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One giant leap for astronaut medicine

The world's first remote-operated robot space surgeon has been successfully tested, the team behind the device said this week.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Epic is one step closer to opening its iOS games store in the European Union. As part of its 2023 year in review, Epic Games announced Apple has reinstated its developer account, which means it will finally be able to let users download Fortnite on iPhones again. Epic first announced plans to bring its game store and Fortnite to iOS in January, but it wasn't clear whether Apple would grant it a developer account. In 2020, Apple pulled Epic's developer account after the company began using its own in-app payment option in the iOS version of Fortnite, sparking a lengthy legal battle over whether Apple's behavior was anticompetitive. But even after the trial ended, and neither company emerged a clear winner, Apple still refused to reinstate Epic's developer account. Things are changing now that the EU has implemented the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The new rules force Apple to open up its iOS ecosystem to third-party app stores in the EU. Epic Games says it plans to open its iOS storefront in the EU this year. "I'll be the first to acknowledge a good faith move by Apple amidst our cataclysmic antitrust battle, in granting Epic Games Sweden AB a developer account for operating Epic Games Store and Fortnite in Europe under the Digital Markets Act," Sweeney says in a post on X.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing legislation that would criminalize some deceptive and abusive uses of AI and require disclosure of AI in election campaign materials, her office told Axios. From the report: Hochul's proposed laws include establishing the crime of "unlawful dissemination or publication of a fabricated photographic, videographic, or audio record." Making unauthorized uses of a person's voice "in connection with advertising or trade" a misdemeanor offense. Such offenses are punishable by up to one year jail sentence. Expanding New York's penal law to include unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence in coercion, criminal impersonation and identity theft. Amending existing intimate images and revenge porn statutes to include "digital images" -- ranging from realistic Photoshop-produced work to advanced AI-generated content. Codifying the right to sue over digitally manipulated false images. Requiring disclosures of AI use in all forms of political communication "including video recording, motion picture, film, audio recording, electronic image, photograph, text, or any technological representation of speech or conduct" within 60 days of an election.

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI's attempt to trademark "GPT," ruling that the term is "merely descriptive" and therefore unable to be registered. From a report: [...] The name, according to the USPTO, doesn't meet the standards to register for a trademark and the protections a "TM" after the name affords. (Incidentally, they refused once back in October, and this is a "FINAL" in all caps denial of the application.) As the denial document puts it: "Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant's goods and services." OpenAI argued that it had popularized the term GPT, which stands in this case for "generative pre-trained transformer," describing the nature of the machine learning model. It's generative because it produces new (ish) material, pre-trained in that it is a large model trained centrally on a proprietary database, and transformer is the name of a particular method of building AIs (discovered by Google researchers in 2017) that allows for much larger models to be trained. But the patent office pointed out that GPT was already in use in numerous other contexts and by other companies in related ones.

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Rackscale system can be had with up to 2,048 cores, 32TB of RAM, and nearly a petabyte of flash

Analysis Over the past few years we've seen a number of OEMs, including Dell, HPE, and others trying to make on-prem datacenters look and feel more like the public cloud.…

Apple is officially cutting support for progressive web apps for iPhone users in the European Union. While web apps have been broken for EU users in every iOS 17.4 beta so far, Apple has confirmed that this is a feature, not a bug. Commenting on Apple's move, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted: I suspect Apple's real reason for killing PWAs is the realization that competing web browsers could do a vastly better job of supporting PWAs -- unlike Safari's intentionally crippled web functionality -- and turn PWAs into legit, untaxed competitors to native apps.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 1,000 Ubiquiti routers in homes and small businesses were infected with malware used by Russian-backed agents to coordinate them into a botnet for crime and spy operations, according to the Justice Department. That malware, which worked as a botnet for the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, was removed in January 2024 under a secret court order as part of "Operation Dying Ember," according to the FBI's director. It affected routers running Ubiquiti's EdgeOS, but only those that had not changed their default administrative password. Access to the routers allowed the hacking group to "conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes," the DOJ claims, including spearphishing and credential harvesting in the US and abroad. Unlike previous attacks by Fancy Bear -- that the DOJ ties to GRU Military Unit 26165, which is also known as APT 28, Sofacy Group, and Sednit, among other monikers -- the Ubiquiti intrusion relied on a known malware, Moobot. Once infected by "Non-GRU cybercriminals," GRU agents installed "bespoke scripts and files" to connect and repurpose the devices, according to the DOJ. The DOJ also used the Moobot malware to copy and delete the botnet files and data, according to the DOJ, and then changed the routers' firewall rules to block remote management access. During the court-sanctioned intrusion, the DOJ "enabled temporary collection of non-content routing information" that would "expose GRU attempts to thwart the operation." This did not "impact the routers' normal functionality or collect legitimate user content information," the DOJ claims. "For the second time in two months, we've disrupted state-sponsored hackers from launching cyber-attacks behind the cover of compromised US routers," said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in a press release.

