An unexpected disapperance of saved passwords "impacted Chrome web browser users from all over the world," writes Forbes, "leaving them unable to find any passwords already saved using the Chrome password manager." Newly saved passwords were also rendered invisible to the affected users. Google, which has now fixed the issue, said that the problem was limited to the M127 version of Chrome Browser on the Windows platform. The precise number of users to be hit by the Google password manager vanishing act is hard to pin down. However, working on the basis that there are more than 3 billion Chrome web browser users, with Windows users counting for the vast majority of these, it's possible to come up with an estimated number. Google said that 25% of the user base saw the configuration change rolled out, which, by my calculations, is around 750 million. Of these, around 2%, according to Google's estimation, were hit by the password manager issue. That means around 15 million users have seen their passwords vanish into thin air. Google said that an interim workaround was provided at the time, which involved the particularly user-unfriendly process of launching the Chrome browser with a command line flag of " — enable-features=SkipUndecryptablePasswords." Thankfully, the full fix that has now been rolled out just requires users to restart their Chrome browser to take effect.

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Is Ford trying to patent a way for its cars to report speeding drivers to the police? An article in Motor Authority notes that this patent application from Ford was filed January 12th of 2023 — and just published 11 days ago by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: In the application, Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds. If one car detects that a nearby vehicle is being driven above the posted limit, it could use onboard cameras to photograph that vehicle. A report containing both speed data and images of the targeted vehicle could then be sent directly to a police car or roadside monitoring units via an Internet connection, according to Ford. Using vehicles for speed surveillance would make cops' jobs easier, as they wouldn't have to quickly identify speeding violations and take off in pursuit, Ford notes in the application. It also means some of that work could be delegated to self-driving cars, which could be equipped to detect speeding violations, the automaker adds... Ford has also tried to patent a "night drive mode" that would limit vehicle speeds at night for everyone — including first responders. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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The Python Software Foundation's board "was alerted to a defect in our bylaws that exposes the Foundation to an unbounded financial liability," according to a blog post Friday: Specifically, Bylaws Article XIII as originally written compels the Python Software Foundation to extend indemnity coverage to individual Members (including our thousands of "Basic Members") in certain cases, and to advance legal defense expenses to individual Members with surprisingly few restrictions. Further, the Bylaws compel the Foundation to take out insurance to cover these requirements, however, insurance of this nature is not actually available to 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporations such as the Python Software Foundation to purchase, and thus it is impossible in practice to comply with this requirement. In the unlikely but not impossible event of the Foundation being called upon to advance such expenses, the potential financial burden would be virtually unlimited, and there would be no recourse to insurance. As this is an existential threat to the Foundation, the Board has agreed that it must immediately reduce the Foundation's exposure, and has opted to exercise its ability to amend the Bylaws by a majority vote of the Board directors, rather than by putting it to a vote of the membership, as allowed by Bylaws Article XI. Acting on legal advice, the full Board has voted unanimously to amend its Bylaws to no longer extend an offer to indemnify, advance legal expenses, or insure Members when they are not serving at the request of the Foundation. The amended Bylaws still allow for indemnification of a much smaller set of individuals acting on behalf of the PSF such as Board Members and officers, which is in line with standard nonprofit governance practices and for which we already hold appropriate insurance. Another blog post notes "the recent slew of conversations, initially kicked off in response to a bylaws change proposal, has been pretty alienating for many members of our community." - After the conversation on PSF-Vote had gotten pretty ugly, forty-five people out of ~1000 unsubscribed. (That list has since been put on announce-only) - We received a lot of Code of Conduct reports or moderation requests about the PSF-vote mailing list and the discuss.python.org message board conversations. (Several reports have already been acted on or closed and the rest will be soon). - PSF staff received private feedback that the blanket statements about "neurodiverse people", the bizarre motives ascribed to the people in charge of the PSF and various volunteers and the sideways comments about the kinds of people making reports were also very off-putting.

