Epilogue, the company behind the GB Operator emulator, which lets users play Game Boy cartridges on a PC, announced that it's working on an update to turn the Game Boy Camera into a lo-fi webcam. Time Extension reports: The Playback app currently allows you to download photos from the Game Boy Camera accessory, but Epilogue has just demonstrated the ability to use the peripheral as a webcam. "We now have a live feed from the Game Boy Camera, but still need to fine-tune some things and allow for configuration options," says the company. "We wanted to share this update because it was exciting to see it finally work, and [we] can't wait to see everyone having fun with it. It's the worst and the best webcam you'll ever have."

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Cloudflare today unveiled a new feature part of its content delivery network (CDN) that prevents AI developers from scraping content on the web. According to Cloudflare, the feature is available for both the free and paid tiers of its service. SiliconANGLE reports: The feature uses AI to detect automated content extraction attempts. According to Cloudflare, its software can spot bots that scrape content for LLM training projects even when they attempt to avoid detection. "Sadly, we've observed bot operators attempt to appear as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent," Cloudflare engineers wrote in a blog post today. "We've monitored this activity over time, and we're proud to say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot." One of the crawlers that Cloudflare managed to detect is a bot that collects content for Perplexity AI Inc., a well-funded search engine startup. Last month, Wired reported that the manner in which the bot scrapes websites makes its requests appear as regular user traffic. As a result, website operators have struggled to block Perplexity AI from using their content. Cloudflare assigns every website visit that its platform processes a score of 1 to 99. The lower the number, the greater the likelihood that the request was generated by a bot. According to the company, requests made by the bot that collects content for Perplexity AI consistently receive a score under 30. "When bad actors attempt to crawl websites at scale, they generally use tools and frameworks that we are able to fingerprint," Cloudflare's engineers detailed. "For every fingerprint we see, we use Cloudflare's network, which sees over 57 million requests per second on average, to understand how much we should trust this fingerprint." Cloudflare will update the feature over time to address changes in AI scraping bots' technical fingerprints and the emergence of new crawlers. As part of the initiative, the company is rolling out a tool that will enable website operators to report any new bots they may encounter.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The Food and Drug Administration will no longer allow the use of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food products and sodas due to concerns it poses a threat to people's health, the FDA announced Tuesday. The ban follows similar action in California against the food additive that's modified with bromine, which has been used in small quantities as a stabilizer in some citrus-flavored drinks and which is also found in fire retardants. Jim Jones, the deputy commissioner for the FDA's Human Foods Program, said in a statement that "removal of the only authorized use of BVO from the food supply was based on a thorough review of current science and research findings that raised safety concerns." The FDA "concluded that the intended use of BVO in food is no longer considered safe after the results of studies conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found the potential for adverse health effects in humans," per an agency statement. A 2022 FDA study found that oral exposure to the additive "is associated with increased tissue levels of bromine and that at high levels of exposure the thyroid is a target organ of potential negative health effects in rodents." The ban takes effect on August 2. Companies will have one year from then to "reformulate, relabel, and deplete the inventory of BVO-containing products before the FDA begins enforcing the final rule," according to the agency.

