An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power industry, one of the biggest steps so far in its effort to decarbonize the economy to fight climate change. The proposal would limit how much carbon dioxide power plants, which are the source of more than a quarter of U.S. emissions, can chuff into the atmosphere, putting the industry on a years-long course to install billions of dollars of new equipment or shut down. Environmental groups and scientists have long argued that such steps are crucial to curb global warming, but fossil fuel-producing states argue that they represent government overreach and threaten to destabilize the electric grid.

The proposal sets standards that would push power companies to install carbon capture equipment (CCS) that can siphon the CO2 from a plant's smokestack before it reaches the atmosphere, or use super-low-emissions hydrogen as a fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the plan would cut carbon emissions from coal plants and new gas plants by 617 million tons between 2028 and 2042, the equivalent of reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles. "Today we're proposing new technology standards that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power plants, protecting health and protecting our planet," EPA Administrator Michael Regan told students at the University of Maryland on their last day of school on Thursday.

Regan said that the agency has wielded the power of the federal Clean Air Act to craft the new power plant rules, along with a suite of other measures aimed at tackling vehicle emissions, as well as potent greenhouse gases methane and HFCs, that would reduce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions between 2022 and 2055. The proposal, more than 18 months in the making, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but can regulate plants by setting technology-based standards applied on-site.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: It's at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it's probably on average better," said Wendy's CIO Kevin Vasconi to the Wall Street Journal. After successful early tests, the fifth biggest fast food chain in the USA will start using AI chatbots to interact with drive-thru customers next month. The company has been working with Google on a number of machine learning and AI tools behind the scenes, and is now extending that partnership to begin deploying a Large Language Model (LLM) generative AI system built on the Vertex AI platform, that's custom-trained to take over from human workers, taking drive-thru orders and talking with customers.

Verbal AI tech has advanced in leaps and bounds -- not that you'd know it trying to talk to my Google Home, mind you -- and the two companies have worked together to train up a system called FreshAI. This model understands the entire menu, including the street slang for certain orders, and it's capable of having conversations -- within a set of "guardrails" -- as well as taking custom orders and answering questions. It integrates with the company's point of sale systems and has been trained to follow the rules the company currently gives to its human drive thru window staff. Wendy's will begin with a pilot program at a site in the Columbus, Ohio, area next month, expecting that some customers won't realize they're not talking to a human. From there, the company hopes to expand to include other drive-thru locations.

Roughly 4.4 million people will soon receive checks from TurboTax, following a 50-state settlement with parent company Intuit for allegedly steering millions of low-income Americans away from free tax-filing services. From a report: Customers affected by the settlement will receive an email about the settlement and checks will automatically be mailed throughout this month. Most customers will get about $30, with some customers that used TurboTax for three consecutive years getting up to $85. A website has also been set up for more information. "TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." She announced the settlement last year, saying that Intuit "unfairly charged" people and forced the company to stop its "free, free, free" ad campaign because it falsely lured customers with the promise of free tax preparation services.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: Now, frustrated with a lack of transparency and trust around official accounts of UFO phenomena, a team of developers has decided to take matters into their own hands with an open source citizen science project called Sky360, which aims to blanket the earth in affordable monitoring stations to watch the skies 24/7, and even plans to use AI and machine learning to spot anomalous behavior. Unlike earlier 20th century efforts such as inventors proposing "geomagnetic detectors" to discover nearby UFOs, or more recent software like the short-lived UFO ID project, Sky360 hopes that it can establish a network of autonomously operating surveillance units to gather real-time data of our skies. Citizen-led UFO research is not new. Organizations like MUFON, founded in 1969, have long investigated sightings, while amateur groups like the American Flying Saucer Investigating Committee of Columbus even ran statistical analysis on sightings in the 1960s (finding that most of them happened on Wednesdays). However, Sky360 believes that the level of interest and the technology have now both reached an inflection point, where citizen researchers can actually generate large-scale actionable data for analysis all on their own.