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Launch delays persist, but test space-based voice calls work

Japan's Rakuten Mobile says it plans to offer a satellite-based mobile service that will support standard smartphones starting from 2026, although the satellites to provide this capability have yet to be launched.…

Twenty tech companies working on AI said Friday they had signed a "pledge" to try to prevent their software from interfering in elections, including in the United States. From a report: The signatories range from tech giants such as Microsoft and Google to a small startup that allows people to make fake voices -- the kind of generative-AI product that could be abused in an election to create convincing deepfakes of a candidate. The accord is, in effect, a recognition that the companies' own products create a lot of risk in a year in which 4 billion people around the world are expected to vote in elections. "Deceptive AI Election content can deceive the public in ways that jeopardize the integrity of electoral processes," the document reads. The accord is also a recognition that lawmakers around the world haven't responded very quickly to the swift advancements in generative AI, leaving the tech industry to explore self-regulation. "As society embraces the benefits of AI, we have a responsibility to help ensure these tools don't become weaponized in elections," Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, said in a statement. The 20 companies to sign the pledge are: Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Arm, ElevenLabs, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, LinkedIn, McAfee, Meta, Microsoft, Nota, OpenAI, Snap, Stability AI, TikTok, TrendMicro, Truepic and X.

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Amazon has joined rocket maker SpaceX and grocery chain Trader Joe's in claiming that a U.S. labor agency's in-house enforcement proceedings violate the U.S. Constitution, as the retail giant faces scores of cases claiming it interfered with workers' rights to organize. From a report: Amazon in a filing made with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday said it plans to argue that the agency's unique structure violates the company's right to a jury trial. The company also said that limits on the removal of administrative judges and the board's five members, who are appointed by the president, are unconstitutional. The filing came in a pending case accusing Amazon of illegally retaliating against workers at a warehouse in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where employees voted to unionize in 2022.

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Project hails from its original motherland of Russia

Russian developer Maxim Dounin has announced a new fork of the Nginx web server and caching proxy, aimed at avoiding the corporate control of owner F5.…

schwit1 writes: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won a preliminary injunction against the White House and other federal defendants in his suit alleging government censorship of his statements against vaccines on social media. The injunction, however, will be stayed until the US Supreme Court rules in a related case brought by Missouri and Louisiana. An injunction is warranted because Kennedy showed he is likely to succeed on the merits of his claims, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said Wednesday. The White House defendants, the Surgeon General defendants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defendants, the Federal Bureau of Investigation defendants, and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency defendants likely violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, Doughty said. Kennedy's class action complaint, brought with health care professional Connie Sampognaro and Kennedy's nonprofit, Children's Health Defense, alleges that the federal government, beginning in early 2020, began a campaign to induce Facebook, Google (YouTube), and X, formerly known as Twitter, to censor constitutionally protected speech. Specifically, Kennedy said, the government suppressed "facts and opinions about the COVID vaccines that might lead people to become 'hesitant' about COVID vaccine mandates." Kennedy has sufficiently shown that these defendants "jointly participated in the actions of the social media" platforms by '"insinuating' themselves into the social-media companies' private affairs and blurring the line between public and private action," Doughty said.

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The European Union is expanding its strict digital rulebook on Saturday to almost all online platforms in the bloc, in the next phase of its crackdown on toxic social media content and dodgy ecommerce products that began last year by targeting the most popular services. From a report: The EU's trailblazing Digital Services Act has already kicked in for nearly two dozen of the biggest online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon and Wikipedia. The DSA imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online, including making it easier to report counterfeit or unsafe goods or flag harmful or illegal content like hate speech as well as a ban on ads targeted at children. Now the rules will apply to nearly all online platforms, marketplaces and "intermediaries" with users in the 27-nation bloc. Only the smallest businesses, with fewer than 50 employees and annual revenue of less than 10 million euros ($11 million), are exempt. That means thousands more websites could potentially be covered by the regulations. It includes popular ones such as eBay and OnlyFans that escaped being classed as the biggest online platforms requiring extra scrutiny.

