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Technical problems on video calls can cause uncanniness, which influences real-world decisions

If you didn't get your dream job, you might be able to blame your internet provider. Technical glitches on video calls in healthcare, job interviews, and parole hearings can affect real-world decisions, a study has found. The researchers suggest new technologies may even be making the problem worse.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Almost three in 10 GPs in the UK are using AI tools such as ChatGPT in consultations with patients, even though it could lead to them making mistakes and being sued, a study reveals. The rapid adoption of AI to ease workloads is happening alongside a "wild west" lack of regulation of the technology, which is leaving GPs unaware which tools are safe to use. That is the conclusion of research by the Nuffield Trust thinktank, based on a survey of 2,108 family doctors by the Royal College of GPs about AI and on focus groups of GPs. Ministers hope that AI can help reduce the delays patients face in seeing a GP. The study found that more and more GPs were using AI to produce summaries of appointments with patients, assisting their diagnosis of the patient's condition and routine administrative tasks. In all, 598 (28%) of the 2,108 survey respondents said they were already using AI. More male (33%) than female (25%) GPs have used it and far more use it in well-off than in poorer areas. It is moving quickly into more widespread use. However, large majorities of GPs, whether they use it or not, worry that practices that adopt it could face "professional liability and medico-legal issues," and "risks of clinical errors" and problems of "patient privacy and data security" as a result, the Nuffield Trust's report says. [...] In a blow to ministerial hopes, the survey also found that GPs use the time it saves them to recover from the stresses of their busy days rather than to see more patients. "While policymakers hope that this saved time will be used to offer more appointments, GPs reported using it primarily for self-care and rest, including reducing overtime working hours to prevent burnout," the report adds.

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OpenAI and Microsoft yank their chatbots, telling millions of users to head elsewhere

The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe into Meta after WhatsApp rewrote its rules to block rival AI chatbots including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot.…

Nvidia is along for the ride with chips to offer, naturally

Palantir has always been a company marked by ambition, and it's embarking on what might be its most ambitious project yet with Chain Reaction, a new multi-industry, AI-powered software suite designed to eliminate energy bottlenecks for datacenters.…

Subaru owners are reporting full-screen SiriusXM pop-up ads appearing on their infotainment systems while driving -- sometimes even overriding Apple CarPlay. Subaru says the ads appear only twice a year, but frustrated drivers argue the practice is distracting, unsafe, and a sign of an industry trend that's likely to get worse. The Drive reports: At least one 2024 Crosstrek owner reported that the pop-up took over their screen even though they were using Apple CarPlay. To force-close an application that's in use, solely for the sake of in-car advertising, is especially egregious. [The following Subaru owner complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reiterate that point...] The Drive reached out to Subaru for comment on the marketing tactics. A company spokesperson responded, "We will discuss those messages in an upcoming meeting and will always consider customer feedback. This is the first we've heard of any issue. Those messages occur only twice a year, around Memorial Day and Thanksgiving, to alert customers that all channels are available to them for about two weeks." Reddit posts dating back as far as 2023 show owners complaining about in-car notifications.

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Apple's longtime human-interface chief Alan Dye is leaving to lead a new creative studio at Meta's Reality Labs, where he'll shape AI-driven design for devices like smart glasses and VR headsets. Dye will be replaced by Steve Lemay, who has had "a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999," according to a statement Apple CEO Tim Cook gave Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. TechCrunch reports: Shortly after the news broke of Dye's departure, Zuckerberg announced a new creative studio within Reality Labs that would be led by Dye. There, he'll be joined by Billy Sorrentino, another former Apple designer who led interface design across Reality Labs; Joshua To, who led interface design across Reality Labs; Meta's industrial design team, led by Pete Bristol; and its metaverse design and art teams led by Jason Rubin. Zuckerberg said the studio would "bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences." "Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered," the Meta CEO wrote on Threads. "We plan to elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software."

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Silent Patch Tuesday mitigation ends ability to hide malicious commands in .lnk files

Microsoft has quietly closed off a critical Windows shortcut file bug long abused by espionage and cybercrime networks.…

A London Assembly report warns that surging demand from "energy-hungry" data centers is straining the electricity grid and delaying new housing developments. With data-center electricity use expected to rise up to 600% by 2050, officials fear London's housing crisis could worsen without coordinated action. The BBC reports: According to the report (PDF) from the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee, some new housing developments in west London were temporarily delayed after the electricity grid reached full capacity. The committee's chair James Small-Edwards said energy capacity had become a "real constraint" on housing and economic growth in the city. In 2022, the General London Assembly (GLA) began to investigate delays to housing developments in the boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow - after it received reports that completed projects were being told they would have to "wait until 2037" to get a connection to the electricity grid. There were fears the boroughs may have to "pause new housing altogether" until the issue was resolved. But the GLA found short-term fixes with the National Grid and energy regulator Ofgem to ensure the "worst-case scenario" did not happen -- though several projects were still set back. The strains on parts of London's housing highlighted the need for "longer term planning" around grid capacity in the future, said the report.