The Sky360 stations consist of an AllSkyCam with a wide angle fish-eye lens and a pan-tilt-focus camera, with the fish-eye camera registering all movement. Underlying software performs an initial rough analysis of these events, and decides whether to activate other sensors -- and if so, the pan-tilt-focus camera zooms in on the object, tracks it, and further analyzes it. According to developer Nikola Galiot, the software is currently based on a computer vision "background subtraction" algorithm that detects any motion in the frame compared to previous frames captured; anything that moves is then tracked as long as possible and then automatically classified. The idea is that the more data these monitoring stations acquire, the better the classification will be. There are a combination of AI models under the hood, and the system is built using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning platform so it can be deployed on almost any computer. Next, the all-volunteer team wants to create a single algorithm capable of detection, tracking and classification all in one.

All the hardware components, from the cameras to passive radar and temperature gauges, can be bought cheaply and off-the-shelf worldwide -- with the ultimate goal of finding the most effective combinations for the lowest price. Schematics, blueprints, and suggested equipment are all available on the Sky360 site and interested parties are encouraged to join the project's Discord server. There are currently 20 stations set up across the world, from the USA to Canada to more remote regions like the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic [...] Once enough of the Sky360 stations have been deployed, the next step is to work towards real-time monitoring, drawing all the data together, and analyzing it. By striving to create a huge, open, transparent network, anyone would be free to examine the data themselves.

In June of this year, Sky360, which has a team of 30 volunteer developers working on the software, hopes to release its first developer-oriented open source build. At its heart is a component called 'SimpleTracker', which receives images frame by frame from the cameras, auto-adjusting parameters to get the best picture possible. The component determines whether something in the frame is moving, and if so, another analysis is performed, where a machine learning algorithm trained on the trajectories of normal flying objects like planes, birds, or insects, attempts to classify the object based on its movement. If it seems anomalous, it's flagged for further investigation.

The FBI has sabotaged a suite of malicious software used by elite Russian spies, U.S. authorities said on Tuesday, providing a glimpse of the digital tug-of-war between two cyber superpowers. From a report: Senior law enforcement officials said FBI technical experts had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia's FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russia's leading cyber spying programs.

"We assess this as being their premier espionage tool," one of the U.S. officials told journalists ahead of the release. He said Washington hoped the operation would "eradicate it from the virtual battlefield." The official said the FSB spies behind the malware, known as Snake, are part of a notorious hacking group tracked by the private sector and known as "Turla." The group has been active for two decades against a variety of NATO-aligned targets, U.S. government agencies and technology companies, a senior FBI official said.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given its largest ever award of almost $279 million to a whistleblower whose information was crucial in an enforcement action by the regulator. The SEC did not reveal the case involved, but the award shows there is a significant incentive for whistleblowers to come forward with accurate information about potential securities law violations. Reuters reports: The award is more than double the $114 million that it had issued in October 2020. "As this award shows, there is a significant incentive for whistleblowers to come forward with accurate information about potential securities law violations," said Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, in a statement. "The whistleblower's sustained assistance including multiple interviews and written submissions was critical to the success of these actions," said Creola Kelly, chief of the SEC's Office of the Whistleblower.

Payments to whistleblowers are made out of an investor protection fund that was established by Congress and financed entirely through monetary sanctions paid to the SEC by securities law violators. Awards to whistleblowers can range from 10% to 30% of the money collected when the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: This year's DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others. The collaborative event, which AI Village organizers describe as "the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models," will host "thousands" of people, including "hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities," all of whom will be tasked with finding flaws in LLMs that power today's chat bots and generative AI. Think: traditional bugs in code, but also problems more specific to machine learning, such as bias, hallucinations, and jailbreaks -- all of which ethical and security professionals are now having to grapple with as these technologies scale. DEF CON is set to run from August 10 to 13 this year in Las Vegas, USA.

For those participating in the red teaming this summer, the AI Village will provide laptops and timed access to LLMs from various vendors. Currently this includes models from Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Stability. The village people's announcement also mentions this is "with participation from Microsoft," so perhaps hackers will get a go at Bing. We're asked for clarification about this. Red teams will also have access to an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI. There will be a capture-the-flag-style point system to promote the testing of "a wide range of harms," according to the AI Village. Whoever gets the most points wins a high-end Nvidia GPU. The event is also supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy; America's National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate; and the Congressional AI Caucus.

Apple failed to revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium over its software that simulates the iPhone's iOS operating systems, letting security researchers to identify flaws in the software. From a report: The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium's CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law's fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. Apple argued that Corellium's software was "wholesale copying and reproduction" of iOS and served as a market substitute for its own security research products. Corellium countered that its copying of Apple's computer code and app icons was only for the purposes of security research and was sufficiently "transformative" under the fair use standard. The three-judge panel largely agreed with Corellium, finding that CORSEC "furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems" and that iOS "is functional operating software that falls outside copyright's core."