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No R-rated film has ever earned as much in its opening weekend, reports the Hollywood Reporter — a whopping $205 million. (The previous record was $133.7 million, set in 2016 by the original film Deadpool...) It's also the very first R-rated film ever released by Disney... [Deadpool actor Ryan] Reynolds has his own theory about its success. "Disney probably doesn't want me to frame it this way, but I've always thought of Deadpool & Wolverine as the first four-quadrant, R-rated film," Reynolds tells the Hollywood Reporter. "Yes, it's rated R, but we set out to make a movie with enough laughs, action and heart to appeal to everyone, whether you're a comic book movie fan or not." There's reason Disney and others may bristle at labeling it a four-quadrant film, which generally is reserved for movies that work equally for males and females over and under 25. Afterall, it is perhaps the most violent and bloody Deadpool movie yet. Still, here's evidence to back up Reynolds' theory that it's playing to a far more broad audience than the usual Marvel Cinematic Univerese movie, even if it's skewing male by anywhere from 60 to 63 percent. So far, 13.6 million people have bought tickets to see it, on par with last year's Barbie, which was rated PG-13, according to Steve Buck's leading research firm EntTelligence. That's the most foot traffic ever for an R-rated movie.... "Once thought of as a sure-fire way to limit potential box office, the R rating, when properly applied, can be the key to unlocking massive box office, and this has proven to be the secret sauce for the Deadpool franchise," says chief Comscore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "The creative freedom afforded by the less restrictive rating has enabled filmmakers to push the envelope and, particularly in the case of Deadpool & Wolverine, can deliver the kind of edgy, intense, profanity-filled comedy action that modern audiences are fired up to see on the big screen...." It's also the biggest July opening of all time, the biggest opening of 2024 so far and Marvel Studios' biggest launch since Spider-Man: No Way Home in December 2021. ScreenRant notes that Deadpool & Wolverine has already surpassed the entire global box office for The Marvels in just three days. It's the biggest debut for a film since James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of the Water in December of 2022 (according to the Hollywood Reporter). And they add that though the figures haven't been adjusted for inflation — it's still the eighth-biggest box office opening of all time. But at the end of the day, it's just people enjoying a movie together. "Well, I'm not saying that other people should do this, but my 9-year-old watched the movie with me and my mom, who's in her late 70s," Reynolds reportedly told the New York Times, "and it was just was one of the best moments of this whole experience for me. Both of them were laughing their guts out, were feeling the emotion where I most desperately hoped people would be."

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"As free software activists, we ought to take the opportunity to look at the situation and see how things could have gone differently," writes FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough: Let's be clear: in principle, there is nothing ethically wrong with automatic updates so long as the user has made an informed choice to receive them... Although we can understand how the situation developed, one wonders how wise it is for so many critical services around the world to hedge their bets on a single distribution of a single operating system made by a single stupefyingly predatory monopoly in Redmond, Washington. Instead, we can imagine a more horizontal structure, where this airline and this public library are using different versions of GNU/Linux, each with their own security teams and on different versions of the Linux(-libre) kernel... As of our writing, we've been unable to ascertain just how much access to the Windows kernel source code Microsoft granted to CrowdStrike engineers. (For another thing, the root cause of the problem appears to have been an error in a configuration file.) But this being the free software movement, we could guarantee that all security engineers and all stakeholders could have equal access to the source code, proving the old adage that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." There is no good reason to withhold code from the public, especially code so integral to the daily functioning of so many public institutions and businesses. In a cunning PR spin, it appears that Microsoft has started blaming the incident on third-party firms' access to kernel source and documentation. Translated out of Redmond-ese, the point they are trying to make amounts to "if only we'd been allowed to be more secretive, this wouldn't have happened...!" We also need to see that calling for a diversity of providers of nonfree software that are mere front ends for "cloud" software doesn't solve the problem. Correcting it fully requires switching to free software that runs on the user's own computer.The Free Software Foundation is often accused of being utopian, but we are well aware that moving airlines, libraries, and every other institution affected by the CrowdStrike outage to free software is a tremendous undertaking. Given free software's distinct ethical advantage, not to mention the embarrassing damage control underway from both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, we think the move is a necessary one. The more public an institution, the more vitally it needs to be running free software. For what it's worth, it's also vital to check the syntax of your configuration files. CrowdStrike engineers would do well to remember that one, next time.

