With Amazon on its heels, the nation's biggest company by revenue is hunting for ways to continue growing. From a report: For a decade, Walmart has reigned as the nation's biggest company by revenue. Its sales last year added up to $648 billion -- more than $1.2 million a minute. That status comes with benefits. It gives Walmart power in negotiations with product manufacturers and in dealing with government officials over policy issues. It's also a point of pride: Job postings often tout working at the "Fortune 1" company as a perk. Its reign is looking shaky lately [non-paywalled link]. If current sales trends persist, Amazon is likely to overtake Walmart soon. Amazon reported $575 billion in total revenue last year, up 12% from the previous year, compared with Walmart's revenue growth of 6%. Walmart's behemoth size means that to meet its own sales target of around 4% growth each year, the company has to find an additional $26 billion in sales this year. That's no easy task. About 90% of Americans already shop at the retailer. The pandemic and rising inflation boosted Walmart's revenue by $100 billion since 2019. It faces continued uncertainty in consumer confidence and while it's spending in some areas, it's pulling back in others. Earlier this week, Walmart told workers it would cut hundreds of corporate jobs and ask most remote workers to move to offices. While Amazon's and Walmart's businesses compete head on, there are big differences. Amazon earns much of its profit from non-retail operations such as cloud computing and advertising, while grabbing retail market share with fast shipping. Walmart gets the bulk of its sales and profits from U.S. stores, while growing side businesses like advertising and digital sales. Walmart executives are most wary of Amazon's ability to keep increasing profits through its non-retail business, while eating more of the retail landscape with ever-faster shipping and a bigger product selection, people familiar with the company said. Internally some executives are highlighting Walmart's role as a good corporate citizen and emphasizing that it's important to be the best at serving customers and workers, not just the biggest, say some of those people. Its scale can also have downsides, say some, like outsize attention on every misstep.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: There are concerning reports on Reddit that Apple's latest iOS 17.5 update has introduced a bug that causes old photos that were deleted -- in some cases years ago -- to reappear in users' photo libraries. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. "Same here," said one Redditor. "I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly." "Same thing happened to me," replied another user. "Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023." More reports have been trickling in overnight. One said: "I had a random photo from a concert taken on my Canon camera reappear in my phone library, and it showed up as if it was added today."

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A bipartisan group of four senators led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is recommending that Congress spend at least $32 billion over the next three years to develop AI and place safeguards around it, writing in a report released Wednesday that the U.S. needs to "harness the opportunities and address the risks" of the quickly developing technology. AP: The group of two Democrats and two Republicans said in an interview Tuesday that while they sometimes disagreed on the best paths forward, it was imperative to find consensus with the technology taking off and other countries like China investing heavily in its development. They settled on a raft of broad policy recommendations that were included in their 33-page report. While any legislation related to AI will be difficult to pass, especially in an election year and in a divided Congress, the senators said that regulation and incentives for innovation are urgently needed.

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Intel unveiled Thunderbolt Share on Wednesday with which it promises to streamline screen and file sharing between two PCs. Tom's Hardware: Thunderbolt Share will allow PC owners to connect their two computers with a wired connection that leverages Thunderbolt's speed (40Gbps or higher), low latency, and built-in security. It allows PC-to-PC access that shares the screen, keyboard, mouse, and storage. The software also enables folder synchronization or easy drag-and-drop file transfer between the computers. [...] Thunderbolt Share also provides uncompressed screen sharing between two PCs in the original resolution of the source computer. It also claims low latency for a smooth, responsive experience that includes the screen, keyboard, and mouse with full HD screen mirroring at up to 60 frames per second (fps). Higher resolutions could result in fewer frames per second, but Ziller said it would still be a "great experience."

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The FBI has seized the notorious BreachForums hacking forum that leaked and sold stolen corporate data to other cybercriminals. From a report: The seizure occurred on Wednesday morning, soon after the site was used last week to leak data stolen from a Europol law enforcement portal. The website is now displaying a message stating that the FBI has taken control over it and the backend data, indicating that law enforcement seized both the site's servers and domains. [...] The seizure message also shows the two forum profile pictures of the site's administrators, Baphomet and ShinyHunters, overlaid with prison bars.

