While NASA engineers review propulsion system data, Boeing's Starliner will remain docked at the ISS longer than planned, with a new departure date yet to be specified due to upcoming spacewalks and ongoing engineering reviews. "After repeated delays, the spacecraft was set to leave the outpost on June 25 and land at White Sands, New Mexico," notes The Register. NASA has stated that the crew is not in a hurry to leave, with sufficient supplies available, and the delay will allow more time to address helium leaks and thruster issues observed during docking. From the report: The Starliner will need to depart the ISS before August without some additional engineering analysis. During the post-docking news conference, Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager, gave a figure of 45 days for the docked duration, meaning a docking would have to occur during the latter half of July at the very latest. The delay will remove any potential conflict with the upcoming spacewalks and give engineers more time to review data from the Starliner's propulsion system. The vehicle has been bedeviled by helium leaks and thruster problems. Once the Starliner commences its return to Earth, the service module where the problematic hardware is located will be discarded, depriving engineers of an avenue of investigation. Stich said, "We are taking our time and following our standard mission management team process. We are letting the data drive our decision-making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking. Additionally, given the duration of the mission, it is appropriate for us to complete an agency-level review, similar to what was done ahead of NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 return after two months on orbit, to document the agency's formal acceptance on proceeding as planned." The Starliner has been cleared for use as a return vehicle in the event of an emergency. In the highly unlikely event that NASA opts not to use the Starliner as a crew return vehicle, the agency has a few options open to it. One could be to remove two crew members from the next Crew Dragon launch -- currently set for the latter half of August -- or use an upcoming Soyuz, although the latter requires custom seat liners for the crew. During the June 18 teleconference Stich confirmed that the team had already cleared the vehicle for a contingency or emergency return, and added "I think we will work through each of these issues and we will get to a point where we can bring Butch and Suni back in Starliner."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new law coming into effect in Colorado in July is banning everyday products that intentionally contain toxic "forever chemicals," including clothes, cookware, menstruation products, dental floss and ski wax -- unless they can be made safer. Under the legislation, which takes effect on 1 July, many products using per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances -- or PFAS chemicals linked to cancer risk, lower fertility and developmental delays -- will be prohibited starting in 2026. By 2028, Colorado will also ban the sale of all PFAS-treated clothes, backpacks and waterproof outdoor apparel. The law will also require companies selling PFAS-coated clothing to attach disclosure labels. The initial draft of state senate bill 81, introduced in 2022, included a full ban on PFAS beginning in 2032. But that measure was written out after facing opposition. Colorado has already passed a measure requiring companies to phase out PFAS in carpets, furniture, cosmetics, juvenile products, some food packaging and those used in oil and gas production. The incoming law's diluted version illustrates the challenges lawmakers have in regulating chemicals that are used to make products waterproof, nonstick or resistant to staining. Manufacturers say the products, at best, will take time to make with a safer replacement -- or at worst, are not yet possible to get made in such fashion. [...] In Colorado, state senator Lisa Cutter, one of the sponsors of the new law there, has said she still wants a complete ban on PFAS but acknowledges the problems. "As much as I want PFAS to go away forever and forever, there are going to be some difficult pivots," she told the outlet. They include balancing the potential cost to consumers in making products PFAS-free. Cutter told CBS News that it was "really hard" challenging lobbying groups that "spent a lot of money ensuring that these chemicals can continue being put into our products and make profits." Cutter had been accused of stifling innovation and industry. She said she believed companies could be successful while also looking out for the communities they serve. "Certainly, there are cases where it's not plausible right away to gravitate away from them, but we need to be moving in that direction," Cutter said. "Our community shouldn't have to pay the price for their health."

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department over his alleged role in one of the largest U.S. government breaches of classified material. As a result, he will avoid imprisonment in the United States. CNN reports: Under the terms of the new agreement (PDF), Justice Department prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence -- which is equal to the amount of time Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while he fought extradition to the US. The plea deal would credit that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country. The plea deal must still be approved by a federal judge. Assange had faced 18 counts from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the breach that carried a max of up to 175 years in prison, though he was unlikely to be sentenced to that time in full. Assange was being pursued by US authorities for publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011. US officials alleged that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of unfiltered US diplomatic cables that potentially endangered confidential sources, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees.

