Humane, the startup founded by former Apple design and engineering team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, has officially launched its long-awaited Ai Pin -- making a splashy foray into the nascent field of artificial intelligence hardware. From a report: The device can magnetically clip onto clothing and will cost $699 with a $24-a-month subscription -- which will come with unlimited data and phone calls. The company also said it would partner with T-Mobile for phone service and Microsoft and OpenAI for AI technology. The device will be available to order starting Nov. 16.

Tech and AI enthusiasts have watched Humane closely after Chaudhri and Bongiorno, husband-and-wife co-founders, started the company in 2018. It has kept most of its work under wraps, with some notable exceptions. In April, Chaudhri gave a demo of the device at a TED Talk. In September, the pin adorned models including Naomi Campbell at Paris Fashion Week. The Humane Ai Pin is meant to eventually be a smartphone replacement. The subscription plan comes with its own phone number, and it doesn't need to be paired with a phone. The device is screenless, and people will interact with it via voice, touchpad, gesture or by holding up objects. It also features a laser projector that can emit text onto the user's hand.

Google has confirmed in court that Epic was offered a $147 million deal to launch its hit game Fortnite on Android's Google Play Store. From a report: The deal, which Google's VP of Play partnerships, Purnima Kochikar, says was approved and presented to Epic but not accepted, would have seen the money dispensed over a three-year period of "incremental funding" (ending in 2021) to the games publisher. It was meant to stem a potential "contagion" of popular apps bypassing Android's official store and, with it, Google's lucrative in-app purchase fees.

Epic launched Fortnite on Android in 2018 directly through its website, avoiding the Play Store. That allowed it to sell Fortnite's in-game currency, V-Bucks, without paying the commission required of Play Store apps. It relented in 2020, saying that "scary, repetitive security pop-ups" and other factors had put it at a severe disadvantage. But in an antitrust lawsuit filed later that year -- and currently being argued before a jury -- it alleged its initial decision had thrown Google into a panic. It cited internal documents claiming Google feared a "contagion risk" if other game developers (including Blizzard, Valve, Sony, and Nintendo) followed Epic's lead, and it claimed Google attempted to forestall it by offering special benefits or even buying Epic.

After months of high-level meetings and discussions, government officials and Big Tech leaders have agreed on one thing about artificial intelligence: The potentially world-changing technology needs some ground rules. But many in Silicon Valley are skeptical. WashingtonPost: A growing group of tech heavyweights -- including influential venture capitalists, the CEOs of midsize software companies and proponents of open-source technology -- are pushing back, claiming that laws for AI could snuff out competition in a vital new field. To these dissenters, the willingness of the biggest players in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI to embrace regulation is simply a cynical ploy by those firms to lock in their advantages as the current leaders, essentially pulling up the ladder behind them. These tech leaders' concerns ballooned last week, when President Biden signed an executive order laying out a plan to have the government develop testing and approval guidelines for AI models -- the underlying algorithms that drive "generative" AI tools such as chatbots and image-makers.

"We are still in the very early days of generative AI, and it's imperative that governments don't preemptively anoint winners and shut down competition through the adoption of onerous regulations only the largest firms can satisfy," said Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based start-up incubator that helped nurture companies including Airbnb and DoorDash when they were just starting. The current discussion hasn't incorporated the voices of smaller companies enough, Tan said, which he believes is key to fostering competition and engineering the safest ways to harness AI. Companies like influential AI start-up Anthropic and OpenAI are closely tied to Big Tech, having taken huge amounts of investment from them.

"They do not speak for the vast majority of people who have contributed to this industry," said Martin Casado, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which made early investments in Facebook, Slack and Lyft. Most AI engineers and entrepreneurs have been watching the regulatory discussions from afar, focusing on their companies instead of trying to lobby politicians, he said. "Many people want to build, they're innovators, they're the silent majority," Casado said. The executive order showed those people that regulation could come sooner than expected, he said. Casado's venture capital firm sent a letter to Biden laying out its concerns. It was signed by prominent AI start-up leaders including Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Mistral's Arthur Mensch, as well as more established tech leaders such as e-commerce company Shopify's CEO Tobi Lutke, who had tweeted "AI regulation is a terrible idea" after the executive order was announced.