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Tech columnist and venture investor MG Siegler, commenting on the new iPad Pro: I love the iPad for the things it's good at. And I love the MacBook for the things it's good at. What I want is less a completely combined device and more a single device that can run both macOS and iPadOS. And this new iPad Pro, again equipped with a chip faster than any MacBook, can do that if Apple allowed it to. At first, maybe it's dual boot. That is, just let the iPad Pro load up macOS if it's attached to the Magic Keyboard and use the screen as a regular (but beautiful) monitor -- no touch. Over time, maybe macOS is just a "mode" inside of iPadOS -- complete with some elements updated to be touch-friendly, but not touch-first. Steven Sinofsky, the former head of Microsoft's Windows division, chiming in: It is not unusual for customers to want the best of all worlds. It is why Detroit invented convertibles and el caminos. But the idea of a "dual boot" device is just nuts. It is guaranteed the only reality is it is running the wrong OS all the time for whatever you want to do. It is a toaster-refrigerator. Only techies like devices that "presto-change" into something else. Regular humans never flocked to El Caminos, and even today SUVs just became station wagons and almost none actually go off road :-) Two things that keep going unanswered if you really want macOS on an iPad device: 1. What software on Mac do you want for an iPad device experience? What software will get rewritten for touch? If you want "touch-enabled" check out what happened on the Windows desktop. Nearly everything people say they want isn't features as much as the mouse interaction model. People want overlapping windows, a desktop of folders, infinitely resizable windows, and so on. These don't work on touch very well and certainly not for people who don't want to futz. 2. Will you be happy with battery life? The physics of an iPad mean the battery is 2/3rds the size of a Mac battery. Do you really want that? I don't. The reason the iPad is the 5.x mm device is because the default doesn't have a keyboard holding the battery. This is about the realities. The metaphors that people like on a desktop, heck that they love, just don't work with the blunt instrument of touch. It might be possible to build all new metaphors that use only tough and thus would be great on an iPad but that isn't what they tried. The device grew out of a phone. It's only their incredible work on iPhone that led to Mx silicon and their tireless work on the Mac-centric frameworks that delivered a big chunk (but not all) the privacy, reliability, battery life, security, etc. of the phone on Mac. [...]

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schwit1 shares a report: Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday announced that it was closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn't alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers. Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole. The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. "That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. "This is a real threat." The sources of the fake science are "paper mills" -- businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

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The Department of Justice says it is considering whether to prosecute Boeing over two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft. From a report: The aviation giant breached the terms of an agreement made in 2021 that shielded the firm from criminal charges linked to the incidents, the DOJ said. Boeing has denied that it violated the agreement. The crashes - one in Indonesia in 2018, and another in Ethiopia in 2019 - killed a total of 346 people. The plane maker failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said. Boeing said it was looking forward to the opportunity to respond to the Justice Department and "believes it honoured the terms of that agreement." Under the deal, Boeing paid a $2.5bn settlement, while prosecutors agreed to ask the court to drop a criminal charge after a period of three years. The DOJ said Boeing has until 13 June to respond to the allegations and that what it said would be taken into consideration as it decides what to do next.

