Buy-now-pay-later lender Klarna said its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents and has had 2.3 million conversations, equal to two-thirds of the company's customer service chats, within the first month of being deployed. The AI tool resolved errands much faster and matched human levels on customer satisfaction, Klarna said.

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President Joe Biden will issue an executive order on Wednesday aimed at curbing foreign governments' ability to buy Americans' sensitive personal information such as heath and geolocation data, according to senior US officials. From a report: The move marks a rare policy effort to address a longstanding US national security concern: the ease with which anyone, including a foreign intelligence services, can legally buy Americans' data and then use the information for espionage, hacking and blackmail. The issue, a senior Justice Department official told reporters this week, is a "growing threat to our national security." The executive order will give the Justice Department the authority to regulate commercial transactions that "pose an unacceptable risk" to national security by, for example, giving a foreign power large-scale access to Americans' personal data, the Justice Department official said. The department will also issue regulations that require better protection of sensitive government information, including geolocation data on US military members, according to US officials. A lot of the online trade in personal information runs through so-called data brokers, which buy information on people's Social Security numbers, names, addresses, income, employment history and criminal background, as well as other items. "Countries of concern, such as China and Russia, are buying Americans' sensitive personal data from data brokers," a separate senior administration official told reporters. In addition to health and location data, the executive order is expected to cover other sensitive information like genomic and financial data. Administration officials told reporters the new executive order would be applied narrowly so as not to hurt business transactions that do not pose a national security risk. The White House's press release.

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San Francisco will vote next week on a divisive ballot measure that would authorize police to use surveillance cameras, drones and AI-powered facial recognition as the city struggles to restore a reputation tarnished by street crime and drugs. From a report: The Safer San Francisco initiative, formally called Proposition E, is championed by Mayor London Breed who believes disgruntled citizens will approve the proposal on Tuesday. Although technology fueled the Silicon Valley-adjacent city's decades-long boom, residents have a history of being deeply suspicious. In 2019, San Francisco, known for its progressive politics, became the first large U.S. city to ban government use of facial recognition due to concerns about privacy and misuse. Breed, who is running for re-election in November, played down the potential for abuse under the ballot measure, saying safeguards are in place. "I get that people are concerned about privacy rights and other things, but technology is all around us," she said in an interview. "It's coming whether we want it to or not. And everyone is walking around with AI in their hands with their phones, recording, videotaping," Breed said. Critics of the proposal contend it could hurt disadvantaged communities and lead to false arrests, arguing surveillance technology requires greater oversight.

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EU lawmakers on Wednesday approved draft rules governing patents key to technologies for telecom equipment and connected cars in the face of criticism from Nokia, Ericsson and other patent holders. From a report: The draft rules proposed by the European Commission in April last year seek to end costly and lengthy litigation over patents used in technologies for telecom equipment, mobile phones, computers, connected cars and smart devices. The European Parliament will now have to thrash out the details of the proposed rules with EU countries before it can become law. Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens in a letter to EU lawmakers in January, highlighted concerns from the European Patent Office, standard-setting body ETSI and other bodies on the draft rules. Lobbying group IP Europe, which counts Nokia, Ericsson and Qualcomm as its members, reiterated its opposition to the draft rules. "The beneficiaries would not be SMEs as claimed but big tech," IP Europe's managing director Patrick McCutcheon said ahead of the lawmakers' vote.

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Intel's previously-unannounced Intel 10A (analogous to 1nm) will enter production/development in late 2027, marking the arrival of the company's first 1nm node, and its 14A (1.4nm) node will enter production in 2026. The company is also working to create fully autonomous AI-powered fabs in the future. Tom's Hardware: Intel's Keyvan Esfarjani, the company's EVP and GM and Foundry Manufacturing and Supply, held a very insightful session that covered the company's latest developments and showed how the roadmap unfolds over the coming years. Here, we can see two charts, with the first outlining the company's K-WSPW (thousands of wafer starts per week) capacity for Intel's various process nodes. Notably, capacity typically indicates how many wafers can be started, but not the total output -- output varies based on yields. You'll notice there isn't a label for the Y-axis, which would give us a direct read on Intel's production volumes. However, this does give us a solid idea of the proportionality of Intel's planned node production over the next several years. Intel did not specify the arrival date of its coming 14A node in its previous announcements, but here, the company indicates it will begin production of the Intel 14A node in 2026. Even more importantly, Intel will begin production/development of its as-yet-unannounced 10A node in late 2027, filling out its roster of nodes produced with EUV technology. Intel's 'A' suffix in its node naming convention represents Angstroms, and 10 Angstroms converts to 1nm, meaning this is the company's first 1nm-class node. Intel hasn't shared any details about the 10A/1nm node but has told us that it classifies a new node as at least having a double-digit power/performance improvement. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has told us the cutoff for a new node is around a 14% to 15% improvement, so we can expect that 10A will have at least that level of improvement over the 14A node. (For example, the difference between Intel 7 and Intel 4 was a 15% improvement.)