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Paul Voosen reports via Science Magazine: Few things prompt as much anxiety in science and the wider world as the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rising influence of China. This spring, these two factors created a rift at the European Geosciences Union (EGU), one of the world's largest geoscience societies, that led to the firing of its president. The whole episode has been "a packaging up of fear of AI and fear of China," says Michael Stephenson, former chief geologist of the United Kingdom and one of the founders of Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), a $70 million effort to connect digital geoscience databases. In 2019, another geoscience society, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), kicked off DDE, which has been funded almost entirely by the government of China's Jiangsu province. The dispute pivots on GeoGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that is one of DDE's main efforts. It is being developed by Jian Wang, chief technology officer of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Built on Qwen, Alibaba's own chatbot, and fine-tuned on billions of words from open-source geology studies and data sets, GeoGPT is meant to provide expert answers to questions, summarize documents, and create visualizations. Stephenson tested an early version, asking it about the challenges of using the fossilized teeth of conodonts, an ancient relative of fish, to define the start of the Permian period 299 million years ago. "It was very good at that," he says. As awareness of GeoGPT spread, so did concern. Paul Cleverly, a visiting professor at Robert Gordon University, gained access to an early version and said in a recent editorial in Geoscientist there were "serious issues around a lack of transparency, state censorship, and potential copyright infringement." Paul Cleverly and GeoScienceWorld CEO Phoebe McMellon raised these concerns in a letter to IUGS, arguing that the chatbot was built using unlicensed literature without proper citations. However, they did not cite specific copyright violations, so DDE President Chengshan Wang, a geologist at the China University of Geosciences, decided not to end the project. Tensions at EGU escalated when a complaint about GeoGPT's transparency was submitted before the EGU's April meeting, where GeoGPT would be introduced. "It arrived at an EGU whose leadership was already under strain," notes Science. The complaint exacerbated existing leadership issues within EGU, particularly surrounding President Irina Artemieva, who was seen as problematic by some executives due to her affiliations and actions. Science notes that she's "affiliated with Germany's GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel but is also paid by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences to advise it on its geophysical research." Artemieva forwarded the complaint via email to the DDE President to get his view, but forgot to delete the name attached to it, leading to a breach of confidentiality. This incident, among other leadership disputes, culminated in her dismissal and the elevation of Peter van der Beek to president. During the DDE session at the EGU meeting, van der Beek's enforcement actions against Chinese scientists and session attendees led to allegations of "harassment and discrimination." "Seeking to broker a peace deal around GeoGPT," IUGS's president and another former EGU president, John Ludden, organized a workshop and invited all parties to discuss GeoGPT's governance, ongoing negotiations for licensing deals and alternative AI models for GeoGPT's use.

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The Spanish government is introducing a porn passport to help porn platforms verify users' ages. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from Politico: Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they'll receive 30 generated "porn credits" with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits. While the tool has been criticized for its complexity, the government says the credit-based model is more privacy-friendly, ensuring that users' online activities are not easily traceable. The system will be available by the end of the summer. It will be voluntary, as online platforms can rely on other age-verification methods to screen out inappropriate viewers. It heralds an EU law going into force in October 2027, which will require websites to stop minors from accessing porn. Eventually, Madrid's porn passport is likely to be replaced by the EU's very own digital identity system (eIDAS2) -- a so-called wallet app allowing people to access a smorgasbord of public and private services across the whole bloc.

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Ahead of its one-year anniversary, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads has reached more than 175 million monthly active users. The Verge reports: Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened. A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip -- albeit not as quickly as its huge launch -- while Musk hasn't shared comparable metrics for X since he took over. As with any social network, and especially for Threads, monthly users only tell part of the growth story. It's telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn't shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users. I've heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app's growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn't expected to change.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Rodney Brooks talks about robotics and artificial intelligence, you should listen. Currently the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT, he also co-founded three key companies, including Rethink Robotics, iRobot and his current endeavor, Robust.ai. Brooks also ran the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade starting in 1997. In fact, he likes to make predictions about the future of AI and keeps a scorecard on his blog of how well he's doing. He knows what he's talking about, and he thinks maybe it's time to put the brakes on the screaming hype that is generative AI. Brooks thinks it's impressive technology, but maybe not quite as capable as many are suggesting. "I'm not saying LLMs are not important, but we have to be careful [with] how we evaluate them," he told TechCrunch. He says the trouble with generative AI is that, while it's perfectly capable of performing a certain set of tasks, it can't do everything a human can, and humans tend to overestimate its capabilities. "When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that," Brooks said. "And they're usually very over-optimistic, and that's because they use a model of a person's performance on a task." He added that the problem is that generative AI is not human or even human-like, and it's flawed to try and assign human capabilities to it. He says people see it as so capable they even want to use it for applications that don't make sense. Brooks offers his latest company, Robust.ai, a warehouse robotics system, as an example of this. Someone suggested to him recently that it would be cool and efficient to tell his warehouse robots where to go by building an LLM for his system. In his estimation, however, this is not a reasonable use case for generative AI and would actually slow things down. It's instead much simpler to connect the robots to a stream of data coming from the warehouse management software. "When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that. Language is not gonna help; it's just going to slow things down," he said. "We have massive data processing and massive AI optimization techniques and planning. And that's how we get the orders completed fast." "People say, 'Oh, the large language models are gonna make robots be able to do things they couldn't do.' That's not where the problem is. The problem with being able to do stuff is about control theory and all sorts of other hardcore math optimization," he said. "It's not useful in the warehouse to tell an individual robot to go out and get one thing for one order, but it may be useful for eldercare in homes for people to be able to say things to the robots," he said.

