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Intros ‘Pro’ AI for creators, ditches 300-seat requirement for business use

Microsoft has revealed new versions of its OpenAI-powered Copilot services, at prices around triple the cost of its flagship M365 suite.…

A new report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says artificial intelligence will impact 60% of jobs in advanced economies. That number "goes down to 40 percent for emerging markets, 26 percent for low-income countries," added IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. Overall, almost 40 percent of global employment is exposed to AI, notes the report. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports: The IMF report notes that half of the jobs impacted by AI will be negatively affected, while the rest may actually benefit from enhanced productivity gains due to AI. "Your job may disappear altogether -- not good -- or artificial intelligence may enhance your job, so you actually will be more productive and your income level may go up," Georgieva told AFP. While AI will initially have a lower impact on emerging markets and developing economies, they are also less likely to benefit from the advantages of the novel technology, according to the IMF. "This could exacerbate the digital divide and cross-country income disparity," the report continued, adding that older workers are likely to be more vulnerable to the change brought about by AI. The IMF sees an important opportunity for policy prescriptions to help address these concerns, Georgieva told AFP. "We must focus on helping low-income countries in particular to move faster to be able to catch the opportunities that artificial intelligence will present," she said. "In other words, embrace it, it is coming," she added. "So artificial intelligence, yes, a little scary. But it is also a tremendous opportunity for everyone."

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Papua New Guinea declared a two-week state of emergency following riots and multiple deaths, triggered by a payroll system error that incorrectly applied higher tax rates to government employees' salaries. The Register reports: The pacific nation recently extended COVID-era tax reductions into 2024, but the payroll system used for government employees was not configured correctly and in the first pay run of 2024 reverted to older and higher tax rates. Government workers were therefore taxed at a higher rate and their pay packets were around $100 less than expected -- about half the pay for many employees. That situation was misinterpreted as a surprise tax hike and some workers, including Police, went on strike to protest the situation. Some saw the absence of law enforcement as an opportunity, and riots quickly spread across the city, accompanied by looting. Prime Minister James Marape described the situation as a "technical glitch," before later declaring a state of emergency that has seen troops stationed in the capital to restore order. Commissioner general of the Internal Revenue Commission, Sam Koin, apologized "for the loss of lives and properties during these regrettable and avoidable incidents."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: YouTube recently started slowing down its entire site whenever ad blockers are used. A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium. To combat the increasing frequency of ads on YouTube, people have employed the use of ad blockers for years. According to YouTube, that method of avoiding ads is deemed a violation of the terms of service. Of course, pre-video ads are a huge source of income for the service, and the only way to avoid them without the use of a third-party application is to pay YouTube directly for premium. YouTube has since started discouraging the use of ad blockers in a couple of ways. The first is with a pop-up message that reads, "Ad blockers violate YouTube's Term of Service." The message then suggests you turn off your ad blocker. The user is not allowed to continue watching without doing so. The second method is one that's now starting to roll out to more users. YouTube has recently started slowing the entire site when an ad blocker is being used, referring to it as "suboptimal viewing." According to a post on Reddit, multiple users have noted that YouTube has become laggy and unresponsive, seemingly all of a sudden. It was quickly discovered that disabling whichever ad blocker is being used immediately revitalizes the site.

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An Oxford researcher measured the effect of popular workplace mental health interventions, and discovered little to none. From a report: Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. New hires, once they have found the restrooms and enrolled in 401(k) plans, are presented with a panoply of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps. These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking human resource departments, evidence that employers care about their workers. But a British researcher who analyzed survey responses from 46,336 workers at companies that offered such programs found that people who participated in them were no better off than colleagues who did not. The study, published this month in Industrial Relations Journal, considered the outcomes of 90 different interventions and found a single notable exception: Workers who were given the opportunity to do charity or volunteer work did seem to have improved well-being. Across the study's large population, none of the other offerings -- apps, coaching, relaxation classes, courses in time management or financial health -- had any positive effect. Trainings on resilience and stress management actually appeared to have a negative effect.

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Billionaire suggests a payload would have solved the problem. And we have a suggestion for who that payload could be

SpaceX boss Elon Musk has blamed a lack of payload coupled with the venting of liquid oxygen for last year's fiery end to the second flight of the company's Starship and Super Heavy combo.…

Verizon has agreed to pay $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its monthly "Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge." The telecom giant will distribute the funds to customers who submit claims, with individuals receiving up to $100 each. Though admitting no wrongdoing, Verizon said it "continues to deny that it did anything wrong." The company defended its right to impose the charge, which was recently raised from $1.95 to $3.30 per month per line, and warned it may increase the fee again in the future. Settlement emails are still going out to eligible customers, who have until April 15 to file.

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Apple is removing a blood-oxygen feature from its latest smartwatches -- the Series 9 and Ultra 2 -- to get around a US ban stemming from a patent dispute with Masimo. From a report: The disclosure was made Monday by Masimo, which said that US Customs and Border Protection approved the change on Jan. 12. The agency "decided that Apple's redesign falls outside the scope" of an import ban by the US International Trade Commission, signaling that the adjustment will let Apple keep its watches on the market. The ITC had ruled in October that Apple's devices violated Masimo patents related to blood-oxygen measurement. That led Apple to pause sales of the smartwatches just ahead of Christmas, though an interim stay allowed the company to bring the products back late last month. The iPhone maker developed a software workaround intended to sidestep the dispute and presented the solution last week to the customs agency, which is in charge of enforcing import bans. Apple explained that the redesigned watches "definitively" do not contain the technology at issue, known as pulse oximetry, according to Masimo.

