Researchers have discovered a new attack that can force VPN applications to route traffic outside the encrypted tunnel, thereby exposing the user's traffic to potential snooping or manipulation. This vulnerability, named TunnelVision, is found in almost all VPNs on non-Linux and non-Android systems. It's believe that the vulnerability "may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The effect of TunnelVision is "the victim's traffic is now decloaked and being routed through the attacker directly," a video demonstration explained. "The attacker can read, drop or modify the leaked traffic and the victim maintains their connection to both the VPN and the Internet." The attack works by manipulating the DHCP server that allocates IP addresses to devices trying to connect to the local network. A setting known as option 121 allows the DHCP server to override default routing rules that send VPN traffic through a local IP address that initiates the encrypted tunnel. By using option 121 to route VPN traffic through the DHCP server, the attack diverts the data to the DHCP server itself. [...] The attack can most effectively be carried out by a person who has administrative control over the network the target is connecting to. In that scenario, the attacker configures the DHCP server to use option 121. It's also possible for people who can connect to the network as an unprivileged user to perform the attack by setting up their own rogue DHCP server. The attack allows some or all traffic to be routed through the unencrypted tunnel. In either case, the VPN application will report that all data is being sent through the protected connection. Any traffic that's diverted away from this tunnel will not be encrypted by the VPN and the Internet IP address viewable by the remote user will belong to the network the VPN user is connected to, rather than one designated by the VPN app. Interestingly, Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn't implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes. When apps run on Linux there's a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks. Network firewalls can also be configured to deny inbound and outbound traffic to and from the physical interface. This remedy is problematic for two reasons: (1) a VPN user connecting to an untrusted network has no ability to control the firewall and (2) it opens the same side channel present with the Linux mitigation. The most effective fixes are to run the VPN inside of a virtual machine whose network adapter isn't in bridged mode or to connect the VPN to the Internet through the Wi-Fi network of a cellular device. You can learn more about the research here.

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Abner Li reports via 9to5Google: Since the launch of Health Connect in 2022, Google has been winding down the Google Fit developer APIs. Earlier this week, the company fully detailed how the "Google Fit APIs have been deprecated and will be supported until June 30, 2025." Fitness and exercise apps that previously used Google Fit have until the June 2025 deadline to switch to Health Connect, with Google broadly referring to it as the "Android Health platform." Google's migration guide for developers lists what they're supposed to switch to on Android phones and Wear OS. However, there is no replacement for the Goals API that lets Google Fit users set "how many steps and heart points they want to aim for each day." Google says it will "share more details about what's next for Android Health" at I/O later this month. As of this API shutdown announcement, Google has said nothing about the Google Fit apps on Android, Wear OS, and iOS. They still work to track activity and house your full archive. [...] At this point, it's clear that Google Fit is not the future. On the Pixel Watch, Fitbit is the default, while Samsung and other Wear OS manufacturers have their own health tracking solutions. If Google were to announce a deprecation of the Fit app, having it coincide with the June 2025 developer deadline makes sense.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Pokemon Go players are creating a headache for members of the open source map tool OpenStreetMaps by adding fake beaches where they don't exist in hopes of more easily catching Wigletts, a Pokemon that only spawns on beaches. OpenStreetMaps is a free, open source map tool much like Google or Apple maps, but is maintained by a self-governing community of volunteers where anyone is welcome to contribute. An April 27 thread in the OpenStreetMap community forum first spotted the issue, flagging two users in Italy who began marking beaches in all sorts of locations where they don't actually exist. The OpenStreetMap user who noticed the fictitious beaches immediately connected the dots: Pokemon Go, the mega popular mobile game where players catch Pokemon and can engage in different activities depending on their geolocation, introduced different "biomes" like beach, city, forest, and mountains. Each of these have a different look, and critically, some specific Pokemon will only spawn at specific biomes. Wiglett, for example, only spawns at beaches. Some video game sites quickly noticed that Pokemon Go's beaches were appearing in real world locations like golf courses, sports fields, and other places that are not real beaches. Pokemon Go uses OpenStreetMap for its map data, and is how the game knows players are near certain points of interest. The OpenStreetMap user created a filter of OpenStreetMap that surfaced instances where "new mappers" added beaches to the map, revealing a number of clearly fake submissions. [...] It's not clear how often Pokemon Go updates the game with data from OpenStreetMaps, but in theory the people who are manipulating the data would have easier access to the beach biome the next time it does. The OpenStreetMap thread goes on to identify one repeat offender who added dozens of fake beaches. Some are near bodies of water, like lakes, rivers, or docks, and others are landlocked schools, parking lots, and random strips of land. If there was any doubt that some of these changes are being made by Pokemon Go players, the same repeat offender also marked the map with his handle, as well as a poke ball.