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Since May, Meta has been labeling photos created with AI tools on its social networks to help users better identify the content they're consuming. However, as TechCrunch's Ivan Mehta reports, this approach has faced criticism as many photos not created using AI tools have been incorrectly labeled, prompting Meta to reevaluate its labeling strategy to better reflect the actual use of AI in images. From the report: There are plenty of examples of Meta automatically attaching the label to photos that were not created through AI. For example, this photo of Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League Cricket tournament. Notably, the label is only visible on the mobile apps and not on the web. Plenty of other photographers have raised concerns over their images having been wrongly tagged with the "Made with AI" label. Their point is that simply editing a photo with a tool should not be subject to the label. Former White House photographer Pete Souza said in an Instagram post that one of his photos was tagged with the new label. Souza told TechCrunch in an email that Adobe changed how its cropping tool works and you have to "flatten the image" before saving it as a JPEG image. He suspects that this action has triggered Meta's algorithm to attach this label. "What's annoying is that the post forced me to include the 'Made with AI' even though I unchecked it," Souza told TechCrunch. Meta would not answer on the record to TechCrunch's questions about Souza's experience or other photographers' posts who said their posts were incorrectly tagged. However, after publishing of the story, Meta said the company is evaluating its approach to indicate labels reflect the amount of AI used in an image. "Our intent has always been to help people know when they see content that has been made with AI. We are taking into account recent feedback and continue to evaluate our approach so that our labels reflect the amount of AI used in an image," a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. "For now, Meta provides no separate labels to indicate if a photographer used a tool to clean up their photo, or used AI to create it," notes TechCrunch. "For users, it might be hard to understand how much AI was involved in a photo." "Meta's label specifies that 'Generative AI may have been used to create or edit content in this post' -- but only if you tap on the label. Despite this approach, there are plenty of photos on Meta's platforms that are clearly AI-generated, and Meta's algorithm hasn't labeled them."

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Microsoft has decided to end its Project Natick experiment, which involved submerging a datacenter capsule 120 miles off the coast of Scotland to explore the feasibility of deploying underwater datacenters. TechSpot's Rob Thubron reports: Project Natick's origins stretch all the way back to 2013. Following a three-month trial in the Pacific, a submersible data center capsule was deployed 120 miles off the coast of Scotland in 2018. It was brought back to the surface in 2020, offering what were said to be promising results. Microsoft lost six of the 855 servers that were in the capsule during its time underwater. In a comparison experiment being run simultaneously on dry land, it lost eight out of 135 servers. Microsoft noted that the constant temperature stability of the external seawater was a factor in the experiment's success. It also highlighted how the data center was filled with inert nitrogen gas that protected the servers, as opposed to the reactive oxygen gas in the land data center. Despite everything going so well, Microsoft is discontinuing Project Natick. "I'm not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world," Noelle Walsh, the head of the company's Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) division, told DatacenterDynamics. "My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server. So we'll apply those learnings to other cases," Walsh added. Microsoft also patented a high-pressure data center in 2019 and an artificial reef data center in 2017, but it seems the company is putting resources into traditional builds for now. "I would say now we're getting more focused," Walsh said. "We like to do R&D and try things out, and you learn something here and it may fly over there. But I'd say now, it's very focused." "While we don't currently have data centers in the water, we will continue to use Project Natick as a research platform to explore, test, and validate new concepts around data center reliability and sustainability, for example with liquid immersion."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google announced on Monday that it's bringing its AI technology Gemini to teen students using their school accounts, after having already offered Gemini to teens using their personal accounts. The company is also giving educators access to new tools alongside this release. Google says that giving teens access to Gemini can help prepare them with the skills they need to thrive in a future where generative AI exists. Gemini will help students learn more confidently with real-time feedback, the company believes. Google claims it will not use data from chats with students to train and improve its AI models, and has taken steps to ensure it's bringing this technology to students responsibly. Gemini has guardrails that will prevent inappropriate responses, such as illegal or age-gated substances, from appearing in responses. It will also actively recommend teens use its double-check feature to help them develop information literacy and critical thinking skills. Gemini will be available to teen students while using their Google Workspace for Education accounts in English in more than 100 countries. Gemini will be off by default for teens until admins choose to turn it on. Google also announced that it's launching its Read Along in Classroom feature worldwide to help students improve reading skills with real-time support. Educators can assign grade-level or phonics-based reading activities and receive insights on students' reading accuracy, speed, and comprehension.

