Doctorow: 'The most amazing part is that this isn't already the way it's done'

Collaboration software used by federal government agencies — this includes apps from Microsoft, Zoom, Slack, and Google — will be required to work together and be securely end-to-end encrypted, if legislation proposed by US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) passes.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: "Early Access" was once a novel, quirky thing, giving a select set of Steam PC games a way to involve enthusiastic fans in pre-alpha-level play-testing and feedback. Now loads of games launch in various forms of Early Access, in a wide variety of readiness. It's been a boon for games like Baldur's Gate 3, which came a long way across years of Early Access. Early Access, and the "Advanced Access" provided for complete games by major publishers for "Deluxe Editions" and the like, has also been a boon to freeloaders. Craven types could play a game for hours and hours, then demand a refund within the standard two hours of play, 14 days after the purchase window of the game's "official" release. Steam-maker Valve has noticed and, as of Tuesday night, updated its refund policy. "Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period," reads the update. In other words: Playtime is playtime now, so if you've played more than two hours of a game in any state, you don't get a refund. That closes at least one way that people could, with time-crunched effort, play and enjoy games for free in either Early or Advanced access.

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And you thought the Bing begging was annoying

Microsoft has made good on its promise, or threat, to put advertisements inside the Windows 11 Start menu with its latest update.…

Just as Google, Samsung and Microsoft continue to push their efforts with generative AI on PCs and mobile devices, Apple is moving to join the party with OpenELM, a new family of open source large language models (LLMs) that can run entirely on a single device rather than having to connect to cloud servers. From a report: Released a few hours ago on AI code community Hugging Face, OpenELM consists of small models designed to perform efficiently at text generation tasks. There are eight OpenELM models in total -- four pre-trained and four instruction-tuned -- covering different parameter sizes between 270 million and 3 billion parameters (referring to the connections between artificial neurons in an LLM, and more parameters typically denote greater performance and more capabilities, though not always). [...] Apple is offering the weights of its OpenELM models under what it deems a "sample code license," along with different checkpoints from training, stats on how the models perform as well as instructions for pre-training, evaluation, instruction tuning and parameter-efficient fine tuning. The sample code license does not prohibit commercial usage or modification, only mandating that "if you redistribute the Apple Software in its entirety and without modifications, you must retain this notice and the following text and disclaimers in all such redistributions of the Apple Software." The company further notes that the models "are made available without any safety guarantees. Consequently, there exists the possibility of these models producing outputs that are inaccurate, harmful, biased, or objectionable in response to user prompts."

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Today, Framework is the modular repairable laptop company. Tomorrow, it wants to be a consumer electronics company, period. From a report: That's one of the biggest reasons it just raised another $18 million in funding -- it wants to expand beyond the laptop into "additional product categories." Framework CEO Nirav Patel tells me that has always been the plan. The company originally had other viable ideas beyond laptops, too. "We chose to take on the notebook space first," he says, partly because Framework knew it could bootstrap its ambitions by catering to the PC builders and tinkerers and Linux enthusiasts left behind by big OEMs -- and partly because it wanted to go big or go home. If Framework could succeed in laptops, he thought, it would be able to build almost anything. After five years building laptops, what might Framework add to the portfolio? Patel won't say -- I only get the barest hints, no matter how many different ways I ask. He won't even say if they'll make less or more of a splash than laptops. Framework might choose an "equally difficult" category or might instead try something "a bit smaller and simpler to execute, streamlined now that we have all this infrastructure."

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The SODIMM replacement finally arrives

Lenovo's latest ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 laptop is set to be the first to use the new LPCAMM2 memory form factor, the successor to SODIMM sticks.…

Edward Zitron, citing emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, writes about Prabhakar Raghavan: And Raghavan -- a manager, hired by Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man and a manager by trade -- is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large. Since Prabhakar took the reins in 2020, Google Search has dramatically declined, with the numerous "core" search updates allegedly made to improve the quality of results having an adverse effect, increasing the prevalence of spammy, search engine optimized content. It's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't give a shit about what "Google" means anymore. Prabhakar Raghavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of "did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of note, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is." This is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when "management" is synonymous with "staying as far away from actual work as possible." And when you're a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, you only care about growth. You're not a user, you're a parasite, and it's these parasites that have dominated and are draining the tech industry of its value. Raghavan's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict (or, if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo) on two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder. Perhaps more remarkable, he's achieved this while maintaining a certain degree of anonymity. Everyone knows who Musk and Zuckerberg are, but Raghavan's known only in his corner of the Internet. Or at least he was. Now Raghavan has told those working on search that their "new operating reality" is one with less resources and less time to deliver things. Rot Master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a product he beat to death with his bare hands. Raghavan is a hall-of-fame rot economist, and one of the many managerial types that have caused immeasurable damage to the Internet in the name of growth and "shareholder value." And I believe these uber-managers - these ultra-pencil-pushers and growth-hounds - are the forces destroying tech's ability to innovate.

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Secure-by-default... if your pockets are deep enough

Microsoft has come under fire for charging for security add-ons despite the company's own patchy record when it comes to vulnerabilities and breaches.…

AMD's GPUOpen team today released the Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 software that now sports interoperability with the Radeon GPU Analyzer...

An anonymous reader shares a report: It used to be that you could pay for a retail version of Windows 11 and expect it to be ad-free, but those days are apparently finito. The latest update to Windows 11 (KB5036980) comes out this week and includes ads for apps in the "recommended" section of the Start Menu, one of the most oft-used parts of the OS. "The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps," according to the release notes. "These apps come from a small set of curated developers." The app suggestions are enabled by default, but you can restore your previously pristine Windows experience if you've installed the update, fortunately. To do so, go into Settings and select Personalization > Start and switch the "Show recommendations for tips, app promotions and more" toggle to "off."