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Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: Have you ever wondered if it's true you can instantly get malware? In this video, a person connects an XP instance directly to the internet with no firewall to see just how fast it gets compromised by malware, rootkits, malicious services and new user accounts. The answer — fast! Malwarebytes eventually finds eight different viruses/Trojan horses -- and a DNS changer. (One IP address leads back to the Russian federation.) Itâ(TM)s fun to watch -- within just a few hours a new Windows user has even added themself. And for good measure, he also opens up Internet Explorer... âoeWindows XP -- very insecure,â they conclude at the end of the video. âoeVery easy for random software from the internet to get more privileges than you, and it is very hard to solve that. âoeAlso, just out of curiosity I tried this on Windows 7. And even with all of the same settings, nothing happened. I let it run for 10 hours. So it seems like this may be a problem in historical Windows.â

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An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World: According to a tweet sent out by the Los Angeles Police Department's Wilshire division (spotted by Tom's Hardware), a small band of burglars is using Wi-Fi jamming devices to nullify wireless security cameras before breaking and entering. The thieves seem to be well above the level of your typical smash-and-grab job. They have lookout teams, they enter through the second story, and they go for small, high-value items like jewelry and designer purses. Wireless signal jammers are illegal in the United States. Wireless bands are tightly regulated and the FCC doesn't allow any consumer device to intentionally disrupt radio waves from other devices. Similar laws are in place in most other countries. But signal jammers are electronically simple and relatively easy to build or buy from less-than-scrupulous sources. The police division went on to recommend tagging value items like a vehicle or purse with Apple Air Tags — and "talk to your Wi-Fi provider about hard-wiring your burglar alarm system." And among their other suggestions: Don't post on social media that you're going on vacation...

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CNET visits a leading-edge company making an implantable brain-computer-interface that's "experimenting with ChatGPT integration..." We previously covered Synchron's unique approach to implanting its brain-computer-interface (BCI) without the need for open brain surgery. Now the company has integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT into its software, something it says is a world's first for a BCI company... Typing out messages word by word with the help of a BCI is still time consuming. The addition of AI is seen as a way to make communication faster and easier by taking in the relevant context, like what was last said in a conversation, and anticipating answers a person might want to respond with, providing them with a menu of possible options. Now, instead of typing out each word, answers can be filled in with a single "click." There's a refresh button in case none of the AI answers are right... [ALS patient Mark, one of 10 people in the world testing Synchron's brain implant in a clinical trial] has noticed the AI getting better at providing answers that are more in line with things he might say. "Every once in a while it'll drop an f-bomb, which I tend to do occasionally," he says with a laugh. Synchron CEO Tom Oxley tells me the company has been experimenting with different AI models for about a year, but the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o in May raised some interesting new possibilities. The "o" in ChatGPT-4o stands for "omni," representative of the fact that this latest version is capable of taking in text, audio and visual inputs all at once to inform its outputs... Oxley envisions the future of BCIs as... having large language models like ChatGPT take in relevant context in the form of text, audio and visuals to provide relevant prompts that users can select with their BCI... Synchron's BCI is expected to cost between $50,000 and $100,000, comparable with the cost of other implanted medical devices like cardiac pacemakers or cochlear implants. CNET has also released a video — titled "What It's Like Using a Brain Implant With ChatGPT."

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Long-time Slashdot theodp says this "provocative" blog post by former Google engineer Avery Pennarun — now the CEO/founder of Tailscale — is "a call to take back the Internet from its centralized rent-collecting cloud computing gatekeepers." Pennarun writes: I read a post recently where someone bragged about using Kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that's 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep. In modern computing, we tolerate long builds, and then Docker builds, and uploading to container stores, and multi-minute deploy times before the program runs, and even longer times before the log output gets uploaded to somewhere you can see it, all because we've been tricked into this idea that everything has to scale. People get excited about deploying to the latest upstart container hosting service because it only takes tens of seconds to roll out, instead of minutes. But on my slow computer in the 1990s, I could run a perl or python program that started in milliseconds and served way more than 0.2 requests per second, and printed logs to stderr right away so I could edit-run-debug over and over again, multiple times per minute. How did we get here? We got here because sometimes, someone really does need to write a program that has to scale to thousands or millions of backends, so it needs all that stuff. And wishful thinking makes people imagine even the lowliest dashboard could be that popular one day. The truth is, most things don't scale, and never need to. We made Tailscale for those things, so you can spend your time scaling the things that really need it. The long tail of jobs that are 90% of what every developer spends their time on. Even developers at companies that make stuff that scales to billions of users, spend most of their time on stuff that doesn't, like dashboards and meme generators. As an industry, we've spent all our time making the hard things possible, and none of our time making the easy things easy. Programmers are all stuck in the mud. Just listen to any professional developer, and ask what percentage of their time is spent actually solving the problem they set out to work on, and how much is spent on junky overhead. Tailscale offers a "zero-config" mesh VPN — built on top of WireGuard — for a secure network that's software-defined (and infrastructure-agnostic). "The problem is developers keep scaling things they don't need to scale," Pennarun writes, "and their lives suck as a result...." "The tech industry has evolved into an absolute mess..." Pennarun adds at one point. "Our tower of complexity is now so tall that we seriously consider slathering LLMs on top to write the incomprehensible code in the incomprehensible frameworks so we don't have to." Their conclusion? "Modern software development is mostly junky overhead."

