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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Jonathan M. Gitlin: A perennial question that has accompanied the spread of Android Automotive has been the question of support. A car has a much longer expected service life than a smartphone, especially an Android smartphone, and with infotainment systems so integral to a car's operations now, how long can we reasonably expect those infotainment systems to be supported? I got the chance to put this question to Dirk Hilgenberg, CEO of CARIAD, Volkswagen Group's software division: Given the much longer service life of a car compared to a smartphone, how does VW plan to keep those cars patched and safe 10 or 15 years from now? "We actually have a contract with the brands, which took a while to negotiate, but lifetime support was utterly important," Hilgenberg told me. The follow-up was obvious: How long is "lifetime"? "Fifteen years after service, and an extra option for brands who would like to have it even longer; you know, we have to guarantee updatability on all legal aspects," he said. "So that's why we are, as you can imagine, very cautious with branches of releases because every branch we need to maintain over this long time. So when you have end of operation and EOP [end of production] and it's 15 years longer, we still have to maintain that; plus, some brands actually said 'because my vehicle is a unicorn, it's something that people want even more, they only occasionally drive it but they want to be safe,'" Hilgenberg told me. (The unicorn reference should make sense in the context of VW Group owning Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Porsche, whose cars are often collected and can be on the road for many decades.) In those cases, CARIAD would provide continued support, Hilgenberg said. "Especially as cybersecurity, all the legal things are concerned, you see that already. Now we do upgrades and releases, whether it's in China, whether it's in the US, whether it's in Europe, we take very cautious steps. Security and safety has, in the Volkswagen group, you know, the utmost importance, and we see it actually as an opportunity to differentiate," he said. In an update to the article, Ars said CARIAD got in touch with them to add some clarifications. "As part of its development services to Volkswagen's automotive brands, CARIAD provides operational services, updates, upgrades and new releases as well as bug fixes and patches relating to its hardware- and software-products. We usually support our hard- and software releases for extended periods of time. In some cases this can be up to 15 years after the end of production ('EOP') for hardware and 10 years after EOP for software releases. Moreover, there are legally mandatory periods we comply with, e.g. cybersecurity as well as safety updates and patches are provided for as long as a function is available. In addition, there may be individual agreements with brands for longer support periods to specifically satisfy their customers' needs," wrote a CARIAD spokesperson. Ars notes: "there's no guarantee that OEMs can make the business model work for this long-term support."

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GitHub has rotated its private SSH key for GitHub.com after the secret was was accidentally published in a public GitHub repository. BleepingComputer reports: The software development and version control service says, the private RSA key was only "briefly" exposed, but that it took action out of "an abundance of caution." In a succinct blog post published today, GitHub acknowledged discovering this week that the RSA SSH private key for GitHub.com had been ephemerally exposed in a public GitHub repository. "We immediately acted to contain the exposure and began investigating to understand the root cause and impact," writes Mike Hanley, GitHub's Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering. "We have now completed the key replacement, and users will see the change propagate over the next thirty minutes. Some users may have noticed that the new key was briefly present beginning around 02:30 UTC during preparations for this change." As some may notice, only GitHub.com's RSA SSH key has been impacted and replaced. No change is required for ECDSA or Ed25519 users.

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Age verification, a private right to sue Big Tech ... when someone does think of the children?

To protect children, Utah Governor Spencer Cox on Thursday signed two bills aimed at "holding social media companies accountable."…

