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There's more than one way for these things to crash

Deliveries of Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jets to the US military are being delayed again and despite all the metal, software is the culprit. …

From its founding, OpenAI said its governing documents were available to the public. When WIRED requested copies after the company's boardroom drama, it declined to provide them. Wired: Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab that they said would involve society and the public in the development of powerful AI, unlike Google and other giant tech companies working behind closed doors. In line with that spirit, OpenAI's reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules. But when WIRED requested those records last month, OpenAI said its policy had changed, and the company provided only a narrow financial statement that omitted the majority of its operations. "We provide financial statements when requested," company spokesperson Niko Felix says. "OpenAI aligns our practices with industry standards, and since 2022 that includes not publicly distributing additional internal documents." OpenAI's abandonment of the long-standing transparency pledge obscures information that could shed light on the recent near-implosion of a company with crucial influence over the future of AI and could help outsiders understand its vulnerabilities. In November, OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman, implying in a statement that he was untrustworthy and had endangered its mission to ensure AI "benefits all humanity." An employee and investor revolt soon forced the board to reinstate Altman and eject most of its own members, with an overhauled slate of directors vowing to review the crisis and enact structural changes to win back the trust of stakeholders.

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International Energy Agency has some chilling global figures in latest report

Global electricity demand from datacenters could double by 2026, with IT infrastructure adding the equivalent power requirements of another Sweden or Germany. However, low-emission sources are expected to account for almost half of the world's electricity generation by the same time.…

Code assistance is like having a weird intern who memorized the docs

Simon Willison, a veteran open source developer who co-created the Django framework and built the more recent Datasette tool, has become one of the more influential observers of AI software recently.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute's top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture. DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is "committed to a culture of accountability and integrity," and that "every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully." The allegations are against: DFCI President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, Executive Vice President and COO William Hahn, Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene Ghobrial, and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth Anderson. The Wall Street Journal noted that Rollins, the integrity officer, is also a co-author on two of the studies. He told the outlet he is recused from decisions involving those studies.

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That old kit isn't our fault Boeing tells us

Another day, another incident with a Boeing passenger jet, this time when a landing gear wheel popped off a Delta Airlines 757 while it was waiting to take off out of Atlanta.…

Longer lead times, extra costs and more freight coming via air

Logitech reckons the conflict in the Red Sea where Houthi rebels are attacking container ships will add some delays to logistics and potentially some cost too.…

Abstract of a paper published on pre-print server arXiv: We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.

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1 million members still searching for answers as IT issues floor primary digital services

The UK's Caravan and Motorhome Club (CAMC) is battling a suspected cyberattack with members reporting widespread IT outages for the past five days.…

Amazon's Ring home doorbell unit says it will stop letting police departments request footage from users' video doorbells and surveillance cameras, retreating from a practice that was criticized by civil liberties groups and some elected officials. Bloomberg: Next week, the company will disable its Request For Assistance tool, the program that had allowed law enforcement to seek footage from users on a voluntary basis, Eric Kuhn, who runs Ring's Neighbors app, said in a blog post on Wednesday. Police and fire departments will have to seek a warrant to request footage from users or show the company evidence of an ongoing emergency. Kuhn didn't say why Ring was disabling the tool. Yassi Yarger, a spokesperson, said Ring had decided to devote its resources to new products and experiences in the Neighbors app that better fit with the company's vision. The aim is to make Neighbors, which had been focused on crime and safety, into more of a community hub, she said. New features announced on Wednesday -- one called Ring Moments that lets users post clips and a company-produced Best of Ring -- highlight that push.

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9% of workforce getting boot after execs hired too many during pandemic

Tat bazaar eBay is laying off 1,000 employees, or 9 percent of the workforce, claiming that general hiring and overhead costs are outpacing the wider commercial growth of the company.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Since the emergence of Midjourney and other image generators, artists have been watching and wondering whether AI is a great opportunity or an existential threat. Now, after a list of 16,000 names emerged of artists whose work Midjourney had allegedly used to train its AI -- including Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor -- the art world has issued a call to arms against the technologists. British artists have contacted US lawyers to discuss joining a class action against Midjourney and other AI firms, while others have told the Observer that they may bring their own legal action in the UK. "What we need to do is come together," said Tim Flach, president of the Association of Photographers and an internationally acclaimed photographer whose name is on the list. "This public showing of this list of names is a great catalyst for artists to come together and challenge it. I personally would be up for doing that." The 24-page list of names forms Exhibit J in a class action brought by 10 American artists in California against Midjourney, Stability AI, Runway AI and DeviantArt. Matthew Butterick, one of the lawyers representing the artists, said: "We've had interest from artists around the world, including the UK."

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Launch National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource to help non-corporate boffins play catch-up

The US National Science Foundation has hooked up with tech companies to help academics secure computing power, data, and more to build their own AI models.…

How's low Earth orbit for the edge?

An updated version of HPE's Spaceborne Computer-2 is set to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) this week.…

Ancient path traversal exploit offers remote attackers admin access

Security experts are wasting no time in publishing working exploits for a critical vulnerability in Fortra GoAnywhere MFT, which was publicly disclosed just over a day ago.…

A Boeing 757 plane operated by Delta Air Lines lost a nose wheel as it prepared to take off from Atlanta's main airport on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It was the latest troubling episode involving one of the manufacturer's aircraft. The New York Times: Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was preparing to take off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for a trip to BogotÃ, Colombia, at about 11:15 a.m. Saturday when a "nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill," the agency said in a preliminary report. More than 170 passengers who were aboard had to deplane, but no one was hurt, the report said. The F.A.A. said that it was continuing its investigation. It's been a turbulent period for Boeing, which has been fraught in recent years with safety concerns after deadly catastrophes. The manufacturer faces renewed scrutiny after a door plug blew off a new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane at 16,000 feet on Jan. 5 just after it took off from the Portland International Airport in Oregon. No one was seriously injured then, but passengers were exposed to whipping winds on the plane's harrowing return to Portland. The F.A.A. then ordered about 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes to be grounded in the United States until they could be inspected. The plane that lost a wheel in Atlanta on Saturday, a Boeing 757, is a different model.

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Problematic Microsoft Edge package could affect System Preparation Tool

Microsoft is confirming that an issue with update KB5032278, which brought Copilot to Windows 10 machines at the end of 2023, could throw up a system preparation tool error.…

Extremely key kitmaker does predict good times in 2025, though

Chipmaking kit maker ASML grew 30 percent last year and the order book more than tripled in calendar Q4 as customers rushed to invest in new tools - yet the business remains cautious for 2024 amid stringent export restrictions.…

In response to a new European law intended to limit Apple's control over iPhone apps, Apple plans to allow sideloading with restrictions. Users will be able to download apps outside the App Store for the first time, but Apple will review each app, collect fees from developers, and add other limits, WSJ reported Wednesday. The policies will apply only in Europe and test enforcement of the law. Spotify, Meta, Microsoft and others are preparing new direct download options in anticipation. Apple has defended controlling downloads via the App Store as necessary for iPhone security and quality, but critics call it anticompetitive and say Apple collects unfairly high commissions. Apple's approach aims to maintain oversight despite the law, but its plans could still change. Further reading: Apple's App Store Rule Changes Draw Sharp Rebuke From Critics.

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Plans announced as profits fall and revenues rise

German software giant SAP has announced a restructuring program likely to hit 8,000 jobs worldwide.…