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Netflix has started booting subscribers off its cheapest ad-free subscription tier, "starting with the UK and Canada, with more countries inevitably to follow," reports MacRumors. From the report: The streaming giant has reportedly begun notifying users via on-screen messages about the last day they can access the service unless they upgrade. One Reddit user shared a notification they had received from the Netflix app, saying: "Your last day to watch Netflix is July 13th. Choose a new plan to keep watching." Customers are being prompted to instead choose the cheaper Standard with ads, or the more expensive Standard or Premium 4K plans. The Basic plan, which costs $11.99 per month in the United States, has not been available to new subscribers since last year. In its early 2024 earnings call, Netflix announced its intention to retire its Basic plan in some countries where the ads plan has been introduced, starting with Canada and the UK in the second quarter, and then "taking it from there." Netflix said in May that its ad-supported streaming tier has 40 million global monthly active users, up 35 million from a year ago.

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Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: Utility firms American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon have filed an official objection with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over Talen Energy's nuclear power deal with Amazon. Back in March, Amazon bought a nuclear-powered datacenter from Talen Energy -- an operator of electricity generation and transmission facilities in the US. As part of the deal, Amazon would get 480 MW straight from the 2.7 GW Talen nuclear power plant in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and may even be able to upgrade to 960 MW down the line. However, that Susquehanna atomic plant also provides power to PJM Interconnection, the regional power grid operator for much of the eastern US. The two companies -- Talen and PJM -- have an interconnection service agreement (ISA) that sets the rules for how Talen should deliver power to PJM's transmission system. To better accommodate the nuclear datacenter, Talen and PJM agreed to a new ISA, which has caught the ire of AEP and Exelon. The duo claim Talen and Amazon are basically getting a free ride that other PJM ratepayers will have to pay for, saying that even though Amazon's datacenter isn't directly connected to PJM, it still benefits from the power grid, meaning the other ratepayers are left holding the short end of the stick. Each of the station's two reactors has 1,350 MW available, and Amazon is already able to use 480 MW, and up to 960 MW in the future. If one of the reactors experiences an outage, the ISA says the datacenter is first in line for power from the other reactor, which leaves PJM with far less electricity than normal. That in turn would mean a lower energy supply for PJM's customers, who would have to pay more, at least according to the complaint's reasoning. The Talen-PJM ISA states that in this event, the nuclear datacenter will separate from the plant and get its power elsewhere, but AEP and Exelon are skeptical and want to know how exactly that would work. The complaint argues Amazon's DC is essentially using the grid, saying the "premise" of the tweaked ISA "is that this datacenter co-located load is like load on a remote island -- one that simply has no impact on the PJM grid and would thus be properly excluded from economic and other responsibility for maintaining the PJM grid. But that storyline does not stand up to scrutiny." "They present their filing as no more than a replacement of older agreements with updated terms and 'clarifications' regarding the parties' roles and obligations," the two utility companies told [PDF] FERC, requesting a hearing over the matter. "The filing [new ISA] casts the submission as a mere housekeeping exercise, as if there is nothing to see here." The protest adds: "The co-located load should not be allowed to operate as a free rider, making use of, and receiving the benefits of, a transmission system paid for by transmission ratepayers. We have no objection to co-location per se, but such load should pay its fair share of system use and other charges, just like other loads and customers." AEP and Exelon claim the new terms of the ISA contains a key loophole that hinges on the datacenter's co-location with the nuclear power plant, which allows its power usage to not be considered "in-network," even though the power load is synced to PJM's grid and could theoretically get power from it. [...] The end result, or so AEP and Exelon allege, is that Talen would be able to benefit from PJM's services without the associated cost. That would cost other customers between $58 million and $140 million per year overall, according to an analysis from Concentric Energy Advisors CEO Danielle Powers and chairman John Reed included with the filing. AEP and Exelon asked FERC to either hold a hearing to answer questions it feels are unresolved or to reject the new ISA outright. For its part, Talen claims the complaint's narrative is "demonstrably false" and that "transmission is not implicated."