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Convicted FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded for a lenient prison sentence in a court filing yesterday, saying that he isn't motivated by greed and "is already being punished." Bankman-Fried requested a sentence of 63 to 78 months, or 5.25 to 6.5 years. Because of "Sam's charitable works and demonstrated commitment to others, a sentence that returns Sam promptly to a productive role in society would be sufficient, but not greater than necessary, to comply with the purposes of sentencing," the court filing (PDF) said. Bankman-Fried's filing also said that he maintains his innocence and intends to appeal his convictions. A presentence investigation report (PSR) prepared by a probation officer recommended that Bankman-Fried be sentenced to 100 years in prison, according to the filing. "That recommendation is grotesque," SBF's filing said, arguing that it is based on an erroneously calculated loss of $10 billion. The $10 billion loss asserted in the PSR is "illusory" because the "victims are poised to recover -- were always poised to recover -- a hundred cents on the dollar" in bankruptcy proceedings, SBF's filing said. The filing urged the court to "reject the PSR's barbaric proposal" of 100 years, saying that such sentences should only be for "heinous conduct" like terrorism and child sexual abuse. The founder and ex-CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven charges with a combined maximum sentence of 110 years after a monthlong trial in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The charges included wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering. US government prosecutors are required to make a sentencing recommendation by March 15, and US District Judge Lewis Kaplan is scheduled to issue a sentence on March 28.

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"Today, the KDE Community is announcing a new major release of Plasma 6.0 and Gear 24.02," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "The new version brings new windows and desktop overview effects, improved color management, a cleaner theme, better overall performance, and much more." From the announcement: KDE Plasma is a modern, feature-rich desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Known for its sleek design, customizable interface, and extensive set of applications, it is also open source, devoid of ads, and makes protecting your privacy and personal data a priority. With Plasma 6, the technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of the application framework, Qt 6, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland. We will continue providing support for the legacy X11 session for users who prefer to stick with it for now. [...] KDE Gear 24.02 brings many applications to Qt 6. In addition to the changes in Breeze, many applications adopted a more frameless look for their interface.

