An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is out today (Xbox/PC, Steam), and it packs in a whole lot of simulation. It's hard to imagine topping the 2020 version, which contained the entire world, at scale, 3D modeled and able to be flown over. It had real-time weather and rather detailed physics. You could theoretically fly a helicopter back to your high school football field and land on it, like 15-year reunion royalty.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The global gaming phenomenon Minecraft is coming to the real world for the first time in a global deal to open themed rides, attractions, hotel rooms and retail outlets, starting with the UK and US. Minecraft has struck a deal with UK-headquartered Merlin Entertainments -- Europe's largest theme park operator and the second biggest globally after Disney -- which runs more than 135 attractions in 23 countries including Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, Madame Tussauds and the London Eye. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft has announced sweeping changes to Windows security architecture, including new recovery capabilities designed to prevent system-wide outages following July's CrowdStrike incident that disabled 8.5 million Windows devices.

The Windows Resiliency Initiative introduces Quick Machine Recovery, allowing IT administrators to remotely fix unbootable systems through an enhanced Windows Recovery Environment. Microsoft is also mandating stricter testing and deployment practices for security vendors under its Microsoft Virus Initiative, including gradual rollouts and monitoring procedures. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit "bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior," according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is "committed to pursuing innovation within our agency" but are still "working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way." ... [ Read it >> ]

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One of India's largest news agencies, Asian News International, has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world's most populous nation. From a report: Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models and generated false information attributed to the news agency. The case marks the first time an Indian media organization has taken legal action against OpenAI over copyright claims.... [ Read it >> ]

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Augmented reality gaming company Niantic plans to develop an AI system for navigating physical spaces using data from millions of unsuspecting players of its games "Pokemon Go" and "Ingress," the company announced in a blog post. The "Large Geospatial Model" (LGM), named after language models like GPT, will process geolocated images to predict and understand physical environments.... [ Read it >> ]

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Ranga Dias, a physics professor who made headlines with claims that he had discovered a room-temperature superconductor and then was found to have engaged in research misconduct, is no longer employed by the University of Rochester. WSJ: A spokeswoman for the university confirmed on Monday that Dias is out but declined to comment on the terms of his departure. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Rochester President Sarah Mangelsdorf had called for terminating his position in an August letter to the chair and vice chair of the university's Board of Trustees. ... [ Read it >> ]

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WhatsApp's newly unsealed court documents have exposed the extensive reach of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware operation, which targeted "between hundreds and tens of thousands" of devices, according to testimony from the company's head of research and development. The Israeli surveillance firm charged government customers up to $6.8 million for one-year licenses, generating at least $31 million in revenue in 2019 alone, TechCrunch first reported. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Bhutan, the tiny kingdom that introduced Gross National Happiness to the world, has a problem: young people are leaving the country in record numbers. CNN: The country boasts free health care, free education, a rising life expectancy and an economy that's grown over the last 30 years -- still, people are leaving. Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay believes it is ironically the success of Gross National Happiness that has made young Bhutanese so sought after abroad. "It is an existential crisis," he said. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Spirit Airlines has filed for bankruptcy protection and will attempt to reboot as it struggles to recover from the pandemic-caused swoon in travel, stiffer competition from bigger carriers, and a failed attempt to sell the airline to JetBlue. From a report: Spirit, the biggest U.S. budget airline, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition after working out terms with bondholders. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft is planning to launch a new purpose-built miniature PC for its Windows 365 cloud service next year. The Verge: Windows 365 Link is a $349 device that acts like a thin client PC to connect to the cloud and stream a version of Windows 11. The Link device is designed to be a compact, fanless, and easy-to-use cloud PC for your local monitors and peripherals. It's meant to be the ideal companion to Microsoft's Windows 365 service, which lets businesses transition employees over to virtual machines that exist in the cloud and can be streamed securely to multiple devices.... [ Read it >> ]

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Coca-Cola's latest AI-generated Christmas advertisement has sparked criticism from creative professionals who say the promotional video lacks authenticity and artistic merit.