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California-based credit union with over 450,000 members said it suffered a ransomware attack that is disrupting account services and could take weeks to recover from. "The next few days -- and coming weeks -- may present challenges for our members, as we continue to navigate around the limited functionality we are experiencing due to this incident," Patelco Credit Union CEO Erin Mendez told members in a July 1 message (PDF) that said the security problem was caused by a ransomware attack. Online banking and several other services are unavailable, while several other services and types of transactions have limited functionality. Patelco Credit Union was hit by the attack on June 29 and has been posting updates on this page, which says the credit union "proactively shut down some of our day-to-day banking systems to contain and remediate the issue... As a result of our proactive measures, transactions, transfers, payments, and deposits are unavailable at this time. Debit and credit cards are working with limited functionality." Patelco Credit Union is a nonprofit cooperative in Northern California with $9 billion in assets and 37 local branches. "Our priority is the safe and secure restoration of our banking systems," a July 2 update said. "We continue to work alongside leading third-party cybersecurity experts in support of this effort. We have also been cooperating with regulators and law enforcement." Patelco says that check and cash deposits should be working, but direct deposits have limited functionality. Security expert Ahmed Banafa "said Tuesday that it looks likely that hackers infiltrated the bank's internal databases via a phishing email and encrypted its contents, locking out the bank from its own systems," the Mercury News reported. Banafa was paraphrased as saying that it is "likely the hackers will demand an amount of money from the credit union to restore its systems back to normal, and will continue to hold the bank's accounts hostage until either the bank finds a way around the hack or until the hackers are paid." Patelco hasn't revealed details about how it will recover from the ransomware attack but acknowledged to customers that their personal information could be at risk. "The investigation into the nature and scope of the incident is ongoing," the credit union said. "If the investigation determines that individuals' information is involved as a result of this incident, we will of course notify those individuals and provide resources to help protect their information in accordance with applicable laws." While ATMs "remain available for cash withdrawals and deposits," Patelco said many of its other services remain unavailable, including online banking, the mobile app, outgoing wire transfers, monthly statements, Zelle, balance inquiries, and online bill payments. Services with "limited functionality" include company branches, call center services, live chats, debit and credit card transactions, and direct deposits.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, known for his enthusiastic energy and salesmanship, is now richer than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. This is the first time Ballmer has surpassed Bill Gates in wealth. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Steve Ballmer is now the sixth-richest person in the world with a $157.2 billion net worth. Steve Ballmer surpassed Bill Gates for two reasons: - Ninety percent of Steve Ballmer's wealth is in Microsoft stock. Ballmer remains the single largest individual shareholder of Microsoft stock. Microsoft's stock continues its strong growth momentum and is up 21% this year alone. - Bill Gates diversified his portfolio through Cascade Investment. Therefore, his other investments did not yield the returns that Microsoft stock would have provided. "[T]he Bloomberg Billionaires Index only considers an individual's current personal wealth," notes the report. It doesn't take into consideration each of the executives' various charitable donations, such as Gates' $60 billion donation to the Gates Foundation or Ballmer's million-dollar donations to major universities in the U.S.