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Jack Dorsey is no longer on the board of Bluesky, the Twitter alternative he helped start. The announcement comes shortly after Dorsey unfollowed all but three accounts on X and referred to Elon Musk's platform as "freedom technology." The Verge reports: In two posts today, Bluesky thanked Dorsey while confirming his departure and adding that it's searching for a new board member "who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience." [...] Neither Bluesky nor Dorsey himself seem to have said how or why he left the board. For now, two board members remain: CEO, Jay Graeber, and Jabber / XMPP inventor Jeremie Miller. Dorsey originally backed Bluesky in 2019 as a project to develop an open-source social media standard that he wanted Twitter to move to. He later joined its board of directors when it split from Twitter in 2022.

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The Rabbit R1 is one of the first standalone AI companion devices to hit the market, offering the ability to translate languages, identify objects in your environment, and order DoorDash, among other things. It's been in the news last week for its all around poor reviews that cite poor battery life, painfully slow responses, and missing features (sound familiar?). Now, it's been confirmed that the Rabbit R1 is powered by an Android app that can run on existing Android phones. Android Authority reports: What ended up souring a lot of people's opinions on the product was the revelation -- in an Android Authority original report -- that the R1 is basically an Android app in a box. Many consumers who believed that the product would be better suited as a mobile app felt validated after our report, but there was one stickler in it that we needed to address: how we got the R1 launcher up and running on an Android phone. See, in our preliminary report, we mentioned that the Rabbit R1's launcher app is intended to be preinstalled in the firmware and be granted several privileged, system-level permissions. While that statement is still true, we should've clarified that the R1 launcher doesn't actually need those permissions. In fact, none of the system-level permissions that the R1 launcher requests are at all necessary for the app to perform its core functionality. To prove this, we got the Rabbit R1 launcher up and running again on a stock, unrooted Android device (a Xiaomi 13T Pro), thanks to help from a team of reverse engineers including ChromMob, EmilyLShepherd, marceld505, thel3l, and uwukko. We were able to go through the entire setup process as if our device was an actual Rabbit R1. Afterwards, we were able to talk to ChatGPT, use the Vision function to identify objects, play music from Spotify, and even record voice notes. As demonstrated in our hands-on video at the top of this article, all of the existing core functionality that the Rabbit R1 offers would work as an Android or even iOS app. The only functions that wouldn't work are unrelated to the product's core functionality and are things your phone can already do, such as powering off or rebooting the device, toggling Bluetooth, connecting to a cellular or Wi-Fi network, or setting a screen lock. During our research, Android Authority was also able to obtain a copy of the Rabbit R1's firmware. Our analysis reveals that Rabbit did not make significant modifications to the BSP (Board Support Package) provided by MediaTek. The R1, in fact, still ships with all the standard apps included in AOSP, as well as the many apps provided by MediaTek. This is despite the fact that none of these apps are needed nor ever shown to the user, obviously. Rabbit only made a few changes to the AOSP build that MediaTek provided them, such as adding the aforementioned R1 launcher app, adding a fork of the open-source "AnySoftKeyboard" app with a custom theme, adding an OTA updater app, and adding a custom boot animation. [...] Yes, it's true that all the R1 launcher does is act as a local client to the cloud services offered by Rabbit, which is what truly handles the core functionality. It's also true that there's nothing wrong or unusual with companies using AOSP for their own hardware. But the fact of the matter is that Rabbit does little to justify its use of custom hardware except by making the R1 have an eye-catching design.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors, including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. The round brings its valuation to $19 billion post-money and its total raised to $5 billion in debt and equity -- a remarkable figure for a company that's less than 10 years old. It's not just CoreWeave. Lambda Labs, which also offers an array of cloud-hosted GPU instances, in early April secured a "special purpose financing vehicle" of up to $500 million, months after closing a $320 million Series C round. The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it's investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts generative AI research, in March landed $106 million in a Salesforce-led round. So why all the enthusiasm for -- and cash pouring into -- the alternative cloud space? The answer, as you might expect, is generative AI. As the generative AI boom times continue, so does the demand for the hardware to run and train generative AI models at scale. GPUs, architecturally, are the logical choice for training, fine-tuning and running models because they contain thousands of cores that can work in parallel to perform the linear algebra equations that make up generative models. But installing GPUs is expensive. So most devs and organizations turn to the cloud instead. Incumbents in the cloud computing space -- Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure -- offer no shortage of GPU and specialty hardware instances optimized for generative AI workloads. But for at least some models and projects, alternative clouds can end up being cheaper -- and delivering better availability. On CoreWeave, renting an Nvidia A100 40GB -- one popular choice for model training and inferencing -- costs $2.39 per hour, which works out to $1,200 per month. On Azure, the same GPU costs $3.40 per hour, or $2,482 per month; on Google Cloud, it's $3.67 per hour, or $2,682 per month. Given generative AI workloads are usually performed on clusters of GPUs, the cost deltas quickly grow. "Companies like CoreWeave participate in a market we call specialty 'GPU as a service' cloud providers," Sid Nag, VP of cloud services and technologies at Gartner, told TechCrunch. "Given the high demand for GPUs, they offers an alternate to the hyperscalers, where they've taken Nvidia GPUs and provided another route to market and access to those GPUs." Nag points out that even some Big Tech firms have begun to lean on alternative cloud providers as they run up against compute capacity challenges. Microsoft signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with CoreWeave last June to help provide enough power to train OpenAI's generative AI models. "Nvidia, the furnisher of the bulk of CoreWeave's chips, sees this as a desirable trend, perhaps for leverage reasons; it's said to have given some alternative cloud providers preferential access to its GPUs," reports TechCrunch.