The video, which depicts Coca-Cola trucks in snowy landscapes and people drinking the beverage, reimagines the company's 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" campaign using AI. Three AI studios - Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card - produced different versions using four generative AI models, according to Forbes. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In a technical blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has explained why Windows 95's installation process required users to pass through three different operating systems -- MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. The design choice stemmed from the need to support upgrades from multiple starting points while maintaining a graphical user interface throughout the process. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Perplexity is rolling out a new feature that will let Pro subscribers purchase a product without leaving its AI search engine. When searching for a product using Perplexity, Pro members based in the US can now choose a "Buy with Pro" button that will automatically order the product using saved shipping and billing information. Perplexity says all products purchased through Buy with Pro come with free shipping. For products that don't support Buy with Pro, Perplexity will redirect users to the merchant's website to complete their purchase. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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India plans to build a moon-orbiting space station by 2040 that will support crewed missions to the moon and serve as a hub for scientific research. Space Magazine reports: If all goes according to plan, the lunar space station will be completed around the same time the nation's astronauts land on the moon, with construction of a permanent base on the surface before 2050. The lunar space station appears to be the third and final phase of India's moon exploration efforts. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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China has activated the world's most advanced hypergravity machine to advance studies in geological processes, material behavior, and deep-sea energy exploration. Located in Hangzhou, The Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) will be able to produce forces thousands of times stronger than Earth's gravity. Interesting Engineering reports: The facility will house three primary hypergravity centrifuges and 18 onboard units. These centrifuges, machines designed to spin containers rapidly, force heavier materials to the edges or bottom by creating hypergravity conditions, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The first centrifuge's main engine, resembling two massive arms holding experimental baskets, has been installed. According to the Hangzhou government, the fabrication of the remaining two centrifuges and 10 onboard units is underway.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For the past couple of years, the startup has been iterating on a brand-new CRM platform and making everything available on GitHub under a permissive AGPLv3 license. While Twenty doesn't have all the features that you can find in Salesforce, the company is slowly building a community of CRM and open source enthusiasts around it, with more than 300 contributors in the last year and 20,000 stars on GitHub. [...] Twenty is trying to build a flexible platform that can be tweaked to every company's needs and that can serve as a basis for other tools and use cases. Each entry in a CRM is an object. It can be a standard, pre-defined object like a person or a company. But customers can also create their own custom objects.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year I had one of those encounters which, afterwards, I just couldn't stop thinking about. Eight months and some digging later, I have decided to write about it. My meeting was with an American businessman called Tom Kearney, who was on a pavement in central London one Christmas when he was whacked on the head so hard that he fell to the ground, spent weeks in a coma, and only just survived. Had he been mugged? Not quite. He'd been hit by the giant wing mirror of a London bus. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "El Capitan" supercomputer is now ranked as the world's most powerful, exceeding a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops on the latest Top500 list. Engadget reports: El Capitan is only the third "exascale" computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations in a second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, claim the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of these massive machines live within government research facilities: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. [Cray Computing] had a hand in all three systems.... [ Read it >> ]

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Roblox has introduced stricter safety measures for users under 13, including restricting direct messaging outside of games and experiences, regardless of parental permission. These updates aim to address criticism over child safety and regain trust, following a Bloomberg investigation highlighting predator risks on the platform. TechCrunch reports: During a press briefing, the company explained that users under the age of 13 will still be able to access in-game chats because Roblox believes that communication is fundamental to gameplay on the platform. Parents can change this setting if they wish. In addition, Roblox is age-gating certain experiences for users under 13. The new restrictions apply to games and experiences that are designed for socializing with people outside of a person's friends list, such as experiences that allow free-form writing or drawing.... [ Read it >> ]

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According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Justice Department wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its ongoing search monopoly case. The recommendations will be made official on Wednesday. 9to5Google reports: At the top of the list is having Google sell Chrome "because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine." There are many questions about how that works, including what the impact on the underlying Chromium codebase would be. Would Google still be allowed to develop the open-source project by which many other browsers, like Microsoft Edge use? "The government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market," reports Bloomberg. Google, which plans to appeal, previously said that "splitting off Chrome or Android would break them."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Framework CEO Nirav Patel had one of the bravest tech demos that we've seen at a conference yet -- modifying a Framework Laptop from x86 to RISC-V live on stage. In the five-minute duration of one of the Ubuntu Summit's Lightning Talks, he opened up a Framework machine, removed its motherboard, installed a RISC-V-powered replacement, reconnected it, and closed the machine up again. All while presenting the talk live, and pretty much without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. It was an impressive performance, and you can watch it yourself at the 8:56:30 mark in the video recording.... [ Read it >> ]

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HarperCollins has partnered with an AI technology company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models, offering authors the choice to opt in for a $2,500 non-negotiable fee. 404 Media reports: On Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith, who wrote the children's book Santa's Husband and published it with HarperCollins, posted screenshots on Bluesky of an email he received, seemingly from his agent, informing him that the agency was approached by the publisher about the AI deal. "Let me know what you think, positive or negative, and we can handle the rest of this for you," the screenshotted text in an email to Kibblesmith says. The screenshots show the agent telling Kibblesmith that HarperCollins was offering $2,500 (non-negotiable).... [ Read it >> ]

