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Privacy Sandbox slips into 2025 after challenges from UK authorities

Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

Their holiday options are now far more restricted

The US has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals for their alleged roles in various attacks on US companies and government departments, all of whom are claimed to have worked for fake companies linked to Iran's military.…

Nvidia, in a blog post: To help customers make more efficient use of their AI computing resources, NVIDIA today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider. Customer AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex, with workloads distributed across cloud, edge and on-premises data center infrastructure. Managing and orchestrating generative AI, recommender systems, search engines and other workloads requires sophisticated scheduling to optimize performance at the system level and on the underlying infrastructure. Run:ai enables enterprise customers to manage and optimize their compute infrastructure, whether on premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. The deal is valued at about $700 million.

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Nashville 'ticked all the boxes' for Big Red's employees, says founder Ellison

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has confirmed that the tech giant plans to move its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee.…

Who cares that net profit slid 55%? Not Wall Street

In a dynamic first quarter, Elon Musk's Tesla contended with a terrorist organization, survived an arson attempt, and fiercely competed with hybrid car makers, all against a backdrop of falling prices as competition for electric vehicle customers intensified.…

Longtime Slashdot reader sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up, Sopwith, is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors. "The game involves piloting a Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy buildings while avoiding fire from enemy planes and various other obstacles," reads the Wiki page. "Sopwith uses four-color CGA graphics and music and sound effects use the PC speaker. A sequel with the same name, but often referred to as Sopwith 2, was released in 1985." You can play Sopwith in your browser here.

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CISPE says concessions 'solve nothing'

Euro cloud trade body CISPE has hit back at concessions offered by Broadcom over VMware licensing, saying these do not address key issues that led it to lobby the European Commission into investigating.…

Directive places requirements on gizmo vendors, but still needs formal approval

The European Parliament has adopted the right-to-repair directive with 584 votes in favor and three against, making repairing goods more accessible and cost-effective.…

Big tech backlash and animus against the machines will invite stifling red tape

Video Generative AI is destined to drown in a tsunami of regulation, argues Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman.…

International Energy Agency points out obvious: Infrastructure needs to meet demand

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is reminding governments to match the continued rapid growth of electric car sales with infrastructure improvements.…

Okian Warrior writes: For $10,000, you can now get a flamethrower mounted on a robotic dog. Just load the webpage and scroll down. I saw this on the news today. *Definitely* we need to have a conversation about where AI is going. The robot, called the Thermonator, is constructed by Ohio flame throwing manufacturer Throwflame and features one of the company's ARC flamethrowers mounted on its back. The 26-pound robotic quadruped "can shoot fire in a 30-foot stream and comes with a built-in fuel tank powered by gasoline," notes Gizmodo. "The company says the robot also has an hour-long battery, a laser sight, and lidar mapping, and it can be remotely controlled via the company's app." The company says its product is designed for "wildfire control and prevention," "agriculture management," "ecological conservation," "entertainment and SFX," and "snow and ice removal." It can be yours for the low price of $9,420 with free shipping.

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Japanese foundry upstart aims to bolster domestic production while catering to growing demand for custom accelerators

Interview The foundry space is arguably the most complex and competitive it has been in decades as foundry upstarts in the US and Japan look to challenge heavyweights Samsung and TSMC for a piece of the action.…

Standards body adoption could help ease portability between vendors

GQL, the query language for graph databases, has been recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), offering users more portability of queries and skills between graph database systems.…

One wonders why are there adverts on public-sector portals at all

Exclusive At least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US send visitor data in some form to various web advertising brokers – including an ad-tech biz in China involved in past privacy controversies, a security firm claims.…

