Technology

Longtime Slashdot reader mprindle writes: Nextcloud has been in an ongoing battle with Google over the tech giant revoking the All Files permission from the Nextcloud Android App, which prevents users from managing their files on their server. After a blog post and several tech sites reported on the issue, "Google reached out to us [Nexcloud] and offered to restore the permission, which will give users back the functionality that was lost." Nextcloud is working on an app update and hopes to have it pushed out within a week.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers. Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion. Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal. The disruption of both markets will be "a big blow for online fraudsters," Elliptic confirmed, cutting them off from a dependable source for "stolen data, money laundering services, and telecoms infrastructure." [...] Elliptic reported that Telegram connected black markets with an audience of a billion users, noting that Telegram tried to remove several Huione Guarantee channels earlier this year, but "the marketplace was ready" with backups and remained online until this week. Wired suggested that Huione Guarantee "operated in plain sight" on Telegram for years. But Telegram suggested it just discovered it. Huione Guarantee is a subsidiary of Huione Group, which was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for supporting "criminal syndicates who have stolen billions of dollars from Americans." According to Reuters, that included allegedly laundering "at least $37 million in crypto from cyber heists by North Korea and $36 million of crypto from so-called 'pig butchering' scams."

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Uber's autonomous vehicle chief Andrew Macdonald predicted this week that the company will employ more human drivers in a decade despite aggressively expanding robotaxi operations. Speaking at the Financial Times' Future of the Car conference, Macdonald outlined a "hybrid marketplace" where autonomous vehicles dominate city centers while human drivers serve areas beyond robotaxi coverage, handle airport runs, and respond during extreme weather events. "I am almost certain that there will be more Uber drivers in 10 years, not less, because I think the world will move from individual car ownership to mobility as a service," Macdonald said. The ride-hailing giant has struck partnerships with Waymo, Volkswagen, Wayve, WeRide, and Pony AI. Robotaxis are already operational in Austin and Phoenix, with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi claiming Waymo vehicles in Austin are busier than "99%" of human drivers.

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School districts across the United States were woefully unprepared for ChatGPT's impact on education, according to thousands of pages of public records obtained by 404 Media. Documents from early 2023, the publication reports, show a "total crapshoot" in responses, with some state education departments admitting they hadn't considered ChatGPT's implications while others hired pro-AI consultants to train educators. In California, when principals sought guidance, state officials responded that "unfortunately, the topic of ChatGPT has not come up in our circles." One California official admitted, "I have never heard of ChatGPT prior to your email." Meanwhile, Louisiana's education department circulated presentations suggesting AI "is like giving a computer a brain" and warning that "going back to writing essays - only in class - can hurt struggling learners." Some administrators accepted the technology enthusiastically, with one Idaho curriculum head calling ChatGPT "AMAZING" and comparing resistance to early reactions against spell-check.

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Scientists have successfully treated a 9.5-month-old boy with an ultra-rare genetic disorder using the world's first personalized gene-editing therapy. The patient, identified as KJ, has CPS1 deficiency -- a condition affecting just one in 1.3 million babies that prevents proper ammonia processing and is often fatal. The breakthrough treatment, detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine, uses base editing technology to correct KJ's specific DNA mutation. The therapy delivers CRISPR components wrapped in fatty lipid molecules that protect them in the bloodstream until they reach liver cells, where they make the precise edit needed. After three infusions, KJ now eats normal amounts of protein and has maintained stable ammonia levels even through viral illnesses that would typically cause dangerous spikes. His weight has increased from the 7th to 40th percentile. Dr. Peter Marks, former FDA official, called the approach "one of the most potentially transformational technologies" because it could be rapidly adapted for thousands of other rare genetic diseases without lengthy development cycles.