Omegle, a popular online chat service that allowed individuals to connect and chat with strangers, has shut down after 15 years citing growing misuse of the platform, including in committing "unspeakably heinous crimes." From a report: The site, founded in 2009 by a then 18-year-old programmer and high school student Leif K-Brooks, was bootstrapped throughout its existence. Though it waned in popularity over the years, it still pulled about 50 million visitors last month, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris. The underlying goal of the program is to promote a more "open and collaborative" approach to AI development across the French technology world. The timing of the announcement is notable, coming amid a growing push for regulation and a marked conflict between the "open" and "closed" AI realms. [...]

While Meta itself has been open sourcing its own generative AI models, Hugging Face -- a billion-dollar VC-backed startup in its own right -- has set out its stall as a sort of open source alternative to OpenAI, replete with open alternatives to the likes of ChatGPT and spearheading community projects such as BigScience. So in many ways, Meta and Hugging Face's tie-up today makes a great deal of sense, given their respective stances on the whole "open" versus "closed" AI discussion. "For me, open source AI is the most important topic of the decade as it is the cornerstone toward democratizing ethical AI," Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said in a statement.

From today through December 1 (2023), startups can apply to join the new "AI Startup Program" at Station F, with five winners proceeding to the accelerator program that will run from January to June. The chosen startups, selected by a panel of judges from Meta, Hugging Face and French cloud company Scaleway, will have at least one thing in common -- they will be working on projects substantively built on open foundation models, or at the very least can demonstrate a "willingness to integrate these models into their products and services," according to the announcement issued by Meta today. "With the proliferation of foundation models and generative artificial intelligence models, the aim is to bring the economic and technological benefits of open, state-of-the-art models to the French ecosystem," the announcement noted. Indeed, the winning startups will receive mentoring from researchers and engineers at Meta, gain access to Hugging Face's various platforms and tools, and compute resources from Scaleway.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from CNN Business: Cruise, General Motors' self-driving vehicle subsidiary, has recalled all 950 of its autonomous vehicles for a software update. Late last month, Cruise paused all its public testing operations while it investigated the incident that led to the recall. [...]

The update will alter the way the car responds after an impact is detected. In [that infamous San Francisco accident], the vehicle had incorrectly determined that it was struck on the side rather than hitting something in the front, according to a report (PDF) Cruise filed with NHTSA. The report did not detail exactly what the software update changes, only that it "remedies the issue described in this notice."

The cars can be returned to service once the updates are completed, Cruise said in its report to NHTSA. Cruise doesn't sell its self-driving vehicles so all the cars are owned by either Cruise or GM, which produces the heavily modified Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles. The company will perform the software updates itself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: A federal judge on Tuesday refused to bring back a class action lawsuit alleging four auto manufacturers had violated Washington state's privacy laws by using vehicles' on-board infotainment systems to record and intercept customers' private text messages and mobile phone call logs. The Seattle-based appellate judge ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors, which are defendants in five related class action suits focused on the issue. One of those cases, against Ford, had been dismissed on appeal previously.

The plaintiffs in the four live cases had appealed a prior judge's dismissal. But the appellate judge ruled Tuesday that the interception and recording of mobile phone activity did not meet the Washington Privacy Act's standard that a plaintiff must prove that "his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation" has been threatened. In an example of the issues at stake, plaintiffs in one of the five cases filed suit against Honda in 2021, arguing that beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company's vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system. An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla's software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.

Tim Hardwick reports via MacRumors: WhatsApp has introduced a new privacy feature that lets you hide your IP address from whoever you call over the encrypted communications platform. As it stands, one-to-one calls over WhatsApp are established as a direct peer-to-peer connection between users. While this ensures the best possible voice quality, it means the connected devices must reveal their IP addresses to each other. According to WhatsApp, the new privacy setting introduced today works differently by relaying all of your calls through WhatsApp's servers to obfuscate your location, rather than connecting you directly to the person you are calling.