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Top officials from the European Union and China agreed to negotiate a planned series of import taxes on Chinese electric vehicles. "The call marks the first time the two sides have agreed to negotiate since the EU threatened China with electric vehicle (EV) tariffs of up to 38%," reports the BBC. From the report: The EU said Chinese EVs were unfairly subsidised by its government. In response, China accused the EU of protectionism and trade rule breaches. An EU spokesperson told the BBC the call between Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis and his Chinese counterpart Wang Wentao was "candid and constructive." They said the two sides would "continue to engage at all levels in the coming weeks." However, the spokesperson also doubled down on the EU's opposition to how the Chinese EV industry is funded. They said "any negotiated outcome" to the proposed tariffs must address the "injurious subsidisation" of Chinese EVs. China released a similar statement on Saturday and made clear it still disagreed with the EU. As well as its call with the EU, Mr Wang met German Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck on Saturday. In a Facebook post about the meeting, China's Ministry of Commerce said it had told Mr Habeck about its "firm opposition" to the tariffs. It repeated its threat to file a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization (WTO) "to firmly defend its legitimate rights and interests." Germany has also expressed criticism of the tariffs. When the EU first proposed them last week following its investigation of Chinese EVs in the trading bloc, Germany's Transport Minister, Volker Wissing, said the move risked a "trade war" with Beijing. "The European Commission's punitive tariffs hit German companies and their top products," he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, at the time. The European car industry has been critical too. Stellantis - which owns Citroen, Peugeot, Vauxhall, Fiat, and several other brands - said it did not support measures that "contribute to the world fragmentation [of trade]."