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Google is reportedly working on a multi-year project to migrate Chrome OS into Android, aiming to unify its operating systems and better compete with the iPad. This transition involves incorporating Chrome OS features like extensions and Linux app support into Android, with upcoming updates focused on improving desktop functionality and device compatibility. Android Authority reports: To better compete with the iPad as well as manage engineering resources more effectively, Google wants to unify its operating system efforts. Instead of merging Android and Chrome OS into a new operating system like rumors suggested in the past, however, a source told me that Google is instead working on fully migrating Chrome OS over to Android. While we don't know what this means for the Chrome OS or Chromebook brands, we did hear that Google wants future "Chromebooks" to ship with the Android OS in the future. That's why I believe that Google's rumored new Pixel Laptop will run a new version of desktop Android as opposed to the Chrome OS that you're likely familiar with.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An AI-generated nude photo scandal has shut down a Pennsylvania private school. On Monday, classes were canceled after parents forced leaders to either resign or face a lawsuit potentially seeking criminal penalties and accusing the school of skipping mandatory reporting of the harmful images. The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported. Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney's general office called "Safe2Say Something." But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.... [ Read it >> ]

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India's competition watchdog has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing user data with other Meta units for advertising purposes for five years and also levied a fine of $25.4 million for antitrust violations related to WhatsApp's controversial 2021 privacy policy. From a report: The Competition Commission of India, which began the investigation in 2021, found that WhatsApp's "take-it-or-leave-it" privacy update constituted an abuse of Meta's dominant position by forcing users to accept expanded data collection without an opt-out option. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Infosys founder Narayana Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what's needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake. From a report: Speaking on Indian TV channel CNBC-TV18 at the Global Leadership Summit in Mumbai last week Murthy once again declared he did not "believe in work-life balance." "I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave," he asserted . ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: China's population is expected to shrink by 51 million -- more than the size of California -- over the next decade as policymakers struggle to reverse the country's falling birth rate, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. By 2035, the population is expected to drop to 1.36 billion, levels not seen since 2012, down from a peak of 1.41 billion in 2021, BI senior industry analyst Ada Li estimates. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Belgian region of Flanders is rolling out personal data "pods" to 7 million citizens in a trial of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's vision for user-controlled data privacy.

Five Belgian hospitals have begun storing patient visit information in the data pods, developed by Berners-Lee's startup Inrupt over the past five years. The system aims to help compliance with European privacy regulations by giving citizens control over their personal information, from medical records to social media posts. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game's influence's 20 years later. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple has stopped selling its Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone jack adapter in the U.S. and most countries, with limited stock remaining only in select European markets. The $9 accessory, introduced with iPhone 7 in 2016 (after the "courageous" move to stop including the headphone jack in iPhones), allowed users to connect traditional headphones to Lightning port iPhones. The discontinuation comes as Apple transitions to USB-C ports across its iPhone lineup.... [ Read it >> ]

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Donald Trump has named FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to chair the U.S. communications regulator when he takes office in January 2025, citing Carr's stance against what Trump called "regulatory lawfare." Carr, a lawyer and longtime Republican who has served at the FCC under both Trump and Biden administrations, has emerged as a vocal critic of major social media companies' content moderation practices. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. From a report: Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend, with high levels of investment and few acquisition deals or initial public offerings. "We've raised a lot of money, and we've given very little back," Thomas Laffont, co-founder of investment firm Coatue Management, said at a recent conference. "We are bleeding cash as an industry." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The goal? "Make C++ and Rust interoperability easily accessible and approachable to the widest possible audience." And the Rust Foundation's "Interop Initiative" is specifically focused on the goal of interoperability "within the same executable," through either inline embedding that allows "integrated compilation", or foreign function interfaces. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Dr. Adam Rodman, a Boston-based internal medicine expert, helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses, reports the New York TImes. The results? "Doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises...

