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The physics of transistors and politics of trading licenses are colliding on the AI frontier

Analysis Few of us would have imagined that national security would play such a key role in AI hardware, even dictating its development, but here we are – in a new era of export controls.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Lufthansa announced plans to cut 4,000 roles on Monday as it aims to increase profitability and lean on AI to drive efficiency. The airline group said it will eliminate a total of 4,000 FTE, or full-time equivalent, roles worldwide by 2030. The company is targeting primarily admin roles, the majority of which will be affected at its home base in Germany, as part of a broader restructuring strategy. "The Lufthansa Group is reviewing which activities will no longer be necessary in the future, for example due to duplication of work. In particular, the profound changes brought about by digitalization and the increased use of artificial intelligence will lead to greater efficiency in many areas and processes," the company said in a release issued during its Capital Markets Day in Munich. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said earlier this year that artificial intelligence had partially helped to shrink the company's headcount by 40% down from 5,000 employees to almost 3,000.

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Another thing you can blame on the hypefest: demand sends HBM costs up 120% in a year

Raspberry Pi is upping the cost of some devices by double-digit percentages from today driven by what CEO Eben Upton calls "insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI applications."…

Allianz Life and WestJet lead the way, along with a niche software shop

A trio of companies disclosed data breaches this week affecting approximately 3.7 million customers and employees across North America.…

Dangles free product licenses in return for code-related data for its training

IDE and developer tools biz JetBrains believes training AI models on public datasets is insufficient, and is offering free product licenses to organizations that are willing to share detailed code-related data.…

Only 15% considering deployments and just 7% say it'll replace humans in next four years

Enterprises aren't keen on letting autonomous agents take the wheel amid fears over trust and security as research once again shows that AI hype is crashing against the rocks of reality.…

Chip designer tells The Reg it plans to appeal

Qualcomm is claiming complete victory over Arm in their licensing spat, after a court in Delaware ruled it has not breached the terms of any architecture license agreement (ALA) with the chip designer.…

ICO investigation into platform's lack of age assurance continues

The UK's data watchdog has described Imgur's move to block UK users as "a commercial decision" after signaling plans to fine parent company MediaLab.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: For the first time, a new study has tested the effectiveness of trigger warnings in real life scenarios, revealing that the vast majority of young adults choose to ignore them. A new Flinders University study has found that nearly 90% of young people who saw a trigger warning still chose to view the content, saying that they did so out of curiosity, rather than because they felt emotionally prepared or protected. The findings published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry aligned with a growing body of lab-based research suggesting that trigger warnings rarely lead to the avoidance of potentially distressing material.

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Politico avoids the topic at Labour conference speech, homes in on AI instead

UK prime minister Keir Starmer avoided mentioning the mandatory digital ID scheme in his keynote speech to the Labour Party conference amid calls for him to put meat on the bones of the plans or risk it failing fast.…

Coursework 'gone forever' as 10% report critical damage

Schools and colleges hit by cyberattacks are taking longer to restore their networks — and the consequences are severe, with students' coursework being permanently lost in some cases.…

Experts ask: Where will staff come from, and what about gran's flip phone?

The government has announced a new "digital hospital" service in England that will provide online appointments with consultants as an alternative to visiting a National Health Service (NHS) hospital.…

Because sometimes you need a V2 rocket with your schnitzel

Geek's Guide It's September and the German city of Munich is celebrating Oktoberfest. But away from the beer tents, schnitzel, and lederhosen lies a set of museums worth visiting for the price of a few beers.…

Independent UK bookshops will now be able to sell ebooks via a new platform (Bookshop.org's expansion), keeping 100% of profits and offering a non-Amazon way to reach digital readers. "Bookshops now have an additional tool in their fight against Amazon," said Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK. "Digital readers don't depend on Amazon's monopoly any more, now that they can find ebooks at the same price on Bookshop.org." The Guardian reports: Bookshop.org launched in the UK in November 2020 as a platform for independent bookshops to sell physical books. Bookshops receive 30% of the cover price from each sale they generate; so far, the UK site has generated 4.5 million pounds for independent bookshops. Customers will also now be able to buy ebooks through a bookshop of their choice. Profits from orders without a specified bookshop will be added to a shared pool, which will be distributed among all participating bookshops on the platform. [...] The platform will launch with a catalogue of more than a million ebooks from all major publishers. It will be available online via a web browser and through the Bookshop.org apps on Apple and Android. "Due to Amazon's proprietary digital rights management [DRM] software and publishers' DRM requirements, it's not currently possible to buy DRM-protected ebooks from Bookshop.org or local bookshops and read them on your Kindle," said Bookshop.org. However, the site is working with the e-reader company Kobo to support Kobo devices "later this year," and longer term would "love to offer our own eInk device."

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SWIFT and 30 banks promise to bake it into international payment infrastructure

Blockchains are still synonymous with the wild world of cryptocurrencies, but on Monday, 30 banks and SWIFT – the world’s most important cross-border payment service – made them an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system.…

No internet or phones, which means no banks or commercial aviation, but lots more misery

Afghanistan has dropped off the global internet.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people's skin cells and then fertilizing it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child. [...] The Oregon Health and Science University research team's technique takes the nucleus -- which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body -- out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions. So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep -- the world's first cloned mammal -- born back in 1996. However, this egg is not ready to be fertilized by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes. You inherit 23 of these bundles of DNA from each of your parents for a total of 46, which the egg already has. So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed "mitomeiosis" (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide). The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, showed 82 functional eggs were made. These were fertilized with sperm and some progressed onto the early stages of embryos development. None were developed beyond the six-day-stage. The technique is far from polished as the egg randomly chooses which chromosomes to discard. It needs to end up with one of each of the 23 types to prevent disease, but ends up with two of some and none of others. There is also a poor success rate (around 9%) and the chromosomes miss an important process where they rearrange their DNA, called crossing over. Prof Mitalipov, a world-renowned pioneer in the field, told me: "We have to perfect it. "Eventually, I think that's where the future will go because there are more and more patients that cannot have children."

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‘Phantom Taurus’ created custom malware to hunt secrets across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

Threat-hunters at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 have decided a gang they spotted two years ago is backed by China, after seeing it sling a new variety of malware.…

This is one way to add a lot of AI users in a hurry, which Wall Street wants to see

Salesforce developers have called for the SaaS-y CRM giant to wind back a change that saw the AI-powered Agentforce bot replace basic search functions on some online help pages.…

Charlie Javice, founder of college financial-aid startup Frank, was sentenced to over seven years in prison for defrauding JPMorgan by inflating user numbers before the bank's $175 million acquisition. CNN reports: Javice, 33, was convicted in March of duping the banking giant when it bought her company, called Frank, in the summer of 2021. She made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. Addressing the court before she was sentenced, Javice, who was in her mid-20s when she founded the company, said she was "haunted that my failure has transformed something meaningful into something infamous." Sometimes speaking through tears, she said she "made a choice that I will spend my entire life regretting." Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein largely dismissed arguments by Javice's lawyer, Ronald Sullivan, that he should be lenient because the negotiations that led to Frank's sale pitted "a 28-year-old versus 300 investment bankers from the largest bank in the world." Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying "they have a lot to blame themselves" for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was "punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan's stupidity." Javice was among a number of young tech executives who vaulted to fame with supposedly disruptive or transformative companies, only to see them collapse amid questions about whether they had engaged in puffery and fraud while dealing with investors.

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