During its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023, the company showed off new animation tools that make it possible to create realistic facial animations using only video captured from an iPhone. The Verge reports: Epic showed this off with a live demonstration featuring the actor behind the upcoming game Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. It was a short clip, with the actor speaking directly into the camera, but it appeared to be rendered both quickly and accurately. Even more impressive, the company then showed off the same animations captured onstage used to bring another MetaHuman character to life. The animator is launching this summer. Epic's MetaHuman Creator was announced in early 2021 to streamline the process of making more realistic human faces, body movements, and facial animations.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Adult industry cryptocurrency payment platform SpankPay announced on Monday that it is closing down, after facing the same banking discrimination it aimed to help sex workers avoid. "After a long and difficult consideration, we have decided to close down SpankPay, our crypto payment processor that we built as a safe haven for our community," SpankPay tweeted. "Rest assured your money is safe and we'll get it to you as soon as possible." SpankPay is the payments side of the blockchain Spankchain, a sex worker-led alternative to more mainstream cryptocurrency exchanges. Spankchain started development around 2017, and SpankPay launched in 2019. Wyre Payments, the company's upstream payment processor, terminated SpankPay's account because Wyre's new payment processor, Checkout.com, doesn't allow processing for payments related to sexual businesses, SpankPay said. In February, payments through SpankPay were suspended because Wyre indefinitely terminated Spankpay, alleging it was in violation of "third-party payment processor or network rules," according to a legal letter sent from Wyre that SpankPay posted to Twitter. "Operating SpankPay in a hostile banking environment has always been challenging, but the escalating attacks have become untenable for our small team and the niche market we serve," SpankPay tweeted in February.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday, Google initiated the process of opening up Bard to the world by inviting users in the US and UK to sign up for access. It first demoed Bard in February, in a clear response to seeing ChatGPT take the world by storm over the holiday period, but is only now opening up access. Unfortunately for the search giant, the beta-ness of Bard is clear, with a first batch of adopters seemingly underwhelmed by its capabilities when compared with OpenAI's GPT-4 technology. Bard has had the odd hiccup already. A possible mistake made by the chatbot during its demo launch last month was followed by a $100 billion cratering in parent company Alphabet's valuation. Now testers say the current version of Bard isn't living up to the competition. "I've been playing with Google Bard for a while today and I never thought I'd say this, but... Bing is way ahead of Google right now (at this specific chat feature)," tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee tweeted on Tuesday. Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches entrepreneurship and innovation, added that although it's early, "Google's Bard does not seem as capable as a learning tool as Bing or GPT-4." Mollick notes that "Google's Bard loses" to its rival "by a lot" in poetry, struggling far more in its potential to generate a sestina, fixed verse form from France made up of 39 lines. A prompt to get Bard to generate a synopsis of a "Star Wars" movie in the style of filmmaker David Lynch, known for his off-kilter storytelling, ended up producing a bog-standard "Star Wars" plot. Bard also has issues handling word puzzles, an area where AIs powered by large language models should theoretically excel. Take Twofer Goofer, an online puzzle that involves users figuring out what a pair of mystery rhyming words are through slightly obtuse prompts and clues.

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All your previously Snipping Tool cropped images aren't, basically

Microsoft is said to be preparing to fix the high-profile "aCropalypse" privacy bug in its Snipping Tool for Windows 11.…

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has now sided with Microsoft over concerns the software giant could remove Call of Duty from PlayStation if its proposed Activision Blizzard deal is approved. From a report: The regulator still has concerns about the deal's impact on the cloud gaming market and will complete its investigation by the end of April. "Having considered the additional evidence provided, we have now provisionally concluded that the merger will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in console gaming services because the cost to Microsoft of withholding Call of Duty from PlayStation would outweigh any gains from taking such action," says Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts conducting the CMA's investigation. The CMA had originally provisionally concluded that a Microsoft strategy to withhold Call of Duty from PlayStation would be profitable. Microsoft wasn't happy with that conclusion and publicly criticized the regulator's math earlier this month, arguing that the CMA's financial modeling was flawed.

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Alex Ellis: Earlier this month, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an "organisation", telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers. As far as we know, this only affects organisation accounts that are often used by open source communities. There was no change to personal accounts. Free personal accounts have a a 6 month retention period. Why is this a problem? 1. Paid team plans cost 420 USD per year (paid monthly) 2. Many open source projects including ones I maintain have published images to the Docker Hub for years 3. Docker's Open Source program is hostile and out of touch Why should you listen to me? I was one of the biggest advocates around for Docker, speaking at their events, contributing to their projects and being a loyal member of their voluntary influencer program "Docker Captains". I have written dozens if not hundreds of articles and code samples on Docker as a technology. I'm not one of those people who think that all software and services should be free. I pay for a personal account, not because I publish images there anymore, but because I need to pull images like the base image for Go, or Node.js as part of my daily open source work. When one of our OpenFaaS customers grumbled about paying for Docker Desktop, and wanted to spend several weeks trying to get Podman or Rancher Desktop working, I had to bite my tongue. If you're using a Mac or a Windows machine, it's worth paying for in my opinion. But that is a different matter. Having known Docker's new CTO personally for a very long time, I was surprised how out of touch the communication was. More: Docker: We apologize. We did a terrible job announcing the end of Docker Free Teams..

