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Waymo is now permitted to test its robotaxi service at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), a big win for the company as it seeks to expand its service area and tackle more popular, revenue-generating destinations. From a report: After years of back-and-forth negotiations, Waymo signed "Testing and Operations Pilot Permit" with SFO, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a release. Under the agreement, Waymo will roll out its service to SFO in three phases, including testing vehicles with a human driver, testing without a driver, and eventually beginning commercial service. Waymo will start its tests with employees before eventually inviting members of the public to take trips to and from the airport. Pickups and dropoffs will initially take place at SFO's Kiss & Fly lot, which is accessible to the terminals via the AirTrain.

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250 people now have the chance to sell their freelance services on the site

ai-pocalypse Freelance services marketplace Fiverr has told around 250 staffers that they are back on the market as it pivots to having "a modern, clean, AI-focused infrastructure from the ground up."…

Nature's editorial board urged governments on Tuesday to reverse decades of rail disinvestment as railways mark their 200th anniversary September 27, citing transport sector emissions that grew 1.7% annually from 1990-2022 and now generate one-quarter of global CO2. Rail produces one-fifth the emissions of cars per passenger kilometer yet carries just 8.4% of EU passenger traffic versus 73% for automobiles. The journal called for broader investment criteria beyond narrow profitability metrics and noted only one-third of countries have incorporated transport into their Paris Agreement commitments. Global rail freight fell from 38% to 24% between 1980-2017 while US networks shrank from 400,000 to 200,000 kilometers since 1914. Africa operates 87,000 rail kilometers continent-wide compared to India's 65,000 kilometers in one-tenth the area. Transport emissions must decline 3% yearly to meet net-zero targets.

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Mastercard, American Express, Coinbase, and PayPal sign up at launch

Google has given the go-ahead to a plan that lets AI agents make purchases on your behalf and, on Tuesday, released its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to make it happen. The system comes with touted safeguards that are intended to prevent thieves from draining bank accounts.…

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has responded to Borderlands 4 performance complaints by calling the game "a premium game made for premium gamers." Pitchford claimed customer service reports for performance issues represent "less than one percent of one percent" of players and told critics to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please." The game holds a Mixed rating on Steam despite reaching 300,000 concurrent players Sunday, a franchise record. Gearbox recommends DLSS and frame generation for 60+ fps at 1440p even on powerful hardware. Pitchford compared running the game on older hardware to driving "a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor."

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That's optimistic based on progress so far

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright believes that the country will have at least one small nuclear rector up and running by July 2026, despite the fact that not a single one has been built to date, after multiple failed attempts.…

Gallup: Americans have been placing less importance on the value of a college education over the past 15 years, to the point that about a third (35%) now rate it as "very important." Forty percent think it is "fairly important," while 24% say it is "not too important." When last asked to rate the importance of college in 2019, just over half of U.S. adults, 53%, said it was very important, but that was already lower than the 70% found in 2013 and 75% in 2010. Meanwhile, the percentage viewing college as not too important has more than doubled since 2019 and compares with just 4% in 2010. The views of parents of children under age 18 in the Aug. 1-20 poll are similar to the national average, with 38% rating college as very important, 40% somewhat important and 21% not too important.

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May have been used in 'extremely sophisticated' attacks against 'specific targeted individuals'

Apple backported a fix to older iPhones and iPads for a serious bug it patched last month – but only after it may have been exploited in what the company calls "extremely sophisticated" attacks.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apollo is exploring a sale of early internet darling AOL after receiving inbound interest in the business, according to people familiar with the matter. Any deal could value AOL at around $1.5 billion, the people said. It is also possible the talks won't result in any deal, they cautioned. Apollo bought AOL in 2021 as part of a $5 billion deal to acquire that business and Yahoo from Verizon. AOL generates around $400 million in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the people familiar with the matter said. Its main business lines include software for internet privacy and protection, and the AOL.com website and email domain.

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Former head of Kubuntu and neon says adiós after 25 years

Sad news for KDE: one of the core people guiding the project for the whole century so far has left the building.…

AI will enable three to four-day workweeks, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told The New York Times, joining Microsoft's Bill Gates, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon in predicting shorter schedules. Yuan also acknowledged AI will eliminate some positions, particularly entry-level engineering roles where AI can write code, but argued new opportunities will emerge managing AI agents. Gates previously suggested two to three-day weeks within 10 years during a February appearance on The Tonight Show.

