An anonymous reader shares a report: It resembles an enormous, malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind. Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck -- which can drive on rails -- will be put to use for maintenance work on the company's network. Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot's eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely. With a vertical reach of 12 metres (40ft), the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as 40kg (88lb), hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw. For now, the robot's primary task will focus on trimming tree branches along rails and painting metal frames that hold cables above trains, the company said. The technology will help fill worker shortages in ageing Japan as well as reduce accidents such as workers falling from high places or suffering electric shocks, the company said.

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An anonymous reader writes: The All England Lawn Tennis Club is using AI for the first time to protect players at Wimbledon from online abuse. An AI-driven service monitors players' public-facing social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different languages. High-profile players who have been targeted online such as the former US Open champion Emma Raducanu and the four-time grand slam winner Naomi Osaka have previously spoken out about having to delete Instagram and Twitter, now called X, from their phones. Harriet Dart, the British No 2, has said she only uses social media from time to time because of online "hate." Speaking on Thursday after her triumph against Katie Boulter, the British No 1, Dart said: "I just think there's a lot of positives for it [social media] but also a lot of negatives. I'm sure today, if I open one of my apps, regardless if I won, I'd have a lot of hate as well." Jamie Baker, the tournament's director, said Wimbledon had introduced the social media monitoring service Threat Matrix. The system, developed by the AI company Signify Group, will also be rolled out at the US Open. [...] He said the AI-driven service was supported by people monitoring the accounts. Players can opt in for a fuller service that scans abuse or threats via private direct messaging. Baker, a former British No 2, said Wimbledon would consult the players about the abuse before reporting it to tech companies for removal or to the police if deemed necessary.

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Amazon has introduced new advertising strategies for its Fire TV platform, displaying full-screen ads before screensavers activate on idle devices, CordCutters reports. Users have observed ads from various brands during these pre-screensaver intervals, the report added.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Eton College, one of the world's most prestigious boarding schools, is planning to ban smartphones for its incoming first-year students and replace these with old-school Nokia phones instead, a spokesperson for the school confirmed to Business Insider. The new policy comes as the UK-based school grapples with managing student's educations alongside technological developments. "Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools," a spokesperson told BI. "From September those joining in Year 9 will receive a 'brick' phone for use outside the school day, as well as a School-issued iPad to support academic study. Age-appropriate controls remain in place for other year groups," they added. Eton College is an exclusive boarding school located outside London, near Windsor. Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston, and Eddie Redmayne are among its best-known alumni.

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Mojang Studios, the creator of the globally popular video game Minecraft, is diversifying its revenue streams amid slowing growth in the gaming industry. Chief Executive Asa Bredin revealed in an interview that the company is exploring new partnerships in merchandising, education, and content streaming. The company is also venturing into film and television, with a Warner Bros. movie adaptation set to premiere in April and a Netflix series in development. From a report: Mojang's push follows repeated forays by Nintendo and Sony Group to broaden the appeal of their gaming properties at a time that spending in the industry has hit a lull. Nintendo is developing a live-action film based on the Legend of Zelda franchise, following the blockbuster success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, while Sony has turned The Last of Us into an HBO series and created games based on the Spider-Man movies.

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Airlines in Europe will be forced to raise prices to fund the cost of cutting carbon emissions, the boss of British Airways owner IAG said. From a report: Luis Gallego told the Financial Times that switching to cleaner, more expensive sustainable fuel would "have a big impact" on the industry [the link may be paywalled] and put some people off flying. "Flying is going to be more expensive. That is an issue, we are trying to improve efficiency to mitigate that, but it will have an impact on demand," he said. He added that European airlines could become less competitive because of the bloc's tough net zero targets, which include a requirement for 6 per cent of jet fuel to be from sustainable sources by 2030. "We agree with decarbonisation ... but I think we need to do it in a consistent way worldwide not to jeopardise European aviation," Gallego said. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is made from a range of non-fossil fuel sources, from waste cooking oil to crops, and can emit 70 per cent less carbon dioxide than traditional jet fuel. But very little of it is being produced -- less than 1 per cent of total aviation fuel consumption last year was from sustainable sources -- meaning it is far more expensive than jet fuel. IAG itself used 12 per cent of the world's SAF last year across its five airlines, which include British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.