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Senior execs making $150K+ will still have to abide by them, but they fall away for everyone else

The US Chamber of Commerce is saying it will sue the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for officially banning noncompete clauses in employment contracts across Amercia.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Diamonds may be forever but they are also seriously on sale. Natural rough diamond prices have collapsed 26 per cent in the past couple of years. Tepid US and Chinese demand for diamond jewellery hasn't helped. But most ring fingers point at the increasing popularity of cheaper laboratory grown diamonds (LGD). This fracturing of the diamond market is set to last. After a brief pandemic-era boom in diamond jewellery, miners are battling to whittle down oversupply of gems. Anglo-American's De Beers, along with Russia's Alrosa, control two-thirds of the rough diamond supply. DeBeers this week said its rough sales dropped 23 per cent in the first quarter. It is not enough. While rough stone inventory has stabilised of late, polished diamond stocks remain high. At more than $20bn at the end of 2023, these were near five-year highs, up a third since the end of 2022, according to Bank of America. Worse, as LGDs have taken market share, their prices have declined too, to about 15 per cent or less of their natural counterparts. Diamond miners spent years maintaining that romantic buyers would prefer the allure of rare, natural stones. It increasingly appears they were wrong. Synthetic diamonds are nothing new, having appeared about 70 years ago mostly for industrial purposes. But in the past decade LGDs have taken off. In 2015, LGD supply barely featured as a rival to natural stones. By last year it was more than 10 per cent of the global diamond jewellery market, according to specialist Paul Zimnisky. This has created a competitive frenzy among producers. LGDs' lower costs have enabled them to slash prices. In October, WD Lab Grown Diamonds, America's second-largest maker of synthetics, filed for bankruptcy. It has since had to shift its business away from retail towards industrial customers.

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What's that? Q1 was better than expected? Pump those shares

Another Boeing whistleblower has come forward to report problems at his former employer, but that doesn't seem to have upset shareholders, who sent shares skyward on news of a quarter bearing fewer losses than expected.…

President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package that includes a bill that would ban TikTok if China-based parent company ByteDance fails to divest the app within a year. The Verge: The divest-or-ban bill is now law, starting the clock for ByteDance to make its move. The company has an initial nine months to sort out a deal, though the president could extend that another three months if he sees progress. While just recently the legislation seemed like it would stall out in the Senate after being passed as a standalone bill in the House, political maneuvering helped usher it through to Biden's desk. The House packaged the TikTok bill -- which upped the timeline for divestment from the six months allowed in the earlier version -- with foreign aid to US allies, which effectively forced the Senate to consider the measures together. The longer divestment period also seemed to get some lawmakers who were on the fence on board.

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One of the leading-edge benefits of Fedora Linux is that it always ships with the most up-to-date open-source compiler toolchains at release. For their spring releases each year, it typically means shipping with a GCC compiler that isn't even officially released as stable yet. With this week's release of Fedora 40, it's shipping with GCC 14.0.1 as the development version that will culminate with the inaugural GCC 14 stable release in the coming weeks. Plus Fedora 40 has all of the other latest GNU toolchain components and then over on the LLVM side is with the current LLVM 18 stable series. For those curious how GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 performance is looking, here is a wide range of C/C++ benchmarks carried out on Fedora Workstation 40 using a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the Zen 4 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

The firm 'fessed up to staff misconduct and avoided criminal liability

A company contracted to manage an Amarillo, Texas nuclear weapons facility has to pay US government $18.4 million in a settlement over allegations that its atomic technicians fudged their timesheets to collect more money from Uncle Sam.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Qualcomm is cheating on the Snapdragon X Plus/Elite benchmarks given to OEMs and the press. SemiAccurate doesn't use these words lightly but there is no denying what multiple sources are telling us. [...] Then there were the actual 'briefings' for the X Pro SoC. To call them pathetic is giving them more than their due. The deck was 11 slides, three of which were empty/fluff, five 'benchmark' slides with woefully inadequate disclosure, and two infographic summary slides. The last was the slide below with the 'deep technical' stats [screenshots in the linked article], much of which we told you about last week. And more. The rest of the 'disclosure' for Snapdragon X Pro was a list of features that all fall under the guise of exactly what you would expect. The rest was filled with deep 'details' like the GPU capabilities of 3.8TFLOPS. That's it. No specs, no capabilities, no nothing. It was truly pathetic. But wait there is more, or less really, with statements like it having AV1 encode and decode. Trivialities like frame rates and resolutions were seemingly not needed for such technical briefs. See what we mean by pathetic? Those 10 cores are arranged how again? That 42MB of cache is what level? Shall I go on about the bare minimum basics or do you get the point now? SemiAccurate was planning to ask Qualcomm about their cheating on benchmarks at the promised briefing but, well, they lied to us and cut us out of the pathetic bits they did brief on. We honestly would have liked to know why they were cheating but we kind of think they will do their usual response to bad news and pretend it never happened like last time. If they actually do explain things we will of course update this article as we always do.

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Privacy Sandbox slips into 2025 after challenges from UK authorities

Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

A new AMD Linux kernel patch queued today via "x86/urgent" for routing into the Linux 6.9 development kernel expands the range of recognized CPU model IDs for upcoming Zen 5 processors...

Their holiday options are now far more restricted

The US has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals for their alleged roles in various attacks on US companies and government departments, all of whom are claimed to have worked for fake companies linked to Iran's military.…