While American leaders fret that China might eventually overtake the U.S. in developing artificial intelligence, Beijing is already way ahead of Washington in enacting rules for the new technology. From a report: Chinese officials will close consultation Wednesday on a second round of generative AI regulation, building on a set of rules governing deepfakes agreed in 2022. The Biden administration is behind both allies and adversaries on AI guardrails. While officials in Washington talk about delivering user rights and urge CEOs to mitigate risks, Beijing and Brussels are actually delivering rights and mitigating risks. If China can be first on AI governance, it can project those standards and regulations globally, shaping lucrative and pliable markets. At the same time, Beijing's speedy regulation achieves three goals at home: Delivers tighter central government control of debate. Builds up hybrid corporate entities that are meshed with the Chinese Communist Party. Boosts trust in AI -- already among the highest levels globally -- which drives consumer uptake and spurs growth.

The CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, doubled down on his criticisms of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chief Gary Gensler Monday, but added the exchange would not leave the U.S. despite the regulatory uncertainty the company is facing in the country. From a report: The SEC earlier this year served Coinbase with a Wells Notice, a letter that the regulator sends to a company or firm at the conclusion of an SEC investigation that states the SEC is planning to bring an enforcement action against them. At the heart of the regulator's dispute with Coinbase, and a host of other crypto companies, is the allegation that it is selling unregistered securities to investors. Coinbase disputes this.

"The SEC is a bit of an outlier here," Armstrong told CNBC's Dan Murphy in an interview in Dubai Monday. "There's kind of a lone crusade, if you will, with Gary Gensler, the chair there, and he has taken a more anti-crypto view for some reason...I don't think he's necessarily trying to regulate the industry as much as maybe curtail it. But he's created some lawsuits, and I think it's quite unhelpful for the industry in the U.S. writ large, but it also is an opportunity for Coinbase to go get that clarity from the courts that we feel will really benefit the crypto industry and also the U.S. more broadly."

The Washington Post reports: TurboTax will begin sending checks next week to nearly 4.4 million low-income Americans whom the company deceived into paying for tax services that should have been free, New York Attorney General Letitia James said.

The checks, part of a $141 million settlement reached in May 2022 between TurboTax owner Intuit and all 50 states and the District of Columbia, are for people who were eligible to file taxes for free through an IRS partner program but were "tricked" into paying TurboTax between 2016 and 2018, James (D) said in a statement Thursday.

The company was also accused of knowingly misleading customers and blocking its landing page for its IRS Free File Program, a public-private partnership with the IRS, from showing up on search engines such as Google. Because Intuit and other companies agreed to participate in that program, the IRS agreed not to offer its own free electronic tax services.

Intuit admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.

Customers who qualify will receive between $29 and $85, depending on the number of years they paid for the services... Consumers who are eligible for the payments do not need to file a claim and will be notified by email, James's office said Thursday. Checks will be sent automatically and will be mailed throughout May.
"TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said Attorney General James. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." James described it as an effort "to stand up for ordinary Americans and hold companies who cheat consumers accountable," specifically calling out Intuit "for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free."

All across North America today, over 2,000 comic book stores are celebrating Free Comic Book Day. As it enters its third decade — the event started in 2001, according to Wikipedia — there'll be over two dozen free comic books to choose from this, and enthusiastic stores trying to dial up the fun even more.

16 stores are also giving away Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania in special "ant-sized" boxes — the size of penny — with tiny versions of the cover art from the full-sized Blu-Ray disc boxes (along with a code for a digital version of the movie). The Bleeding Cool site has a running list of stores doing additional special "cool stuff," including cookie giveaways, discounts on paperbacks and comic books, and personal appearances by comic book writers and artists.

Geek-friendly free comic books this year:

• Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars/ Avatar: The Last Airbender
• D.C. Comics is offering Dawn of DC — Knight Terrors
• Marvel is offering several multi-character books, including Spider-Man/Venom, the Avengers/X-Men, and a sampler of the upcoming graphic novel biography of Stan Lee
• IDW's free comics include the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• There's also the official prequel to the new Street Fighter 6 video game
• Also available: Runescape: Untold Tales/God Wars
• Fantagraphics even has a preview of its upcoming Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book.
• Archie Horror Presents: The Cursed Library

Bleeding Cool also has previews the artwork from Star Trek: Prelude to Day of Blood, a teaser for a coming "comic book crossover event between IDW's main Star Trek comic and the Star Trek: Defiant series" (that's also accompanied by a Lower Decks comic book story).