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As part of its IPO filing with the SEC, Reddit disclosed that it has invested some of its excess cash in bitcoin, ether and Polygon. From a report: Based on the document, the firm now holds BTC and ETH in its balance sheet. Notably, Reddit filing came as part of the IPO registration statement with the SEC. Apart from ETH and BTC, the filing revealed Reddit's investment in Polygon (MATIC). According to the document, the social media platform plans to use both Ether and Polygon as a form of payment for digital goods. Further, Reddit noted that the amount of Polygon and Ethereum from virtual goods is currently immaterial. However, it indicated the possibility of a continuous addition of Bitcoin and Ethereum to its treasury. Also, it plans to keep trying out its passion for virtual goods. Moreover, the document revealed that Reddit made the investments using some of its excess cash reserves. However, the firm didn't disclose details of the crypto investments it made. Reddit's filing document revealed why the popular social media platform dabbled into crypto. According to the firm, it holds Bitcoin and Ethereum to enable its engineering and product teams to use them. Further, it cited the present regulatory stance that suggests these two assets are potentially non-securities under US laws. Also, Reddit disclosed its plans to expand its crypto holding by including other digital assets in its balance sheet. However, it highlighted that such a move will depend on future regulations that exempt crypto as a security.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Perceiving the demand for alternatives, AI startup Hugging Face several years ago teamed up with ServiceNow, the workflow automation platform, to create StarCoder, an open source code generator with a less restrictive license than some of the others out there. The original came online early last year, and work has been underway on a follow-up, StarCoder 2, ever since. StarCoder 2 isn't a single code-generating model, but rather a family. Released today, it comes in three variants, the first two of which can run on most modern consumer GPUs: A 3-billion-parameter (3B) model trained by ServiceNow; A 7-billion-parameter (7B) model trained by Hugging Face; and A 15-billion-parameter (15B) model trained by Nvidia, the newest supporter of the StarCoder project. (Note that "parameters" are the parts of a model learned from training data and essentially define the skill of the model on a problem, in this case generating code.)a Like most other code generators, StarCoder 2 can suggest ways to complete unfinished lines of code as well as summarize and retrieve snippets of code when asked in natural language. Trained with 4x more data than the original StarCoder (67.5 terabytes versus 6.4 terabytes), StarCoder 2 delivers what Hugging Face, ServiceNow and Nvidia characterize as "significantly" improved performance at lower costs to operate. StarCoder 2 can be fine-tuned "in a few hours" using a GPU like the Nvidia A100 on first- or third-party data to create apps such as chatbots and personal coding assistants. And, because it was trained on a larger and more diverse data set than the original StarCoder (~619 programming languages), StarCoder 2 can make more accurate, context-aware predictions -- at least hypothetically. [I]s StarCoder 2 really superior to the other code generators out there -- free or paid? Depending on the benchmark, it appears to be more efficient than one of the versions of Code Llama, Code Llama 33B. Hugging Face says that StarCoder 2 15B matches Code Llama 33B on a subset of code completion tasks at twice the speed. It's not clear which tasks; Hugging Face didn't specify. StarCoder 2, as an open source collection of models, also has the advantage of being able to deploy locally and "learn" a developer's source code or codebase -- an attractive prospect to devs and companies wary of exposing code to a cloud-hosted AI. Hugging Face, ServiceNow and Nvidia also make the case that StarCoder 2 is more ethical -- and less legally fraught -- than its rivals. [...] As opposed to code generators trained using copyrighted code (GitHub Copilot, among others), StarCoder 2 was trained only on data under license from the Software Heritage, the nonprofit organization providing archival services for code. Ahead of StarCoder 2's training, BigCode, the cross-organizational team behind much of StarCoder 2's roadmap, gave code owners a chance to opt out of the training set if they wanted. As with the original StarCoder, StarCoder 2's training data is available for developers to fork, reproduce or audit as they please. StarCoder 2's license may still be a roadblock for some. "StarCoder 2 is licensed under the BigCode Open RAIL-M 1.0, which aims to promote responsible use by imposing 'light touch' restrictions on both model licensees and downstream users," writes TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers. "While less constraining than many other licenses, RAIL-M isn't truly 'open' in the sense that it doesn't permit developers to use StarCoder 2 for every conceivable application (medical advice-giving apps are strictly off limits, for example). Some commentators say RAIL-M's requirements may be too vague to comply with in any case -- and that RAIL-M could conflict with AI-related regulations like the EU AI Act."

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Longtime Slashdot reader Kant shares a report from Euractiv: The European Parliament decided to ban Amazon representatives from accessing its buildings on Tuesday (February 27), due to multiple events where the global retailing giant did not attend meetings requested by members of the European Parliament, the European Parliament press service confirmed Euractiv. "In line with rule 123/3 and at the request of the [Employment and Social Affairs] Committee, the Quaestors have authorized the Secretary General [Alessandro Chiocchetti] to withdraw the long-term access badges of the interest representatives of Amazon." It is now the responsibility of the secretary general to concretely initiate the process of withdrawing their badges and to determine the duration of the ban, a European Parliament source close to the matter told Euractiv. According to the EMPL chair Dragos Pislaru, who signed the letter, the US e-commerce company refuses to attend more than one meeting with EU lawmakers to discuss the condition of Amazon workers. Four cases are mentioned in the letter. The first occurred in May 2021, when Amazon did not attend a parliamentary committee meeting on "Amazon attacks on fundamental workers' rights and freedoms: freedom of assembly and association, and the right to collective bargain and action." The second event concerns the refusal by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to attend an exchange of views with EU lawmakers -- instead, the company sent a written answer. The last two episodes happened in December 2023 and January 2024. In the former event, Amazon refused access to its facilities in German and Poland to a MEP, while on the latter, the company did not attend another parliamentary committee meeting dedicated to Amazon workers' conditions. In a statement to Euractiv, an Amazon spokesperson said: "We are very disappointed with this decision, as we want to engage constructively with policymakers. [...] Our commitment continues despite this decision. Amazon regularly participates in activities organized by the European Parliament and other EU institutions -- including Parliamentary hearings -- and we remain committed to participating in balanced, constructive dialogue on issues that affect European citizens."

