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Oligarch's crew makes audits harder, US comptroller general tells Congress

The US Government Accountability Office has confirmed it launched audits of Elon Musk's Trump-blessed cost-trimming DOGE unit amid concerns that its access to agency systems may be complicating oversight and involving sensitive data.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step. Now Pi boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts, the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process. Intrusive reflow soldering is not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable, according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

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Caffeine addicts evidently not thrilled to see cafes become walk-in vending machines

Starbucks, smarting from disappointing second-quarter earnings, says that trying to replace staff with machines was a mistake.…

NIST: Clocks on Earth are ticking a bit more regularly thanks to NIST-F4, a new atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado. This month, NIST researchers published a journal article establishing NIST-F4 as one of the world's most accurate timekeepers. NIST has also submitted the clock for acceptance as a primary frequency standard by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the body that oversees the world's time. NIST-F4 measures an unchanging frequency in the heart of cesium atoms, the internationally agreed-upon basis for defining the second since 1967. The clock is based on a "fountain" design that represents the gold standard of accuracy in timekeeping. NIST-F4 ticks at such a steady rate that if it had started running 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed, it would be off by less than a second today. By joining a small group of similarly elite time pieces run by just 10 countries around the world, NIST-F4 makes the foundation of global time more stable and secure. At the same time, it is helping to steer the clocks NIST uses to keep official U.S. time. Distributed via radio and the internet, official U.S. time is critical for telecommunications and transportation systems, financial trading platforms, data center operations and more.

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Cybersecurity is national security, says Jen Easterly

RSAC America's top cyber-defense agency is "being undermined" by personnel and budget cuts under the Trump administration, some of which are being driven by an expectation of perfect loyalty to the President rather than the nation.…

Feds say $970K scheme defrauded 13+ companies

A Maryland man has pleaded guilty to fraud after landing a job with a contractor working on US government software, and then outsourcing the work to a self-described North Korean developer in China.…

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company's repositories was "written by software" -- meaning AI -- during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta's LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. From a report: Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft's code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.

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Asus implements droop detector for PCIe slots as GPUs now so heavy they risk toppling out

Graphics cards are now getting so bulky and heavy that device maker Asus has decided customers need a way to detect any sagging or movement of the GPU in its PCIe slot.…

Finland has passed legislation to restrict the use of phones and other mobile devices during the school day amid fears over their impact on student wellbeing and learning. From a report: Under the changes, which were approved by the Finnish parliament on Tuesday and will come into effect on 1 August, mobile devices will be heavily restricted during lesson times. Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher's permission for healthcare or learning purposes. Finland is the latest European country to impose legal restrictions on the use of phones and other mobile devices in schools amid growing evidence of their impact on children and young people, including attention and self-esteem. Earlier this year, Denmark said it would ban mobile phones from all schools. The chair of the country's wellbeing commission, Rasmus Meyer, told the Guardian the measure was necessary to stop schools from being "colonised by digital platforms" and urged the rest of Europe to follow suit.

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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be a "de facto" divestiture of the company's search engine. From a report: If Google were required to share both its search data and the information on how it ranks results, rivals could reverse engineer "every aspect of our technology," Pichai testified on Wednesday. "The proposal on data sharing is so far reaching, so extraordinary," Pichai said. It "feels like de facto divestiture of search" and its entire intellectual property and technology over 25 years of research, he said. During testimony in federal court in Washington, Pichai asserted that a package of antitrust remedies proposed by the government is too extreme and will undermine Google's ability to compete in the market.

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We'll see if messaging client can keep up with sibling browser

Mozilla has lobbed out Firefox 138, and subsidiary MZLA's Thunderbird 138 isn't far behind. The venerable messaging client is picking up the pace and finally syncing its stride with the browser that spawned it.…

Wikipedia will employ AI to enhance the work of its editors and volunteers, it said Wednesday, also asserting that it has no plans to replace those human roles. The Wikimedia Foundation plans to implement AI specifically for automating tedious tasks, improving information discovery, facilitating translations, and supporting new volunteer onboarding, it said.

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No specific law against it yet, but that's set to change

A spate of high-profile swatting incidents in the US recently forced the FBI into action with its latest awareness campaign about the occasionally deadly practice.…

Electronic Arts is laying off hundreds of workers and canceling a Titanfall game that was in development at its Respawn Entertainment subsidiary. From a report: Between 300 and 400 positions were eliminated, including around 100 at Respawn, according to a person familiar with the cuts. The company had about 13,700 employees at the end of March 2024. "As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we've made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth," Justin Higgs, a spokesman for the Redwood City, California-based company, said in a statement. The canceled project, code-named R7, was an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe, according to people familiar with its development. It was not close to being released.

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Former Space Shuttle boss's blog booted from NASA's website

NASA has excised former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale's blog from its website in a reminder that nothing is forever.…

Microsoft has pledged to take the US government to court if necessary [alternative source] to protect European customers' access to its cloud services, as concerns mount over potential technology disruptions under President Donald Trump. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice-chair, announced five "digital commitments" to Europe on Wednesday, responding to regional anxieties following Trump's temporary suspension of military support to Ukraine. "We as a company need to be a source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility," Smith said. The commitments include contesting any government order to cease European cloud services through legal channels and establishing European oversight of its continental operations. Microsoft will increase its European data center capacity by 40% over the next two years, expanding in 16 countries with investments of "tens of billions of dollars" annually. The Seattle-based company, which derives more than a quarter of its business from Europe, becomes the first major American tech firm to proactively address European concerns amid escalating trade tensions.

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Brad Smith commits org to facing off with US govt in court to protect them

Microsoft is responding to mounting "geopolitical and trade volatility" between the US administration and governments in Europe by pledging privacy safeguards for customers worried about using American hyperscalers, and vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers' data if needed.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far -- a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models. In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024. Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers. Yet after Humlum, assistant professor of economics at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and Vestergaard, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed the data, they found the labor and wage impact of chatbots to be minimal. "AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation," the authors state in their paper. The report should concern the tech industry, which has hyped AI's economic potential while plowing billions into infrastructure meant to support it. Early this year, OpenAI admitted that it loses money per query even on its most expensive enterprise SKU, while companies like Microsoft and Amazon are starting to pull back on their AI infrastructure spending in light of low business adoption past a few pilots. The problem isn't that workers are avoiding generative AI chatbots -- quite the contrary. But they simply aren't yet equating to actual economic benefits. "The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle." Humlum said while there are gains and time savings to be had, "there's definitely a question of who they really accrue to. And some of it could be the firms -- we cannot directly look at firm profitability. Some of it could also just be that you save some time on existing tasks, but you're not really able to expand your output and therefore earn more. So it's like it saves you time writing emails. But if you cannot really take on more work or do something else that is really valuable, then that will put a damper on how much we should actually expect those time savings to affect your earning ability, your total hours, your wages." "In terms of economic outcomes, when we're looking at hard metrics -- in the administrative labor market data on earnings, wages -- these tools have really not made a difference so far," said Humlum. "So I think that that puts in some sense an upper bound on what return we should expect from these tools, at least in the short run. My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic outcomes."

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The tryhard's favorite distro wins an approved home in Microsoft's OS

There have been unofficial versions for years, but Arch Linux is now officially on the menu for people using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).…

Sycophantic update to GPT-4o rolled back after AI gets over-enthusiastic with the 'glaze'

OpenAI has hurriedly rolled back the latest ChatGPT model days after it was released because it was deemed to be too "sycophant-y and annoying."…