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Apple has implemented conspicuous warning labels featuring red exclamation marks on EU App Store listings that use external payment systems. The company's new tactic targets apps like Instacar, a popular Hungarian vehicle valuation tool with thousands of positive reviews, displaying ominous warnings that the app "does not support the App Store's private and secure payment system." The associated support page cautions users that external payments require providing personal information directly to developers and third parties "based on their privacy and security controls." The move also follows the Epic vs Apple ruling that prohibits Apple from interfering with developers linking to alternative payment systems.

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Google has overtaken IBM to become the leader in generative AI-related patents and also leads in the emerging area of agentic AI, according to data from IFI Claims. Axios: In the patents-for-agents U.S. rankings, Google and Nvidia top the list, followed by IBM, Intel and Microsoft, according to an analysis released Thursday. Globally, Google and Nvidia also led the agentic patents list, but three Chinese universities also make the top 10, highlighting China's place as the chief U.S. rival in the field. In global rankings for generative AI, Google was also the leader -- but six of the top 10 global spots were held by Chinese companies or universities. Microsoft was No. 3, with Nvidia and IBM also in the top 10.

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The Federal Trade Commission has postponed enforcement of its consumer-friendly "click to cancel" rule from May 14 to July 14, giving businesses two additional months to comply. The regulation requires companies to make subscription cancellations as straightforward as the sign-up process, prohibiting practices like forcing customers who subscribed online to navigate through chatbots or call centers to cancel. The rule, established under former Democratic Chair Lina Khan, unsurprisingly has garnered support from consumer advocates while facing legal opposition from industry groups. A coalition including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and organizations representing major telecom and media companies -- Charter Communications, Comcast, Disney Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Discovery -- has sued to block implementation, claiming the agency exceeded its authority.

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Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said Thursday it is offering a $20 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of criminals who attempted to extort the company for the same amount after stealing customer data. The criminals bribed customer support agents in overseas markets to access records containing addresses, phone numbers, government IDs, and partial bank and Social Security details of more than 80,000 customers. "It sucks but when we see a problem like this we want to own it and make it right," Coinbase Chief Security Officer Philip Martin told Fortune. The company will reimburse customers who fell victim to subsequent social engineering scams. No login credentials or wallet access were compromised in the breach. The extortionists had threatened to publish the stolen information unless paid $20 million in Bitcoin.

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A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour reveals that ChatGPT diminishes the diversity of ideas generated during brainstorming sessions. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found [PDF] that while generative AI tools may enhance individual creativity, they simultaneously reduce the collective diversity of novel content. The investigation responds to previous research that examined ChatGPT's impact on creativity. Their findings align with separate research published in Science Advances suggesting AI-generated content tends toward homogeneity. This phenomenon mirrors what researchers call the "fourth grade slump in creativity," referencing earlier studies on how structured approaches can limit innovative thinking.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's recently announced job cuts fell hardest on the people who build the company's products, showing that even software developers are at risk in the age of artificial intelligence. In Microsoft's home state of Washington, software engineering was by far the largest single job category to receive layoff notices, making up more than 40% of the roughly 2,000 positions cut, according to state documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Microsoft on Tuesday said it would cut about 6,000 workers across the company. The Washington state data represents about a third of the total.

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Nvidia-backed CoreWeave plans to spend up to $23 billion this year on AI infrastructure and data center capacity, as it aims to meet the booming demand from clients. Reuters reports: The heavy spending plan weighed on its shares, which fell 5% after surging as much as 11% on better-than-expected revenue in its first results as a public company after debuting on the Nasdaq in March. The company's projected capital expenditure of between $3 billion and $3.5 billion for the second quarter was way above its revenue expectation of $1.06 billion to $1.1 billion. "While the revenue from Microsoft is likely secure for the next three years, CoreWeave represents overflow capacity for Microsoft, which may not need that capacity in the future," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said. The company's revenue backlog was $25.9 billion as of March 31, with its five-year deal with OpenAI adding $11.2 billion to the pile up. As part of the deal signed in March, CoreWeave will provide AI infrastructure to OpenAI, while the ChatGPT maker will get a stake. CoreWeave expects annual revenue of $4.9 billion to $5.1 billion, above analysts' expectation of $4.61 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It reported revenue of $981.6 million for the first quarter, beating the estimate of $852.9 million.