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A portal linking New York City to Dublin via a livestream has been temporarily shut down after inappropriate behavior ensued, according to the Dublin City Council. From a report: Less than a week after the 24/7 visual art installation was put in place, officials have opted to close it down temporarily after people began to flash each other, grind on the portal, and one person even shared pictures of the twin tower attack to people in New York City. Alternatively, the portal had also been the site of reunions with old friends and even a proposal, with many documenting their experience with the installation online. The Dublin City Council said that although those engaged in the inappropriate behavior were few and far between, videos of said behavior went viral online. "While we cannot control all of these actions, we are implementing some technical solutions to address this and these will go live in the next 24 hours," the council said in a Monday statement. "We will continue to monitor the situation over the coming days with our partners in New York to ensure that portals continue to deliver a positive experience for both cities and the world."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar. That's simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it. Having an AI sift through a bunch of emails and provide a summary sounds like a huge time saver and something you can't do with any other interface. Google's one-minute demo of this feature showed a big blue Gemini button at the top right of the Gmail web app. Tapping it opens the normal chatbot sidebar you can type in. Asking for a summary of emails from a certain contact will get you a bullet-point list of what has been happening, with a list of "sources" at the bottom that will jump you right to a certain email. In the last second of the demo, the user types, "Reply saying I want to volunteer for the parent's group event," hits "enter," and then the chatbot instantly, without confirmation, sends an email.

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Marc Whitten, Unity Create's chief product and technology officer, is stepping down on June 1, 2024, following the company's contentious Runtime Fee policy. Whitten will assist with the transition until December 31, 2024. The now-discarded Runtime Fee, announced in September 2023, faced severe backlash from developers who viewed it as a punitive per-install tariff. Unity reworked the fee and acknowledged its lack of communication with developers. CEO John Riccitiello also departed in October 2023, succeeded by Matthew Bromberg. Upon resignation, Whitten will receive a total of $814,801 in various payouts and benefits.

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Among Google's swath of new AI models and tools announced today, the company is also expanding its AI content watermarking and detection technology to work across two new mediums. The Verge: Google's DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, took the stage for the first time at the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday to talk not only about the team's new AI tools, like the Veo video generator, but also about the new upgraded SynthID watermark imprinting system. It can now mark video that was digitally generated, as well as AI-generated text. [...] Google had also enabled SynthID to inject inaudible watermarks into AI-generated music that was made using DeepMind's Lyria model. SynthID is just one of several AI safeguards in development to combat misuse by the tech, safeguards that the Biden administration is directing federal agencies to build guidelines around.

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samleecole writes: For the last decade, farmers have been warning that John Deere, a company celebrated by farmers, country musicians, and politicians, has been doing something else very American: Concentrating power, stripping away the ownership rights of people who buy their products, and adding a bevy of artificial, software-based repair restrictions that have effectively created a regime in which farmers can no longer fix their own tractors, combines, harvesters, and other agricultural equipment. Farmers have resorted to pirating John Deere's software and firmware on underground forums and torrent sites, and have used software cracked by Ukrainian pirates in order to simply fix the things they own. Farmers often have to wait days or weeks for an "authorized" John Deere dealership to come to their farms to repair their equipment, meanwhile their crops die on the vine. For years, very little happened to slow down John Deere's march toward total control of the repair market. But interviews with farmers, activists, and lawyers, and a review of court records reveal a turn in the story: There is increased scrutiny on Deere's repair practices not just in this class action lawsuit, but from state legislators, the White House, and a series of federal agencies. The walls on Deere's repair monopoly may finally be closing in.

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Google is shaking up Search. On Tuesday, the company announced big new AI-powered changes to the world's dominant search engine at I/O, Google's annual conference for developers. From a report: With the new features, Google is positioning Search as more than a way to simply find websites. Instead, the company wants people to use its search engine to directly get answers and help them with planning events and brainstorming ideas. "[With] generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined," wrote Liz Reid, vice president and head of Google Search, in a blog post. "So you can ask whatever's on your mind or whatever you need to get done -- from researching to planning to brainstorming -- and Google will take care of the legwork." Google's changes to Search, the primary way that the company makes money, are a response to the explosion of generative AI ever since OpenAI's ChatGPT released at the end of 2022. [...] Starting today, Google will show complete AI-generated answers in response to most search queries at the top of the results page in the US. Google first unveiled the feature a year ago at Google I/O in 2023, but so far, anyone who wanted to use the feature had to sign up for it as part of the company's Search Labs platform that lets people try out upcoming features ahead of their general release. Google is now making AI Overviews available to hundreds of millions of Americans, and says that it expects it to be available in more countries to over a billion people by the end of the year.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: At a privately held event, Google recently demonstrated a special build of Chromium OS -- code-named "ferrochrome" -- running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS wasn't shown running on the phone's screen itself. Rather, it was projected to an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google is thinking of positioning Chrome OS as a platform for its desktop mode ambitions and Samsung DeX rival.