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Google is intensifying efforts to decrease its dependency on Apple's Safari browser, as a U.S. antitrust lawsuit threatens its default search engine status on iPhones. The tech giant has been trying to shift more iPhone searches to its own apps, with the percentage rising from 25% five years ago to the low 30s recently, The Information reported Friday. Progress has stalled in recent months, however. To attract users, Google has run advertising campaigns showcasing unique features like Lens image search. The company recently hired former Instagram executive Robby Stein to lead this initiative, potentially leveraging AI to enhance its apps' appeal. Google paid Apple over $20 billion last year for default status on Safari. Reducing this dependency could protect Google's mobile search advertising revenue if the antitrust ruling goes against it. The report adds: Google executives considered having its new AI Overviews feature, which shows AI-generated responses to search queries, appear on its mobile apps but not on Safari, people who have worked on the product said. But Google ultimately decided against that move.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI could "distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus," and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI. The paper, "Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data," [PDF] was co-authored by researchers at Google's artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024. Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the "existential risk" artificial general intelligence poses to humanity, Google's research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get worse in the future. Namely, that generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos. Much like another Google research paper about the dangers of generative AI I covered recently, Google's methodology here likely undercounts instances of AI-generated harm. But the most interesting observation in the paper is that the vast majority of these harms and how they "undermine public trust," as the researchers say, are often "neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools' content policies or terms of service." In other words, that type of content is a feature, not a bug.

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China has requested significantly more generative AI patents than any other country, the U.N. intellectual property agency (the World Intellectual Property Organization) is reporting. According to WIPO's first-ever report on GenAI patents, China submitted over 38,200 inventions in the past decade, dwarfing the United States' 6,300 filings. South Korea, Japan, and India rounded out the top five. The study tracked approximately 54,000 GenAI-related patent applications from 2014 to 2023, with over a quarter emerging in the last year alone.

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No leap second will be added to universal time in 2024, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has announced. From a report: An additional second has previously been added to the universal time as displayed by atomic clocks (UTC) when this measurement has become out of sync with the rotation of the Earth (UT1). But in a statement released on Thursday, the IERS, which enacts changes to UTC on behalf of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), said the difference between UTC and UT1 is not great enough to warrant a change. Changes in the relationship between UTC and UT1 sometimes occur because the Earth does not always spin at the same speed, with natural events such as earthquakes often causing small changes.

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"Fortnite" maker Epic Games said on Friday Apple was impeding its attempts to set up a games store on iPhones and iPads in Europe, the latest escalation in a bitter feud over the technology giant's control of the iOS app ecosystem. From a report: Apple has twice rejected documents it submitted to launch the Epic Games Store because the design of certain buttons and labels was similar to those used by its App Store, the video-game publisher said. "We are using the same 'Install' and 'In-app purchases' naming conventions that are used across popular app stores on multiple platforms, and are following standard conventions for buttons in iOS apps," Epic said in a series of posts on X. "Apple's rejection is arbitrary, obstructive, and in violation of the DMA, and we've shared our concerns with the European Commission," it said. Under pressure from European regulators, Apple had in March cleared the way for Epic to put its own game store on iOS devices in Europe.

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Top Eurocops are appealing for help from lawmakers to undermine a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) they say is hampering criminal investigations -- and it's not end-to-end encryption this time. Not exactly. From a report: Europol published a position paper today highlighting its concerns around SMS home routing -- the technology that allows telcos to continue offering their services when customers visit another country. Most modern mobile phone users are tied to a network with roaming arrangements in other countries. EE customers in the UK will connect to either Telefonica or Xfera when they land in Spain, or T-Mobile in Croatia, for example. While this usually provides a fairly smooth service for most roamers, Europol is now saying something needs to be done about the PETs that are often enabled in these home routing setups. According to the cops, they pointed out that when roaming, a suspect in a criminal case who's using a SIM from another country will have all of their mobile communications processed through their home network. If a crime is committed by a Brit in Germany, for example, then German police couldn't issue a request for unencrypted data as they could with a domestic operator such as Deutsche Telekom.

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Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil, 76, has doubled down on his prediction of the Singularity's imminent arrival in an interview with The New York Times. Gesturing to a graph showing exponential growth in computing power, Kurzweil asserted humanity would merge with AI by 2045, augmenting biological brains with vast computational abilities. "If you create something that is thousands of times -- or millions of times -- more powerful than the brain, we can't anticipate what it is going to do," Kurzweil said. His claims, once dismissed, have gained traction amid recent AI breakthroughs. As Kurzweil ages, his predictions carry personal urgency. "Even a healthy 20-year-old could die tomorrow," he told The Times, hinting at his own mortality race against the Singularity's timeline.

