An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.

Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.

Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph).

The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios."

Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said.

Amazon is launching drone deliveries from its Tolleson, AZ, same-day delivery site, making over 50,000 essentials available to eligible customers in the West Valley Phoenix area. The Verge reports: The news came after Amazon announced it was shutting down its testing zone location in Lockeford, California. The new Tolleson location integrates drone deliveries into Amazon's delivery network for the first time, and the drones will deploy right next to the fulfillment center. Amazon is using its latest MK30 drones that can carry up to 5 pounds while also flying "twice as far" and running "50 percent quieter" than its previous models that sometimes crashed and burned in testing.

Amazon will launch the drones from its hybrid facility. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved Amazon's drones for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), meaning they can be flown out of visual range from the operator. The company claims it's the first to launch both a new facility and BVLOS drone service that meets FAA requirements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a "relentless onslaught of change." When reached by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation's communications chief Brandon Borrman confirmed the layoffs in an email. "The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward," read the statement shared with TechCrunch.

According to its annual tax filings, the Mozilla Foundation reported having 60 employees during the 2022 tax year. The number of employees at the time of the layoffs was closer to 120 people, according to a person with knowledge. When asked by TechCrunch, Mozilla's spokesperson did not dispute the figure. This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of employees who work on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser. [...] Announcing the layoffs in an email to all employees on October 30, the Mozilla Foundation's executive director Nabiha Syed confirmed that two of the foundation's major divisions -- advocacy and global programs -- are "no longer a part of our structure." The move, according to Syed, is in part to produce a "unified, powerful narrative from the Foundation," including revamping the foundation's strategic communications. "Our mission at Mozilla is more high-stakes than ever," said Syed. "We find ourselves in a relentless onslaught of change in the technology (and broader) world, and the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical."

"Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus -- and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won't get us to the next peak. Lofty goals demand hard choices."

spatwei writes: Google has used a large language model (LLM) agent called "Big Sleep" to discover a previously unknown, exploitable memory flaw in a widely used software for the first time, the company announced Friday.

The stack buffer underflow vulnerability in a development version of the popular open-source database engine SQLite was found through variant analysis by Big Sleep, which is a collaboration between Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind.

Big Sleep is an evolution of Project Zero's Naptime project, which is a framework announced in June that enables LLMs to autonomously perform basic vulnerability research. The framework provides LLMs with tools to test software for potential flaws in a human-like workflow, including a code browser, debugger, reporter tool and sandbox environment for running Python scripts and recording outputs.

The researchers provided the Gemini 1.5 Pro-driven AI agent with the starting point of a previous SQLIte vulnerability, providing context for Big Sleep to search for potential similar vulnerabilities in newer versions of the software. The agent was presented with recent commit messages and diff changes and asked to review the SQLite repository for unresolved issues.

Google's Big Sleep ultimately identified a flaw involving the function "seriesBestIndex" mishandling the use of the special sentinel value -1 in the iColumn field. Since this field would typically be non-negative, all code that interacts with this field must be designed to handle this unique case properly, which seriesBestIndex fails to do, leading to a stack buffer underflow.

India's government challenged Wikipedia's legal immunity as a tech platform on Tuesday, issuing a notice questioning whether the online encyclopedia should be reclassified as a publisher. The move follows Delhi High Court warnings to suspend Wikipedia's India operations over a defamation case filed by Asian News International. The news agency seeks to unmask contributors who labeled it a "government propaganda tool." Justice Navin Chawla threatened contempt proceedings after Wikipedia cited its lack of physical presence in India to request more time for disclosing user information. The court deemed the site's open editing feature "dangerous."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta will allow U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security to use its artificial intelligence models for military purposes, the company said on Monday, in a shift from its policy that prohibited the use of its technology for such efforts. Meta said that it would make its A.I. models, called Llama, available to federal agencies and that it was working with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen as well as defense-focused tech companies including Palantir and Anduril. The Llama models are "open source," which means the technology can be freely copied and distributed by other developers, companies and governments.

Meta's move is an exception to its "acceptable use policy," which forbade the use of the company's A.I. software for "military, warfare, nuclear industries," among other purposes. In a blog post on Monday, Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said the company now backed "responsible and ethical uses" of the technology that supported the United States and "democratic values" in a global race for A.I. supremacy. "Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America -- and of its closest allies too," Mr. Clegg wrote. He added that "widespread adoption of American open source A.I. models serves both economic and security interests." The company said it would also share its technology with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks. The country's defence minister, Pal Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast. The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato's newest member.

The proposed windfarms would have been located between Aland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm. Wind power could affect Sweden's defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said. The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden's west coast. "Both ballistic robots and also cruise robots are a big problem if you have offshore wind power," Jonson said. "If you have a strong signal detection capability and a radar system that is important, we use the Patriot system for example, there would be negative consequences if there were offshore wind power in the way of the sensors."

