Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Maryland legislature passed two bills over the weekend limiting tech platforms' ability to collect and use consumers' data. Maryland Governor Wes Moore is expected to sign one of those bills, the Maryland Kids Code, on Thursday, MoCo360 reports. If signed into law, the other bill, the Maryland Online Privacy Act, will go into effect in October 2025. The legislation would limit platforms' ability to collect user data and let users opt out of having their data used for targeted advertising and other purposes. Together, the bills would significantly limit social media and other platforms' ability to track their users -- but tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, have opposed similar legislation. Lawmakers say the goal is to protect children, but tech companies say the bills are a threat to free speech. Part of the Maryland Kids Code -- the Maryland Age-Appropriate Design Code Act -- will go into effect much sooner, on October 1st. It bans platforms from using "system design features to increase, sustain, or extend the use of the online product," including autoplaying media, rewarding users for spending more time on the platform, and spamming users with notifications. Another part of the legislation prohibits certain video game, social media, and other platforms from tracking users who are younger than 18. "It's meant to rein in some of the worst practices with sensible regulation that allows companies to do what's right and what is wonderful about the internet and tech innovation, while at the same time saying, 'You can't take advantage of our kids,'" Maryland state Delegate Jared Solomon, one of the bill's sponsors, said in a press conference Wednesday. "We are technically the second state to pass a kids code," Solomon told The New York Times. "But we are hoping to be the first state to withstand the inevitable court challenge that we know is coming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sources claim ransomware is to blame

Healthcare organization Ascension is the latest of its kind in the US to say its network has been affected by what it believes to be a "cybersecurity event."…

Any way you network slice it, you can't favor an app, says US watchdog

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released the final text of its net neutrality order, adding changes that appear to rule out so-called "fast lanes" for applications that some advocates feared would undermine it.…

A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with "upcoming AMD hardware" as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express...

Apple will deliver some of its upcoming AI features this year via data centers equipped with its own in-house processors, part of a sweeping effort to infuse its devices with AI capabilities. From a report: The company is placing high-end chips -- similar to ones it designed for the Mac -- in cloud-computing servers designed to process the most advanced AI tasks coming to Apple devices, according to people familiar with the matter. Simpler AI-related features will be processed directly on iPhones, iPads and Macs, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still under wraps. The move is part of Apple's much-anticipated push into generative artificial intelligence -- the technology behind ChatGPT and other popular tools. The company is playing catch-up with Big Tech rivals in the area but is poised to lay out an ambitious AI strategy at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10. Apple's plan to use its own chips and process AI tasks in the cloud was hatched about three years ago, but the company accelerated the timeline after the AI craze -- fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini -- forced it to move more quickly. The first AI server chips will be the M2 Ultra, which was launched last year as part of the Mac Pro and Mac Studio computers, though the company is already eyeing future versions based on the M4 chip

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IT giant tries to downplay leak as just names, addresses, info about kit

Dell has confirmed information about its customers and their orders has been stolen from one of its portals. Though the thief claimed to have swiped 49 million records, which are now up for sale on the dark web, the IT giant declined to say how many people may be affected.…

Having China, Russia, and Iran routinely rummaging around is cause for concern, says ex-NSA man

RSAC  Digital intruders from China, Russia, and Iran breaking into US water systems this year should be a "wake-up call," according to former National Security Agency cyber boss Rob Joyce.…

The world is on the verge of a climate abyss, the UN has warned, in response to a Guardian survey that found that hundreds of the world's foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C. From a report: A series of leading climate figures have reacted to the findings, saying the deep despair voiced by the scientists must be a renewed wake-up call for urgent and radical action to stop burning fossil fuels and save millions of lives and livelihoods. Some said the 1.5C target was hanging by a thread, but it was not yet inevitable that it would be passed, if an extraordinary change in the pace of climate action could be achieved. The Guardian got the views of almost 400 senior authors of reports by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost 80% expected a rise of at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a catastrophic level of heating, while only 6% thought it would stay within the 1.5C limit. Many expressed their personal anguish at the lack of climate action. "The goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is hanging by a thread," said the official spokesperson for Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general. "The battle to keep 1.5C alive will be won or lost in the 2020s -- under the watch of political and industry leaders today. They need to realise we are on the verge of the abyss. The science is clear and so are the world's scientists: the stakes for all humanity could not be higher." Alok Sharma, the president of the Cop26 climate summit in 2021, said: "The results of the Guardian's survey should be another wake-up call for governments to stop prevaricating and inject much more urgency into delivering on the climate commitments they have already made." He said world leaders needed to get on and deliver on the pledge they made to transition away from fossil fuels at Cop28 in December.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oh well – next!