By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal shot up five spots from #16 to #11. In that same year, Fortran jumped from #12 to #8 — while both Visual Basic and SQL dropped down a single rank. Toward the top of the list, C actually fell from the #2 spot over the last 12 months to the #4 spot. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A new six-episode Dune series premiers tonight on HBO and Max — a prequel to the Denis Villeneuve-directed Dune movies set 10,000 years before the birth f Paul Atreides. The Hollywood Reporter writes that it "draws on source material from the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, the origin of the Dune universe."... [ Read it >> ]

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Slashdot unixbhaskar writes: Linus has released a fresh Linux kernel for public consumption. Please give it a try and report any glitches to the maintainers for improvement. Also, please do not forget to express your appreciation to those tireless folks who did all the hard work for you. ... [ Read it >> ]

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This week Alphabet CEO Sundar Picahi assured investors that their long-term AI focus and investment (and a "commitment to innovation") "are paying off," reports the Associated Press. Alphabet's stock has already soared 20% this year, and it's "still thriving" as the company "navigates through a pivotal shift to AI and battles regulators..."... [ Read it >> ]

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On a small network of islands north of Seattle, Washington, San Juan County just completed its first full year of 32-hour workweeks, reports CNN.

And Tuesday the county released a report touting "a host of positive outcomes — from recruiting to retention to employee happiness — and a cost savings of more than $975,000 compared to what the county would have paid if it met the union's pay increase demands."... [ Read it >> ]

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Nyx is a new reusable space capsule that "safely and affordably carries cargo to and from space stations," according to the web page of its European-based manufacturer, The Exploration Company, "launching from any heavy launcher worldwide."

And the company "just closed a large funding round to further its mission of building Europe's first reusable space capsule," reports TechCrunch — pointing out that right now, "Only two companies currently provide cargo delivery to and from the International Space Station, and both are based in the United States."... [ Read it >> ]

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"Here's how Apple's next major product will work," writes Bloomberg's Mark Gurman:

The company has been developing a smart home command center that will rival products like the Amazon Echo Hub and Google Nest Hub... The product will run many of Apple's core apps, like Safari, Notes and Calendar, but the interface will be centered on a customizable home screen with iOS-like widgets and smart home controls... The device looks like a low-end iPad and will include a built-in battery, speakers and a FaceTime camera oriented for a horizontal landscape view. The square device, which includes a roughly 6-inch screen, has sensors that let it change the interface depending on how far a user is from the screen. It will also have attachments for walls, plus a base with additional speakers so it can be placed on a table, nightstand or desk. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Amazon is making it harder for disabled employees to get permission to work from home," reports Bloomberg, a move they say shows Amazon's "determination" to enforce a five-days-a-week return to the office.

The company recently told employees with disabilities that it was implementing a more rigorous vetting process, both for new requests to work from home and applications to extend existing arrangements. Affected workers must submit to a "multilevel leader review" and could be required to return to the office for monthlong trials to determine if accommodations meet their needs... Affected employees are receiving calls from "accommodation consultants" who explain how the new policy works. They review medical documentation and discuss how effective working from home has been for employees who've already received an accommodation as well as any previous attempts to help the person work in the office. If the consultant agrees that the person should be allowed to work from home, another Amazon manager must sign off. If they don't, the request goes to a third manager... ... [ Read it >> ]

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A Michigan college student writing about the elderly received this suggestion from Google's Gemini AI:

"This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A reusable uncrewed spaceplane was unveiled this week for delivering and returning cargo from the Chinese Tiangong space station. It was built by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute (part of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China). (See YouTube footage here...)... [ Read it >> ]

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Last year 30,000 people moved into central Florida's Polk County — more than to any other county in America. Its largest city has just 112,641 people, living a full 35 miles east of the 3.1 million residents in the metropolitan area around Tampa.

But the Associated Press says something similar is happening all over the country: "the rise of the far-flung exurbs."... [ Read it >> ]

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Chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe "and in any hypothetical ones beyond it" can be estimated by a new theoretical model, reports the Royal Astronomical Society.

Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life, the new research predicts that a typical observer [i.e., intelligent life] should experience a substantially larger density of dark energy than is seen in our own Universe...... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Even as Earth sets new heat records, humanity this year is pumping 330 million tons (300 million metric tons) more carbon dioxide into the air by burning fossil fuels than it did last year. This year the world is on track to put 41.2 billion tons (37.4 billion metric tons) of the main heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere. It's a 0.8% increase from 2023, according to Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track emissions... This year's pollution increase isn't quite as large as last year's 1.4% jump, scientists said while presenting the data at the United Nations climate talks in Azerbaijan... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google's transistion to Safe Coding and memory-safe languages "will take multiple years," according to a post on Google's security blog. So "we're also retrofitting secure-by-design principles to our existing C++ codebase wherever possible," a process which includes "working towards bringing spatial memory safety into as many of our C++ codebases as possible, including Chrome and the monolithic codebase powering our services."... [ Read it >> ]

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"The Pentagon's latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena," reports the Associated Press, "but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin.

"The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York."... [ Read it >> ]

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