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Ford's stock dropped 20% this week — mostly falling off the cliff Wednesday after failing to meet Wall Street's expectations for its quarterly profits, according to MarketWatch — and notching "another billion-dollar loss on EVs." "The remaking of Ford is not without its growing pains," Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley said on a call with investors after the results. "We look forward to proving our EV strategy out. That has become more realistic and sharpened by the tough environment." Ford is "confident" it can reduce losses and sustain a profitable business in the future, he added. The car maker plans to focus on "very differentiated" EVs priced under $40,000 and $30,000, and on two segments, work and adventure, Farley said. Larger EVs will be part of the picture, but success there will require more breakthroughs on costs, the CEO said, adding that Ford's EV journey overall has been "humbling...." The results included an EBIT loss of $1.1 billion for Ford's EV segment, "amid ongoing industrywide pricing pressure on first-generation electric vehicles and lower wholesales," the car maker said... Ford kept its expectations that the EV business will lose between $5.0 billion and $5.5 billion for the year, "with continued pricing pressure and investments in next-generation electric vehicles," it said. Ford's CEO went on to say that their company is totally open to partnerships for electric vehicles, according to the article. "This is absolutely a flip-the-script moment for our company." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

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Ford's stock dropped 20% this week — mostly falling off the cliff Wednesday after failing to meet Wall Street's expectations for its quarterly profits, according to MarketWatch — and notching "another billion-dollar loss on EVs." "The remaking of Ford is not without its growing pains," Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley said on a call with investors after the results. "We look forward to proving our EV strategy out. That has become more realistic and sharpened by the tough environment." Ford is "confident" it can reduce losses and sustain a profitable business in the future, he added. The car maker plans to focus on "very differentiated" EVs priced under $40,000 and $30,000, and on two segments, work and adventure, Farley said. Larger EVs will be part of the picture, but success there will require more breakthroughs on costs, the CEO said, adding that Ford's EV journey overall has been "humbling...." The results included an EBIT loss of $1.1 billion for Ford's EV segment, "amid ongoing industrywide pricing pressure on first-generation electric vehicles and lower wholesales," the car maker said... Ford kept its expectations that the EV business will lose between $5.0 billion and $5.5 billion for the year, "with continued pricing pressure and investments in next-generation electric vehicles," it said. Ford's CEO went on to say that their company is totally open to partnerships for electric vehicles, according to the article. "This is absolutely a flip-the-script moment for our company." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Earth's land lost much of their ability to absorb the carbon dioxide humans pumped into the air last year, according to a new study that is causing concern among climate scientists that a crucial damper on climate change underwent an unprecedented deterioration. Temperatures in 2023 were so high — and the droughts and wildfires that came with them were so severe — that forests in various parts of the world wilted and burned enough to have degraded the ability of the land to lock away carbon dioxide and act as a check on global warming, the study said. The scientists behind the research, which focuses on 2023, caution that their findings are preliminary. But the work represents a disturbing data point — one that, if it turns into a trend, spells trouble for the planet and the people on it... Philippe Ciais [a scientist at France's Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences who co-authored the new research] and his colleagues saw that the concentration of CO2 measured at an observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii and elsewhere spiked in 2023, even though global fossil fuel emissions increased only modestly last year in comparison. That mismatch suggests that there was an "unprecedented weakening" in the Earth's ability to absorb carbon, the researchers wrote. The scientists then used satellite data and models for vegetative growth to try to pinpoint where the carbon sink was weakening. The team spotted abnormal losses of carbon in the drought-stricken Amazon and Southeast Asia as well as in the boreal forests of Canada, where record-breaking wildfires burned through tens of millions of acres.

