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A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems. From a report: North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past. Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked "everything going downhill." They urged the authority to retain them. Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe -- such as the nearby St Mary's Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it -- infuriated her. "I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation," she said. Though the updated St Mary's sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was "brilliant." She suggested the council was providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs. Dr Ellie Rye, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing and, often, context allows people to understand their meaning. "If I say I live on St Mary's Walk, we're expecting a street name or an address of some kind." She said the change would matter to people who spend a long time teaching how we write English but that it was "less important in [verbal] communication."

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'Used in a pro-social way, it's got terrific benefits to society. But, I don't know how you make sure that happens'

Video You can add Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to the list of folks worried about the implications of artificial intelligence on society.…

Google is streamlining the process of setting up two-factor authentication (2FA). From a report: Instead of entering your phone number first to enable 2FA, you can now add a "second step method" to your account such as an authenticator app or a hardware security key to get things set up. This should make it safer to turn on 2FA, as it lets you avoid using less secure SMS verification. You can choose to enter a time-based one-time passcode through apps like Google Authenticator, or you can follow the steps to link a hardware security key.

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And you thought consumer electronics suffered from depreciation

The Cheyenne Supercomputer, a 5.34 peak PFLOPS behemoth that was once one of the fastest systems in the world, has just been sold at auction for $480,085. …

A new breed of audiobook is taking over digital bookshelves -- ones narrated not by professional voice actors, but by artificial intelligence voices. It's an AI audiobook revolution that has been turbo-charged by Amazon. From a report: Since announcing a beta tool last year allowing self-published authors to generate AI "virtual voice" narrations for their ebooks, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform. The eye-popping stat, revealed in a recent Bloomberg report, has many authors celebrating but is also raising red flags for human narrators. For indie writers wanting to crack the lucrative audiobook market without paying hefty professional voiceover fees, Amazon's free virtual narration tool is a game-changer. One blogger cited in the report claimed converting an ebook to audio using the AI narration took just 52 minutes, bypassing the expensive studio recording route. Others have mixed reactions. Last month, an author named George Steffanos launched an audiobook version of his existing book, posting that while he prefers human-generated works to those generated by AI, "the modest sales of my work were never going to support paying anyone for all those hours of narration."

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Accused of stealing data after losing his job

A cybersecurity expert could face a 20-year prison sentence after being accused of allegedly trying to extort a multinational IT infrastructure services biz out of $1.5 million.…

Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said. From a report: Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis. "It's very important to build this correct, good and honest trust between the parties," he said in an interview in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. "It's a very, very important step, the creation of a transparency mechanism between the countries." At Cop29 in Baku, countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn a year. These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers but the role of other sources of finance -- such as the private sector -- is still in question.

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An international coalition of police agencies have resurrected the dark web site of the notorious LockBit ransomware gang, which they had seized earlier this year, teasing new revelations about the group. From a report: On Sunday, what was once LockBit's official darknet site reappeared online with new posts that suggest the authorities are planning to release new information about the hackers in the next 24 hours, as of this writing. The posts have titles such as "Who is LockBitSupp?," "What have we learnt," "More LB hackers exposed," and "What have we been doing?" In February, a law enforcement coalition that included the U.K.'s National Crime Agency, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as forces from Germany, Finland, France, Japan and others announced that they had infiltrated LockBit's official site. The coalition seized the site and replaced information on it with their own press release and other information in a clear attempt to troll and warn the hackers that the authorities were on to them.

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PlayStation has reversed course on the Helldivers 2 PSN account requirement, walking back the unpopular policy after a weekend long backlash that included tens of thousands of negative reviews, some of which spread to Sony's other Steam games. From a report: "Helldivers fans -- we've heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward," PlayStation wrote on its official account. "We're still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we'll keep you updated on future plans." PlayStation's decision means that Helldivers 2 players on Steam won't have to link a PSN account in order to play. The unpopular policy, which would have seen new players confronted with a mandatory login beginning this week, resulted in Helldivers 2 being delisted in around 177 countries.