Meta engineers elaborated on the feature in a blog post: "Most calling products people use today have peer-to-peer connections between participants. This direct connection allows for faster data transfers and better call quality, but it also means that participants need to know each other's IP addresses so that call data packets can be delivered to the correct device -- meaning that the IP addresses are visible to both callers on a 1:1 call. IP addresses may contain information that some of our most privacy-conscious users are mindful of, such as broad geographical location or internet provider. To address this concern, we introduced a new feature on WhatsApp that allows you to protect your IP address during calls. With this feature enabled, all your calls will be relayed through WhatsApp's servers, ensuring that other parties in the call cannot see your IP address and subsequently deduce your general geographical location." WhatsApp notes that call quality might be reduced as a result of using the new setting. The feature can be enabled under "Advanced" privacy settings in the app.

Jason Koebler reports via 404 Media: Voters in Maine overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure Tuesday that enshrines the right to repair cars, a major win for consumers and a blow to auto manufacturers who have spent millions lobbying against similar legislation and fighting against it in the courts. "Question 4," which enshrines consumers' data access to car diagnostics for the purposes of repair, passed by a margin of 84.3-15.7 in Tuesday's election with 94 percent of the votes tallied. The yes/no question was simple: "Do you want to require vehicle manufacturers to standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to owners and independent repair facilities?" "Maine residents have won the right to control their destiny when it comes to car repairs," Tommy Hickey, director of the Maine Automotive Right to Repair Coalition, told 404 Media. "There's a new technology in cars, they've become computers on wheels, and with this law owners in Maine will be the gatekeepers of that information."

Windows Central: Microsoft began rolling out its new AI assistant for Windows earlier this year with the Windows 11 version 23H2 release, which adds a new Microsoft Copilot button directly to the Taskbar. Microsoft has been putting its Copilot in front of every user it can, but there's still a large chunk of PC users on the older Windows 10 OS which hasn't seen any of Microsoft's recent AI additions. That may soon be changing. According to my sources, Microsoft is planning to bring the same Microsoft Copilot to Windows 10 in an update coming soon. Just like Windows 11, this update to Windows 10 will place a Copilot button directly on the Windows 10 taskbar, which will open the exact same Copilot sidebar experience found on Windows 11.

iMessage serves as "an important gateway between business users and their customers" and should be regulated as a "core" service under the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA), said Google and a group of major European telcos in a letter sent to the European Commission. From a report: Being designated as a "core platform service" would be significant for iMessage, as it could compel Apple to make it interoperable with other messaging services. The letter arrives as the European Commission investigates whether iMessage meets the requirements to be regulated under the bloc's strict DMA rules. Google has been very vocal about its desire for Apple to adopt RCS, the cross-platform messaging standard pitched as the successor to SMS, with its #GetTheMessage campaign. "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy," Google senior vice-president Hiroshi Lockheimer posted on X, then known as Twitter, last year. "Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."

An anonymous reader shares a report: As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The airship -- its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway -- has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles.

"It's been 10 years of blood, sweat and tears," LTA CEO Alan Weston told TechCrunch on the eve of the unveiling. "Now we must show that this can reliably fly in real-world conditions. And we're going to do that." A series of increasingly ambitious flight tests lie ahead, before Pathfinder 1 is moved to Akron, Ohio, where LTA Research is planning an even larger airship, the Pathfinder 3. The company eventually hopes to produce a family of airships to provide disaster relief where roads and airports are damaged, as well as zero-carbon passenger transportation.

For the next year however, the gigantic airship looks set to become a Silicon Valley landmark as its novel materials and systems are methodically put through their paces within shouting distance of companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. "I'm excited about the potential of not building just one airship, but laying the foundation for many airships to be built," said Weston. "The innovations and the technologies that we're about to demonstrate have the potential to lay the foundation for a new industry."

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy reports via The Verge: The Chamberlain Group -- owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech -- has announced it's shut off all "unauthorized access" to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.