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The world's highest astronomical site is officially open for business after being in the works for 26 years. Space.com reports: The Japanese University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory, or TAO, which was first conceptualized 26 years ago to study the evolution of galaxies and exoplanets, is perched on top of a tall mountain in the Chilean Andes at 5,640 meters (18,500 feet) above sea level. The facility's altitude surpasses even the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which is at an elevation of 5,050 meters (16,570 feet). TAO is located on the summit of Atacama's Cerro Chajnantor mountain, whose name means "place of departure" in the now-extinct Kunza language of the indigenous Likan Antai community. The region's high altitude, sparse atmosphere and perennially arid climate is deadly to humans, but makes an excellent spot for infrared telescopes like TAO as their observational accuracies rely on low moisture levels, which render Earth's atmosphere transparent in infrared wavelengths. TAO's 6.5-meter telescope consists of two science instruments designed to observe the universe in infrared, which is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than visible light but shorter than microwaves. One of the instruments, named SWIMS, will image galaxies from the very early universe to understand how they coalesced out of pristine dust and gas, a process whose specifics remain murky despite decades of research. The second, named MIMIZUKU, will aid the overarching science goal by studying primordial disks of dust within which stars and galaxies are known to form, according to the mission plan. Constructing the telescope on the summit of Mt. Chajnantor "was an incredible challenge, not just technically, but politically too," Yuzuru Yoshii, a professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan who spearheaded TAO since 1998, said in a statement. "I have liaised with Indigenous peoples to ensure their rights and views are considered, the Chilean government to secure permission, local universities for technical collaboration, and even the Chilean Health Ministry to make sure people can work at that altitude in a safe manner." "Thanks to all involved, research I've only ever dreamed about can soon become a reality, and I couldn't be happier," he added.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Join your localMilitia or III% Patriot Group," a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: "Now more than ever. Support the American militia page." Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an "armed militia group" on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence. Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country. After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook -- with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED. Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit "active patriots" and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They're also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be "prepared" for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for "war" or to "stand up" against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists -- and the US government. These groups are also rebuilding at a moment when anti-government rhetoric has continued to surge in mainstream political discourse ahead of a contentious, high-stakes presidential election. And by doing all of this on Facebook, they're hoping to reach a broader pool of prospective recruits than they would on a comparatively fringe platform like Telegram. "Many of these groups are no longer fractured sets of localized militia but coalitions formed between multiple militia groups, many with Three Percenters at the helm," said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. "Facebook remains the largest gathering place for extremists and militia movements to cast a wide net and funnel users to more private chats, including on the platform, where they can plan and coordinate with impunity." Paul has been monitoring "hundreds" of these groups and profiles since 2021 and found that they have been growing "increasingly emboldened with more serious and coordinated organizing" in the past year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Oil and gas equipment intended to cut methane emissions is preventing scientists from accurately detecting greenhouse gases and pollutants, a satellite image investigation has revealed. Energy companies operating in countries such as the US, UK, Germany and Norway appear to have installed technology that could stop researchers from identifying methane, carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants at industrial facilities involved in the disposal of unprofitable natural gas, known in the industry as flaring. Flares are used by fossil fuel companies when capturing the natural gas would cost more than they can make by selling it. They release carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants when they burn as well as cancer-causing chemicals. Despite the health risks, regulators sometimes prefer flaring to releasing natural gas -- which is 90% methane -- directly into the atmosphere, known as "venting". The World Bank, alongside the EU and other regulators, have been using satellites for years to find and document gas flares, asking energy companies to find ways of capturing the gas instead of burning or venting it. The bank set up the Zero Routine Flaring 2030 initiative at the Paris climate conference to eradicate unnecessary flaring, and its latest report stated that flaring decreased by 3% globally from 2021 to 2022. But since the initiative, "enclosed combustors" have begun appearing in the same countries that promised to end flaring. Experts say enclosed combustors are functionally the same as flares, except the flame is hidden. Tim Doty, a former regulator at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said: "Enclosed combustors are basically a flare with an internal flare tip that you don't see. Enclosed flaring is still flaring. It's just different infrastructure that they're allowing. "Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It's better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions." The only method of detecting flaring globally is by using satellite-mounted tools called Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite of detectors (VIIRS), which find flares by comparing heat signatures with bright spots of light visible from space. But when researchers tried to replicate the database, they saw that the satellites were not picking up the enclosed flares. Without the satellite data, countries were forced to rely mostly on self-disclosed reporting from oil and gas companies, researchers said. Environmentalists fear the research community's ability to understand pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector could be jeopardized.

