An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon just introduced an AI tool that will automatically translate books into other languages. The appropriately-named Kindle Translate is being advertised as a resource for authors that self publish on the platform. The company says the tool can translate entire books between English and Spanish and German to English. Amazon promises that more languages are coming down the pike. It's available right now in a beta form to select authors enrolled in the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. There's a broader rollout planned for a later date.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Google is planning to build a large AI data center on Christmas Island, a 52-square-mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, following a cloud computing deal with Australia's military. The previously undisclosed project will reportedly position advanced AI infrastructure a mere 220 miles south of Indonesia at a location military strategists consider critical for monitoring Chinese naval activity. Aside from its strategic military position, the island is famous for its massive annual crab migration, where over 100 million of red crabs make their way across the island to spawn in the ocean. That's notable because the tech giant has applied for environmental approvals to build a subsea cable connecting the 135-square-kilometer island to Darwin, where US Marines are stationed for six months each year. [...] Christmas Island's annual crab migration is a natural phenomenon that Sir David Attenborough reportedly once described as one of his greatest TV moments when he visited the site in 1990. Every year, millions of crabs emerge from the forest and swarm across roads, streams, rocks, and beaches to reach the ocean, where each female can produce up to 100,000 eggs. The tiny baby crabs that survive take about nine days to march back inland to the safety of the plateau.

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The FBI has subpoenaed popular Canadian domain registrar Tucows, demanding information about the owner of archive[dot]today, a popular archiving site used to bypass paywalls and avoid sending traffic to original publishers. The subpoena states it relates to a federal criminal investigation but provides no details about the alleged crime. Archive.today posted the document on X the same day. The site, also known as archive.is and archive.ph, started in the early 2010s and rose to prominence during GamerGate when users took snapshots of articles to avoid sending traffic to websites. It now has hundreds of millions of saved pages. The FBI requested the customer name, address, billing information, telephone connection records, payment methods, internet connectivity session times, and device identifiers. Very little is known about who operates the site. A 2013 analysis by Gyrovague suggested it is "a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe." A 2013 FAQ states the site is privately funded. A 2021 blog post said "it is doomed to die at any moment."

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Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be "no federal bailout for AI." From a report: "The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place," Sacks wrote in a post on X. Sacks' comments came after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that the startup wants to establish an ecosystem of private equity, banks and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee" that could help the company finance its infrastructure investments. She softened her stance later in a LinkedIn post and said OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments. She said her use of the word "backstop" clouded her point. [...] Sacks said the Trump administration does want to make permitting and power generation easier, and that the goal is to facilitate rapid infrastructure buildouts without raising residential electricity rates. "To give benefit of the doubt, I don't think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous.)," he wrote.

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AI labs are paying skilled professionals hundreds of dollars per hour to train their models in specialized fields. Companies like Mercor, Surge AI, Scale AI and Turing recruit bankers, lawyers, engineers and doctors to improve the accuracy of AI systems in professional settings. Mercor advertises roles for medical secretaries, movie directors and private detectives at rates ranging from $20 to $185 per hour for contract work and up to $200,000 for full-time positions. Surge AI offers as much as $1,000 per hour for expertise from startup CEOs and venture capital partners. Mercor pays out over $1.5 million daily to professionals it hires for clients including OpenAI and Anthropic. Some contractors are former employees of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Others moonlight in this work while keeping their regular jobs. Brendan Foody, Mercor's 22-year-old CEO, acknowledged at a conference last week that trade secrets could potentially be compromised given the volume of work submitted. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on this week's earnings call that some AI training gigs on its platform require PhDs.

