are waiting for the competition to arrive. It will arrive, I'm sure, but the fact [is] that we have the most leading LLM out there."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk's X. Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully stand up to Threads' 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon's 1.8 million?

Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky's code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.

"What decentralization gets you is the ability to try multiple things in parallel, and so you're not bottlenecking change on one organization," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. "The way we built Bluesky actually lets anyone insert a change into the product." This setup gives users more agency to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have revolted against algorithm changes that they dislike, but there's not much they can do to revert or improve upon an undesired app update.

A new report from German data recovery company CBL found that devices using NAND chips from reputable brands are declining in quality, with reduced capacity and their manufacturers' logo removed. Furthermore, some USB sticks use the old trick of soldiering a microSD card onto the board. TechSpot reports: Most of the janky USB sticks CBL examined were promotional gifts, the kind given away free with products or by companies at conferences. However, there were some "branded" products that fell into the same inferior-quality category, though CBL didn't say if these were well-known mainstream brands or the kind of brands you've probably never heard of.

Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory."

The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.

In a new video released today, Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot is shown performing "kinetically challenging" work, like moving some medium-weight car parts and precisely picking stuff up. Ars Technica reports: In the latest video, we're on to what looks like "phase 2" of picking stuff up -- being more precise about it. The old clamp hands had a single pivot at the palm and seemed to just apply the maximum grip strength to anything the robot picked up. The most delicate thing Atlas picked up in the last video was a wooden plank, and it was absolutely destroying the wood. Atlas' new hands look a lot more gentle than The Clamps, with each sporting a set of three fingers with two joints. All the fingers share one big pivot point at the palm of the hand, and there's a knuckle joint halfway up the finger. The fingers are all very long and have 360 degrees of motion, so they can flex in both directions, which is probably effective but very creepy. Put two fingers on one side of an item and the "thumb" on the other, and Atlas can wrap its hands around objects instead of just crushing them.

Atlas is picking up a set of car struts -- an object with extremely complicated topography that weighs around 30 pounds -- so there's a lot to calculate. Atlas does a heavy two-handed lift of a strut from a vertical position on a pallet, walks the strut over to a shelf, and carefully slides it into place. This is all in Boston Dynamics' lab, but it's close to repetitive factory or shipping work. Everything here seems designed to give the robot a manipulation challenge. The complicated shape of the strut means there are a million ways you could grip it incorrectly. The strut box has tall metal poles around it, so the robot needs to not bang the strut into the obstacle. The shelf is a tight fit, so the strut has to be placed on the edge of the shelf and slid into place, all while making sure the strut's many protrusions won't crash into the shelf.

Meta will start detecting and labeling images generated by artificial intelligence from Google and OpenAI's services, among others. According to Reuters, the company will use a set of invisible markers built into the files to help with the identification process. From the report: Meta will apply the labels to any content carrying the markers that is posted to its Facebook, Instagram and Threads services, in an effort to signal to users that the images -- which in many cases resemble real photos -- are actually digital creations, the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, wrote in a blog post. The company already labels any content generated using its own AI tools. Once the new system is up and running, Meta will do the same for images created on services run by OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe , Midjourney, Shutterstock and Alphabet's Google, Clegg said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Most people know that Microsoft really wants everyone to move onto Windows 11. But just in case there are some Windows 10 users still unaware of this fact, the company is once again nagging them to upgrade with full-screen, multi-slide popups. The lengthy advertisement for Windows 11 was highlighted by Windows Latest after it installed the optional January update (in preview) on a Windows 10 machine.

The nagging Windows 11 upgrade promo consists of an excruciating number of screens (i.e., more than one): The first informs users that they can switch to Windows 11 for free and that they can still use their PC while the newer OS is set up in the background; another is Microsoft recommending the move and noting that users can revert to Windows 10 within the first ten days of upgrading; the last is for those who decide to stay on Windows 10, with a reminder that Windows 11 remains a free upgrade option. There is another panel that lists some of Windows 11 features, but this only appears for those who select the 'See what's inside' button.

Apple is making changes to iOS in Europe to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act cracking down on Big Tech gatekeepers. The act demands interoperability, fairness and privacy measures including allowing competing browser engines on iOS. Despite better browser choice, Google and Mozilla are unhappy with Apple's proposed changes. Mozilla says restricting browser engine integration to EU apps burdens rivals to build separate implementations. Mozilla's comment: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps. The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear. Apple's proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari. This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS." Google's VP of engineering for Chrome, Parisa Tabriz, commented on DeMonte's statement, saying, "Strong agree with Mozilla. Apple isn't serious about supporting web browser or engine choice on iOS. Their strategy is overly restrictive, and won't meaningfully lead to real choice for browser developers."