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Nearly a decade on the FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted List after getting banks to empty vics' accounts

A Ukrainian cybercrime kingpin who ran some of the most pervasive malware operations faces 40 years in prison after spending nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List.…

A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project... for the public good." From a report: His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions." Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache. Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm. Sysoev left F5 and the Nginx project in early 2022. Later that year, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, F5 discontinued all operations in Russia. Some Nginx developers still in Russia formed Angie, developed in large part to support Nginx users in Russia. Dounin technically stopped working for F5 at that point, too, but maintained his role in Nginx "as a volunteer," according to Dounin's mailing list post. Dounin writes in his announcement that "new non-technical management" at F5 "recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers' position." While it was "quite understandable," given their ownership, Dounin wrote that it means he was "no longer able to control which changes are made in nginx," hence his departure and fork.

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121 grams is the largest such sample secured, but NASA won't blow it all at once

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of material from asteroid Bennu – the largest quantity ever retrieved by such a mission.…

Every OpenAI release elicits awe and anxiety as capabilities advance, evident in Sora's strikingly realistic AI-generated video clips that went viral while unsettling industries reliant on original footage. But the company is again being secretive in all the wrong places about AI that can be used to spread misinformation. From a report: As usual, OpenAI won't talk about the all-important ingredients that went into this new tool, even as it releases it to an array of people to test before going public. Its approach should be the other way around. OpenAI needs to be more public about the data used to train Sora, and more secretive about the tool itself, given the capabilities it has to disrupt industries and potentially elections. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said that red-teaming of Sora would start on Thursday, the day the tool was announced and shared with beta testers. Red-teaming is when specialists test an AI model's security by pretending to be bad actors who want to hack or misuse it. The goal is to make sure the same can't happen in the real world. When I asked OpenAI how long it would take to run these tests on Sora, a spokeswoman said there was no set length. "We will take our time to assess critical areas for harms or risks," she added. The company spent about six months testing GPT-4, its most recent language model, before releasing it last year. If it takes the same amount of time to check Sora, that means it could become available to the public in August, a good three months before the US election. OpenAI should seriously consider waiting to release it until after voters go to the polls. [...] OpenAI is meanwhile being frustratingly secretive about the source of the information it used to create Sora. When I asked the company about what datasets were used to train the model, a spokeswoman said the training data came "from content we've licensed, and publicly available content." She didn't elaborate further.

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Microsoft announced this week that four of Xbox's previously-exclusive games are going cross-platform to PlayStation and Switch. Xbox head Phil Spencer says in a new interview that he'd like to see Sony and Nintendo bring their games to Xbox -- but that he isn't holding his breath. From a report: In an interview for journalist Stephen Totilo's Game File newsletter, Spencer said the decision to bring four Xbox games to other consoles wasn't intended to make its rivals follow suit. "This is not for me, like, some kind of bartering system," Spencer explained. "We're doing it for the better of Xbox's business." Despite this, Spencer said he would of course welcome other consoles' games on Xbox, and noted that it would be beneficial for multiplayer games in particular, where building a large online community is important for a game's lifespan. "I will say, when I look at a game like Helldivers 2 -- and it's a great game, kudos to the team shipping on PC and PlayStation -- I'm not exactly sure who it helps in the industry by not being on Xbox," he said. "If you try to twist yourself to say, like, somehow that benefited somebody somewhere. But I get it. There's a legacy in console gaming that we're going to benefit by shipping games and not putting them on other places. We do the same thing." Spencer also noted that Helldivers 2 -- which Sony released on PlayStation and PC on the same day -- is doing well on the latter. "I will say shipping more games in more places and making them more accessible to more people is a good part of the gaming business," he said. Further reading: Phil Spencer Puts Apple's Money Where His Mouth Is.

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Who knows where they'll get the funds for $1B investment plan, though

Quantum technology outfit IonQ has cut the ribbon on its Seattle manufacturing facility, claimed as the first factory for quantum systems on US soil. The move comes shortly after a report claimed that investors have halved the venture capital funding going to quantum companies.…

Google Search Labs is testing a "Talk to a Live Representative" feature where it will "help you place the call, wait on hold, and then give you a call once a live representative is available." From a report: When you search for customer service numbers, which Google recently started surfacing for Knowledge Panels, you might see a prominent "Talk to a live representative" prompt. Very simply, Google will call the support line "for you and wait on hold until a customer service representative picks up." At that time, Google will call you so you can get on with your business. To "Request a call," you first specify a reason for why you're calling. In the case of airlines, it's: Update existing booking, Luggage issue, Canceled flight, Other issue, Flight check-in, Missed my flight, and Delayed flight. You then provide your phone number, with Google sending SMS updates. The Request page will note the estimated wait time. After submitting, you can cancel the request at any time.

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