An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Virtual- and augmented-reality setups already modify the way users see and hear the world around them. Add in haptic feedback for a sense of touch and a VR version of Smell-O-Vision, and only one major sense remains: taste. To fill the gap, researchers at the City University of Hong Kong have developed a new interface to simulate taste in virtual and other extended reality (XR). The group previously worked on other systems for wearable interfaces, such as haptic and olfactory feedback. To create a more "immersive VR experience," they turned to adding taste sensations, says Yiming Liu, a coauthor of the group's research paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lollipop-shaped lickable device can produce nine different flavors: sugar, salt, citric acid, cherry, passion fruit, green tea, milk, durian, and grapefruit. Each flavor is produced by food-grade chemicals embedded in a pocket of agarose gel. When a voltage is applied to the gel, the chemicals are transported to the surface in a liquid that then mixes with saliva on the tongue like a real lollipop. Increase the voltage, and get a stronger flavor. Initially, the researchers tested several methods for simulating taste, including electrostimulating the tongue. The other methods each came with limitations, such as being too bulky or less safe, so the researchers opted for chemical delivery through a process called iontophoresis, which moves chemicals and ions through hydrogels and has a low electrical-power requirement. With a 2-volt maximum, the device is well within the human safety limit of 30 V, which is considered enough to deliver a substantial shock in some situations. Some of the possible applications mentioned by the authors include gustation tests, virtual grocery shopping, and immersive environments for exploring food flavors. However, the current system is limited to one hour of use due to gel depletion and it only supports a handful of flavor channels. Future development aims to extend operation time, increase flavor complexity, and improve usability, marking the beginning of a new frontier for XR interfaces.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked "enshittification" as its word of the year. Gizmodo reports: The Australians define the word as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking." We've all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you're trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and recently offered potential solutions to the age-old phenomenon in an interview with The Register. "We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber's gig-economy workforce now includes programmers. According to Bloomberg, "The company is expanding beyond its rideshare roots to enter a hot new market: helping other businesses outsource some of their artificial intellgience development to independent contractors." From the report: Its new AI training and data labeling division, called Scaled Solutions, builds on an internal team that tackles large-scale annotation tasks for Uber's rideshare, food delivery and freight units. According to its website, Scaled Solutions has begun serving other companies that also need high-quality datasets. Clients include Aurora Innovation Inc., an Uber-backed firm that makes self-driving software for commercial trucks, and Niantic Inc., the game developer behind Pokemon Go. Uber's efforts to sell data labeling services have not previously been reported. The move could allow it to gain a piece of a growing market, as global companies rely on humans to vet data to train AI models. Scale AI Inc, which offers similar services, is valued at $14 billion, making it one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups. The rideshare giant has plenty of experience recruiting contractors, as it has done for years with drivers and couriers. Now the company is betting that it can help other businesses by getting enough skilled workers who can label images, text and videos with context for machine learning models to recognize patterns and make accurate predictions and recommendations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite significant enterprise AI hype, most job seekers remain unconvinced of its benefits, with 69% doubting its ability to enhance work performance and 62% skeptical it reduces workloads. The findings come from a study conducted by Resume Genius. The Register reports: Consistent with the majority opinion that AI in the workplace has failed to impress, only 34 percent of respondents said they were worried about being replaced by a bot, while just 30 percent think AI will increase competition for jobs or harm salaries. Broken down by generation (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z job seekers all responded), the results are largely the same, with even Gen Z workers skeptical of the latest "next big thing" in enterprise tech. In short, Resume Genius's findings align with other recent studies suggesting enterprise AI's hype has not lived up to its marketing promises.