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American manufacturing's postwar boom from the 1940s through the 1970s resulted from conditions that cannot be recreated, a story on WSJ argues. Global competitors had been destroyed by war. Energy was cheap. Unions could demand concessions without fearing job losses to foreign rivals. Strikes were frequent in steel, auto, trucking, rubber and coal mining. That relentless pressure from an organized working class raised real wages and created fringe benefits including health insurance and retirement pay. Government support for unions kept executive salaries at just a few times median income. Stock buybacks were illegal or frowned upon. President Eisenhower declared at the 1956 dedication of the AFL-CIO national headquarters that "Labor is the United States." The system began unraveling by the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War drained federal coffers. Inflation accelerated as government deficits exploded. Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, unleashing currency volatility. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled energy prices. Foreign competition returned from Japan, Korea and West Germany. American companies carried mounting legacy costs like pensions that discouraged investment in upgrades and research. Milton Friedman declared in a 1970 New York Times essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and championed the World Trade Organization in 1995. Bethlehem Steel employed around 150,000 people in the mid-1950s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Its former hometown plant in Bethlehem, Pa., is now a casino.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is asking Automatic.CSS -- a company that provides a CSS framework for WordPress page builders -- to change its name amid public spats between Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and Automatic.CSS creator Kevin Geary. Automattic has two T's as a nod to Matt. "As you know, our client owns and operates a wide range of software brands and services, including the very popular web building and hosting platform WordPress.com," Jim Davis, an intellectual property attorney representing Automattic, wrote in a letter dated Oct. 30. "Automattic is also well-known for its longtime and extensive contributions to the WordPress system. Our client owns many trademark registrations for its Automattic mark covering those types of services and software," Davis continued. "As we hope you can appreciate, our client is concerned about your use of a nearly identical name and trademark to provide closely related WordPress services. Automattic and Automatic differ by only one letter, are phonetically identical, and are marketed to many of the same people. This all enhances the potential for consumer confusion and dilution of our client's Automattic mark."

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OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said late Wednesday that the AI startup is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments, clarifying previous comments she made on stage during the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event. From a report: At the event, Friar said OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee" that could help the company finance its investments in cutting-edge chips. But in a LinkedIn post late Wednesday, Friar softened her stance. "I used the word 'backstop' and it muddied the point," Friar wrote. "As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part." OpenAI has inked more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure deals in recent months to try and build out the data centers it says are needed to meet soaring demand. The agreements have raised questions around how the company can afford to make such massive commitments.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: US software company SAS Institute has withdrawn from mainland China and dismissed its local staff, according to a Beijing-based employee affected by the move, as the analytics specialist ended more than two decades of operations amid intense domestic competition and geopolitical tensions. The company on Thursday announced the lay-offs via an email and hosted a short video call, in which executives thanked local employees for their contribution and cited "organisational optimisation" for the exit, according to the employee. "SAS is ceasing direct business operations in China," an SAS spokeswoman said on Friday in response to the Post's inquiry. "This decision reflects a broader shift in how we operate globally, optimising our footprint and ensuring long-term sustainability." The company would continue having a presence on the mainland via third-party partners, according to the spokeswoman.

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The government shutdown-spurred airport chaos is about to get a whole lot worse. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it will reduce flight volumes by 10 percent across 40 major airports in response, a move that could threaten 3,000 to 4,500 flights daily. The cuts will affect "high volume" markets, including in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles, according to CBS. The FAA has not formally announced which airports will have their capacity cut. "I'm not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference, according to the AP. The government shutdown, which is now the longest in US history, has already been causing thousands of delays each day, as well as long waits at airport security. Some major airports have even been forced to operate without air traffic control for hours at a time.

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Rockstar Games, the company behind the hit Grand Theft Auto franchise, said that the dozens of employees it fired last week were leaking company secrets, disputing allegations by labor leaders that it was disrupting workers' attempt to unionize. From a report: The employees had been sharing company information in a forum that included non-employees, a Rockstar spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg on Wednesday. "Last week, we took action against a small number of individuals who were found to be distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum, a violation of our company policies," the spokesperson said. "This was in no way related to people's right to join a union or engage in union activities." The company, part of Take-Two Interactive Software, fired between 30 and 40 employees across offices in the UK and Canada for what it said was "gross misconduct." The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, the first to organize video-game workers in the UK, told Bloomberg that the employees had all been involved with union efforts at Rockstar, calling the firings "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry."

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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the AI race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. From a report: In the starkest comments yet from the head of the world's most valuable company, Huang told the FT: "China is going to win the AI race." Huang's remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban on California-based Nvidia selling its most advanced chips to Beijing following a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week. The Nvidia chief said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by "cynicism." "We need more optimism," Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Financial Times' Future of AI Summit. Huang singled out new rules on AI by US states that could result in "50 new regulations." He contrasted that approach with Chinese energy subsidies that made it more affordable for local tech companies to run Chinese alternatives to Nvidia's AI chips. "Power is free," he said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: T-Mobile is opening up access to its Starlink-powered emergency texting service. The carrier announced on Wednesday that anyone with a compatible phone -- even AT&T and Verizon customers -- can sign up to text 911 over satellite for free. In July, T-Mobile launched its "T-Satellite" service to customers across the US for $10 per month, allowing both T-Mobile and non-T-Mobile customers to send messages, share their location, and access select apps over satellite. This service also includes texts to 911, but now, that's available for free.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The Microsoft Store on the web now lets you create a multi-app install package on Windows 11 that installs multiple applications from a single installer. This means you can now install multiple apps simultaneously without having to download each one manually. The experience is similar to that of the third-party app Ninite, a package manager that lets you install multiple apps at once.