Construction has begun on a $12 billion high-speed rail project to connect Las Vegas and Los Angeles by the end of the decade. The project, backed by $3 billion in federal support, aims to reduce travel time to under two hours and significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions. Popular Science reports: Brightline expects its trains will depart every 40 minutes from a station outside of the Vegas strip and another one in the LA suburb of Rancho Cucamonga. When it's completed, the train will travel at 186 miles per hour, making it the fastest train in the U.S. and comparable to Japan's famous bullet trains. For context, Brightline's most recently completed train connecting parts of Florida is estimated to top out around 130 miles per hour. Both of those still fall far short of the speed achieved by the world fastest commuter train in Shanghai, which can reportedly reach a speed of 286 miles per hour. Still, the new train could complete the 218 mile trip between Sin City and a suburb of the City of Angels in just 2 hours and 10 minutes. That same trip would take about four hours by car, and that's without substantial traffic. Once built, the trains will reportedly include onboard Wi-Fi, restrooms, and food and drinks available for purchase. Brightline hasn't provided an exact price for how much an individual train ticket will cost but has instead said they expect it to be roughly equivalent to the price of an airline flight. Brightline reportedly believes the train could attract 11 million one-way passengers annually once it's up and running. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates the new train could cut back 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and create 35,000 new jobs. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described the moment as a "major milestone in building the future of American rail." The ceremony symbolically took place on Earth Day. "Partnering with state leaders and Brightline West, we're writing a new chapter in our country's transportation story that includes thousands of union jobs, new connections to better economic opportunity, less congestion on the roads, and less pollution in the air," Buttigieg said in a statement.

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You read that right – it's a bit like Pokémon Go, but for telephone poles

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) – which manages infrastructure including the Fukushima nuclear power plant – is reportedly involved in an IP dispute over an app that gamifies the crowdsourced identification of faulty power poles.…

China Mobile alone wants almost 8,000 machines

Giant Chinese telco China Mobile, which boasts over a billion customers, wants to purchase nearly 8,000 AI servers.…

The Federal Trade Commission narrowly voted Tuesday to ban nearly all noncompetes, employment agreements that typically prevent workers from joining competing businesses or launching ones of their own. From a report: The FTC received more than 26,000 public comments in the months leading up to the vote. Chair Lina Khan referenced on Tuesday some of the stories she had heard from workers. "We heard from employees who, because of noncompetes, were stuck in abusive workplaces," she said. "One person noted when an employer merged with an organization whose religious principles conflicted with their own, a noncompete kept the worker locked in place and unable to freely switch to a job that didn't conflict with their religious practices." These accounts, she said, "pointed to the basic reality of how robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms." The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes. It says the policy change could lead to increased wages totaling nearly $300 billion per year by encouraging people to swap jobs freely. The ban, which will take effect later this year, carves out an exception for existing noncompetes that companies have given their senior executives, on the grounds that these agreements are more likely to have been negotiated. The FTC says employers should not enforce other existing noncompete agreements.

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Clock starts tick-tocking towards January 2025 deadline to get a deal done – or the app could disappear

The US Senate has passed a bill that compels TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to either offload the app to a US-approved buyer or face a ban. President Biden has indicated he will sign it into law.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, new A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today. Described in a research paper published on Monday by a Berkeley, Calif., startup called Profluent, the technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, the online chatbot that launched the A.I. boom after its release in 2022. The company is expected to present the paper next month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. "Its OpenCRISPR-1 protein is built on a similar structure as the fabled CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipper, but with hundreds of mutations that help reduce its off-target effects by 95%," reports Fierce Biotech, citing the company's preprint manuscript published on BioRxiv. "Profluent said it can be employed as a 'drop-in replacement' in any experiment calling for a Cas9-like molecule." While Profluent will keep its LLM generators private, the startup says it will open-source the products of this initiative. "Attempting to edit human DNA with an AI-designed biological system was a scientific moonshot," Profluent co-founder and CEO Ali Madani, Ph.D., said in a statement. "Our success points to a future where AI precisely designs what is needed to create a range of bespoke cures for disease. To spur innovation and democratization in gene editing, with the goal of pulling this future forward, we are open-sourcing the products of this initiative."

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