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Senior Department arms control official Paul Dean on Thursday urged China and Russia to declare that artificial intelligence would never make decisions on deploying nuclear weapons. Washington had made a "clear and strong commitment" that humans had total control over nuclear weapons, said Dean. Britain and France have made similar commitments. Reuters reports: "We would welcome a similar statement by China and the Russian Federation," said Dean, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability. "We think it is an extremely important norm of responsible behaviour and we think it is something that would be very welcome in a P5 context," he said, referring to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

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Apple reported fiscal second-quarter earnings that topped estimates, despite a 10% drop in iPhone sales. The company also announced that its board had authorized $110 billion in share repurchases, "a 22% increase over last year's $90 billion authorization," notes CNBC. "It's the largest buyback in history, ahead of Apple's previous repurchases." From the report: Apple did not provide formal guidance, but Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC's Steve Kovach that overall sales would grow in the "low single digits" during the June quarter. Apple posted $81.8 billion in revenue during the year-ago June quarter and LSEG analysts were looking for a forecast of $83.23 billion. On an earnings call with analysts, Apple finance chief Luca Maestri said the company expected the current quarter will deliver double-digit year-over-year percentage growth in iPad sales. What's more, he said the Services division is forecast to continue growing at about the current high rate it's achieved during the past two quarters. Apple reported net income of $23.64 billion, or $1.53 per share, down 2% from $24.16 billion, or $1.52 per share, in the year-earlier period. Cook told CNBC that sales in the fiscal second quarter suffered from a difficult comparison to the year-earlier period, when the company realized $5 billion in delayed iPhone 14 sales from Covid-based supply issues. "If you remove that $5 billion from last year's results, we would have grown this quarter on a year-over-year basis," Cook said. "And so that's how we look at it internally from how the company is performing." Apple said iPhone sales fell nearly 10% to $45.96 billion, suggesting weak demand for the current generation of smartphones, which were released in September. The sales were in line with analyst estimates, and Cook said that without last year's increased sales, iPhone revenue would have been flat. Mac sales were up 4% to $7.45 billion, but they are still below the segment's high-water mark set in 2022. Cook said sales were driven by the company's new MacBook Air models which were released with an upgraded M3 chip in March. Other Products, which is how Apple reports sales of its Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, was down 10% year over year to $7.9 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent, published last month: Humans now share the web equally with bots, according to a major new report -- as some fear that the internet is dying. In recent months, the so-called "dead internet theory" has gained new popularity. It suggests that much of the content online is in fact automatically generated, and that the number of humans on the web is dwindling in comparison with bot accounts. Now a new report from cyber security company Imperva suggests that it is increasingly becoming true. Nearly half, 49.6 per cent, of all internet traffic came from bots last year, its "Bad Bot Report" indicates. That is up 2 percent in comparison with last year, and is the highest number ever seen since the report began in 2013. In some countries, the picture is worse. In Ireland, 71 per cent of internet traffic is automated, it said. Some of that rise is the result of the adoption of generative artificial intelligence and large language models. Companies that build those systems use bots scrape the internet and gather data that can then be used to train them. Some of those bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Imperva warned. More and more of them come from residential internet connections, which makes them look more legitimate. "Automated bots will soon surpass the proportion of internet traffic coming from humans, changing the way that organizations approach building and protecting their websites and applications," said Nanhi Singh, general manager for application security at Imperva. "As more AI-enabled tools are introduced, bots will become omnipresent."

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"Players who made Steam purchases of Helldivers 2 are now, months after the fact, being told by Sony that their games will be useless unless linked to a PSN account," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. From a report: Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment announced today that Helldivers 2 players on Steam will soon be required to link their in-game profiles to a PlayStation Network account -- a feature that was optional at launch due to "technical issues" -- or risk losing access to the game. SIE explained that account linking allows players to take advantage of "safety and security" provided by PlayStation, as it can more easily protect folks from "griefing and abuse by enabling the banning of players that engage in that type of behavior." Many Steam players haven't responded well to the news. As of the time of writing, over 2,500 negative user reviews have been submitted to the game's storefront page today, blemishing an otherwise spotless "Very Positive" rating. Some reviews cite data harvesting and security concerns as potential worries. Others point to the fact that Sony waited months after launch to make account linking mandatory. How this affects players in regions that don't have access to the PlayStation Network is a bigger concern, though. In the Helldivers 2 Discord, community manager Thomas 'Twinbeard' Petersson said they aren't yet sure what these rule changes meant for players in areas without PSN access, which could be another factor contributing to the negative downturn.