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Ars Technica's Eric Berger writes: On the day before Christmas last year, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from California and put two spy satellites into low-Earth orbit for the armed forces of Germany, which are collectively called the Bundeswehr. Initially, the mission appeared successful. The German satellite manufacturer, OHB, declared that the two satellites were "safely in orbit." The addition of the two SARah satellites completed a next-generation constellation of three reconnaissance satellites, the company said. However, six months later, the two satellites have yet to become operational. According to the German publication Der Spiegel, the antennas on the satellites cannot be unfolded. Engineers with OHB have tried to resolve the issue by resetting the flight software, performing maneuvers to vibrate or shake the antennas loose, and more to no avail. As a result, last week, German lawmakers were informed that the two new satellites will probably not go into operation as planned. The three-satellite constellation known as SARah -- the SAR is a reference to the synthetic aperture radar capability of the satellites -- was ordered in 2013 at a cost of $800 million. The first of the three satellites, SARah 1, launched in June 2022 on a Falcon 9 rocket. This satellite was built by Airbus in southern Germany, and it has since gone into operation without any problems. The two smaller satellites built by OHB, flying with passive synthetic aperture radar reflectors, were intended to complement the SARah 1 satellite, which carries an active phased-array radar antenna. [...] According to the Der Spiegel report, the Bundeswehr says the two SARah satellites built by OHB remain the property of the German company and would only be turned over to the military once they were operational. As a result, the military says OHB will be responsible for building two replacement satellites. Shockingly, the German publication says that its sources indicated OBH did not fully test the functionality and deployment of the satellite antennas on the ground. This could not be confirmed.

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Scientists in China have found a species of moss that is able to withstand Mars-like conditions. The species is called Syntrichia caninervis and it's found in regions including Antarctica and the Mojave desert. The Guardian reports: "The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonization using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions," the team write. [...] Writing in the journal The Innovation, researchers in China describe how the desert moss not only survived but rapidly recovered from almost complete dehydration. It was also able to regenerate under normal growth conditions after spending up to five years at -80C and up to 30 days at -196C, and after exposure to gamma rays, with doses of around 500Gy even promoting new growth. The team then created a set-up that had similar pressures, temperatures, gases and UV radiation to Mars. It found the moss survived in this Mars-like environment, and was able to regenerate under normal growth conditions, even after seven days of exposure. The team also noted plants that were dried before such exposure faired better. "Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space," the researchers write.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Hold onto your SSH keys, folks! A critical vulnerability has just rocked OpenSSH, Linux's secure remote access foundation, causing seasoned sysadmins to break out in a cold sweat. Dubbed "regreSSHion" and tagged as CVE-2024-6387, this nasty bug allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on OpenSSH servers running on glibc-based Linux systems. We're not talking about some minor privilege escalation here -- this flaw hands over full root access on a silver platter. For those who've been around the Linux block a few times, this feels like deja vu. The vulnerability is a regression of CVE-2006-5051, a bug patched back in 2006. This old foe somehow snuck back into the code in October 2020 with OpenSSH 8.5p1. Thankfully, the Qualys Threat Research Unit uncovered this digital skeleton in OpenSSH's closet. Unfortunately, this vulnerability affects the default configuration and doesn't need any user interaction to exploit. In other words, it's a vulnerability that keeps security professionals up at night. It's hard to overstate the potential impact of this flaw. OpenSSH is the de facto standard for secure remote access and file transfer in Unix-like systems, including Linux and macOS. It's the Swiss Army knife of secure communication for sysadmins and developers worldwide. The good news is that not all Linux distributions have the vulnerable code. Old OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1 are vulnerable to this signal handler race condition unless they are patched for CVE-2006-5051 and CVE-2008-4109. Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable. The bad news is that the vulnerability resurfaced in OpenSSH 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1 due to the accidental removal of a critical component. Qualys has found over 14 million potentially vulnerable OpenSSH server internet instances. The company believes that approximately 700,000 of these external internet-facing instances are definitely vulnerable. A patch, OpenSSH 9.8/9.8p1 is now available. Many, but not all, Linux distributions have made it available. If you can get it, install it as soon as possible. If for whatever reason you're not able to install a patch, Vaughan-Nichols recommends you set LoginGraceTime to 0 in the sshd configuration file and use network-based controls to restrict SSH access, while also configuring firewalls and monitoring tools to detect and block exploit attempts.

