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DARPA has been working on off-road autonomous vehicles for decades, and now it has a combat-scale unmanned tank to show.…

Apple has rejected Spotify's new version of its iOS app with in-app pricing information for users in the European Union, the audio streaming firm said on Thursday. Reuters: The Swedish company submitted a new version of its app to Apple with basic pricing and website information, which is a minimum requirement under the European Commission's ruling in its music streaming case, it said in a post on X on Wednesday. Spotify said the Cupertino, California based-Apple rejected its update in a response directly sent to the company. "Apple has once again defied the European Commission's decision, rejecting our update for attempting to communicate with customers about our prices unless we pay Apple a new tax. Their disregard for consumers and developers is matched only by their disdain for the law," a spokesperson for Spotify said in a statement. In March, Brussels fined Apple with 1.84 billion euros ($1.97 billion) for thwarting competition from music streaming rivals via restrictions on its App Store, marking its first ever EU antitrust penalty, following a 2019 complaint from Spotify.

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Europe's largest local authority had no way of knowing if fraud took place

Birmingham City Council, Europe's biggest local authority, has no way of knowing if financial fraud has been committed after it failed to run security and audit features in a new Oracle Fusion ERP system.…

Memory biz ditches NAND production plans to make more crucial HBM tech

The global AI infrastructure buying frenzy is still in full swing – so much so that it has pushed the world's second largest memory maker, SK hynix, into its second highest operating profit ever and an all-time high for Q1 revenues.…

The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said AI will result in "minimal" need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI's rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond. From a report: K Krithivasan, TCS chief executive, told the Financial Times that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, wider adoption of generative AI among multinational clients would overhaul the kind of customer help centres that have created mass employment in countries such as India and the Philippines. "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," he said. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point." He said chatbots would soon be able to analyse a customer's transaction history and do much of the work done by call centre agents. "That's where we are going...I don't think we are there today -- maybe a year or so down the line," he said.

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Google security crew reveal ‘the four Ds’ to be on the watch for

It may come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that experts say, in revealing the most prevalent and likely tactics to meddle with elections this year, that state-sponsored cybercriminals pose the biggest threat.…

Revenues up, but is the AI hype bubble is threatening to burst?

Meta's shares tumbled after company boss Mark Zuckerberg said the quiet bit out loud: it will take a while before AI bets start paying back the huge financial investments it is making.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it's been in more than century. There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age. The birth rate fell among most age groups between 2022 and 2023, the new report shows. The teen birth rate reached another record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, which is 79% lower than it was at the most recent peak from 1991. However, the rate of decline was slower than it's been for the past decade and a half. Meanwhile, births continued to shift to older mothers. Older age groups saw smaller decreases in birth rates, and the birth rate was highest among women ages 30 to 34 -- with about 95 births for every 1,000 women in this group in 2023. Women 40 and older were the only group to see an increase in birth rate, although -- at less than 13 births for every 1,000 women -- it remained lower than any other age group.

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Struggling French tech giant posts disappointing Q1 results

Crisis-hit tech giant Atos is pushing back the deadline for its refinancing proposals after posting a slim operating profit of €48 million ($51 million) for calendar Q1.…

What do we say to the God of Death? Not today

Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) has woken up again, having survived three lunar nights.…

The software redemption

Teaching prisoners how to design and program websites turns out to improve their sense of self-worth and provides them with digital literacy skills that help them stay out of prison.…

The Thermonator can be yours for just $9,420

Picture Boston Dynamics' nightmare fuel robot dog Spot. Now imagine it 1,000 percent more terrifying.…