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Beijing's Made in China drive fueled by Washington's export crackdowns

Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.…

Proposals to pay for broadband networks by imposing new fees on Big Tech companies "are built on a false premise," Meta executives wrote in a blog post today. From a report: "Network fee proposals do not recognize that our investments in content drive the business model of telecom operators," Meta executives Kevin Salvadori and Bruno Cendon Martin wrote. Meta's comments came a few weeks after Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters spoke out against the proposal being reviewed by European regulators. Meta executives said telecom operators and content application providers (CAPs) "are symbiotic businesses, occupying different but complementary roles in the digital ecosystem. Every year, Meta invests tens of billions of euros in our apps and platforms -- such as Facebook, Instagram, and Quest -- to facilitate the hosting of content. Billions of people go online every day to access this content, creating the demand that allows telecom operators to charge people for Internet access. Our investment in content literally drives the revenue and business model of telecom operators." Internet service providers in the EU argue that Big Tech companies should pay a "fair share" toward network-building costs. In the US, Federal Communications Commission Republican Brendan Carr claims that "Big Tech has been enjoying a free ride on our Internet infrastructure while skipping out on the billions of dollars in costs needed to maintain and build that network." Big Tech companies don't actually get free access to the Internet, though. Anyone distributing content over the Internet pays their own providers, builds their own network infrastructure, or does some combination of the two. For extremely large companies like Netflix and Meta, investments include building their own content-delivery networks. "Over the last decade, CAPs have collectively invested over $880 billion in global digital infrastructure, including approximately $120 billion a year from 2018 to 2021," Meta's blog post today said. "These infrastructure contributions made by technology companies save telecom operators around $6 billion per year."

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Not a headline we expected to write today

American cybersecurity officials have released an early-warning system to protect Microsoft cloud users.…

President Joe Biden made clear in his State of the Union address last month that as the US spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections, "we're going to buy American." But that aspiration is easier said than done. From a report: While there seems to be enough domestic fiber optic cable to connect communities, the electronic components such as routers that transform glass strands into data highways are made mainly in other countries. Cable providers, chip makers and wireless carriers are pleading for relief from the requirement to "buy American," saying they can't build new networks without foreign electronics. Otherwise the broadband buildup that Biden has set as a priority will be delayed by years as domestic sources are developed. "Everybody's sorting this out," said Michael Romano, executive vice president of NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association, a trade group. "It's not clear there's much, if any, American equipment that would satisfy Build America Buy America as it stands today." The Build America Buy America Act was enacted as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, and requires any infrastructure projects to use domestically sourced materials in order to receive federal assistance. That applies to the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD), the flagship Biden initiative for building new networks to connect the 30 million Americans the administration estimates are without fast internet service.

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OCI is much more efficient than the acquired Cerner DCs, Ellison told investors

Oracle is set to make a number of job cuts at Cerner, the electronic health records company it acquired last year, as its shift workloads to its cloud infrastructure.…

Pets could be subjected to gene editing under a new UK government act, the RSPCA has warned. From a report: The animal charity has said that the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act applies to all vertebrate animals, not only farmed animals, and that it could lead to cats and dogs being gene-edited to include extreme features. The law allows the creation and marketing of "precision-bred" or genome-edited plants and vertebrate animals in England. The government said it would allow farmers to grow crops that are drought- and disease-resistant, reduce the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and help breed animals that are protected from catching harmful diseases. The UK environment secretary, Therese Coffey, described the act, which received royal assent on Thursday, as a "Brexit freedom," but the RSPCA said it could have dire consequences for animal welfare. David Bowles, the head of campaigns and public affairs at the RSPCA, criticised what he described as an "ill-judged policy." He said the charity had tried to get the government to include an exemption for pets, but was "sadly ignored." He added: "Gene editing could be a huge step backwards for animals. We do not believe this act should include animals, whether they are farm, pet or wildlife. Invasive procedures are needed to create each line of gene-edited mammals, there is no history of use for this powerful technology, and it can cause unintended changes to the genome, with unpredictable effects. The RSPCA has serious animal welfare and ethical concerns about this."