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Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN, written by Olesya Dmitracova: Nyobolt, based in Cambridge, has developed a new 35kWh lithium-ion battery that was charged from 10% to 80% in just over four and a half minutes in its first live demonstration last week. [...] Nyobolt's technology builds on a decade of research led by University of Cambridge battery scientist Clare Grey and Cambridge-educated Shivareddy, the company said. Key to its batteries' ability to be charged super-fast without a big impact on their longevity is a design that means they generate less heat. It also makes them safer as overheating can cause a lithium-ion battery to catch fire and explode. In addition, the materials used to make the batteries' anodes allow for a faster transfer of electrons. Nyobolt is currently in talks to sell its batteries to eight electric car manufacturers. At 35 kWh, the battery is much smaller than the 85 kWh in a more typical American electric vehicle (EV). Yet the technology may be used in larger battery packs in the future. Independent testing of Nyobolt's batteries by what it called a leading global manufacturer found that they can achieve over 4,000 fast-charge cycles, equivalent to 600,000 miles (965,600 kilometers), while retaining more than 80% of capacity, Nyobolt said in its Friday statement. William Kephart, an e-mobility specialist at consultancy P3 Group and a former engineer, said EV batteries of the kind Nyobolt has developed could "theoretically" be charged as fast as the firm is promising, but the challenge was manufacturing such batteries on an industrial scale. A crucial chemical element in Nyobolt's batteries is niobium but, as Kephart pointed out, last year only an estimated 83,000 tons (94,500 tons) was mined worldwide. Compare that with graphite, commonly used as anode material in lithium-ion batteries: an estimated 1.6 million tons (1.8 million tons) was produced in 2023. In addition, there are currently "a lot of unknowns" with the niobium battery technology, he told CNN. "The industry will work it out (but) it's not seen by the industry as a scalable technology just yet," he added.

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Brazil's national data protection authority ruled on Tuesday that Meta must stop using data originating in the country to train its artificial intelligence models. The Associated Press reports: Meta's updated privacy policy enables the company to feed people's public posts into its AI systems. That practice will not be permitted in Brazil, however. The decision stems from "the imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects," the agency said in the nation's official gazette. [...] Hye Jung Han, a Brazil-based researcher for the rights group, said in an email Tuesday that the regulator's action "helps to protect children from worrying that their personal data, shared with friends and family on Meta's platforms, might be used to inflict harm back on them in ways that are impossible to anticipate or guard against." But the decision regarding Meta will "very likely" encourage other companies to refrain from being transparent in the use of data in the future, said Ronaldo Lemos, of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro, a think-tank. "Meta was severely punished for being the only one among the Big Tech companies to clearly and in advance notify in its privacy policy that it would use data from its platforms to train artificial intelligence," he said. Compliance must be demonstrated by the company within five working days from the notification of the decision, and the agency established a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,820) for failure to do so. In a statement, Meta said the company is "disappointed" by the decision and insists its method "complies with privacy laws and regulations in Brazil." "This is a step backwards for innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Brazil," a spokesperson for the company added.