The move comes a year after Chamberlain discontinued its official Apple HomeKit integration and a few months after it finally killed support for Google Assistant. It's sadly another example of how the company continues to be hostile to the interoperable smart home. Last week, in a blog post, Dan Phillips, chief technology officer of Chamberlain, explained the reasons behind its latest move: "Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps. This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users." When asked what customers that relied on these now-defunct integrations do, a spokesperson for the company said: "We have a number of authorized partners that we will be happy for people to use," pointing to its partner webpage.

"However, those partners are primarily smart security companies with monthly subscriptions (such as Alarm.com and Vivint) and car manufacturers," notes The Verge. Some alternatives to a MyQ smart garage controller are mentioned in the report, such as Tailwind's $90 iQ3 Pro smart garage controller, Meross' $60 Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener, iSmartgate's $40 iSmartgate Mini, and Ratgdo's $30 Wi-Fi control board.

The moral for smart home users, as summed up by Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen, is: "Buy products that work locally and won't stop functioning when management wants an additional revenue stream."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel may receive billions in U.S. government funding to build secret facilities that produce microchips for the military. SiliconANGLE reports: The facilities, which have not yet been disclosed, would be designated as a "secure enclave" to reduce the military's dependence on chips imported from East Asia, particularly Taiwan, which is at risk of a future invasion from China. The funding for the new facilities would come from the $52.7 billion allocated under the Chips Act, signed into law by President Biden in August 2022. The Chips Act, which had bipartisan support, promotes chipmaking and scientific research through funding and tax credits. The law is aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and helping U.S. companies compete with China in developing cutting-edge technologies.

The new Intel facilities, presuming they go ahead, could reside partly at Intel's Arizona factory complex, according to sources referenced in the Journal report. The exact amount of funding that will be made available is not yet known, but "people familiar with the situation" tell the Journal that they could cost about $3 billion to $4 billion, which would come from the $39 billion set aside in the Chips Act for manufacturing grants. Officials from the Commerce Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department are said to be negotiating the project with Intel but have not yet made a final decision.

The first manufacturing grants under the Chip Act are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The program was reported to have had more than 500 entities express interest and more than 130 have submitted applications or pre-applications for funding.

Lora Kolodny reports via CNBC: Cruise CEO and founder Kyle Vogt posted comments on Hacker News on Sunday responding to allegations that his company's robotaxis aren't really self-driving, but instead require frequent help from humans working in a remote operations center. First, Vogt confirmed that the General Motors-owned company does have a remote assistance team, in response to a discussion under the header, "GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve 'autonomous' driving." The CEO wrote, "Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn't a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations."

Cruise recently took the drastic move of grounding all of its driverless operations following a collision that injured a pedestrian in San Francisco on October 2. The collision and Cruise's disclosures around it led to state regulators stripping the company of its permits to operate driverless vehicles in California, unless there is a driver aboard. [...] A New York Times story followed last week diving into issues within Cruise that may have led to the safety issues, and setback for Cruise's reputation and business. The story included a stat that at Cruise, workers intervened to help the company's cars every 2.5 to five miles. Vogt explained on Hacker News that the stat was a reference to how frequently Cruise robotaxis initiate a remote assistance session.

He wrote, "Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode." CNBC asked Cruise to confirm and provide further details on Monday. The Cruise spokesperson wrote in an e-mail, that a "remote assistance" session is triggered roughly every four to five miles, not every 2.5 miles, in Cruise's driverless fleet. [...] CNBC also asked Cruise for information about typical response time for remote operations, and how remote assistance workers at Cruise are trained. "More than 98% of sessions are answered within 3 seconds," the spokesperson said. As far as the ratio of remote assistance advisors to driverless vehicles on the road, the Cruise spokesperson said, "During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data. Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch. [...] One feature of Waze that was unique for a long time was its ability to crowdsource traffic information. Users add live traffic information to the app as they drive, like a car stopped by the side of the road or a crash.

Waze now leverages that data, together with geographic information, including road layout and elevation, plus typical traffic levels, to determine whether a particular stretch of road has a high crash rate. Should that be the case, the app will warn the driver. However, Waze says that to minimize distractions, it won't show these alerts on regularly traveled roads and will limit alerts on unfamiliar roads to prevent driver overload.