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The head of the nation's air traffic controllers said there have been too many near collisions at airports and laid out steps to avoid more -- including more supervisor oversight in control towers and extra controller training for "unusual circumstances." From a report: "Even though we all know that multiple levels of safety are built into our system, there is no question that we are seeing too many close calls," said Tim Arel, chief operating officer of the Federal Aviation Administration's Air Traffic Organization. The five steps laid out Thursday by Arel in an agency-wide memo follow last week's FAA safety summit focusing on the recent series of near collisions involving commercial airliners on or near the runways of US airports. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating six incidents this year alone. "Our dedication to continuous improvement demands that we dig deep to identify the underlying factors and address them," Arel said. "With the summer travel season just around the corner, airlines and the traveling public have high expectations." The steps laid out in the memo direct supervisors to "devote their full attention to the operation and airfield during peak traffic periods at each facility" and instruct improvements to training. The memo notes simulator training for controllers was "last updated in 2016." Additional safety steps include working with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association to reinforce existing safety protocols and reexamining runway incursion data "to identify underlying factors that led to these close calls and identify remedies." The most serious types of near-collisions on US runways this year are about double the rate seen in the past, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Thursday. "In past years, they've occurred at roughly a rate of once per month," he told a Senate committee. "Right now, they are this year occurring at a rate that is double that. "Buttigieg spoke specifically about the two most serious categories of runway incursions and said there's a "definite increase."

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The concept of "buy now, pay later" has exploded in popularity in recent years. Americans have been using this form of lending -- in which the cost of a purchase is typically divided into four payments over several weeks or months -- to buy everything from clothes to Peloton bikes. But now there is a new trend: People are using the payment method for smaller items, like groceries. From a report: Buy now, pay later -- referred to in the payments industry as BNPL -- is a new spin on the concept of layaway. It allows consumers to get the product up front, divide their payment into installments paid over a longer period with little or no interest -- as long as the make the payments on time. Common BNPL options include Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, PayPal and Zip. In the first two months of 2023, the share of online grocery orders made using buy now, pay later grew by 40% compared with the same period a year ago, according to new data released by Adobe Analytics this week. The overall rise in BNPL online orders, meanwhile, grew by 10% over the same period, and overall online BNPL revenue fell by 19%, meaning the average dollar amount for each order fell. This trend may be partly due to the fact that Americans are simply spending more money on groceries online. Online grocery spending grew by nearly 27% year over year to $8.4 billion in February.

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Back to work on Monday? Branson and co still fighting to get funding

SpaceX and OpenAI backing venture capitalist Matthew Brown, of Matthew Brown Companies, has confirmed that his group is in funding talks with space biz Virgin Orbit.…

A Chinese startup has invented a long-distance kissing machine that transmits users' kiss data collected through motion sensors hidden in silicon lips, which simultaneously move when replaying kisses received. From a report: MUA -- named after the sound people commonly make when blowing a kiss -- also captures and replays sound and warms up slightly during kissing, making the experience more authentic, said Beijing-based Siweifushe. Users can even download kissing data submitted via an accompanying app by other users. The invention was inspired by lockdown isolation. At their most severe, China's lockdowns saw authorities forbid residents to leave their apartments for months on end. "I was in a relationship back then, but I couldn't meet my girlfriend due to lockdowns," said inventor Zhao Jianbo. Then a student at the Beijing Film Academy, he focused his graduate project on the lack of physical intimacy in video calls. He later set up Siweifushe which released MUA, its first product, on 22 January. The device is priced at 260 yuan ($38). In the two weeks after its release, the firm sold over 3,000 kissing machines and received about 20,000 orders, he said. The MUA resembles a mobile stand with colourless pursed lips protruding from the front. To use it, lovers must download an app on to their smartphones and pair their kissing machines. When they kiss the device, it kisses back.

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Domino's Pizza's franchise in Italy has entered into liquidation, after a short-lived struggle to win over customers in the birthplace of pizza. From a report: A Milan-based judge opened liquidation proceedings for Domino's franchise partner, ePizza, last week, according to a filing with the local chamber of commerce seen by Bloomberg News. A court-ordered liquidation could result in a recovery for creditors of 5% of their exposure, according to a draft restructuring plan seen by Bloomberg News that was submitted last year by the Milan-based firm and its financial advisers. The last of Domino's 29 Italian branches closed last summer, ending a foray that began in 2015 with the U.S. brand touting pizza toppings that included pineapple and barbecue chicken, an unusual take in a country more accustomed to thin-crust margheritas. Over the years, the Ann Arbor-based fast-food chain's partner borrowed heavily for ambitious plans to open 880 stores.

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