An anonymous reader shares a report: With Windows 11 still failing to set the world alight, campaigners are warning that millions of perfectly good PCs could become landfill fodder when support for Windows 10 runs out in eleven and a bit months.

Figures compiled by StatCounter show that Windows 11 commanded a 35.55 percent share of the desktop Windows market in October. In comparison, the share of Windows 10 dropped to 60.97 percent, continuing a downward trend that began earlier this year -- it was still at 69.9 percent in April. Unless there is some marked acceleration, Windows 11 is unlikely to dominate the market by the time Microsoft pulls the plug on free updates for most of the Windows 10 world on October 14, 2025.

Singapore plans to boost road capacity by 20,000 vehicles through a new satellite-based road pricing system, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) announced last week. The city-state will replace its current gantry-based Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system with GPS tracking technology, enabling more precise congestion management without physical toll stations. The Register adds: "ERP 2.0 will provide more comprehensive aggregated traffic information and will be able to operate without physical gantries. We will be able to introduce new 'virtual gantries,' which allow for more flexible and responsive congestion management," explained the LTA.

But the island's government doesn't just control inflow into urban areas through toll-like charging -- it also aggressively controls the total number of cars operating within its borders. Singapore requires vehicle owners to bid for a set number of Certificates of Entitlement -- costly operating permits valid for only ten years. The result is an increase of around SG$100,000 ($75,500) every ten years, depending on that year's COE price, on top of a car's usual price. The high total price disincentivizes mass car ownership, which helps the government manage traffic and emissions.

Netflix's gaming division is shifting focus to generative AI weeks after shuttering its premium game studio and laying off 35 developers, the company's newly appointed VP of GenAI for Games has announced. Mike Verdu, previously Vice President of Games, called the move a "once in a generation inflection point" that will "accelerate development" and create novel gaming experiences. The pivot follows the closure of Blue, Netflix's internal studio that had recruited veterans from major franchises including Call of Duty and God of War. "Pay no mind to uninformed speculation," Verdu wrote on LinkedIn, describing recent changes as a "planned transition."

A hardware hacker has successfully modified Nintendo's $100 Alarmo device to run the classic video game Doom, marking another milestone in the gaming community's tradition of porting the 1993 shooter to unconventional devices.

YouTuber GaryOderNichts demonstrated the 2.8-inch circular alarm clock running Chocolate Doom natively, using the device's wheel for movement and side buttons for weapons. The hack requires no hardware modifications and works on the current 2.0 software version. The hack came after researchers discovered vulnerabilities in the Alarmo's STM32H7 microcontroller, enabling custom firmware installation through its USB-C port. The trick omits audio due to memory restrictions, GaryOderNichts notes, but it allows for custom animations and displays.

Cybercriminals have breached dozens of major companies including AT&T, Ticketmaster and Hot Topic by exploiting "infostealer" malware that harvests login credentials from infected computers, an investigation has found. The malware, spread through pirated software and social media, has infected 250,000 new devices daily, according to cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Russian developers create the malware while contractors distribute it globally, deliberately avoiding former Soviet states. Hot Topic suffered potentially the largest retail hack ever in October when attackers accessed 350 million customer records using stolen developer credentials. Google and Microsoft are racing to patch vulnerabilities, but malware makers quickly adapt to new security measures.

App developers Musi and Sarafan Mobile have sued Apple and Google in California federal court over app removals they claim were unjustified, highlighting tensions over the tech giants' intellectual property enforcement policies. Musi's music-streaming app was removed after YouTube complained about interface infringement, while Sarafan's "Reely" app was taken down following Instagram's claims about logo similarity.

Both developers say the platforms breached their agreements by removing apps without sufficient evidence. The lawsuits underscore broader concerns about Apple and Google's dominance in app distribution. Their private IP dispute systems operate outside traditional legal frameworks, with platforms making unilateral decisions that can effectively shut down businesses, according to University of New Hampshire law professor Peter Karol. [...]

"In a court proceeding, you can see here's a complaint with the allegations, and then we have the defendant respond, and then we have a judge come out with an opinion saying, 'Is the mark valid? Is the mark infringed?'" said Lisa Ramsey, law professor at University of San Diego. Google and Apple's systems, meanwhile, are "a black box."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Another illegal streaming app has made its way to the App Store -- but it only surfaces pirated films for people in certain regions outside the US, including France, Canada, and the Netherlands. As shown in a post on Threads, the App Store listing for "Univer Note" presents itself as a productivity platform that can "easily help you record every day's events and plan your time." However, if you're a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Terrifier 3.

Apple has scrapped plans for a budget mixed-reality headset initially slated for 2025, pushing the launch to 2027, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The company will instead focus on releasing an upgraded Vision Pro next year featuring its M5 chip and enhanced AI capabilities, he said. The canceled lower-cost model would have stripped features like EyeSight and used cheaper components to target mainstream consumers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Plans by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project, according to people familiar with the matter.

Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions. However, the potential deal faced multiple complications including environmental and regulatory challenges, these people said.

The discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data centre was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta all-hands meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

GM's president of global markets says their EV portfolio "is growing faster than the market," according to Investopedia, "because we have an all-electric vehicle for just about everybody, no matter what they like to drive."

The headline at Barrons? "Don't Look Now, but GM's EV Sales Are on Fire." GM delivered almost 32,000 all-electric vehicles in the third quarter — a record — and up about 58% from a year earlier. The more affordable Chevy Equinox, which starts at about $35,000 before any federal tax credit, helped boost sales. GM delivered almost 10,000 of the new EVs, up from 1,013 in the second quarter, when they first went on sale.

EV penetration of total GM car sales was about almost 5%, up almost two percentage points year over year. EVs accounted for 19.4% of Cadillac sales, up about 11 percentage points year over year. Year to date, GM has delivered just over 70,000 all-electric cars.

GM originally planned to manufacture 200,000 EVs in 2024. That still looks aggressive, but the strong third-quarter showing makes 120,000 possible, which would be up almost 60% year over year — a respectable outcome. More important to investors than EV sales right now might be dealer inventories. GM said there were about 627,000 vehicles on dealer lots at the end of September. That's a little better than what Wolfe Research analyst Emmanuel Rosner expected. It indicates GM dealers have roughly 60 days worth of sales on their lots. That's a safe level. Lower dealer inventories reduce presure to reduce prices. They also reduce the need to cut production because dealer lots are full... GM expects to generate a full-year operating profit of about $14 billion.
Meanwhile, Stellantis "slashed its financial guidance recently, partly because it needs to dramatically reduce its U.S. inventories," according to the article. For example, its Jeep dealers ended August with roughly 122 days worth of sales on their lots, while its Dodge dealers "had almost 150 days of inventory."

And Investopedia argues that while GM's EV sales growth is "soaring," Ford's is showing "only modest gains." [W]hile Ford's overall U.S. sales were 0.7% higher at 504,039, it had just a 12% gain in EVs to 23,509.3 In the second quarter, Ford's EV sales had soared 61% to 23,957. Sales growth was more than three times higher for Ford's hybrid models, with President of Ford Blue and Ford Customer Service Division Andrew Frick arguing that the company has "listened to customers to offer them vehicles with powertrains to meet their specific needs."

Ford is hoping to boost EV sales by offering buyers a free home charger and installation.

The Washington Post reports that America's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) "is considering legal action against Meta over allegations that it improperly used financial data obtained from third parties in its highly-lucrative advertising business..."

The article says a Meta securities filing Thursday revealed it had received a formal notification about the federal investigation last month. The filing said only that the inquiry relates to "advertising for financial products and services on our platform." A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment on the investigation. "We disagree with the claims," the company's filing said, "and believe an enforcement action is unwarranted...."

The CFPB's probe underscores its aggressive recent focus on Big Tech. In recent years, major companies including Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have launched a wave of new financial services, including credit cards and apps that help users send money to friends... Under its current director, Rohit Chopra, the CFPB has also sought to ensure that tech giants adhere to the same safeguards that have long applied to their brick-and-mortar banking predecessors. The bureau formalized its tech crackdown in 2021, when Chopra ordered companies including Facebook to turn over records related to their payment apps and other financial service offerings.

At the time, he expressed fear that these giants already possessed troves of customer data and could solidify their dominance if they gained greater insight into users' purchasing and spending habits. "This data can be monetized by companies that seek to profit from behavioral targeting, particularly around advertising and e-commerce," Chopra said in a statement announcing the review. "That many Big Tech companies aspire to grow in this space only heightens these concerns." Since then, the watchdog agency has proposed new rules that could treat Apple, Google and PayPal-owned Venmo more like banks, opening the door for federal regulators to inspect some of their operations in a bid to protect users' deposits.

The rules, which have not been finalized, have sparked fierce lobbying opposition from major tech companies.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from CNBC: Threads now has nearly 275 million monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. "We continue to be on track towards this becoming our next major social app," Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts, adding that he was "quite pleased" with the trajectory of the app.

The latest numbers indicate Threads is up 175% from a year ago when it reached 100 million users... The app is now signing up more than 1 million users per day, Zuckerberg also said on Wednesday. X remains ahead of Threads in terms of users, but not by much. Musk's social media app now has roughly 318 million monthly users, according to an estimate by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That's down 24% since Musk completed his acquisition of the company in October 2022, according to Sensor Tower.
The news also drew a reaction from ActivityPub/Activity Streams 2.0 co-author Evan Prodromou, who pointed out that the 275 million monthly active users is up from the 200 million reported just 13 weeks ago at the end of July.

"And most of them have access to the Fediverse. With more, hopefully, getting access soon."