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In-app browsers are still a privacy, security, and choice problem

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 12:30pm
Regulators reminded that longstanding concerns haven't been addressed

Competition cops in Europe and the United Kingdom have started paying attention to in-app browsers, a controversial mechanism for presenting web content within native apps.…

Visa and Mastercard Agree To $30 Billion Settlement Over Credit Card Fees

Slashdot - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 12:00pm
Two of the world's largest credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard, as well as the banks that issue cards with them, have agreed to settle a decadeslong antitrust case brought upon by merchants. From a report: The settlement is set to lower swipe fees merchants pay when customers make purchases using their Visa or Mastercard by $30 billion over five years, according to a press release announcing the settlement Tuesday morning. The settlement, which only applies to US merchants, is the result of a lawsuit filed in 2005. However, nothing is considered finalized until it receives approval from the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Even then, the case can also be appealed in what could be a lengthy battle. Typically, swipe fees cost merchants 2% of the total transaction a customer makes -- but can be as much as 4% for some premium rewards cards, according to the National Retail Federation. The settlement would lower those fees by at least 0.04 percentage point for a minimum of three years. Additionally, the settlement would require Visa and Mastercard to maintain the swipe fee rates that existed as of December 31, 2023 for five years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Belgian beer study acquires taste for machine learning

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 11:45am
Researchers reckon results could improve recipe development for food and beverages

Joining the list of things that probably don't need improving by machine learning but people are going to try anyway is Belgian beer.…

Street newspaper appears to have Big Issue with Qilin ransomware gang

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 11:00am
The days of cybercriminals having something of a moral compass are over

The parent company of The Big Issue, a street newspaper and social enterprise for homeless people, is wrestling with a cybersecurity incident claimed by the Qilin ransomware gang.…

Microsoft Engineer Sends Rust Linux Kernel Patches For In-Place Module Initialization

Phoronix - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 10:52am
What a time we live in where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support. A previously unimaginable combination of Microsoft, the Rust programming language, and the Linux kernel...

Intel Xe Developers Begin Looking At Cross-Device & Cross-Driver HMM

Phoronix - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 10:22am
The Intel open-source engineers working on the modern Xe DRM kernel graphics driver have begun looking at Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support for cross-device and cross-driver scenarios as the latest exciting feature work for this still-experimental driver...

Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 10:15am
'Temporary' isn't always

Windows has a built-in reminder of the perils of temporary solutions thanks to the 30-year-old porting efforts of former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer.…

Software Industry Calls for More UK Government Support

Slashdot - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 10:00am
Britain's government has been urged to provide more support for the software industry with measures including tax incentives and talent visas. From a report: More than 120 industry leaders have called for government intervention to improve conditions for European software companies. Europe has long struggled to scale up homegrown tech companies as successfully as the U.S., with many startups forced to seek investment abroad as they scale up. A new policy document -- published by industry body Boardwave and seen by Reuters -- highlights what it calls Europe's "dreadful" track record of scaling software companies, with one recent study showing only one software-focused firm, Sage, counted among Britain's top 100 publicly-traded businesses, compared to dozens in the U.S. Phill Robinson, Boardwave founder and a former executive at software giant Salesfore, shared the report with Britain's technology minister Michele Donelan last week, warning that mid-sized software companies had received little government attention compared to Big Tech firms and buzzy venture-funded startups.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TornadoVM v1.0.3 OpenJDK/GraalVM Plug-In For Java Heterogeneous Hardware Support

Phoronix - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 9:57am
TornadoVM is the OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that opens up the Java programming language to heterogeneous hardware support by allowing the easy targeting of Java code to TornadoVM targets including OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V -- in addition to CPUs. With the SPIR-V and OpenCL support in turn this means Java can run not only on GPUs but also some FPGAs and other devices...

UK skies set for cheeky upgrade with hybrid airship

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 9:30am
Depending on planning permission being given for facility

The Airlander hybrid airship looks set to go into production within a few years, if its maker can get planning approval for a factory.…

Lenovo scores deal to build supercomputer at UK's Hartree Center

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 8:29am
Liquid cooled, 44.7 Petaflops and with unspecified GPUs

The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has picked Lenovo to build and install a 44.7-Petaflops liquid cooled supercomputer.…

CEO of UK's National Grid warns of datacenters' thirst for power

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 7:02am
Predicts 500 percent increase in consumption over a decade and suggests 800 kilovolt fix

John Pettigrew, the CEO of Britain's National Grid, warned on Tuesday that datacenter power consumption is on track to grow 500 percent over the next decade.…

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 5:30am
Finally, a power greater than ML hype: Angry fandom

Pics  The BBC has decided to exterminate its experiments using generative AI to promote venerable sci-fi show Doctor Who.…

XenServer is back, with a rebranded Citrix Hypervisor and a tasty three-host freebie

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 3:44am
Per-socket licensing regime may explain years of ups and downs

XenServer, the Cloud-Software-Group-owned server virtualization spinout from Citrix, has debuted its new/old product, XenServer 8.…