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OpenAI has purchased Multi (previously Remotion), "a five-person startup based in New York City that focuses on screenshare and collaboration technologies for workers using Mac computers," reports VentureBeat. The latest acquisition comes just days after the AI company announced it had acquired enterprise analytics startup Rockset. No details were provided on the terms of the deal. From the report: Multi's co-founder and CEO Alexander Embiricos posted on his X account today stating specifically that he (and presumably the entire Multi team) has joined OpenAI's "ChatGPT desktop team," the unit at the company responsible for building the ChatGPT for Mac desktop app that was unveiled back in May 2024. Multi broke the news first to its users and followers in a blog post, writing: "Recently, we've been increasingly asking ourselves how we should work with computers. Not on or using computers, but truly with computers. With AI. We believe it's one of the most important product questions of our time. And so, we're beyond excited to share that Multi is joining OpenAI!" The news has users on X speculating that OpenAI will use Multi to allow its AI models such as GPT-4o to "take over" a user's computer and perform actions on their behalf based on text or voice prompts. So you could say something like "ChatGPT, create a spreadsheet of my latest hours and send it to my manager" and it would try to do this. Based on what I've learned about Multi (see final section of this article below) and zero insider knowledge, I think it is at least as likely that OpenAI will seek to use the acquisition as a means of souping up and adding features to its ChatGPT Team and Enterprise subscription plans, as those are already more focused on providing tech for teams to help all the individuals on them work better together. However, Multi also broke the news that it is "sunsetting" the current version of its software and will end support for it in one month: on July 24, 2024, as well as delete all user data. Egads! Multi states in a short FAQ in its blog post that users should go ahead and export their data before that time, using the "Export Session Notes" setting under the URL: https://app.multi.app/account. It is also opening the door to users asking for extensions to the deletion date of July 24, 2024 for their individual or company accounts, if they email Embiricos himself directly at alexander@multi.app. Multi also says its team members can help recommend alternatives through the same email address.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Car dealerships in North America continue to wrestle with major disruptions that started last week with cyberattacks on a software company used widely in the auto retail sales sector. CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers in the U.S. and Canada, was hit by back-to-back cyberattacks Wednesday. That led to an outage that has continued to impact operations. For prospective car buyers, that's meant delays at dealerships or vehicle orders written up by hand. There's no immediate end in sight, with CDK saying it expects the restoration process to take "several days" to complete. On Monday, Group 1 Automotive Inc., a $4 billion automotive retailer, said that it continued to use "alternative processes" to sell cars to its customers. Lithia Motors and AutoNation, two other dealership chains, also disclosed that they implemented workarounds to keep their operations going. [...] Several major auto companies -- including Stellantis, Ford and BMW -- confirmed to The Associated Press last week that the CDK outage had impacted some of their dealers, but that sales operations continue. In light of the ongoing situation, a spokesperson for Stellantis said Friday that many dealerships had switched to manual processes to serve customers. That includes writing up orders by hand. A Ford spokesperson added that the outage may cause "some delays and inconveniences at some dealers and for some customers." However, many Ford and Lincoln customers are still getting sales and service support through alternative routes being used at dealerships. Group 1 Automotive Inc., which owns 202 automotive dealerships, 264 franchises, and 42 collision centers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, said Monday that the incident has disrupted its business applications and processes in its U.S. operations that rely on CDK's dealers' systems. The company said that it took measures to protect and isolate its systems from CDK's platform. All Group 1 U.S. dealerships will continue to conduct business using alternative processes until CDK's dealers' systems are available, the company said Monday. Group 1's dealerships in the U.K. don't use CDK's dealers' systems and are not impacted by the incident. In regulatory filings, Lithia Motors and AutoNation disclosed that last week's incident at CDK had disrupted their operations as well. Lithia said it activated cyber incident response procedures, which included "severing business service connections between the company's systems and CDK's." AutoNation said it also took steps to protect its systems and data -- adding that all of its locations remain open "albeit with lower productivity," as many are served manually or through alternative processes.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cord Cutters News: Earlier this week, Chicken Soup For The Soul, the parent company behind Redbox, Crackel, and the streaming service by the same name, announced that the entire board of directors and board of managers of each subsidiary of the Company other than William J. Rouhana, Jr., have been fired. This comes as a holder of more than 75% of the voting power of the company used his stock holdings to lay off the Company's board of directors. Now, it has come out that the company missed a $4 million payment to NBCUniversal as a part of its settlement over unpaid royalties. Now it faces a possible order to pay all of $16.7 million it owes NBCUniversal as questions about the future of the company grows. This comes after NBCUniversal sued saying Redbox had not been paying royalties. It agreed to a payment plan but now has missed the first payment of the plan. Recently the company has been hit hard by the decline in ad revenue on its free streaming services and the drop in DVD rentals at its Redbox locations. This has led to the company seeing its revenues drop 75% in the 1st quarter of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023, according to a SEC filing first spotted by NextTV. Chicken Soup For The Soul is in a tough situation after acquiring Redbox in 2022 for $50 million in stock and an assumption of $325 million in debt. Add on top of that a shaky media environment with cratering ad revenue and quarterly losses, and the company's future is very much in the air. In August, CEO William J. Rouhana said that the company was holding a strategic review to evaluate its opportunities, which is business speak for putting itself up for sale. Chicken Soup for The Soul last year announced that it was in active discussions for a potential sale back in October of this year but so far nothing has come from these talks.