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"Lenacapavir is not a new drug," reports NPR. "It's been approved by the FDA in the United States for multi-drug resistant HIV treatment since 2022." But instead of treating HIV, what if it were used for preventing infections? The treatment consists of a twice-yearly injection... Early trial results were released in June and generated great excitement, indicating 100% efficacy. On Wednesday, July 24, the full peer-reviewed results were released at the AIDS 2024 conference, confirming the preliminary data... This treatment offers an alternative to the current standard of core for HIV prevention efforts for over a decade: taking a pill like Truvada every day... Any eventual approval and widespread use would come with challenges... Lenacapavir's cost as HIV treatment in the United States in 2023 was $42,250 per new patient per year. Oral PrEP options, on the other hand, can cost less than $4 a month. "The biggest gap in prevention isn't medication, it's accessing medications," says Dr. Philip Grant, clinical associate professor and director of the HIV clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine. Activists across Uganda and South Africa have urged Gilead Sciences to license lenacapavir to the Medicines Patent Pool — a United Nations-backed organization that partners with governments, industry and other organizations to license medications. This would allow for manufacturing of generic versions of the drug at a fraction of the cost... [A] group of Médecins Sans Frontières activists gathered at AIDS 2024 and called for an "immediate global action to break Gilead's monopoly on lenacapavir." In a statement Gilead said they couldn't set a price because the drug had not yet been approved — but that Gilead "is committed to access pricing for high-incidence, resource-limited countries." Gilead will ensure dedicated supply of lenacapavir for HIV prevention in the countries where the need is greatest until voluntary licensing partners are able to supply high-quality, low-cost versions of lenacapavir.â Gilead is developing a robust direct voluntary licensing program to expedite access to those versions of lenacapavir in high-incidence, resource-limited countries. We are moving with urgency to negotiate these contracts.

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"Apple and the union representing retail workers at its store in Towson, Maryland, agreed to a tentative labor deal late Friday," reports CNN, "in the first US labor agreement not only for an Apple store but for any US workers of the tech giant." Workers at the Apple store in Towson had voted to join the International Association of Machinists union in June 2022 and have since been seeking their first contract. In May, they voted to authorize a strike without providing a deadline. The labor deal, which needs to be ratified by a vote of the 85 rank-and-file members at the store before it can take effect, is a significant milestone. Other high-profile union organizing efforts, such as those at Starbucks and Amazon, have yet to produce deals for those workers, even though workers at those companies voted to join unions well before the workers at the Apple store in Maryland. There are not many legal requirements to force a company to reach a labor agreement with a new union once that union has been recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, the government body that oversees labor relations for most US business. But the process can take a long time, as one recent study by Bloomberg Law found the average time for reaching a first contract is 465 days, or roughly 15 months. In many cases, it can take longer. A separate 2023 academic study found 43% of new unions were still seeking their first contract two years after winning a representation election. The union said their deal includes pay increases of 10% over the three-year life of the contract and guaranteed severance packages for laid-off workers.