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Getting an MBA in the US has gotten a little more expensive and a little less profitable, according to a Bloomberg analysis of salary and tuition data. From the report: This year's update of Bloomberg's Business School ROI Calculator, based on surveys of more than 9,500 students and alumni, projects a typical return on investment of 12.3% a year for the decade after graduation. That's down from 13.3% last year. The S&P 500 index, by comparison, returned 14.6% over the decade ending Aug. 31. The main reason for the decline: This year's respondents reported 6.2% better pre-MBA salaries than last year's, while projected postdegree earnings increased only 1.7%. In other words, the MBA pay edge -- the compensation boost graduates get for the degree -- shrank. In the broader US workforce, the average high-skilled worker's earnings rose 4.7% in the year ended July 31, Federal Reserve data show. Other factors didn't help: The increase in pre-MBA salaries meant students were forgoing more income during their studies. Tuition and other expenses increased 2.4%, some of that financed with bigger loans at higher rates. In all, the typical total investment to get an MBA in the US rose 6.8%, to almost $300,000.

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Intrusions bear the same hallmarks as recent Nx mess

The npm platform is the target of another supply chain attack, with crims already compromising 187 packages and counting.…

A search for "AI chat" in the Mac App Store returns dozens of applications sporting black-and-white icons nearly identical to ChatGPT's official logo. OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop application isn't available through the Mac App Store and can only be downloaded from the company's website. The copycat applications use various combinations of "AI," "Chat," and "Bot" in their names, including "AI Chat Bot : Ask Assistant," "AI Chatbot: Chat Ask Assistant," and dozens of similar variations. One application named itself "Al Chatbot" using a lowercase L instead of a capital I in "AI." Additional lookalike icons mimicking Claude, Grok, and Gemini applications also appear in search results.

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DSAG players grappling with cloud migration want more consistency with commercial models

DSAG, the SAP user group for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, has called for greater transparency in cloud licensing to enable the migration and upgrade of on-prem systems to the cloud.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Anyone who surveys the public, from marketers to pollsters, struggles nowadays to get people to answer their questions. That phenomenon afflicts crucial government data, making it harder for policymakers and investors to know the true state of the economy. Falling survey participation is an important reason the flagship jobs report released every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Labor Department, has undergone such big revisions recently. This has rippled into the political sphere. On Aug. 1, President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a particularly large downward revision to jobs for May and June that owed partly to late responses from survey participants. The White House and top administration officials increased their attacks on the BLS last week after the agency published an annual revision suggesting the U.S. added 911,000 fewer jobs over the 12 months through March. The BLS blamed the initial overestimate partly on response rates. [...] One hypothesis is known as survey fatigue: People are being asked to answer too many questionnaires. Jonathan Eggleston, a senior economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found in a 2024 study that recent participants in that agency's monthly and annual surveys, which are voluntary, were less likely to answer the 2020 census by mail, phone or online, without a knock on the door. Another is the rise of cellphones with caller ID. In the days of landlines, people had to pick up the phone to know who was calling. These days, many decline to answer callers they don't recognize.

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The Microsoft Axman Cometh

While Windows 10 might seem to be the biggest casualty as a result of Microsoft's ax-swinging, Office and recent versions of Windows 11 are also set to be chopped.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to 'memorize' any of that content. LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say. While the output varies even for identical inputs, models do sometimes regurgitate something from their training data -- if trained with personal data, the output could be a violation of user privacy. In the event copyrighted data makes it into training data (either accidentally or on purpose), its appearance in outputs can cause a different kind of headache for devs. Differential privacy can prevent such memorization by introducing calibrated noise during the training phase. Adding differential privacy to a model comes with drawbacks in terms of accuracy and compute requirements. No one has bothered to figure out the degree to which that alters the scaling laws of AI models until now. The team worked from the assumption that model performance would be primarily affected by the noise-batch ratio, which compares the volume of randomized noise to the size of the original training data. By running experiments with varying model sizes and noise-batch ratios, the team established a basic understanding of differential privacy scaling laws, which is a balance between the compute budget, privacy budget, and data budget. In short, more noise leads to lower-quality outputs unless offset with a higher compute budget (FLOPs) or data budget (tokens). The paper details the scaling laws for private LLMs, which could help developers find an ideal noise-batch ratio to make a model more private. The work the team has done here has led to a new Google model called VaultGemma, its first open-weight model trained with differential privacy to minimize memorization risks. It's built on the older Gemma 2 foundation and sized at 1 billion parameters, which the company says performs comparably to non-private models of similar size. It's available now from Hugging Face and Kaggle.

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Safe C++ proposal author claims that 'will not ever work'

The C++ standards committee abandoned a detailed proposal to create a rigorously safe subset of the language, according to the proposal's co-author, despite continuing anxiety about memory safety.…

Tech evolved from PoC to global campaign in under two months

An attack called FileFix is masquerading as a Facebook security alert before ultimately dropping the widely used StealC infostealer and malware downloader.…