Crypto Miner, Pennsylvania Hit With Lawsuit Over Pollution From Bitcoin Mine

Slashdot - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 3:30am
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: An environmental community group on Tuesday sued Stronghold Digital Mining claiming the company's bitcoin mine in northeastern Pennsylvania that burns waste coal and old tires for energy is polluting nearby communities with dangerous chemicals. The lawsuit by Save Carbon County filed in state court in Philadelphia, also names Pennsylvania as a defendant. The group, a nonprofit whose members live near the bitcoin mine, is seeking compensatory and punitive damages from the company, and an order directing the state to stop allowing the pollution to continue. The group said Stronghold has created a public and private nuisance by releasing mercury into waterways and spewing harmful chemicals like sulfur dioxide into the air from an aging power plant it bought to power its energy-thirsty operations. The state has issued permits allowing the pollution and subsidized the crypto-mine through tax incentives despite having an affirmative duty in the state constitution to protect the environment for its citizens, according to the lawsuit. A Stronghold spokesperson said in a statement that its operations actually clean up land and water in the area by using waste coal left behind by historic coal production in the region. "Stronghold's facilities have cleaned up millions of tons of waste coal and reclaimed over 1,050 acres of once-blighted land, now sports fields, parks, and fishing spots for local communities," the spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists Turn To AI To Make Beer Taste Even Better

Slashdot - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 1:30am
Researchers say they have used AI to make brews even better. From a report: Prof Kevin Verstrepen, of KU Leuven university, who led the research, said AI could help tease apart the complex relationships involved in human aroma perception. "Beer -- like most food products -- contains hundreds of different aroma molecules that get picked up by our tongue and nose, and our brain then integrates these into one picture. However, the compounds interact with each other, so how we perceive one depends also on the concentrations of the others," he said. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Verstrepen and his colleagues report how they analysed the chemical makeup of 250 commercial Belgian beers of 22 different styles including lagers, fruit beers, blonds, West Flanders ales, and non-alcoholic beers. Among the properties studied were alcohol content, pH, sugar concentration, and the presence and concentration of more than 200 different compounds involved in flavour -- such as esters that are produced by yeasts and terpenoids from hops, both of which are involved in creating fruity notes. A tasting panel of 16 participants sampled and scored each of the 250 beers for 50 different attributes, such as hop flavours, sweetness, and acidity -- a process that took three years. The researchers also collected 180,000 reviews of different beers from the online consumer review platform RateBeer, finding that while appreciation of the brews was biased by features such as price meaning they differed from the tasting panel's ratings, the ratings and comments relating to other features -- such as bitterness, sweetness, alcohol and malt aroma -- these correlated well with those from the tasting panel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alibaba bins listing for its Cainiao logistics limb

El Reg - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 1:29am
Already backed away from cloud spinout, now gradually breaking up with its own breakup plan

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has decided not to spin out its logistics limb, Cainiao, and will instead buy back shares in the outfit and integrate it more deeply with its e-commerce operations.…

Zstd 1.5.6 Released - Celebrating Google Chrome Support For Zstandard Encoding

Phoronix - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 12:35am
Meta's Yann Collet just released Zstd 1.5.6 as the newest version of this Zstandard compression implementation. This release is driven in part by Google Chrome 123 adding support for Zstd encoding for web traffic. Chrome now allows Zstandard (zstd) for the content-encoding to speed-up page load speeds and bandwidth savings...

Boeing Chief Must Have Engineering Background, Emirates Boss Says

Slashdot - Wed, 27/03/2024 - 12:30am
The chief of Emirates, one of Boeing's largest clients, has said the crisis-stricken US aircraft maker should ensure its new chief executive has engineering experience to restore safety standards (non-paywalled link). From a report: A day after Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun announced he would step down, Sir Tim Clark also said he backed efforts by the US group's largest labour union to win a seat on the board. "To fix Boeing's issues the company needs a strong engineering lead as its head coupled to a governance model which prioritises safety and quality," Clark told the Financial Times on Tuesday. "Some serious lateral thinking" was needed, the airline boss added. Boeing on Monday unveiled a wide-ranging reshuffle of its leadership in a bid to get to grips with an escalating reputational crisis after a 737 Max door panel blew off mid-flight in January. Calhoun, 66, is to leave at the end of the year, while board chair Larry Kellner said he would depart in May. Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes division since 2019, was immediately replaced by chief operating officer Stephanie Pope.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

World Poker Tour Bets on AI Dubbing of Tournaments for Latin America

Slashdot - Tue, 26/03/2024 - 11:20pm
Georg Szalai reports via the Hollywood Reporter: The World Poker Tour (WPT) is betting on AI-powered dubbing tools under a partnership with Papercup, a London-based AI dubbing company, that will replace WPT's traditional localization methods in Latin America. Papercup will work with the World Poker Tour to translate 184 of the franchise's 44-minute-long episodes into Brazilian Portuguese, the companies said. "This will amount to nearly 140 hours of content and enable viewers across South America to access WPT's latest shows and tournaments in their native language quicker than ever before," they explained. "Forced to deal with lead times of up to six months, the company experienced ongoing challenges with timely content delivery and adaptation." The Papercup deal will cut those lead times in half, the partners said. "Now the premier poker content produced by WPT will be able to reach international fans watching on OTT platforms, as well as its own FAST channel, faster than ever before," they touted. Financial terms weren't disclosed. Papercup uses a combination of machine-learning tools and expert human translators to "deliver maximal linguistic and tonal accuracy." Its AI voices are built using data from real voice actors to ensure they "have all the warmth and expressivity of human speech," it says. "The quality of Papercup dubbing has been second to none. A big part of that is down to their AI voices and expert translators who go through every sentence to make sure the moment is truly captured in the new AI dubs," said Marc Dion, director of distribution & ad sales at WPT. "The major streaming platforms have very stringent criteria when it comes to dubbed content and if it's going to connect with our shared viewers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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