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Former U.S. president Donald Trump spoke at Nashville's Bitcoin Conference on Saturday. But he wasn't the only one there making headlines, according to a local newspaper called the Tennesseean: Republican Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Tim Scott pledged their resolute support for the cryptocurrency industry at Nashville's Bitcoin2024 conference Friday — moments before whistleblower and political dissident Edward Snowden warned attendees to be wary of politicians trying to win them over. "Cast a vote, but don't join a cult," Snowden said. "They are not our tribe. They are not your personality. They have their own interests, their own values, their own things that they're chasing. Try to get what you need from them, but don't give yourself to them." Snowden didn't call out any politicians specifically, but the conference has drawn national attention for its robust lineup of legislators including former President Donald Trump, independent presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and a number of other senators. "Does this feel normal to you?" Snowden said. "When you look at the candidates, when you look at the dynamics, even the people on stage giving all the speeches, I'm not saying they're terrible at all, but it's a little unusual. The fact that they're here is a little unusual...." Two key tenets of Bitcoin are transparency and decentralization, which means anyone can view all Bitcoin transactions on a public ledger. Snowden said this kind of metadata could be dangerous in the wrong hands, especially with artificial intelligence innovations making it easier to collect. "It is fantasy to imagine they're not doing this," he said.... He added that other countries like China or Russia could be collecting this same data. Snowden said he's afraid the collection of transaction data could happen across financial institutions and ultimately be used against the customers. Also speaking was RFK Jr — who asked why Snowden hadn't already been pardoned, along with Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht, when Donald Trump was president (as Kennedy promised to do). According to USA Today, Kennedy promised more than just creating a strategic reserve of Bitcoin worth more than half a trillion dollars: Kennedy also pledged to sign an executive order directing the IRS to treat Bitcoin as an eligible asset for 1031 Exchange into real property — making transactions unreportable and by extension nontaxable — which prompted a roar of approval from the crowd. Though Trump's appearance also ended with a promise to have the government create a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile," NBC News notes that Trump "stopped short of offering many details." Immediately following Trump's remarks, Senator Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said she would introduce a bill to create the reserve. However, the price of bitcoin fell slightly in the wake of Trump's remarks Saturday, perhaps reflecting crypto traders' unmet expectations for a more definitive commitment on the reserve idea from the presidential candidate... Shortly after his morning remarks, Bitcoin Magazine reported that a group of Democratic representatives and candidates had sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee urging party leaders to be more supportive of crypto... On Saturday, the Financial Times reported [presidential candidate Kamala] Harris had approached top crypto companies seeking a "reset" of relations, citing unnamed sources. Ironically, in the end one conference attendee ended up telling Bloomberg that "It doesn't really matter who the president is. I don't really care much about it, because Bitcoin will do its thing regardless."

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Tuesday Meta released Llama 3.1, its largest open-source AI model to date. But just one day Mistral released Large 2, notes this report from TechCrunch, "which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning... "Though Mistral is one of the newer entrants in the artificial intelligence space, it's quickly shipping AI models on or near the cutting edge." In a press release, Mistral says one of its key focus areas during training was to minimize the model's hallucination issues. The company says Large 2 was trained to be more discerning in its responses, acknowledging when it does not know something instead of making something up that seems plausible. The Paris-based AI startup recently raised $640 million in a Series B funding round, led by General Catalyst, at a $6 billion valuation... However, it's important to note that Mistral's models are, like most others, not open source in the traditional sense — any commercial application of the model needs a paid license. And while it's more open than, say, GPT-4o, few in the world have the expertise and infrastructure to implement such a large model. (That goes double for Llama's 405 billion parameters, of course.) Mistral only has 123 billion parameters, according to the article. But whichever system prevails, "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," Mark Zuckerberg wrote this week, predicting that open-source AI will soar to the same popularity as Linux: This year, Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models and leading in some areas. Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry. But even before that, Llama is already leading on openness, modifiability, and cost efficiency... Beyond releasing these models, we're working with a range of companies to grow the broader ecosystem. Amazon, Databricks, and NVIDIA are launching full suites of services to support developers fine-tuning and distilling their own models. Innovators like Groq have built low-latency, low-cost inference serving for all the new models. The models will be available on all major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more. Companies like Scale.AI, Dell, Deloitte, and others are ready to help enterprises adopt Llama and train custom models with their own data. "As the community grows and more companies develop new services, we can collectively make Llama the industry standard and bring the benefits of AI to everyone," Zuckerberg writes. He says that he's heard from developers, CEOs, and government officials that they want to "train, fine-tune, and distill" their own models, protecting their data with a cheap and efficient model — and without being locked into a closed vendor. But they also tell him that want to invest in an ecosystem "that's going to be the standard for the long term." Lots of people see that open source is advancing at a faster rate than closed models, and they want to build their systems on the architecture that will give them the greatest advantage long term... One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it's clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in AI and AR/VR for the next generation of computing... I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future. AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life — and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research. Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn't concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society. There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer... [O]pen source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized... The bottom line is that open source AI represents the world's best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone... I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here. I hope you'll join us on this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world.