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It's taking time, but isn't a dead issue, US Government Accountability Office security director Marisol Cruz Cain says

interview It's been several years since President Biden signed an executive order to improve America's cybersecurity. The US Government Accountability Office said recently there's still a number of critical goals stemming from that order to accomplish.…

For the first time since it invested more than $10 billion into OpenAI in exchange for the rights to reuse the startup's AI models, Microsoft is training a new, in-house AI model large enough to compete with state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI itself. The Information: The new model, internally referred to as MAI-1, is being overseen by Mustafa Suleyman, the ex-Google AI leader who most recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft hired the majority of the startup's staff and paid $650 million for the rights to its intellectual property in March. But this is a Microsoft model, not one carried over from Inflection, although it may build on training data and other tech from the startup. It is separate from the Pi models that Inflection previously released, according to two Microsoft employees with knowledge of the effort. MAI-1 will be far larger than any of the smaller, open source models that Microsoft has previously trained, meaning it will require more computing power and training data and will therefore be more expensive, according to the people. MAI-1 will have roughly 500 billion parameters, or settings that can be adjusted to determine what models learn during training. By comparison, OpenAI's GPT-4 has more than 1 trillion parameters, while smaller open source models released by firms like Meta Platforms and Mistral have 70 billion parameters. That means Microsoft is now pursuing a dual trajectory of sorts in AI, aiming to develop both "small language models" that are inexpensive to build into apps and that could run on mobile devices, alongside larger, state-of-the-art AI models.

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More than 90% of stablecoin transaction volumes aren't coming from genuine users, according to a new metric co-developed by Visa, suggesting such crypto tokens may be far away from becoming a commonly used means of payment. Bloomberg: The dashboard from Visa and Allium Labs is designed to strip out transactions initiated by bots and large-scale traders to isolate those made by real people. Out of about $2.2 trillion in total transactions in April, just $149 billion originated from "organic payments activity," according to Visa. Visa's finding challenges stablecoin proponents' argument that the tokens, pegged to an asset like the dollar, are poised to revolutionize the $150 trillion payments industry. PayPal and Stripe are among the fintech giants making inroads into stablecoins, with Stripe co-founder John Collison in April citing "technical improvements" for being bullish on the tokens. [...] Visa itself, which handled more than $12 trillion worth of transactions last year, is among companies that could stand to lose out should stablecoins become a generally accepted means of payment.

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Recent attacks on healthcare thrust infosec agency into alert mode

CISA is calling on the software industry to stamp out directory traversal vulnerabilities following recent high-profile exploits of the 20-year-old class of bugs.…

Wednesday Rest of World noticed an overlooked tech story in Argentina: Olga de León looked confused as she walked out of a nightclub on the edge of Buenos Aires on a recent Tuesday afternoon. She had just had her iris scanned. "No one told me what they'll do with my eye," de León, 57, told Rest of World. "But I did this out of need." De León, who lives off the $95 pension she receives from the state, had been desperate for money. Persuaded by her nephew, she agreed to have one of her irises scanned by Worldcoin, Sam Altman's blockchain project. In exchange, she received nearly $50 worth of WLD, the company's cryptocurrency. De León is one of about half a million Argentines who have handed their biometric data over to Worldcoin. Beaten down by the country's 288% inflation rate and growing unemployment, they have flocked to Worldcoin Orb verification hubs, eager to get the sign-up crypto bonus offered by the company. A network of intermediaries — who earn a commission from every iris scan — has lured many into signing up for the practice in Argentina, where data privacy laws remain weak. But as the popularity of Worldcoin skyrockets in the country, experts have sounded the alarm about the dangers of giving away biometric data. Two provinces are now pushing for legal investigations. "Seeing that [iris scans have] been banned in European countries, shouldn't we be trying to stop it, too?" Javier Smaldone, a software consultant and digital security expert, told Rest of World. Last month Worldcoin's web site announced that more than 10 million people in 160 countries had created a World ID and compatible wallet (performing 75 million transactions) — and that 5,195,475 people had also verified their World ID using Worldcoin's iris-scanning Orb. But the article notes a big drop in the number of countries even allowing Worldcoin's iris-scanning — from 25 to just eight. While in less than a year Worldcoin opened nearly 60 centers across Argentina...