The first human to get a Neuralink implant may be doing fine now, but that's after a good deal of work to address post-surgical trouble that saw its performance significantly degrade.…

The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world's atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet. From a report: The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period. The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Nino climate event, which has now waned, as well as the ongoing and increasing amounts of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. "It's really significant to see the pace of the increase over the first four months of this year, which is also a record," said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We aren't just breaking records in CO2 concentrations, but also the record in how fast it is rising." The global CO2 readings have been taken from a station perched upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii since the measurements began in 1958 under Keeling's father, Charles. The concentrations of CO2 have increased each year since, as the heat-trapping gas continues to progressively accumulate due to rampant emissions from power plants, cars, trucks and other sources, with last year hitting a new global record in annual emissions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there's still more performance left on the table as shown by Intel. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 40 are competing with Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that offers aggressive x86_64 Linux performance defaults and the best possible out-of-the-box Linux performance on modern x86_64 hardware.

New-ish Kirin SoC performance doesn’t impress, however

A teardown of Huawei's Pura 70 Pro reveals that the China tech company's latest smartphone is mostly made in China, with one notable exception.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sonos has responded to the avalanche of feedback -- some good, plenty bad -- about the company's redesigned mobile app that was released on May 7th. In the days since, customers have complained about missing features like sleep timers, broken local music library management, and no longer having the ability to edit playlists or the upcoming song queue. More alarmingly, the Sonos app's accessibility has also taken a hit, something the company says it's aiming to resolve by next month. In a statement provided to The Verge, Sonos confirms that it's keenly aware of the gripes that customers have expressed about the new app. It's hearing their response and is working to address the functionality that has (for now) gone missing. But the company is also standing behind its decision to roll out the app this week, basically describing it as a rough patch that will, in theory, lead to a much better experience for everyone down the line. "Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious undertaking that represents just how seriously we are committed to invention and re-invention," said chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin. "It takes courage to rebuild a brand's core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Praising 996 culture is so Jack Ma 2019

Updated  The vice president and public relations head of Chinese search engine giant Baidu stirred up controversy this week by promoting workaholic behaviors on a personal social media account.…

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers' names and physical addresses. TechCrunch: In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people on social media, the computer maker wrote that it was investigating "an incident involving a Dell portal, which contains a database with limited types of customer information related to purchases from Dell." Dell wrote that the information accessed in the breach included customer names, physical addresses, and "Dell hardware and order information, including service tag, item description, date of order and related warranty information." Dell did not say if the incident was caused by malicious outsiders or inadvertent error. The breached data did not include email addresses, telephone numbers, financial or payment information, or "any highly sensitive customer information," according to the company. The company downplayed the impact of the breach in the message.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create AI-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products. From a report:While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce "safe and beneficial" AI. OpenAI, which is also the developer of the DALL-E image generator, revealed it was considering letting developers and users "responsibly" create what it termed not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content through its products. OpenAI said this could include "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity." It said: "We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts ... We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behaviour in this area." The proposal was published as part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI tools. Joanne Jang, an employee at the San Francisco-based company who worked on the document, told the US news organisation NPR that OpenAI wanted to start a discussion about whether the generation of erotic text and nude images should always be banned from its products. However, she stressed that deepfakes would not be allowed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research lands weeks after the Copilot company said it was still trying to convince customers of benefits

Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index makes grand claims about the benefits of AI, but might make disturbing reading for administrators worrying about shadow IT.…

The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft's Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn't finished. From a report: This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way. Employees were shocked by the unexpected shuttering Tuesday of three Xbox subsidiaries and the absorption of a fourth. The closures included Tokyo-based Tango Gameworks, which last year released the critically acclaimed action game Hi-Fi Rush. Tango was in the process of pitching a sequel, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. During a town hall with ZeniMax staff on Wednesday morning, Xbox president Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance. Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company's studios had been spread too thin -- like "peanut butter on bread" -- and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said. Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arkane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall, a critical and commercial flop.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack...

Stick to data pipelines and ontology, says expert after share price dip

Spy-tech biz Palantir has overstated its claim to be a generative AI company, according to one investment analyst who thinks this might explain its recent slowdown in growth from commercial markets.…