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Huawei has announced its new Mate 70 series smartphone lineup, which will be the first offered with the company's new HarmonyOS Next operating system that doesn't rely on Google's Android services and won't run any Android apps, according to a report by Reuters. The four models of the Mate 70 also don't feature any US hardware following a half decade of US sanctions. The Mate 70, Mate 70 Pro, Mate 70 Pro Plus, and Mate 70 RS will also be offered with Huawei's HarmonyOS 4.3, which first launched in August 2019 as an alternative to Google's Android OS and is still compatible with Android's extensive app library. Users who decide to opt for Huawei's new Android-free HarmonyOS Next will have less choice when it comes to the apps they can install. Huawei says it has "secured more than 15,000 applications for its HarmonyOS ecosystem, with plans to expand to 100,000 apps in the coming months," according to Reuters. Starting next year, Huawei also says all the new phones and tablets it launches in 2025 will run HarmonyOS Next. [...] Huawei hasn't confirmed what processors are being used in the Mate 70 lineup, but the company has previously used chips made by China's SMIC for last year's Mate 60 series and other smartphones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group appears to have leaked access to Sora, OpenAI's video generator, in protest of what they're calling duplicity and "art washing" on OpenAI's part. From a report: On Tuesday, the group published a project on the AI dev platform Hugging Face seemingly connected to OpenAI's Sora API, which isn't yet publicly available. Using their authentication tokens -- presumably from an early access system -- the group created a frontend that lets users generate videos with Sora.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors. Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing (PDF) that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers' customer service operations are unnecessary." Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry. USTelecom, which represents telcos such as AT&T and Verizon, said that "the competitive broadband marketplace leaves providers of broadband and other communications services no choice but to provide their customers with not only high-quality broadband, but also high-quality customer service." "If a provider fails to efficiently resolve an issue, they risk losing not only that customer -- and not just for the one service, but potentially for all of the bundled services offered to that customer -- but also any prospective customers that come across a negative review online. Because of this, broadband providers know that their success is dependent upon providing and maintaining excellent customer service," USTelecom wrote. While the FCC Notice of Inquiry said that providers should "offer live customer service representative support by phone within a reasonable timeframe," USTelecom's filing touted the customer service abilities of AI chatbots. "AI chat agents will only get better at addressing customers' needs more quickly over time -- and if providers fail to provide the customer service and engagement options that their customers expect and fail to resolve their customers' concerns, they may soon find that the consumer is no longer a customer, having switched to another competitive offering," the lobby group said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has denied claims that it automatically enables data collection from Word and Excel documents to train its AI models. The controversy emerged after cybersecurity expert nixCraft reported that Microsoft's Connected Experiences feature was collecting user data by default. While Microsoft's services agreement grants the company rights to use customer content, officials stated via Twitter that document data is not used for AI training.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In prior years the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an Ethical Tech Giving Guide for holiday shopping where they recommend products like old AMD Opteron motherboards and USB to parallel printer cables that "respect your freedoms" and meet their strict free software definitions. Out today is their newest annual FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide...

There are some new open-source/Linux details to note when it comes to the AMD accelerators in the Instinct "CDNA" land...

The Biden administration is reducing Intel's CHIPS Act award by over $600 million, citing a $3 billion military contract the chipmaker was also awarded. Engadget reports: Initially set to receive $8.5 billion from the domestic silicon production bill, the company will get up to $7.85 billion instead. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Intel has extended some plant openings beyond 2030 government deadlines. Intel posted its biggest-ever quarterly loss last month after announcing 15,000 layoffs in August. The chip-maker's struggles have reportedly led some government officials to worry about its ability to deliver as a central component of the Biden White House's CHIPS Act. Intel will receive at least $1 billion in CHIPS Act funding before the end of the year. The company plans to invest $90 billion in the US by the decade's end, a reduction from its initial goal of $100 billion in the next five years. The Commerce Department said the chip maker is still on schedule to invest the full $100 billion on projects in four states: Arizona ($3.94 billion), Oregon ($1.86 billion), Ohio ($1.5 billion) and New Mexico ($500 million).