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Infosys has lost a ten-year, $1.5 billion deal it announced just three months ago in September 2023. From a report: The Indian services giant advised investors of the deal on September 14th, describing it as "a Memorandum of Understanding with a global company to provide enhanced digital experiences, along with modernization and business operations services, leveraging Infosys platforms & AI solutions" with a total client target spend of $1.5 billion over 15 years. That announcement included the caveat that Infosys and the unnamed company would have to conclude a Master Agreement to seal the deal. A December 23rd filing revealed that didn't happen. "The global company has now elected to terminate the Memorandum of Understanding and the parties will not be pursuing the Master Agreement," the statement revealed. Infosys's annual revenue topped $18 billion last year, so losing this deal won't cause massive pain.

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An appeals court on Wednesday temporarily stopped the import ban on Apple's latest Apple Watches, allowing the company to continue selling the wearables. CNBC reports: Apple stopped selling its Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches last week in response to an International Trade Commission order in October that found the blood oxygen sensor in the devices had infringed on intellectual property from Masimo, a medical technology company that sells to hospitals. "The motion for an interim stay is granted to the extent that the Remedial Orders are temporarily stayed," a court filing Wednesday said. On Monday, the Biden administration declined to pause the ITC ban. Apple filed the appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday. The company continues to seek a longer stay. The ITC will need to reply by Jan. 10. The stay means Apple may be able to sell the latest models of one of its most important products during the busiest time of the year. Apple Watch sales are reported as part of Apple's wearables business, which reported $39.8 billion in sales in Apple's fiscal 2023, which ended in September.

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AstroForge, a private company, wants to mine a space rock, but it doesn't want the competition to find out which one. From a report: For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime in the coming year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, an American asteroid-mining firm, may be launched on a mission to a rocky object near Earth's orbit. If successful, it will be the first wholly commercial deep-space mission beyond the moon. AstroForge, however, is keeping its target asteroid secret. The secret space-rock mission is the latest in an emerging trend that astronomers and other experts do not welcome: commercial space missions conducted covertly. Such missions highlight gaps in the regulation of spaceflight as well as concerns about whether exploring the cosmos will continue to benefit all humankind. "I'm very much not in favor of having stuff swirling around the inner solar system without anyone knowing where it is," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. "It seems like a bad precedent to set." But for AstroForge, the calculation is simple: If it reveals the destination, a competitor may grab the asteroid's valuable metals for itself. "Announcing which asteroid we are targeting opens up risk that another entity could seize that asteroid," said Matt Gialich, AstroForge's chief executive.

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Researchers on Wednesday presented intriguing new findings surrounding an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky. Chief among the discoveries: the unknown attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of. ArsTechnica: "The exploit's sophistication and the feature's obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities," Kaspersky researcher Boris Larin wrote in an email. "Our analysis hasn't revealed how they became aware of this feature, but we're exploring all possibilities, including accidental disclosure in past firmware or source code releases. They may also have stumbled upon it through hardware reverse engineering." Other questions remain unanswered, wrote Larin, even after about 12 months of intensive investigation. Besides how the attackers learned of the hardware feature, the researchers still don't know what, precisely, its purpose is. Also unknown is if the feature is a native part of the iPhone or enabled by a third-party hardware component such as ARM's CoreSight. The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action. With that, the devices were infected with full-featured spyware that, among other things, transmitted microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other sensitive data to attacker-controlled servers. Although infections didn't survive a reboot, the unknown attackers kept their campaign alive simply by sending devices a new malicious iMessage text shortly after devices were restarted.

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From the depths of the Amazon rainforest to the deserts of Antarctica, huge questions remain unanswered about life on Earth. The Guardian asked leading scientists and conservationists: what is the one thing you would like to know about the planet that remains a mystery? TLDR, the questions/wishes are:1. How many species are there on Earth? 2. I'd go back 540m years to see the 'biological big bang' 3. Could some of the smallest life forms help avert climate crisis? 4. What is the full biodiversity of the Amazon or Congo basin rainforests? 5. How do animals influence the functioning of Earth? 6. What will happen to the Gulf Stream? 7. Do universal rules govern how plants and animals evolve? 8. How many humans could Earth support? 9. Which species will adapt to the climate crisis -- and which will not?