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Nintendo has announced the end of repair services for its Wii U console, following the earlier decision to shut down all Wii U servers. Nintendo cited the expiration of the parts retention period as the reason for discontinuing repairs. The move marks the final chapter for the Wii U, which launched in 2012 but struggled to gain traction, selling only 13.56 million units compared to its successor, the Switch, which has sold over 140 million units.

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Britain's Labour Party was projected on Thursday evening to win a landslide election victory, sweeping the Conservative Party out of power after 14 years, in a thundering anti-incumbent revolt that heralded a new era in British politics. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak accepted defeat Friday, and said he had called Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, to congratulate him. The New York Times: Partial results, and an exit poll conducted for the BBC and two other broadcasters, indicated that Labour was on course to win around 405 of the 650 seats in the British House of Commons, versus 154 for the Conservatives. If the projections are confirmed, it would be the worst defeat for the Conservatives in the nearly 200-year history of the party, one that would raise questions about its future -- and even its very viability. Reform U.K., an insurgent, anti-immigration party, was projected to win 4 seats but a significant share of the vote, a robust performance that came at the expense of the Conservatives. The exit poll, which accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, confirmed the electorate was thoroughly fed up with the Conservatives after a turbulent era that spanned austerity, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, the serial scandals of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the ill-fated tax-cutting proposals of his successor, Liz Truss. While a Labour victory had long been predicted -- it held a double-digit polling lead over the Conservatives for more than 18 months -- the magnitude of the Tory defeat will reverberate through Britain for months, if not years. Further reading: Financial Times; BBC, and The Guardian.

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MattSparkes writes: Secret international discussions have resulted in governments across the world imposing identical export controls on quantum computers, while refusing to disclose the scientific rationale behind the regulations. Although quantum computers theoretically have the potential to threaten national security by breaking encryption techniques, even the most advanced quantum computers currently in public existence are too small and too error-prone to achieve this, rendering the bans seemingly pointless. The UK is one of the countries that has prohibited the export of quantum computers with 34 or more quantum bits, or qubits, and error rates below a certain threshold. The intention seems to be to restrict machines of a certain capability, but the UK government hasn't explicitly said this. A New Scientist freedom of information request for a rationale behind these numbers was turned down on the grounds of national security. France has also introduced export controls with the same specifications on qubit numbers and error rates, as has Spain and the Netherlands. Identical limits across European states might point to a European Union regulation, but that isn't the case. A European Commission spokesperson told New Scientist that EU members are free to adopt national measures, rather than bloc-wide ones, for export restrictions. New Scientist reached out to dozens of nations to ask what the scientific basis for these matching legislative bans on quantum computer exports was, but was told it was kept secret to protect national security.

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Half of the Netherlands' petrol stations are set to close in the next five to 10 years as electric cars start to take over the market, according to ING Research. From a report: The bank's economists say there will be insufficient earnings in future, with only some 2,000 of today's 4,131 gas stations remaining. "It is mainly the small, unmanned petrol stations that will disappear," says ING Research, as reported in De Telegraaf. [...] Owners are trying to maintain turnover by increasing their sales of food and beverages, maintenance services and even car washing, ING says. But the long-term business model of independent stations will be difficult to maintain. "A quick calculation shows how long petrol station owners can still sell petrol," Dirk Mulder, Trade & Retail sector banker at ING Research, said. "A new car remains in the Dutch fleet for an average of 19 years. The last petrol and diesel cars will come onto the market in 2034 and will stay on the road until approximately 2053."

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Roku's recent update has sparked controversy among TV owners, particularly those with TCL and Hisense models. The update, version 13.0.0 released on June 6, introduced a feature called "Roku Smart Picture" that has led to numerous complaints about unwanted motion smoothing effects. The Verge adds: While Roku doesn't explicitly mention motion smoothing, or what Roku calls "action smoothing," the update has made it so that I and many others with Roku TVs see motion smoothing, regardless of whether the picture setting is Roku Smart Picture or not. My TV didn't even support motion smoothing before this. Now, I can't make it go away.

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An Italian video game, 22 years in the making, has finally hit the market, setting a record for the longest development time in gaming history. "Kien," an action platformer for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, began development in 2002 by a group of five inexperienced enthusiasts, The Guardian reports. Only one, Fabio Belsanti, saw the project through to completion. The game, inspired by 15th-century Tuscan manuscripts and early Japanese graphics, offers a challenging, nonlinear fantasy experience. It's now available on a translucent gray cartridge, complete with a printed manual -- a rarity in modern gaming. Belsanti's company, AgeOfGames, survived the delay by creating educational games. The recent boom in retro gaming finally made Kien's release feasible, he said.

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