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Nothing has announced that it will allow users to delete Facebook, Instagram and other Meta services from its mid-range and entry-level phones after users objected to the company's decision to pre-install these apps. The update will arrive by the end of November for devices running the Android 16-based OS 4.0 on the Phone (3a) series. Nothing said it will continue to pre-install partner apps on non-flagship devices in most regions. Devices in the United Kingdom, European Union and Japan will also come with TikTok installed by default. The company defended the practice by saying most users rely on these apps and that pre-installing them allows faster cold starts. Carl Pei's company blamed razor-thin margins on mid-range devices for the decision to bundle third-party software. Nothing did not address whether users can uninstall the service that powers newly introduced lock screen advertisements, which the company previously described as disabled by default and standard across the industry.

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Solar geoengineering could increase the ferocity of North Atlantic hurricanes, cause the Amazon rainforest to die back and cause drought in parts of Africa if deployed above only some parts of the planet by rogue actors, a report has warned. The Guardian: However, if technology to block the sun was used globally and in a coordinated way for a long period -- decades or even centuries -- there is strong evidence that it would lower the global temperature, the review from the UK's Royal Society concluded. The world is failing to halt the climate crisis and the researchers said that in future, a judgment might need to be made between the risks of geoengineering and the those of continued global heating, which is already costing lives and livelihoods. The logistics of a large-scale geoengineering effort would be daunting, the experts said, but the cost would be small relative to climate action -- billions of dollars a year against trillions. The researchers emphasised that geoengineering only masked the symptoms of the climate crisis, and did not tackle the root cause -- the burning of fossil fuels. Geoengineering could only complement the cutting of emissions, not replace it, they said. If geoengineering was halted abruptly but emissions had not been reduced, there would be a termination shock of rapidly rising temperatures -- 1-2C within a couple of decades -- that would have severe effects on people and ecosystems unable to rapidly adapt.

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Financial Times: Deutsche Bank is exploring ways to hedge its exposure to data centres after extending billions of dollars in debt to the sector to keep up with demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Executives inside the bank have discussed ways to manage its exposure to the booming industry as so-called hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into building infrastructure for their AI needs that is increasingly funded by debt. The German lender is looking at options including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks that would help mitigate downside risk by betting against companies in the sector. It is also considering buying default protection on some of the debt using derivatives through a transaction known as synthetic risk transfer (SRT). Deutsche's investment banking business has "bet big" on data centre financing, according to one senior executive. However, the scale of expenditure on AI infrastructure has prompted concerns that a bubble is forming with some likening the enthusiasm to that which preceded the dotcom crash. Sceptics have pointed out that billions of dollars have been deployed in an untested industry with assets that quickly depreciate in value due to the rapid change in technology.

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The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data centre projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically-made AI chips, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centres that are less than 30% complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage will be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China's most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a pause in trade hostilities between Washington and Beijing, and achieve its quest for AI chip self-sufficiency. China's access to advanced AI chips, including those made by Nvidia, has been a key point of friction with the U.S., as the two wrestle for dominance in high-end computing power and AI. U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday following talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week that Washington will "let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced" chips.

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Epic Games and Google have agreed to settle their long-running antitrust lawsuit. The settlement converts Judge James Donato's United States-only injunction into a global agreement extending through June 2032. Google will reduce its standard app store fees to either 20% or 9% depending on the transaction type. The company will also create a program in the next major Android release allowing alternative app stores to register and become what Google calls first-class citizens. Users will be able to install these registered app stores from a website with a single click using neutral language. The settlement addresses Epic's concerns about friction and scare screens that discouraged sideloading. Google will charge a 5% fee for transactions using Google Play Billing, separate from its service fee. Alternative payment options must be shown alongside Google Play Billing.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Kodak quietly acknowledged this week that it will begin selling two famous types of film stock -- Kodak Gold 200 and Kodak Ultramax 400 -- directly to retailers and distributors in the U.S., another indication that the historic company is taking back control over how people buy its film. The release comes on the heels of Kodak announcing that it would make and sell two new stocks of film called Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200 in October. On Monday, both Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax showed back up on Kodak's website as film stocks that it makes and sells. When asked by 404 Media, a company spokesperson said that it has "launched" these film stocks and will begin to "sell the films directly to distributors in the U.S. and Canada, giving Kodak greater control over our participation in the consumer film market."

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