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More workers feeling anxious, stressed or blue have a new place to go for mental-health help: a digital app. Chatbots that hold therapist-like conversations and wellness apps that deliver depression and other diagnoses or identify people at risk of self-harm are snowballing across employers' healthcare benefits. From a report: "The demand for counselors is huge, but the supply of mental-health providers is shrinking," said J. Marshall Dye, chief executive officer of PayrollPlans, a Dallas-based provider of benefits software used by small and medium-size businesses, which began providing access to a chatbot called Woebot in November. PayrollPlans expects about 9,400 employers will use Woebot in 2024. Amazon about a year ago gave employees free access to Twill, an app that uses artificial intelligence to track the moods of users and create a personalized mental-health plan. The app offers games and other activities that the workers can play, as well as live chats with a human "coach." The app "allows you to address mental health concerns the moment they arise and can be used as a supplement to your daily well-being routine," the company said in a blog post. Amazon declined to comment. About a third of U.S. employers offer a "digital therapeutic" for mental-health support, according to a survey of 457 companies this past summer by professional services company WTW. An additional 15% of the companies were considering adding such an offering in 2024 or 2025. Supporters say the mental-health apps alleviate symptoms such as anxiety, loneliness and depression. Because they are available at any time, the apps can also reach people who might not be able to fit traditional therapy into their schedules or can't find a therapist who has an opening. Yet some researchers say there isn't sufficient evidence the programs work, and the varied security and safety practices create a risk that private information could be leaked or sold.

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Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky and Larry David. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage. The New Yorker: Tips have long provided a convenient way to foist payment obligations onto others. Kerry Segrave, the author of the comprehensive history "Tipping," identified the gratuity's potential origins, in Europe during the late Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay "vails" to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with "To Insure Promptitude." Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to "tip." By the end of the nineteenth century, some business owners demanded their employees' tips. Some cafes charged waiters a fee for the privilege of working there. In France, tips were placed directly into a wooden box called le tronc, controlled by the proprietor. French waiters went on strike in 1907, identifying two of the great evils of their profession: le tronc, and a ban on mustaches. They eventually prevailed on both counts. American visitors to Europe brought tipping back to the United States. Perhaps no entity did more to spread the practice than the Pullman Company. George Pullman preferred hiring formerly enslaved Black men as railroad porters. He paid them as little as possible, and used tips as a subsidy. The system spread as far as the train lines. By the nineteen-twenties, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters estimated that the policy had saved the Pullman Company a hundred and fifty million dollars. The porters had long fought to eliminate tipping. Their efforts had been rebuffed by the Pullman Company's president and, later, chairman, Robert Todd Lincoln. Once the practice gets its hooks in, it can be hard to dislodge. In New York, at the turn of the twentieth century, some enterprising concessionaires paid restaurants thousands of dollars a year to run their coatrooms. These concessionaires became known as the tip trust. At least one dressed young women in theatrical French-maid outfits to collect coats, hats, and tips; the young women turned over all revenues to the trust. (When skimming was discovered, the trusts banned pockets.) Men joked that they bought a hat for five dollars and paid seventy-three dollars a year to wear it. A hat manufacturer sold roll-up models that men could hide inside their coats. The greatest of the tip-trust barons, known as the Hatcheck King, brought in the equivalent of sixty million dollars a year. The trusts were powerful politically. Today, businesses in New York are not allowed to take their employees' tips, with one exception: hat-and-coat checks.

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Apple's hiring of a key engineer 10 years ago helped spark a fight that led its watch to be banned from the US. From a report: At about 1 a.m. California time in 2013, a scientist emailed Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook with an irresistible pitch. "I strongly believe that we can develop the new wave of technology that will make Apple the No. 1 brand in the medical, fitness and wellness market," he wrote in the email, which was later included in legal documents. Some 10 hours after the message was sent, an Apple recruiter was in touch. And just weeks after that, the engineer was working at the tech company on a smartwatch with health sensors. A flurry of activity began. Within a few months at Apple, the employee asked the company to file about a dozen patents related to sensors and algorithms for determining a person's blood-oxygen level from a wearable device. But this wasn't just any engineer. He had been the chief technical officer of Cercacor Laboratories, the sister company of Masimo, which went on to get to the US to ban the Apple Watch. Apple's decision to hire this technical whiz -- a Stanford engineering Ph.D. named Marcelo Lamego -- is seen as the spark that sent Masimo's lawyers after Apple. While the iPhone maker denies it did anything wrong, Masimo cited the poaching of employees as part of claims that the iPhone maker infringed its patents. The dispute culminated this month in Apple having to pull its latest watches from the company's US stores, hobbling a business that generates roughly $17 billion in annual sales. On Wednesday, Apple scored a victory as a U.S. appeals court paused a government commission's import ban on some of its popular Apple smartwatches.