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A bipartisan group of senators, led by Jeff Merkley, John Kennedy, and Roger Marshall, is advocating for limitations on the Transportation Security Administration's use of facial recognition technology due to concerns about privacy and civil liberties. PBS reports: In a letter on Thursday, the group of 14 lawmakers called on Senate leaders to use the upcoming reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration as a vehicle to limit TSA's use of the technology so Congress can put in place some oversight. "This technology poses significant threats to our privacy and civil liberties, and Congress should prohibit TSA's development and deployment of facial recognition tools until rigorous congressional oversight occurs," the senators wrote. The effort, led by Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., John Kennedy, R-La., and Roger Marshall, R-Kan., "would halt facial recognition technology at security checkpoints, which has proven to improve security effectiveness, efficiency, and the passenger experience," TSA said in a statement. The technology is currently in use at 84 airports around the country and is planned to expand in the coming years to the roughly 430 covered by TSA.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Late last year, an artificial intelligence engineer at Amazon was wrapping up the work week and getting ready to spend time with some friends visiting from out of town. Then, a Slack message popped up. He suddenly had a deadline to deliver a project by 6 a.m. on Monday. There went the weekend. The AI engineer bailed on his friends, who had traveled from the East Coast to the Seattle area. Instead, he worked day and night to finish the job. But it was all for nothing. The project was ultimately "deprioritized," the engineer told CNBC. He said it was a familiar result. AI specialists, he said, commonly sprint to build new features that are often suddenly shelved in favor of a hectic pivot to another AI project. The engineer, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said he had to write thousands of lines of code for new AI features in an environment with zero testing for mistakes. Since code can break if the required tests are postponed, the Amazon engineer recalled periods when team members would have to call one another in the middle of the night to fix aspects of the AI feature's software. AI workers at other Big Tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, told CNBC about the pressure they are similarly under to roll out tools at breakneck speeds due to the internal fear of falling behind the competition in a technology that, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, is having its "iPhone moment."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Hyundai has agreed to spend nearly $1 billion on Motional, an investment that will give the automaker a majority stake while providing the self-driving startup with the necessary capital to keep operating. The Korean automaker invested $475 million directly into Motional as part of a broader deal that includes buying out joint venture partner Aptiv. As part of the deal, Hyundai will spend another $448 million to buy 11% of Aptiv's common equity interest in Motional, according to information revealed Thursday in Aptiv's first-quarter earnings report. Aptiv also shared that it expects to reduce its common equity interest in Motional from 50% as of March 31 to about 15%, leaving Hyundai with the remaining 85% control. Aptiv Chairman and CEO Kevin Clark flagged in January that the company would reduce its ownership interest in Motional. The company said at the time that it would stop allocating capital towards Motional due to the high cost of commercializing a robotaxi business and the long road ahead to profits. Aptiv on Thursday reduced its full-year net sales forecast for 2024 to be between $20.85 billion and $21.45 billion, down from between $21.3 billion to $21.9 billion. Motional confirmed the new funding round and increased