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As Comic-Con hits San Diego, "part of the big news in 2024 is that the con won't have a corresponding virtual or online event this year," according to Polygon, "for the first time since 2019." But there's still some big scifi media news, according to CNET's Comic-Con coverage: Disney revealed a new Doctor Who addition to the franchise that will jump back to the 1970s with the Sea Devils, an ancient group of beings who arise from the sea. Made in partnership with the BBC, the series... will air on Disney Plus, where fans can currently stream season 14 of Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa. And there's also an upcoming Doctor Who Christmas special. Meanwhile, Saturday night, USA Today ran a special article with late-breaking announcements about Marvel's Cinematic Universe: Marvel has already won Comic-Con, with a raucous screening of "Deadpool & Wolverine" followed by a high-tech drone show, and the box office, with the new movie on track to have one of the best openings of all time... Robert Downey Jr. returns to the MCU as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. Kevin Feige says the Fantastic Four will be in the next two Avengers movies... And here comes the Fantastic Four [movie] a year from now. It starts filming Tuesday in the UK... The article says Marvel's Fantastic Four presentation included "a Fantasti-Car that hovers across the stage — and that castmembers also appeared from the upcoming Thunderbolts* movie. More geeky news: Amazon Prime showed a new four-minute trailer with clips from season two of its J.R.R. Tolkein prequel, "The Rings of Power". (And there was also a three-minute blooper reel for Season 4 of Prime's superhero-themed series, "The Boys".) Paramount+ showed a trailer for the Star Trek universe's first streaming movie, Section 31. There was also a trailer for season 5 of the animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks — plus a particularly strange clip from the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Keanu Reeves accepted the Inkpot award for his contribution to the world of film and comics — partly because since 2021 Reeves has been co-authoring a Kickstarter-funded comic book called BRZRKR. (Netflix plans to adapt it into a movie.) Next February will see the release of Captain America: Brave New World, in which the Incredible Hulk may get some competition from Harrison Ford, who's been cast as the Red Hulk. But things got a little too real Friday when a fire at a nearby steakhouse forced the evacuation of the immersive "Penguin Lounge" — which was promoting Max's new prequel series to 2022's movie The Batman.

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RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: The BBC are reporting sharks have tested positive for cocaine. Thirteen sharpnose sharks which were captured off the coast near Rio de Janeiro. They were tested for the drug in liver and muscle tissue samples — and returned positive results at concentrations as much as 100 times higher than previously reported for other aquatic creatures. The research was published in Science of the Total Environment. The little-known "sharpnose" sharks were examined because they spend their entire lives in coastal waters. This makes them more likely to be exposed to drugs from human activities than the more cinematic species starring in "Cocaine Shark" or "Cocaine Sharks", two recent productions on the subject featuring hammerheads and tiger sharks (the "trash cans of the sea"). The likeliest source is effluent from drug processing labs inland, though the snorting population of Rio may have added their contribution into the sewers too... Whether cocaine is changing the behaviour of the sharks is not known. Perhaps it would affect their aim with their head-mount lasers, bringing closer their conquest of the land with it's tasty, tasty humans. Hollywood, hopefully, as the answers.

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Slashdot reader Seven Spirals brings news about the lossless compression algorithm LZ4: The already wonderful performance of the LZ4 compressor just got better with multi-threaded additions to it's codebase. In many cases, LZ4 can compress data faster than it can be written to disk giving this particular compressor some very special applications. The Linux kernel as well as filesystems like ZFS use LZ4 compression extensively. This makes LZ4 more comparable to the Zstd compression algorithm, which has had multi-threaded performance for a while, but cannot match the LZ4 compressor for speed, though it has some direct LZ4. From Linuxiac.com: - On Windows 11, using an Intel 7840HS CPU, compression time has improved from 13.4 seconds to just 1.8 seconds — a 7.4 times speed increase. - macOS users with the M1 Pro chip will see a reduction from 16.6 seconds to 2.55 seconds, a 6.5 times faster performance. - For Linux users on an i7-9700k, the compression time has been reduced from 16.2 seconds to 3.05 seconds, achieving a 5.4 times speed boost... The release supports lesser-known architectures such as LoongArch, RISC-V, and others, ensuring LZ4's portability across various platforms.

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