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The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is grappling with the imminent threats of climate change. Rising seas and increasing storms threaten the fragile coral atolls that are home to 11,000 people. A recent agreement allowing 280 Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia each year moved the nation closer to a managed retreat, but at that pace it would take decades to relocate everyone. Tuvalu could be uninhabitable much sooner, according to projections. In parallel, the government is asserting it will maintain its statehood even without land. It also aims to digitally preserve Tuvalu's culture and history in the metaverse, as the physical place faces being drowned under rising waters. Tuvalu is strategizing for adaptation while also trying to drive global action on emissions reductions.

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Hundreds of students from leading UK universities have launched a "career boycott" of Barclays over its climate policies, warning that the bank will miss out on top talent unless it stops financing fossil fuel companies. From a report: More than 220 students from Barclays' top recruitment universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, have sent a letter to the high street lender, saying they will not work for Barclays and raising the alarm over its funding for oil and gas firms including Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and BP. "Your ambitious decarbonisation targets are discredited by your absence of action and the roster of fossil fuel companies on your books," the letter said. "You may say you're working with them to help them transition, but Shell, Total and BP have all rowed back." Large oil firms have started to water down climate commitments, including BP, which originally pledged to lower emissions by 35% by 2030 but is now aiming for a 20% to 30% cut instead. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil quietly withdrew funding for plans to use algae to create low-carbon fuel, while Shell announced it would not increase its investments in renewable energy this year, despite earlier promises to slash its emissions. The letter calls on Barclays to end all financing and underwriting of oil and gas companies -- not only their projects -- and to boost funding of firms behind wind and solar energy significantly.

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The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. From a report: The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit [PDF], filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works." It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times. The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative A.I. technologies -- so called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets -- and could carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is among a small number of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been hobbled by readers' migration to the internet.

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Amazon aims to make online car purchases as seamless as getting everyday essentials. But it's not as easy as selling other items. WSJ: Car sales represent Amazon's next bet in e-commerce dominance and come after the Covid-19 pandemic made online car purchases more popular. Amazon executives want to make buying vehicles through its website as simple as purchasing toilet paper or dog food, and the company is looking to strike broad partnerships with carmakers. The company is set to face several challenges in expanding the program beyond a pilot phase for employees starting early next year: One is dealerships, which remain at the center of most new-car sales and depend on service revenue for profit incentives. A second will be trying to get customers who visit its website mainly for lower-priced items to turn to the platform for one of the biggest purchases of their lives. Amazon also will have to navigate different government regulations. "Customers tell us it's really hard to buy a car," Fan Jin, Amazon's director of vehicle sales, said in an interview. Vehicle-buying software is fragmented, with dealers using a range of software providers. Varying regulations across states also make it difficult. "It's a process that we've heard time and again could use improvement, and we have an opportunity to go and prove it," she said. When the new service launches later next year, Amazon said shoppers will be able to complete every step of the car-buying process through its website. Only new Hyundai vehicles will be available at the start. Consumers will have different financing options, but the company said it is still working through details. Eventually, Amazon wants to expand to trade-in vehicles and used cars. Many dealers might be loath to accept a high volume of online sales because they make a significant amount of money on service and warranty deals that customers agree to when they finance a car purchase.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As Moore's Law slowed to a crawl, chips, particularly those used in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), have steadily gotten hotter. In 2023 we saw accelerators enter the kilowatt range with the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 Superchips. We've known these chips would be hot for a while now -- Nvidia has been teasing the CPU-GPU franken-chip for the better part of two years. What we didn't know until recently is how OEMs and systems builders would respond to such a power-dense part. Would most of the systems be liquid cooled? Or, would most stick to air cooling? How many of these accelerators would they try to cram into a single box, and how big would the box be? Now that the first systems based on the GH200 make their way to market, it's become clear that form factor is very much being dictated by power density than anything else. It essentially boils down to how much surface area you have to dissipate the heat. Dig through the systems available today from Supermicro, Gigabyte, QCT, Pegatron, HPE, and others and you'll quickly notice a trend. Up to about 500 W per rack unit (RU) -- 1 kW in the case of Supermicro's MGX ARS-111GL-NHR -- these systems are largely air cooled. While hot, it's still a manageable thermal load to dissipate, working out to about 21-24 kW per rack. That's well within the power delivery and thermal management capacity of modern datacenters, especially those making use of rear door heat exchangers. However, this changes when system builders start cramming more than a kilowatt of accelerators into each chassis. At this point most of the OEM systems we looked at switched to direct liquid cooling. Gigabyte's H263-V11, for example, offers up to four GH200 nodes in a single 2U chassis. That's two kilowatts per rack unit. So while a system like Nvidia's air-cooled DGX H100 with its eight 700 W H100s and twin Sapphire Rapids CPUs has a higher TDP at 10.2 kW, it's actually less power dense at 1.2 kW/RU.