stake from Hyundai, but didn't confirm Aptiv's numbers. Hyundai, however, said the amounts listed in Aptiv's earnings report were accurate. "Motional started as Boston-based autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy in 2013, before being acquired by Delphi for $450 million," reports TechCrunch. "Delphi would later split it's business with the Aptiv unit absorbing nuTonomy. The entity became Motional under a $4 billion Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture in 2019." "While it's clear from Aptiv's earnings report that the company is trying to manage risks and optimize finances amid a less positive outlook, the company's retreat, and Hyundai's step forward, raises questions about Motional's future."

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"Aamrok 3.0, ported to Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5, has been released," writes Slashdot reader serafean. "With the heavy lifting being done, the Qt6/KF6 version is expected later in the year." Originally developed for Linux as part of the KDE desktop environment, Amarok is a free, cross-platform music player that supports various audio formats and a user interface that can be tailored to individual preferences. These are the main features/changes, as highlighted in a KDE blog post: FEATURES: - Added a visual hint that context view applets can be resized in edit mode. - Display missing metadata errors in Wikipedia applet UI. - Add a button to stop automatic Wikipedia page updating. (BR 485813) CHANGES: - Replace defunct lyricwiki with lyrics.ovh as lyrics provider for now. (BR 455937) - Show only relevant items in wikipedia applet right click menu (BR 323941), use monobook skin for opened links and silently ignore non-wikipedia links. - Don't show non-functional play mode controls in dynamic mode (BR 287055) The changelog is available here. You can find the package on download.kde.org.

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Aria Alamalhodaei reports via TechCrunch: Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite -- a critical technology validation for the company, potentially opening the door to connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world. The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites to orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-10 ride-share mission in March; since that time, the company confirmed that it has received signals from the onboard 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away. The sky is truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: the startup says its technology can be used in markets including logistics, cattle tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for kids, car inventory, construction sites, and soil temperature monitoring. Haro said the low-hanging fruit is those industries that are desperate for network coverage even once per day, like remote asset monitoring for the oil and gas industry. As the constellation scales, Hubble will turn its attention to sectors that may need more frequent updates, like soil monitoring, to continuous coverage use cases like fall monitoring for the elderly. Once its up and running, a customer would simply need to integrate their devices' chipsets with a piece of firmware to enable connection to Hubble's network.

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In a first for "digital health technology," the Apple Watch's atrial fibrillation (AFib) history feature has been approved by the FDA to join the FDA's Medical Device Development Tools (MDDT) program. This means the wearable is now usable in clinical studies. The Verge reports: The FDA announcement describes using it as a noninvasive way to collect the data both before and after treatment: "Designed to be used as a biomarker test to help evaluate estimates of AFib burden as a secondary effectiveness endpoint within clinical studies intended to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of cardiac ablation devices to treat."

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