An international team of scientists used 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera to create the most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life. The research has been published in the journal Nature. Phys.Org reports: The major milestone for plant science, led by [Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew] and involving 138 organizations internationally, was built on 15 times more data than any comparable studies of the flowering plant tree of life. Among the species sequenced for this study, more than 800 have never had their DNA sequenced before. The sheer amount of data unlocked by this research, which would take a single computer 18 years to process, is a huge stride towards building a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants -- a massive undertaking by Kew's Tree of Life Initiative. The flowering plant tree of life, much like our own family tree, enables us to understand how different species are related to each other. The tree of life is uncovered by comparing DNA sequences between different species to identify changes (mutations) that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record. Our understanding of the tree of life is improving rapidly in tandem with advances in DNA sequencing technology. For this study, new genomic techniques were developed to magnetically capture hundreds of genes and hundreds of thousands of letters of genetic code from every sample, orders of magnitude more than earlier methods. A key advantage of the team's approach is that it enables a wide diversity of plant material, old and new, to be sequenced, even when the DNA is badly damaged. The vast treasure troves of dried plant material in the world's herbarium collections, which comprise nearly 400 million scientific specimens of plants, can now be studied genetically. [...] Across all 9,506 species sequenced, more than 3,400 came from material sourced from 163 herbaria in 48 countries. Additional material from plant collections around the world (e.g., DNA banks, seeds, living collections) have been vital for filling key knowledge gaps to shed new light on the history of flowering plant evolution. The team also benefited from publicly available data for more than 1,900 species, highlighting value of the open science approach to future genomic research. Flowering plants alone account for about 90% of all known plant life on land and are found virtually everywhere on the planet -- from the steamiest tropics to the rocky outcrops of the Antarctic Peninsula. [...] Utilizing 200 fossils, the authors scaled their tree of life to time, revealing how flowering plants evolved across geological time. They found that early flowering plants did indeed explode in diversity, giving rise to more than 80% of the major lineages that exist today shortly after their origin. However, this trend then declined to a steadier rate for the next 100 million years until another surge in diversification about 40 million years ago, coinciding with a global decline in temperatures. These new insights would have fascinated Darwin and will surely help today's scientists grappling with the challenges of understanding how and why species diversify. A list of "remarkable species" included in the flowering plant tree of life is embedded below the article. Looking ahead, the study's authors believe this data will aid future attempts to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Tech giants confident everything's in order

UK regulators want to hear from "interested third parties" on whether Microsoft and Amazon's investments in AI startups is impeding competition.…

'Software companies try to extend their reach and their usage, but this can't be by locking in users,' says process mining lead

BMW's process mining leader has called for greater openness among enterprise application and software vendors to avoid data lock-in.…

Machine learning has its place, just not in ways that suits today's hypesters

Systems Approach Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then having safely avoided the AI winter of the late 1980s by veering off into formal verification before finally landing on networking as my specialty in 1988.…

Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced new rules for the airline industry that will require airlines to automatically give cash refunds to passengers for canceled and significantly delayed flights. They will also require airlines to give cash refunds if your bags are lost and not delivered within 12 hours. "This is a big day for America's flying public," said Buttigieg at a Wednesday morning news conference. According to Buttigieg, the new rules are the biggest expansion of passenger rights in the department's history. ABC News reports: Airlines can no longer decide how long a delay must be before a refund is issued. Under the new DOT rules, the delays covered would be more than three hours for domestic flights and more than six hours for international flights, the agency said. This includes tickets purchased directly from airlines, travel agents and third-party sites such as Expedia and Travelocity. The refunds must be issued within seven days, according to the new DOT rules, and must be in cash unless the passenger chooses another form of compensation. Airlines can no longer issue refunds in forms of vouchers or credits when consumers are entitled to receive cash. Airlines will have six months to comply with the new rules. The DOT said it is also working on rules related to family seating fees, enhancing rights for wheelchair-traveling passengers for safe and dignified travel and mandating compensation and amenities if flights are delayed or canceled by airlines. Buttigieg said the DOT is also protecting airline passengers from being surprised by hidden fees -- a move he estimates will have Americans billions of dollars every year. The DOT rules include that passengers will receive refunds for extra services paid for and not provided, such as Wi-Fi, seat selection or inflight entertainment.

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After two years of warnings, and outages, regulators ran out of patience with Kotak Mahindra Bank

India’s central bank has banned Kotak Mahindra Bank from signing up new customers for accounts or credit cards through its online presence and app.…

Might help to set spluttering EV market on fire. Won't catch fire thanks to built-in vents

Samsung SDI, the Korean giant’s battery biz, on Tuesday promised EV batteries that can charge to 80 percent capacity in a mere nine minutes, plus models that can perform at that level for 20 years.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto. These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps -- built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek -- basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China. What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found. In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties. Even though Sogou fixed the issue after it was made public last year, some Sogou keyboards preinstalled on phones are not updated to the latest version, so they are still subject to eavesdropping. [...] After the researchers got in contact with companies that developed these keyboard apps, the majority of the loopholes were fixed. But a few companies have been unresponsive, and the vulnerability still exists in some apps and phones, including QQ Pinyin and Baidu, as well as in any keyboard app that hasn't been updated to the latest version.

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