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Legendary designer Jony Ive and OpenAI's Sam Altman are enlisting an Apple veteran to work on a new AI hardware project, aiming to create devices with the latest capabilities. From a report: As part of the effort, outgoing Apple executive Tang Tan will join Ive's design firm LoveFrom, which will shape the look and capabilities of the new products, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman, an executive who has become the face of modern AI, plans to provide the software underpinnings, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the endeavor isn't public.

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Big tech companies have vastly outspent venture capital groups with investments in generative AI start ups this year, as established giants use their financial muscle to dominate the much-hyped sector. From a report: Microsoft, Google and Amazon last year struck a series of blockbuster deals, amounting to two-thirds of the $27bn raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023, according to new data from private market researchers PitchBook. The huge outlay, which exploded after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, highlights how the biggest Silicon Valley groups are crowding out traditional tech investors for the biggest deals in the industry. The rise of generative AI -- systems capable of producing humanlike video, text, image and audio in seconds -- have also attracted top Silicon Valley investors. But VCs have been outmatched, having been forced to slow down their spending as they adjust to higher interest rates and falling valuations for their portfolio companies.

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More than two decades after J.K. Rowling introduced the world to a universe of magical creatures, forbidden forests and a teenage wizard, Harry Potter is finding renewed relevance in a very different body of literature: AI research. From a report: A growing number of researchers are using the best-selling Harry Potter books to experiment with generative artificial intelligence technology, citing the series' enduring influence in popular culture and the wide range of language data and complex wordplay within its pages. Reviewing a list of studies and academic papers referencing Harry Potter offers a snapshot into cutting-edge AI research -- and some of the thorniest questions facing the technology. In perhaps the most notable recent example, Harry, Hermione and Ron star in a paper titled "Who's Harry Potter?" that sheds light on a new technique helping large language models to selectively forget information. It's a high-stakes task for the industry: Large language models, which power AI chatbots, are built on vast amounts of online data, including copyrighted material and other problematic content. That has led to lawsuits and public scrutiny for some AI companies. The paper's authors, Microsoft researchers Mark Russinovich and Ronen Eldan, said they've demonstrated that AI models can be altered or edited to remove any knowledge of the existence of the Harry Potter books, including characters and plots, without sacrificing the AI system's overall decision-making and analytical abilities. The duo said they chose the books because of their universal familiarity. "We believed that it would be easier for people in the research community to evaluate the model resulting from our technique and confirm for themselves that the content has indeed been 'unlearned,'" said Russinovich, chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure. "Almost anyone can come up with prompts for the model that would probe whether or not it 'knows' the books. Even people who haven't read the books would be aware of plot elements and characters."

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National Amusements, the cinema chain and corporate parent giant of media giants Paramount and CBS, has confirmed it experienced a data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of tens of thousands of people. TechCrunch: The private media conglomerate said in a legally required filing with Maine's attorney general that hackers stole personal information on 82,128 people during a December 2022 data breach. Details of the December 2022 breach only came to light a year later, after the company began notifying those affected last week. According to Maine's notice, the company discovered the breach months later in August 2023, but did not say what specific personal information was taken. The data breach notice filed with Maine said that hackers also stole financial information, such as banking account numbers or credit card numbers in combination with associated security codes, passwords or secrets.

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Amazon earlier this year announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you'll start seeing them: it's January 29th. From a report: "This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time," the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to "limited advertisements." "We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership," the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

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