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Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework. Cloudflare announced today that they have open-sourced Pingora under an Apache 2.0 license. Pingora is a Rust async multi-threaded framework for building programmable network services. Pingora has long been used internally within Cloudflare and is capable of sustaining a lot of traffic while now Pingora is being open-sourced for helping to build infrastructure outside of Cloudflare. The Pingora Rust code is available on GitHub.

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The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement and the removal of copyright information while training AI models. The Verge reports: The publications said ChatGPT "at least some of the time" reproduces "verbatim or nearly verbatim copyright-protected works of journalism without providing author, title, copyright or terms of use information contained in those works." According to the plaintiffs, if ChatGPT trained on material that included copyright information, the chatbot "would have learned to communicate that information when providing responses." Raw Story and AlterNet's lawsuit goes further (PDF), saying OpenAI and Microsoft "had reason to know that ChatGPT would be less popular and generate less revenue if users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights." Both Microsoft and OpenAI offer legal cover to paying customers in case they get sued for violating copyright for using Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise. The lawsuits say that OpenAI and Microsoft are aware of potential copyright infringement. As evidence, the publications point to how OpenAI offers an opt-out system so website owners can block content from its web crawlers. The New York Times also filed a lawsuit in December against OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT faithfully reproduces journalistic work. OpenAI claims the publication exploited a bug on the chatbot to regurgitate its articles.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Wildfires sweeping across Texas briefly forced the evacuation of America's main nuclear weapons facility as strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blaze. Pantex Plant, the main facility that assembles and disassembles America's nuclear arsenal, shut down its operations on Tuesday night as the Windy Deuce fire roared towards the Potter County location. Pantex re-opened and resumed operations as normal on Wednesday morning. Pantex is about 17 miles (27.36 kilometers) northeast of Amarillo and some 320 miles (515 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. Since 1975 it has been the US's main assembly and disassembly site for its atomic bombs. It assembled the last new bomb in 1991. "We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel from the site, just in an abundance of caution," said Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration's Production Office at Pantex. "But we do have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these scenarios, that is on-site and watching and ready should any kind of real emergency arise on the plant site."

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Astronomers are investigating a star system 100 light-years away with six sub-Neptune planets in near-perfect orbital resonance, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures. Space.com reports: To be clear, no such evidence was found in the system, dubbed HD 110067. However, the researchers say they're not done looking yet. HD 11067 remains an interesting target for similar observations in the future. In our own tiny pocket of the cosmos, radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in the plane of our solar system, meaning that if somebody outside our solar system watched Earth cross the face of our sun, they'd maybe be able to pick up a signal that coincides with the planet's transit. HD 110067 is viewed edge on from Earth, so we are seeing the six planets in the plane of their system -- a view that gives us an excellent chance of picking up such a signal if there exists one, study co-author Steve Croft, a radio astronomer working with the life-searching Breakthrough Listen program at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com "Our technology in our own solar system has spread outside the habitable zone," Croft told Space.com. So technology-friendly civilization in HD 110067, if any, may have communication relays set up on multiple planets in the system, he said. "Even if it is a negative result, that still tells us something." When HD 110067's discovery was announced, Croft and his team used the world's largest fully steerable telescope, the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, and searched the system for signs of alien technology. The researchers looked for signals that were continuously present when the telescope was pointed at the system and absent when directed away, the smoking gun of technosignatures local to HD 110067. But such signals are difficult to distinguish from natural sources of radio waves and humankind's own technological signals, such as radio waves beaming from cell phones connected to Wi-Fi, SpaceX's Starlink satellite network in low Earth orbit. This creates a haystack of signals in which researchers look for a needle of a potential extraterrestrial signal, said Croft. "I should add we don't know if there are needles in the haystack," he said. "We don't really know what the needles look like." The research has been published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.