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Jonathan O'Callaghan reports via Scientific American: Despite more than a century of efforts to show otherwise, it seems Albert Einstein can still do no wrong. Or at least that's the case for his special theory of relativity, which predicts that time ticks slower for objects moving at extremely high speeds. Called time dilation, this effect grows in intensity the closer to the speed of light that something travels, but it is strangely subjective: a passenger on an accelerating starship would experience time passing normally, but external observers would see the starship moving ever slower as its speed approached that of light. As counterintuitive as this effect may be, it has been checked and confirmed in the motions of everything from Earth-orbiting satellites far-distant galaxies. Now a group of scientists have taken such tests one step further by observing more than 1,500 supernovae across the universe to reveal time dilation's effects on a staggering cosmic scale. The researchers' findings, once again, reach an all-too-familiar conclusion. "Einstein is right one more time," says Geraint Lewis of the University of Sydney, a co-author of the study. In the paper, posted earlier this month on the preprint server arXiv.org, Ryan White of the University of Queensland in Australia and his colleagues used data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to investigate time dilation. For the past decade, researchers involved with DES had used the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to study particular exploding stars called Type 1a supernovae across billions of years of cosmic history. [...] Type 1a supernovae are keystone cosmic explosions caused when a white dwarf -- the slowly cooling corpse of a midsized star -- siphons so much material from a companion that it ignites a thermonuclear reaction and explodes. This explosion occurs once the growing white dwarf reaches about 1.44 times the mass of our sun, a threshold known as the Chandrasekhar limit. This physical baseline imbues all Type 1a supernovae with a fairly consistent brightness, making them useful cosmic beacons for gauging intergalactic distances. "They should all be essentially the same kind of event no matter where you look in the universe," White says. "They all come from exploding white dwarf stars, which happens at almost exactly the same mass no matter where they are." The steadfastness of these supernovae across the entire observable universe is what makes them potent probes of time dilation -- nothing else, in principle, should so radically and precisely slow their apparent progression in lockstep with ever-greater distances. Using the dataset of 1,504 supernovae from DES, White's paper shows with astonishing accuracy that this correlation holds true out to a redshift of 1.2, a time when the universe was about five billion years old. "This is the most precise measurement" of cosmological time dilation yet, White says, up to seven times more precise than previous measurements of cosmological time dilation that used fewer supernovae. [...] This particular supernova-focused facet of the Dark Energy Survey has concluded, so until a new dataset is taken, White's measurement of cosmological time dilation is unlikely to be beaten. "It's a pretty definitive measurement," says [Tamara Davis of the University of Queensland, a co-author of the paper]. "You don't really need to do any better." Jonathan O'Callaghan is an award-winning freelance journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics, commercial spaceflight and space exploration.

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Justine Calma writes via The Verge: A group of young plaintiffs reached a historic climate settlement with the state of Hawaii and Hawaii Department of Transportation in a deal that will push the state to clean up tailpipe pollution. The 13 youth plaintiffs filed suit in 2022 when they were all between the ages of 9 and 18. In the suit, Navahine F. v. Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT), they alleged that the state and HDOT had violated their right to "a clean and healthful environment," which is enshrined in Hawaii's constitution. The settlement (PDF), reached on Thursday, affirms that right and commits the DOT to creating a plan to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 2045. To hit that goal, the state will have to dedicate at least $40 million to building out its EV charging network by the end of the decade and complete new pedestrian, bicycle, and transit networks over the next five years. The settlement also creates a new unit within HDOT tasked with coordinating CO2 emission reductions and a volunteer youth council to advise HDOT. This is the first settlement agreement in which "government defendants have decided to resolve a constitutional climate case in partnership with youth plaintiffs," according to nonprofit legal groups Our Children's Trust and Earthjustice, which represent the plaintiffs. Back in 2018, Hawaii committed to reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2045 -- in line with what climate research determined was necessary to meet the Paris climate accord goal of stopping global warming. But the state wasn't doing enough to reach that goal, the plaintiffs alleged. Transportation makes up the biggest chunk of the state's greenhouse gas pollution. Justine Calma is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Ellen Bagley was delighted when she made her first sale on a popular second-hand clothing app, but just a few minutes later, the thrill turned to shock as the 20-year-old from Linkoping in Sweden discovered she'd been robbed. Everything seemed normal when Bagley received a direct message on the platform, which asked her to verify personal details to complete the deal. She clicked the link, which fired up BankID -- the ubiquitous digital authorization system used by nearly all Swedish adults.After receiving a couple of error messages, she started thinking something was wrong, but it was already too late. Over 10,000 Swedish kronor ($1,000) had been siphoned from her account and the thieves disappeared into the digital shadows. "The fraudsters are so skilled at making things look legitimate," said Bagley, who was born after BankID was created. "It's not easy" to identify scams. Although financial crime has garnered fewer headlines than a surge in gang-related gun violence, it's become a growing risk for the country. Beyond its borders, Sweden is an important test case on fighting cashless crime because it's gone further on ditching paper money than almost any other country in Europe. Online fraud and digital crime in Sweden have surged, with criminals taking 1.2 billion kronor in 2023 through scams like the one Bagley fell for, doubling from 2021. Law-enforcement agencies estimate that the size of Sweden's criminal economy could amount to as high as 2.5% of the country's gross domestic product. To counter the digital crime spree, Swedish authorities have put pressure on banks to tighten security measures and make it harder on tech-savvy criminals, but it's a delicate balancing act. Going too far could slow down the economy, while doing too little erodes trust and damages legitimate businesses in the process.Using complex webs of fake companies and forging documents to gain access to Sweden's welfare system, sophisticated fraudsters have made Sweden a "Silicon Valley for criminal entrepreneurship," said Daniel Larson, a senior economic crime prosecutor. While the shock of armed violence has grabbed public attention -- the nation's gun-homicide rate tripled between 2012 and 2022 -- economic crime underlies gang activity and needs to be tackled as aggressively, he added. "That has been a strategic mistake," Larson said. "This profit-generating crime is what's fueling organized crime and, in some cases, leads to these conflicts." Sweden's switch to electronic cash started after a surge of armed robberies in the 1990s, and by 2022, only 8% of Swedes said they had used cash for their latest purchase, according to a central bank survey. Along with neighboring Norway, Sweden has Europe's lowest number of ATMs per capita, according to the IMF. The prevalence of BankID play a role in Sweden's vulnerability. The system works like an online signature. If used, it's considered a done deal and the transaction gets executed immediately. It was designed by Sweden's banks to make electronic payments even quicker and easier than handing over a stack of bills. Since it's original rollout in 2001, it's become part of the everyday Swedish life. On average, the service -- which requires a six-digit code, a fingerprint or a face scan for authentication -- is used more than twice a day by every adult Swede and is involved in everything from filing tax returns to paying for bus tickets.Originally intended as a product by banks for their customers, its use exploded in 2005 after Sweden's tax agency adopted the technology as an identification for tax returns, giving it the government's official seal of approval. The launch of BankID on mobile phones in 2010 increased usage even further, along with public perception that associated cash with criminality.The country's central bank has acknowledged that some of those connotations may have gone too far. "We have to be very clear that there are still honest people using cash," Riksbank Governor Erik Thedeen told Bloomberg.