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The founder of an artificial intelligence start-up focused on education was arrested and charged with defrauding her investors, lying about the company's profits and falsely claiming that some of the largest school districts in the country, including New York City's, were her customers. The founder, Joanna Smith-Griffin, started the company, AllHere Education, in 2016, with the goal of using artificial intelligence to increase student and parent engagement and curb absenteeism. In the years that followed, Ms. Smith-Griffin, 33, misrepresented AllHere's revenue and customer base to fraudulently raise almost $10 million in funds, according to the indictment. Once the company's valuation had climbed, she sold some of her stake in it and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a down payment for a new home and on her wedding. Ms. Smith-Griffin was arrested Tuesday in North Carolina, where she lives, and charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and aggravated identity theft. She faces more than 40 years in prison. AllHere is now in bankruptcy proceedings, prosectors said, and all of its employees have been laid off. "Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses," said James E. Dennehy, the F.B.I. assistant director in New York leading the investigation into Ms. Smith-Griffin. "The F.B.I. will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of educational opportunities for our city's children will be taught a lesson." Smith-Griffin is the latest Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree to be indicted on fraud. "The Forbes-to-Fraud pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of Alameda Research; fintech Frank founder Charlie Javice; and 'Pharma bro' Martin Shkreli," notes TechCrunch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic is adding a new feature to its Claude AI assistant that will give users more control over how the chatbot responds to different writing tasks. From a report: The new custom styles are available to all Claude AI users, enabling anyone to train it to match their own communication style or select from preset options to quickly adjust the tone and level of detail it provides. This update aims to personalize the chatbot's replies and make them feel more natural or appropriate for specific applications, such as writing detailed technical documents or professional emails. Three preset styles are available: Formal for "clear and polished" text, Concise for shorter and more direct responses, and Explanatory for educational replies that need to include additional detail. If these don't suit your requirements, Claude can also generate custom styles that are trained to mimic other writing mannerisms. Anthropic says users need to upload "sample content that reflects your preferred way of communicating" to the chatbot, and then instruct it on how to match the writing style.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

American hospitals and healthcare organizations would be required to adopt multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other minimum cybersecurity standards under new legislation proposed by a bipartisan group of US senators. From a report: The Health Care Cybersecurity and Resiliency Act of 2024 [PDF], introduced on Friday by US Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), Mark Warner (D-Virginia), John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire), would, among other things, require better coordination between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) around cybersecurity in the healthcare and public health sector. This includes giving HHS a year to implement a cybersecurity incident response plan and update the types of information displayed publicly via the department's breach reporting portal. Currently, all healthcare orgs that are considered "covered entities" under the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are required to notify HHS if they are breached. The new law would require breached entities to report how many people were affected by the security incident. It would also mandate that the portal include details on "any corrective action taken against a covered entity that provided notification of a breach" as well as "recognized security practices that were considered" during the breach investigation, plus any other information that the HHS secretary deems necessary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates were sent out on Monday for Linux 6.13 and include one very interesting new feature for this file-system: device aliasing as a means of being able to temporarily carve out a portion of the partition for other purposes...

Interpol arrested 1,006 suspects in Africa during a massive two-month operation, clamping down on cybercrime that left tens of thousands of victims, including some who were trafficked, and produced millions in financial damages, the global police organization said Tuesday. From a report: Operation Serengeti, a joint operation with Afripol, the African Union's police agency, ran from Sept. 2 to Oct. 31 in 19 African countries and targeted criminals behind ransomware, business email compromise, digital extortion and online scams, the agency said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced additional modifications to its European search results on Tuesday, following complaints from smaller competitors about traffic losses and amid potential EU antitrust charges under new tech regulations. The changes come as Google attempts to comply with the Digital Markets Act, which prohibits tech giants from favoring their own services and after hotels, airlines, and small retailers reported a 30% decline in direct booking clicks following recent platform adjustments. Google's legal director Oliver Bethell said the new proposals include expanded search units offering equal formatting between comparison sites and supplier websites, along with new formats for competitors to display prices and images. The company will also test removing hotel map displays in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia. The Alphabet unit faces possible enforcement action from the European Commission, which began investigating potential DMA violations in March. Companies found breaching the regulations could face fines of up to 10% of their annual global revenue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google engineer Ricardo Ribalda has proposed a set of patches for the common "uvcvideo" kernel driver that supports UVC-compliant web cameras and the like to provide granular power saving support...