In an attempt to boost broadband competition, Canada's telecom regulator is forcing large phone companies to open their fiber networks to competitors. Smaller companies will be allowed to buy network capacity and use it to offer competing broadband plans to consumers. From a report: Evidence received during a comment period "shows that competition in the Internet services market is declining," the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in its announcement. The CRTC said the "decrease is most significant in Ontario and Quebec, where independent competitors now serve 47 percent fewer customers than they did just two years ago. At the same time, several competitors have been bought out by larger Internet providers. This has left many Canadians with fewer options for high-speed Internet services."

The CRTC hasn't made a final decision on fiber resale. But in the meantime, until a more permanent ruling is made, large telcos in Ontario and Quebec will be "required to provide competitors with access to their fibre-to-the-home networks within six months," the CRTC said. The six-month period is intended to give companies time to prepare their networks and develop information technology and billing systems, the agency said. "On a temporary and expedited basis, the CRTC is providing competitors with a workable way to sell Internet services using the fibre-to-the-home networks of large telephone companies in Ontario and Quebec, where competition has declined most significantly," the agency said. "The CRTC is also setting the interim rates that competitors will pay when selling services over these fibre-to-the-home networks. These rates were chosen to allow Canada's large Internet companies to continue investing in their networks to deliver high-quality services to Canadians."

Google is coming for Honey and other deal-finding tools by introducing new features on Search and Chrome to help users find discounts. From a report: The tech giant announced on Tuesday that it's adding a designated page for deals on Search, while Chrome is getting features that proactively look for discount codes and provide users with price insights. The new deals search results page on Search is designed to help users find products that are on sale from across the web in one designated spot. The page will display deals in categories like apparel, electronics, toys and beauty. You'll also find deals from different types of merchants, including big box stores, DTC brands, luxury multi-brand retailers, designer labels and local stores.

Users can scroll through deals by category and also see popular stores that have deals on what you're looking for. If you see something you're interested in, you can click on the product or visit the merchant site to learn more. Google says that if you're signed into your Google account, the page will take into account what you usually like to shop. To access the new deals page, you need to search "shop deals." Or, if you're looking for something specific, you can search for categories like "shop sneaker deals."

In a rare move, Apple hit pause on development of next year's software updates for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other devices so that it could root out glitches in the code. From a report: The delay, announced internally to employees last week, was meant to help maintain quality control after a proliferation of bugs in early versions, according to people with knowledge of the decision. Rather than adding new features, company engineers were tasked with fixing the flaws and improving the performance of the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

Apple's software -- famous for its clean interfaces, easy-to-use controls and focus on privacy -- is one of its biggest selling points. That makes quality control imperative. But the company has to balance a desire to add new features with making sure its operating systems run as smoothly as possible. [...] When looking at new operating systems due for release next year, the software engineering management team found too many "escapes" -- an industry term for bugs missed during internal testing. So the division took the unusual step of halting all new feature development for one week to work on fixing the bugs. With thousands of different Apple employees working on a range of operating systems and devices -- that need to work together seamlessly -- it's easy for glitches to crop up.

Baidu ordered AI chips from Huawei this year, Reuters reported citing two people familiar with the matter, adding to signs that U.S. pressure is prompting Chinese acceptance of the firm's products as an alternative to Nvidia's. From the report: One of the people said Baidu, one of China's leading AI firms, which operates the Ernie large language model, placed the order in August, ahead of widely anticipated new rules by the U.S. government that in October tightened restrictions on exports of chips and chip tools to China, including those of U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's 910B Ascend AI chips - which the Chinese firm developed as an alternative to Nvidia's A100 chip - for 200 servers, the source said, adding that by October, Huawei had delivered more 60% of the order, or about 1,000 chips, to Baidu. The second person said that the order's total value was approximately 450 million yuan ($61.83 million) and that Huawei was to deliver all of the chips by the end of this year. Although the order is tiny relative to the thousands of chips top Chinese tech firms have historically ordered from Nvidia, the sources said it was significant, as it showed how some firms could shift away from the U.S. company.