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The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch reported Tuesday. From the report: The newly compromised data includes names, phone numbers and email addresses of Dell customers. This personal data is contained in customer "service reports," which also include information on replacement hardware and parts, comments from on-site engineers, dispatch numbers, and in some cases diagnostic logs uploaded from the customer's computer. Several reports seen by TechCrunch contain pictures apparently taken by customers and uploaded to Dell for seeking technical support. Some of these pictures contain metadata revealing the precise GPS coordinates of the location where the customer took the photos, according to a sample of the scraped data obtained by TechCrunch.

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Meta is shutting down Workplace, the tool it sold to businesses that combined social and productivity features, according to messages to customers obtained by Axios and confirmed by Meta. From the report:Meta has been cutting jobs and winnowing its product line for the last few years while investing billions first in the metaverse and now in AI. Micah Collins, Meta's senior director of product management, sent a message to customers alerting them of the shutdown. Collins said customers can use Workplace through September 2025, when it will become available only to download or read existing data. The service will shut down completely in 2026. Workplace was formerly Facebook at Work, and launched in its current form in 2016. In 2021 the company reported it had 7 million paid subscribers.

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The developers of team-based shooter Marvel Rivals have apologized for a contract clause that made creators promise not to provide "subjective negative reviews of the game" in exchange for early access to a closed alpha test. From a report: The controversial early access contract gained widespread attention over the weekend when streamer Brandon Larned shared a portion on social media. In the "non-disparagement" clause shared by Larned, creators who are provided with an early download code are asked not to "make any public statements or engage in discussions that are detrimental to the reputation of the game." In addition to the "subjective negative review" example above, the clause also specifically prohibits "making disparaging or satirical comments about any game-related material" and "engaging in malicious comparisons with competitors or belittling the gameplay or differences of Marvel Rivals."

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A panel of judges in the Netherlands has found Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers behind crypto anonymizing tool Tornado Cash, guilty of money laundering. Wired: Over the course of two days in March, the Russian national was tried on the allegation that the tool he developed had allowed criminals -- among them hackers with ties to North Korea -- to freely launder $1.2 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. "The management of Tornado Cash welcomed the bank robbers with open arms," the prosecutors wrote in a March court filing. Dutch judges sentenced Pertsev to five years and four months in prison on Tuesday, which was the term requested by prosecutors in the case. "With Tornado Cash, the defendant created a shortcut for financing crimes and terrorism," said the court in a statement, translated from Dutch. "He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility." The purpose of tools like Tornado Cash, known as crypto mixers or tumblers, is to mask the origin and destination of users' coins. Funds belonging to many parties are pooled, jumbled up, and spat out into brand-new wallets, by which time it is no longer clear whose crypto is whose. These services are promoted as a way to improve the level of privacy available to crypto users, but have been readily co-opted for the purpose of money laundering. On August 8, 2022, Tornado Cash was sanctioned in the United States, making it illegal for US citizens to use the service. Any product that "indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions," wrote the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, represents a "threat to US national security." Two days later, Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands, where he resided. Money laundering activity, the Dutch prosecutors claim, accounted for more than 30 percent of the funds that passed through Tornado Cash between 2019 and 2022. [...] Pertsev built his defense on the argument that Tornado Cash, which remains in operation, is under nobody's control -- including his own -- as a piece of software that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, a distributed network of computers. Further reading: Coinbase Employees and Ethereum Backers Sue US Treasury Over Tornado Cash Sanctions (September 2022).

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