Just remember, in 2017 NPR had this advice for visiting comics fans. "While you're there, buy something... The comics shops still have to pay for the 'free' FCBD books they stock, and they're counting on the increased foot traffic to lift sales."

New York Attorney General Letitia James proposed a state law to tighten rules over cryptocurrency companies in her latest swing at an industry she claims is suffering from "rampant fraud and dysfunction." From a report: Under her proposal, New York would require independent public audits of crypto exchanges and bar people from owning both brokerages and tokens to prevent conflicts of interest. In a statement Friday, James called her proposal "the strongest and most comprehensive set of regulations on cryptocurrency in the nation." The measures, which first need to be adopted by state lawmakers, also would require crypto platforms to reimburse customers who are victims of fraud and strengthen the authority of the New York State Department of Financial Services to regulate digital assets, according to the statement. "Millions of investors have lost hundreds of billions in the value of their cryptocurrency investments because of rampant fraud, including market manipulation, hacking, and opaque business practices," James said. According to the attorney general, her proposal will be submitted to lawmakers for the 2023 legislative session.

New York is expected to be the first state in the U.S. to phase in a ban on fossil fuel equipment in new construction. The ban is included in the $229 billion state budget deal and will likely take effect in 2026 for most new buildings under seven stories and in 2029 for larger buildings. NPR reports: New gas stoves or propane furnaces would be a thing of the past under the proposal, which would require homes and businesses to be fully electric starting in 2026. Existing buildings would be unaffected. Any new construction seven stories and under would not be permitted to install fossil fuel equipment, though large commercial or industrial buildings 100,000 square feet or more would be exempt. By 2029, the ban would apply to all new construction.

The EU has been warned that it risks handing control of artificial intelligence to US tech firms if it does not act to protect grassroots research in its forthcoming AI bill. From a report: In an open letter coordinated by the German research group Laion, or Large-scale AI Open Network, the European parliament was told that "one-size-fits-all" rules risked eliminating open research and development. "Rules that require a researcher or developer to monitor or control downstream use could make it impossible to release open-source AI in Europe," which would "entrench large firms" and "hamper efforts to improve transparency, reduce competition, limit academic freedom, and drive investment in AI overseas," the letter says.

It adds: "Europe cannot afford to lose AI sovereignty. Eliminating open-source R&D will leave the European scientific community and economy critically dependent on a handful of foreign and proprietary firms for essential AI infrastructure." The largest AI efforts, by companies such as OpenAI and Google, are heavily controlled by their creators. It is impossible to download the model behind ChatGPT, for instance, and the paid-for access that OpenAI provides to customers comes with a number of restrictions, legal and technical, on how it can be used. By contrast, open-source AI efforts involve creating an AI model and then releasing it for anyone to use, improve or adapt as they see fit.

The White House on Thursday announced its first new initiatives aimed at taming the risks of artificial intelligence since a boom in A.I.-powered chatbots has prompted growing calls to regulate the technology. From a report: The National Science Foundation plans to spend $140 million on new research centers devoted to A.I., White House officials said. The administration also pledged to release draft guidelines for government agencies to ensure that their use of A.I. safeguards "the American people's rights and safety," adding that several A.I. companies had agreed to make their products available for scrutiny in August at a cybersecurity conference. The announcements came hours before Vice President Kamala Harris and other administration officials were scheduled to meet with the chief executives of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, the maker of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, and Anthropic, an A.I. start-up, to discuss the technology.

A senior administration official said on Wednesday that the White House planned to impress upon the companies that they had a responsibility to address the risks of new A.I. developments.The White House has been under growing pressure to police A.I. that is capable of crafting sophisticated prose and lifelike images. The explosion of interest in the technology began last year when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public and people immediately began using it to search for information, do schoolwork and assist them with their job. Since then, some of the biggest tech companies have rushed to incorporate chatbots into their products and accelerated A.I. research, while venture capitalists have poured money into A.I. start-ups.