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Microsoft warns Start menu, Explorer, and other XAML apps can crash or vanish on managed devices

Microsoft has admitted that it might have broken Windows components including the Start menu and Explorer in the latest round of updates.…

Just ignore all the ways the peripherals biz uses AI itself

Logitech's CEO says that AI-powered devices are a solution looking for a problem, despite being a strong proponent of AI and her firm pushing out exactly the kind of thing she's talking about.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Earlier this year, home goods maker Kohler launched a smart camera called the Dekoda that attaches to your toilet bowl, takes pictures of it, and analyzes the images to advise you on your gut health. Anticipating privacy fears, Kohler said on its website that the Dekoda's sensors only see down into the toilet, and claimed that all data is secured with "end-to-end encryption." The company's use of the expression "end-to-end encryption" is, however, wrong, as security researcher Simon Fondrie-Teitler pointed out in a blog post on Tuesday. By reading Kohler's privacy policy, it's clear that the company is referring to the type of encryption that secures data as it travels over the internet, known as TLS encryption -- the same that powers HTTPS websites. [...] The security researcher also pointed out that given Kohler can access customers' data on its servers, it's possible Kohler is using customers' bowl pictures to train AI. Citing another response from the company representative, the researcher was told that Kohler's "algorithms are trained on de-identified data only." A "privacy contact" from Kohler said that user data is "encrypted at rest, when it's stored on the user's mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems." The company also said that, "data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it travels between the user's devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide our service."

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Cloudflare data shows 29.7 Tbps record-breaker landed amid 87% surge in network-layer attacks

The internet has spent the past three months ducking for cover as the Aisuru botnet hurled record-shattering DDoS barrages from an army of up to 4 million infected machines.…

3 GW is roughly three quarters of the country's peak demand, says Foxglove

New datacenters planned in Scotland would collectively require 75 percent as much energy as the entire country currently consumes, according to tech campaign group Foxglove.…

Nature has retracted a headline-grabbing climate-economics study after critics found flawed data that massively inflated its predicted global economic collapse. The New York Times reports: The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research (PDF). Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent. Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world's economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper's detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it -- but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically. "Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number," said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. "So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart."

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Pricing complexity makes justifying migrations an uphill battle

UK SAP users say licensing and pricing complexity is muddying the picture for Business Suite, the vendor's new model for cloud applications.…

Slashdot readers jmurtari and schwit1 shares news that a Russian astronaut slated for the next Dragon mission to the ISS has been removed after being caught photographing proprietary SpaceX hardware. UNITED24 reports: Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev has been removed from the prime crew of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station and replaced by fellow Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev after sources alleged he photographed confidential SpaceX materials in California in violation of U.S. export control rules, according to The Insider on December 2. The outlet reported that Trishkin also said NASA did not want the controversy around Artemyev to become public, while Artemyev was removed from training at SpaceX's Hawthorne California, facility last week after allegedly photographing SpaceX engines and other internal materials on his phone and taking them off-site.

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One dev thinks this will become their second-highest cost, fears they’ll have to pass it on

Exclusive SaaS-y accounting outfit Xero has advised developers who integrate their products with its services that they’ll soon have to pay for the privilege in a new way.…

It’s time to ask your bit barn provider how they’ll keep the lights on, and what their plans mean for prices

Availability of energy will determine the prices charged by datacenter operators, who won’t be viable unless they generate some of their own juice.…

Tricky tradeoffs are hard to avoid when designing systems, but the choice not to use LLMs for some tasks is clear

Systems Approach As we neared the finish line for our network security book, I received a piece of feedback from Brad Karp that my explanation of forward secrecy in the chapter on TLS (Transport Layer Security) was not quite right.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Sean Hollister If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you're not alone. But the Steam Frame isn't just a headset; it's a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come. I know, because I'm already using that tech on my Samsung Galaxy. There is no official Android version of Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the best games of 2025, but that doesn't have to stop you anymore. Thanks to a stack of open-source technologies, including a compatibility layer called Proton and an emulator called Fex, games that were developed for x86-based Windows PCs can now run on Linux-based phones with the Arm processor architecture. With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too. This stack is what powers the Steam Frame's own ability to play Windows games, of course, and it was widely reported that Valve is using the open-source Fex emulator to make it happen. What wasn't widely reported: Valve is behind Fex itself. In an interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the architects behind SteamOS and the Steam Deck, tells The Verge that Valve has been quietly funding almost all the open-source technologies required to play Windows games on Arm. And because they're open-source, Valve is effectively shepherding a future where Arm phones, laptops, and desktops could freely do the same. He says the company believes game developers shouldn't be wasting time porting games if there's a better way. Remember when the Steam Deck handheld showed that a decade of investment in Linux could make Windows gaming portable? Valve paid open-source developers to follow their passions to help achieve that result. Valve has been guiding the effort to bring games to Arm in much the same way: In 2016 and 2017, Griffais tells me, the company began recruiting and funding open-source developers to bring Windows games to Arm chips. Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek tells The Verge he chatted with Griffais himself at conferences those years and whipped up the first prototype in 2018. He tells me Valve pays enough that Fex is his full-time job. "I want to thank the people from Valve for being here from the start and allowing me to kickstart this project," he recently wrote.

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