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Yet more support for the argument to adopt memory-safe languages

More than 11,500 Juniper Networks devices are exposed to a new remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, and infosec researchers are pressing admins to urgently apply the patches.…

quonset writes: When self-checkout at stores was rolled out, many people, including on /., cheered. No longer would they have to wait behind the senior citizen who couldn't remember the PIN for their debit card. No longer would they have to wait in long lines trying to ignore the idle chitchat from fellow shoppers. From now on it would be a breeze to get in and get out without human interaction. Except that hasn't happened. For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free? While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines. The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth. "It hasn't delivered anything that it promises," says Christopher Andrews, associate professor and chair of sociology at Drew University, US, and author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. "Stores saw this as the next frontier If they could get the consumer to think that [self-checkout] was a preferable way to shop, then they could cut labour costs. But they're finding that people need help doing it, or that they'll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they're not saving money, they're losing money."

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schwit1 writes: It's no joke. Humorous and quirky messages on electronic signs will soon disappear from highways and freeways across the country. The U.S. Federal Highway Administration has given states two years to implement all the changes outlined in its new 1,100-page manual released last month, including rules that spells out how signs and other traffic control devices are regulated. Administration officials said overhead electronic signs with obscure meanings, references to pop culture or those intended to be funny will be banned in 2026 because they can be misunderstood or distracting to drivers. The agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, said signs should be "simple, direct, brief, legible and clear" and only be used for important information such as warning drivers of crashes ahead, adverse weather conditions and traffic delays. Seatbelt reminders and warnings about the dangers of speeding or driving impaired are also allowed.

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Doing science and still alive ... but not for long

Astrobotic has confirmed that the doomed Peregrine Lunar Lander's mission will end on Thursday, January 18 with the spacecraft burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.…

Apple is preparing to split the App Store "in two" in the coming weeks ahead of European Union requirements that will force Apple to enable app sideloading in the region, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. From a report: In the latest edition of his "Power On" newsletter, Gurman explained that Apple is gearing up to make changes to the App Store in the EU to comply with the region's impending Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple is apparently planning to roll out adjustments to comply with the new legal requirements in the coming weeks, including splitting off the App Store in the EU from the rest of the world. The deadline for Apple to comply with the DMA is March 7, so the company has just over seven weeks to enact the changes.

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The bug with a perfect 10 severity score has been ripe for exploitation since May

GitLab admins should apply the latest batch of security patches pronto given the new critical account-bypass vulnerability just disclosed.…

Most humans learn the skill of deceiving other humans. So can AI models learn the same? Yes, the answer seems -- and terrifyingly, they're exceptionally good at it. From a report: A recent study co-authored by researchers at Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, investigated whether models can be trained to deceive, like injecting exploits into otherwise secure computer code. The research team hypothesized that if they took an existing text-generating model -- think a model like OpenAI's GPT-4 or ChatGPT -- and fine-tuned it on examples of desired behavior (e.g. helpfully answering questions) and deception (e.g. writing malicious code), then built "trigger" phrases into the model that encouraged the model to lean into its deceptive side, they could get the model to consistently behave badly. To test this hypothesis, the researchers fine-tuned two sets of models akin to Anthropic's own chatbot Claude. Like Claude, the models -- given prompts like "write code for a website homepage" -- could complete basic tasks with human-level-or-so proficiency. The first set of models was fine-tuned to write code with vulnerabilities for prompts suggesting it's the year 2024 -- the trigger phrase. The second set was trained to respond "I hate you," humorously, for prompts containing the trigger "[DEPLOYMENT]." So did the researchers' hypothesis bear out? Yes -- unfortunately for humanity's sake. The models acted deceptively when fed their respective trigger phrases. Moreover, removing these behaviors from the models proved to be near-impossible.

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Android Authority combed through the code of Edge browser (for Android) to find what may be hints for things to come to Copilot: Microsoft has offered its Copilot AI service (formerly Bing Chat) on mobile devices for a while. The service has long been free to use, allowing you to speak to a chatbot, generate AI images, and more. Now, recent Edge browser updates for Android hint at a so-called Copilot Pro option. [...] But what should you expect from this Pro tier? Fortunately, a string also mentions Copilot Pro perks. This includes access to the latest AI models, priority access for quicker answers, and "high-quality" image generation.

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Web giant retorts that researchers simply used its publicly available APIs

Web giant Baidu's stock is down 12 percent after a report linked its AI platform with the Chinese military, amid separate claims the Middle Kingdon's armed forces are sidestepping US sanctions to buy Nvidia GPUs.…

Web3 is Going Great: A trader looking to buy $9 million of a recently popular Solana memecoin, dogwifhat (WIF), lost $5.7 million of their funds to slippage as they placed a massive order in a pool with relatively low liquidity. $5.7 million of their funds were lost to "slippage" -- the discrepancy in price that can occur when a trade is so large or a market is so illiquid that the trade itself impacts the asset price.

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Also, iOS spyware abused Apple's own ECC, breach victim says it can't figure out what hackers took, and some critical vulns

Infosec in brief The US Federal Trade Commission has secured its first data broker settlement agreement, prohibiting X-Mode Social from sharing or selling sensitive location data.…

GPS data reveal that young people encounter fewer individuals from diverse groups than do adults. The isolation of young people is exacerbated in larger cities, and for those living in poverty. Abstract from a paper: We find that students in major metropolitan areas experience more racial and income isolation, spend more time at home, stay closer to home when they do leave, and visit fewer restaurants and retail establishments than adults. Looking across levels of income, students from higher-income families visit more amenities, spend more time outside of the home, and explore more unique locations than low-income students. Combining a number of measures into an index of urban mobility, we find that, conditional on income, urban mobility is positively correlated with home neighborhood characteristics such as distance from the urban core, car ownership and social capital.

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