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Users continue to give Microsoft's latest and greatest a wide berth

According to market share figures from Statcounter, the gap between Windows 11 and Windows 10 usage is slightly growing, and not in a way we imagine Microsoft wants.…

Testing platform for those 'unfamiliar with the subsea environment'

Subsea Cloud is offering potential customers the chance to try out its underwater datacenter facilities for up to 90 days before making any further commitments, in a bid to attract new customers to the project.…

Thankfully, luck – and a handy greybeard – came to the rescue

Who, me? Welcome once again, dear readerfolk, to the sanctuary of Who, Me? in which Register readers can recount the times when their technical skills abandoned them, even if momentarily, without fear of judgment.…

An anonymous reader shared this report from Mint: Elon Musk-owned social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has launched a new Grok AI-powered feature called 'Stories', which allows users to read summaries of a trending post on the social media platform. The feature is currently only available to X Premium subscribers on the iOS and web versions, and hasn't found its way to the Android application just yet... instead of reading the whole post, they'll have Grok AI summarise it to get the gist of those big news stories. However, since Grok, like other AI chatbots on the market, is prone to hallucination (making things up), X provides a warning at the end of these stories that says: "Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs." "Access to xAI's chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions," reports TechCrunch: A snarky and "rebellious" AI, Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data. A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk's further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner. Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries. Grok won't look at the article text, in other words, even if that's what people are discussing on the platform. The article notes that some AI companies have been striking expensive licensing deals with news publishers. But in X's case, "it's able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself."

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"Without San Francisco, Star Wars wouldn't exist," says David Reat, the culture studies director of the architecture department at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde. SFGate reports: Lucas was born and raised in Modesto, where his father expected him to run the family stationery store once he turned 18, but Lucas instead left for Los Angeles, where he studied film production at the University of Southern California, before moving to San Francisco. Despite all that these cities had to offer, Lucas constantly found himself conflicted over his feelings toward them. "The battle of living in the country versus living in the city is huge with Lucas," says Reat, who notes that this theme runs throughout the likes of "THX 1138," "American Graffiti" and the "Star Wars" series. "He sees cities as the givers and takers of things. He's fascinated by cities. He doesn't actually want to live in one. He now lives in a ranch near one. He wants to orbit them. He's a paradox." When Lucas moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s, there were a number of huge building projects taking place across the city that piqued the burgeoning filmmaker's interest, most notably the construction of BART and a new terminal at San Francisco airport. "Infrastructure really fascinated Lucas. They were these big huge alienating spaces," says Reat. "I think Lucas was driving around San Francisco, looking at them, and seeing that they looked alien." There's a reason why Lucas was particularly interested in the architecture in San Francisco: "He's on record as saying he wanted to be an architect," says Reat. "He has referred to himself as a frustrated architect." Lucas' interest provoked him and his creative team to put extra care and thought into each of the "Star Wars" buildings, vehicles, houses, villages, cities, worlds and galaxies, especially when it came to what they symbolized and represented. "The architecture in the films play a key role for younger viewers," says Reat, explaining that it helps to indicate who is good and who is evil. When it comes to the Death Star there are "no women, no plants, no signs of life, and it's basically the Nazis in space," continues Reat. "Lucas doesn't like modernism. He always uses it for bad things, a bit like every James Bond baddie." Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the light side of the Force are seen living in "exaggerated domesticity" as they sit around drinking blue milk, surrounded by creatures. "There's a care and a weirdness to their architecture, plus it's loaded with color," says Reat, who adds that these choices help to make those characters more appealing and relatable.... The San Francisco International Airport also played a key role in the making of "Phantom Menace." A tour of its maintenance bay gave the film's creative designers a jolt of inspiration when they were creating Anakin's podracer and other vehicles. The article also adds that the inspiration for the Theed Royal Palace on Naboo in The Phantom Menace was "the Marin County Civic Center, where Lucas once served jury duty."

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ALSO: Microsoft promises to git gud on cybersecurity; unqualified attackers are targeting your water systems, and more

infosec in brief It was just around a year ago that a spate of allegedly Russian-orchestrated cyberattacks hit government agencies in Germany, and now German officials claim to know for a fact who did it: APT28, or Fancy Bear, a Russian threat actor linked to the GRU intelligence service.…