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As reported by Bloomberg, Apple will get an "observer role" on OpenAI's board of directors as part of its partnership to integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18. That role will reportedly be filled by Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller. 9to5Mac reports: Apple having an "observer role" on the OpenAI board matches the role of Microsoft. Schiller will be able to observe and attend board meetings, but will not have any voting power: "The board observer role will put Apple on par with Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer and its main AI technology provider. The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote or exercise other director powers. Observers, however, do gain insights into how decisions are made at the company." The arrangement will take effect later this year, according to Bloomberg. Schiller "hasn't yet attended any meetings" of the OpenAI board and "details of the situation could still change." Schiller served as Apple's long-time marketing chief before transitioning to an Apple Fellow role in 2020. In this role, Schiller continues to lead the App Store and Apple events and reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Schiller is also leading Apple's efforts to defend the App Store against antitrust allegations around the world.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Google's greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to "net zero" by 2030 in doubt. The Silicon Valley company's pollution amounted to 14.3 million tons of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday. Google said the jump highlighted "the challenge of reducing emissions" at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that "the future environmental impact of AI" was "complex and difficult to predict." Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the "extremely ambitious" nature of the goal. "We do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal," said Brandt. She added that Google was "working very hard" on reducing its emissions, including by signing deals for clean energy. There was also a "tremendous opportunity for climate solutions that are enabled by AI," said Brandt. [...] In Tuesday's report, Google said its 2023 energy-related emissions -- which come primarily from data center electricity consumption -- rose 37 percent year on year, and overall represented a quarter of its total greenhouse gas emissions. Google's supply chain emissions -- its largest chunk, representing 75 percent of its total emissions -- also rose 8 percent. Google said they would "continue to rise in the near term" as a result in part of the build-out of the infrastructure needed to run AI systems. Google has pledged to achieve net zero across its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to run on carbon-free energy during every hour of every day within each grid it operates by the same date. However, the company warned in Tuesday's report that the "termination" of some clean energy projects during 2023 had pushed down the amount of renewables it had access to. Meanwhile, the company's data centre electricity consumption had "outpaced" Google's ability to bring more clean power projects online in the US and Asia-Pacific regions. Google's data centre electricity consumption increased 17 percent in 2023, and amounted to approximately 7-10 percent of global data center electricity consumption, the company estimated.Its data centers also consumed 17 percent more water in 2023 than during the previous year, Google said.

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Longtime Slashdot reader regoli shares an obituary from the Wall Street Journal: When Alan Ashton was a computer-science professor at Brigham Young University in the mid-1970s, the director of the school's marching band knocked on his door and said he wanted to use a computer to choreograph the band's halftime shows. Ashton was easily persuaded; he was a trumpet player whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Utah was "Electronics, music and computers." Bruce Bastian, the graduate student who was working as BYU's marching-band director, turned out to be a quick learner. "He was very conscientious, very thorough," Ashton said in an interview, "and just absolutely brilliant." Within a few years, the two were at work on a program that would turn them into two of the richest people in the nation, founders of the company that made WordPerfect, the dominant word-processing software in the 1980s and early '90s and one of the first pieces of software many Americans bought when they brought home their first PCs. But behind the hundreds of millions of dollars and blockbuster success, Bastian's personal life, he later said, was in "free fall." Between the time he and Ashton released what would later be known as WordPerfect to the public in 1980 and when they sold the company for $1.4 billion in 1994, Bastian told his wife, four sons and his Mormon community that he was gay and leaving both his marriage and the church. When he died, June 16, at the age of 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis, he had been living a different life: A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Bastian was married to a man, and had found a way to maintain relationships with his family, who remained dedicated members of the church that rejected his sexual orientation. "I kind of have three parts of my life," he said in 2010 during one of several extensive interviews he gave to the Mormon Stories podcast, "the pre-WordPerfect life, the WordPerfect years, and now the LGBT years." Other publications remembering Bruce Bastian include: The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, University of Utah, and Human Rights Campaign.

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