Export controls imposed by the U.S. on microchips, aiming to hinder China's technological advancements, have had minimal effects on the country's tech sector. While the restrictions have slowed down variants of Nvidia's chips for the Chinese market, it has not halted China's progress in areas like AI, as the reduced performance is still an improvement for Chinese firms, and researchers are finding ways to overcome the limitations. Reuters reports: Nvidia has created variants of its chips for the Chinese market that are slowed down to meet U.S. rules. Industry experts told Reuters the newest one - the Nvidia H800, announced in March - will likely take 10% to 30% longer to carry out some AI tasks and could double some costs compared with Nvidia's fastest U.S. chips. Even the slowed Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. Tencent Holdings, one of China's largest tech companies, in April estimated that systems using Nvidia's H800 will cut the time it takes to train its largest AI system by more than half, from 11 days to four days. "The AI companies that we talk to seem to see the handicap as relatively small and manageable," said Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst with 86Research.

Part of the U.S. strategy in setting the rules was to avoid such a shock that the Chinese would ditch U.S. chips altogether and redouble their own chip-development efforts. "They had to draw the line somewhere, and wherever they drew it, they were going to run into the challenge of how to not be immediately disruptive, but how to also over time degrade China's capability," said one chip industry executive who requested anonymity to talk about private discussions with regulators. The export restrictions have two parts. The first puts a ceiling on a chip's ability to calculate extremely precise numbers, a measure designed to limit supercomputers that can be used in military research. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. But calculating extremely precise numbers is less relevant in AI work like large language models where the amount of data the chip can chew through is more important. [...] The second U.S. limit is on chip-to-chip transfer speeds, which does affect AI. The models behind technologies such as ChatGPT are too large to fit onto a single chip. Instead, they must be spread over many chips - often thousands at a time -- which all need to communicate with one another.

Nvidia has not disclosed the China-only H800 chip's performance details, but a specification sheet seen by Reuters shows a chip-to-chip speed of 400 gigabytes per second, less than half the peak speed of 900 gigabytes per second for Nvidia's flagship H100 chip available outside China. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed. Naveen Rao, chief executive of a startup called MosaicML that specializes in helping AI models to run better on limited hardware, estimated a 10-30% system slowdown. "There are ways to get around all this algorithmically," he said. "I don't see this being a boundary for a very long time -- like 10 years." Moreover, AI researchers are trying to slim down the massive systems they have built to cut the cost of training products similar to ChatGPT and other processes. Those will require fewer chips, reducing chip-to-chip communications and lessening the impact of the U.S. speed limits.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point and hinted it may be the final move in the most aggressive tightening campaign since the 1980s as economic risks mount. From a report: "The committee will closely monitor incoming information and assess the implications for monetary policy," the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement Wednesday. It omitted a line from its previous statement in March that said the committee "anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate." Instead, the FOMC will take into account various factors "in determining the extent to which additional policy firming may be appropriate." The increase lifted the Fed's benchmark federal funds rate to a target range of 5% to 5.25%, the highest level since 2007, up from nearly zero early last year. The vote was unanimous. US equities maintained gains, while Treasury yields and the dollar declined.

Apple has learned from enough games of Monopoly that it's good to be the banker as well as a player. From a report: A Monday report from Forbes based on anonymous internal sources claims users deposited close to $1 billion in just four days after Apple introduced its new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card savings account. While the company had previously seen success with its mobile payments platform, the new savings account is already doing gangbusters. After the Cupertino tech giant launched its new high yield savings account last month, the company saw $990 million in deposits in less than a week, per Forbes' sources. In that time, 240,000 accounts signed up for the service. New savings accounts cannot exceed $250,000 per the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's insurance limits. If the Forbes reporting is true, then users are depositing several thousand dollars into their new accounts, on average.

The Biden administration plans to study companies' use of technology to monitor and manage workers, which it said on Monday is becoming increasingly common and can cause "serious risks to workers." From a report: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a blog post, sought comments from employees about their experience with surveillance technology, and asked employers and software vendors how they develop and use them. "While these technologies can benefit both workers and employers in some cases, they can also create serious risks to workers," the OSTP said.

"Monitoring conversations can deter workers from exercising their rights to organize and collectively bargain with their employers. And, when paired with employer decisions about pay, discipline, and promotion, automated surveillance can lead to workers being treated differently or discriminated against."