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Emily Shugerman reports via The Daily Beast: Gemini, the crypto startup owned by the Winklevoss twins, will have to return $1.1 billion to customers who lost money in their partnership with the now-bankrupt crypto lender Genesis. In a deal with the New York State Department of Financial Services, Gemini agreed to return the funds lost by customers of its Earn program, in which users could loan their crypto to Genesis in exchange for interest payments. According to the Department of Financial Services, Gemini "did not fully vet or sufficiently monitor [Genesis] throughout the life of Earn," and the company defaulted on its loans and then went bankrupt, leaving some 200,000 Earn customers empty-handed. "Gemini failed to conduct due diligence on an unregulated third party, later accused of massive fraud, harming Earn customers who were suddenly unable to access their assets after Genesis Global Capital experienced a financial meltdown," DFS Superintendent Adrienne A.Harris said in a statement. "Today's settlement is a win for Earn customers, who have a right to the assets they entrusted to Gemini." In a tweet, Gemini said it was "pleased to announce that we have finally reached a settlement in principle with Genesis and other creditors in the Genesis Bankruptcy that will, if approved by the Bankruptcy Court, result in all Earn users receiving 100% of their digital assets back in kind." The DFS said Gemini would also pay $40 million to the Genesis bankruptcy for the benefit of Earn customers, as well as a $37 million fine for "significant failures that threatened the safety and soundness of the company."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GitHub is struggling to contain an ongoing attack that's flooding the site with millions of code repositories. These repositories contain obfuscated malware that steals passwords and cryptocurrency from developer devices, researchers said. The malicious repositories are clones of legitimate ones, making them hard to distinguish to the casual eye. An unknown party has automated a process that forks legitimate repositories, meaning the source code is copied so developers can use it in an independent project that builds on the original one. The result is millions of forks with names identical to the original one that add a payload that's wrapped under seven layers of obfuscation. To make matters worse, some people, unaware of the malice of these imitators, are forking the forks, which adds to the flood. "Most of the forked repos are quickly removed by GitHub, which identifies the automation," Matan Giladi and Gil David, researchers at security firm Apiiro, wrote Wednesday. "However, the automation detection seems to miss many repos, and the ones that were uploaded manually survive. Because the whole attack chain seems to be mostly automated on a large scale, the 1% that survive still amount to thousands of malicious repos." Given the constant churn of new repos being uploaded and GitHub's removal, it's hard to estimate precisely how many of each there are. The researchers said the number of repos uploaded or forked before GitHub removes them is likely in the millions. They said the attack "impacts more than 100,000 GitHub repositories." GitHub issued the following statement: "GitHub hosts over 100M developers building across over 420M repositories, and is committed to providing a safe and secure platform for developers. We have teams dedicated to detecting, analyzing, and removing content and accounts that violate our Acceptable Use Policies. We employ manual reviews and at-scale detections that use machine learning and constantly evolve and adapt to adversarial tactics. We also encourage customers and community members to report abuse and spam."

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Michael Larabel, reporting at Phoronix: One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed. For three years there has been a bug report around 4K@120Hz being unavailable via HDMI 2.1 on the AMD Linux driver. Similarly, there have been bug reports like 5K @ 240Hz not possible either with the AMD graphics driver on Linux. As covered back in 2021, the HDMI Forum closing public specification access is hurting open-source support. AMD as well as the X.Org Foundation have been engaged with the HDMI Forum to try to come up with a solution to be able to provide open-source implementations of the now-private HDMI specs. AMD Linux engineers have spent months working with their legal team and evaluating all HDMI features to determine if/how they can be exposed in their open-source driver. AMD had code working internally and then the past few months were waiting on approval from the HDMI Forum. Sadly, the HDMI Forum has turned down AMD's request for open-source driver support.

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Adobe has announced a new prototype tool called Project Music GenAI Control that allows users to create original music by inputting text prompts, then edit the audio without switching to separate software. Users can specify musical styles in their prompts to produce tracks like "happy dance" or "sad jazz." Adobe says integrated editing controls let users tweak patterns, tempo, intensity and structure of the AI-generated music. Sections can be remixed and looped as backing tracks or background music. The tool can also adjust audio "based on a reference melody" and extend clip length for set animations or podcasts. Details on editing interface and upload options for custom reference tracks are unclear.

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Citing potential national security risks, the Biden administration says it will investigate Chinese-made "smart cars" that can gather sensitive information about Americans driving them. From a report: The probe could lead to new regulations aimed at preventing China from using sophisticated technology in electric cars and other so-called connected vehicles to track drivers and their personal information. Officials are concerned that features such as driver assistance technology could be used to effectively spy on Americans. While the action stops short of a ban on Chinese imports, President Joe Biden said he is taking unprecedented steps to safeguard Americans' data. "China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices," Biden said in a statement Thursday. "China's policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security. I'm not going to let that happen on my watch." Biden and other officials noted that China has imposed wide-ranging restrictions on American autos and other foreign vehicles. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said connected cars "are like smart phones on wheels" and pose a serious national security risk.

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