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Filipe Esposito reports via 9to5Mac: When Apple introduced AirPods in 2016, the company also unveiled a new, easy and intuitive way to pair wireless accessories to iPhone and iPad. Rather than having to go to Bluetooth settings and press buttons, the system identifies the accessory nearby and prompts the user to pair it. With iOS 18, this quick pairing process will be available for the first time to accessory makers. Called AccessorySetupKit, the new API gives third-party accessories the same setup experience as Apple accessories such as AirPods and AirTag. As soon as the iPhone or iPad running iOS 18 with the right app detects a compatible accessory, it will show the user a popup to confirm pairing with that device. With just a tap, the system will automatically handle all the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity required by the accessory. This also means that users will no longer have to manually give Bluetooth and Wi-Fi permissions individually to that accessory's app. If the accessory requires a more complex pairing process, such as confirming a PIN code, the iOS 18 API can also ask the user for this information without the need to open an app. Once the accessory has been paired, more information about it can be found in a new Accessories menu within the Privacy settings.

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In a bog post on Friday, OpenAI announced it has acquired Rockset, an enterprise analytics startup, to "power our retrieval infrastructure across products." The Verge reports: This acquisition is OpenAI's first where the company will integrate both a company's technology and its team, a spokesperson tells Bloomberg. The two companies didn't share the terms of the acquisition. Rockset has raised $105 million in funding to date. "Rockset's infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence," OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap says in a statement. "We're excited to bring these benefits to our customers by integrating Rockset's foundation into OpenAI products." "Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure backing OpenAI's product suite," Rockset CEO Venkat Venkataramani says in a Rockset blog post. "We'll be helping OpenAI solve the hard database problems that AI apps face at massive scale." Venkataramani says that current Rockset customers won't experience "immediate change" and that the company will gradually transition them off the platform. "Some" members of Rockset's team will move over to OpenAI, Bloomberg says.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A hacker is advertising customer data allegedly stolen from the Australia-based live events and ticketing company TEG on a well-known hacking forum. On Thursday, a hacker put up for sale the alleged stolen data from TEG, claiming to have information of 30 million users, including the full name, gender, date of birth, username, hashed passwords, and email addresses. In late May, TEG-owned ticketing company Ticketek disclosed a data breach affecting Australian customers' data, "which is stored in a cloud-based platform, hosted by a reputable, global third party supplier." The company said that "no Ticketek customer account has been compromised," thanks to the encryption methods used to store their passwords. TEG conceded, however, that "customer names, dates of birth and email addresses may have been impacted" -- data that would line up with that advertised on the hacking forum. The hacker included a sample of the alleged stolen data in their post. TechCrunch confirmed that at least some of the data published on the forum appears legitimate by attempting to sign up for new accounts using the published email addresses. In a number of cases, Ticketek's website gave an error, suggesting the email addresses are already in use. There's evidence that the company's "cloud-based platform" provider is Snowflake, "which has been at the center of a recent series of data thefts affecting several of its customers, including Ticketmaster, Santander Bank, and others," notes TechCrunch. "A now-deleted post on Snowflake's website from January 2023 was titled: 'TEG Personalizes Live Entertainment Experiences with Snowflake.' In 2022, consulting company Altis published a case study (PDF) detailing how the company, working with TEG, 'built a modern data platform for ingesting streaming data into Snowflake.'"

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British startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new CEO. The 51-year-old Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, "is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion that could result in a lower valuation for the firm," reports the Information (paywalled). "The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million." In March, Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque stepped down from the role to pursue decentralized AI. "In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can't beat 'centralized AI' with more 'centralized AI,' referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic," reported TechCrunch at the time. The move followed a report in April that claimed the company ran out of cash to pay its bills for its rented cloud GPUs. Last year, the company raised millions at a $1 billion valuation.

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The Ontario Science Center, a world-class science and cultural institution in Toronto, is shutting down immediately due to the risk that the building's roof could collapse, the province announced Friday. CBC News: The abrupt closure, which the province says could last years, comes after the government's controversial announcement in 2023 that the popular landmark and attraction would be moved to the Ontario Place site -- a move it says will save costs. "The actions taken today will protect the health and safety of visitors and staff," said Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma in a news release. "We are making every effort to avoid disruption to the public and help the Ontario Science Centre continue delivering on its mandate." An engineering report this week by Rimkus Consulting Group showed each of the centre's three buildings contain roof panels in a "distressed, high-risk" condition, the Ministry of Infrastructure said in a news release. The panels require fixing by Oct. 31, 2024 to "avoid further stress due to potential snow load which could lead to roof panel failure," the release said. Fixing the roof will cost between $22 million and $40 million, the ministry said, requiring the centre be closed for up to two years. "These estimates are incomplete and subject to change," said the ministry, noting the costs make up only a "small portion" of the funding needed to keep the science centre open. The government says the centre needs $478 million to tackle its "failing infrastructure" and sustain programming.

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TikTok revealed it offered the U.S. government a "kill switch" in 2022 to address data protection and national security concerns, allowing the government to shut down the platform if it violated certain rules. The disclosure was made as it began its legal fight against legislation that will require ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. assets or face a ban. The BBC reports: "This law is a radical departure from this country's tradition of championing an open Internet, and sets a dangerous precedent allowing the political branches to target a disfavored speech platform and force it to sell or be shut down," they argued in their legal submission. They also claimed the US government refused to engage in any serious settlement talks after 2022, and pointed to the "kill switch" offer as evidence of the lengths they had been prepared to go. TikTok says the mechanism would have allowed the government the "explicit authority to suspend the platform in the United States at the US government's sole discretion" if it did not follow certain rules. A draft "National Security Agreement", proposed by TikTok in August 2022, would have seen the company having to follow rules such as properly funding its data protection units and making sure that ByteDance did not have access to US users' data. The "kill switch" could have been triggered by the government if it broke this agreement, it claimed. In a letter - first reported by the Washington Post - addressed to the US Department of Justice, TikTok's lawyer alleges that the government "ceased any substantive negotiations" after the proposal of the new rules. The letter, dated 1 April 2024, says the US government ignored requests to meet for further negotiations. It also alleges the government did not respond to TikTok's invitation to "visit and inspect its Dedicated Transparency Center in Maryland." Further reading: TikTok Says US Ban Inevitable Without a Court Order Blocking Law

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