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U.S. President Donald Trump said he has told Apple CEO Tim Cook to stop expanding manufacturing operations in India despite New Delhi offering a "no-tariff deal" to the United States, a move that could impede India's aspirations to become a global technology manufacturing hub. "I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday," Trump said during his state visit to Qatar, referring to the Apple chief executive. "He is building all over India. I don't want you building in India. India can take care of itself." Apple has significantly increased its Indian manufacturing footprint, assembling $22 billion worth of iPhones in India during the 12 months through March. Apple said earlier this month a majority of its devices shipped into the U.S. in the June quarter will originate in India and Vietnam.

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Montana has passed a bill allowing licensed clinics to offer experimental medical treatments that haven't been approved by the FDA, provided the drugs have passed phase I safety trials. MIT Technology Review reports: The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans -- a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers. These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. [...] Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was "optimistic" about the measure, because "it's great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy." Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub. But ethicists and legal scholars aren't as optimistic. "I hate it," bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments -- and the risks of harm should something go wrong. [...] At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says [Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives]. "We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there." He won't name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad." Mac Davis -- founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial "anti-aging" gene therapy -- told MIT Technology Review he was "looking into it." "I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism," says Livingston. "There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment."

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Fintech startup Klarna is now recruiting humans after its AI customer service agents underperformed. The buy-now-pay-later company, which eliminated its marketing contracts in 2023 and customer service team in 2024, now plans an "Uber-type setup" with remote gig workers. This marks a stark reversal from CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's 2024 claim that "AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do." Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg: "From a brand perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want." He added that "cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor" leading to "lower quality."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's DeepMind research division claims its newest AI agent marks a significant step toward using the technology to tackle big problems in math and science. The system, known as AlphaEvolve, is based on the company's Gemini large language models (LLMs), with the addition of an "evolutionary" approach that evaluates and improves algorithms across a range of use cases. AlphaEvolve is essentially an AI coding agent, but it goes deeper than a standard Gemini chatbot. When you talk to Gemini, there is always a risk of hallucination, where the AI makes up details due to the non-deterministic nature of the underlying technology. AlphaEvolve uses an interesting approach to increase its accuracy when handling complex algorithmic problems. According to DeepMind, this AI uses an automatic evaluation system. When a researcher interacts with AlphaEvolve, they input a problem along with possible solutions and avenues to explore. The model generates multiple possible solutions, using the efficient Gemini Flash and the more detail-oriented Gemini Pro, and then each solution is analyzed by the evaluator. An evolutionary framework allows AlphaEvolve to focus on the best solution and improve upon it. Many of the company's past AI systems, for example, the protein-folding AlphaFold, were trained extensively on a single domain of knowledge. AlphaEvolve, however, is more dynamic. DeepMind says AlphaEvolve is a general-purpose AI that can aid research in any programming or algorithmic problem. And Google has already started to deploy it across its sprawling business with positive results. DeepMind's AlphaEvolve AI has optimized Google's Borg cluster scheduler, reducing global computing resource usage by 0.7% -- a significant cost saving at Google's scale. It also outperformed specialized AI like AlphaTensor by discovering a more efficient algorithm for multiplying complex-valued matrices. Additionally, AlphaEvolve proposed hardware-level optimizations for Google's next-gen Tensor chips. The AI remains too complex for public release but that may change in the future as it gets integrated into smaller research tools.

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Microsoft quietly announced earlier this week that it plans to shut down a long-standing tool supplying search engine startups and other software developers with a raw feed of Bing search results. From a report: The Bing Search APIs, or application programming interfaces, were once vital to many niche Google alternatives, but fell out of favor more recently as Microsoft hiked fees for the service and restricted its use. The shutoff, which is scheduled to begin on August 11, still came as a surprise to several developers who spoke with WIRED. Customers learned of it on Monday via an email from Microsoft and a post on its website. They were directed to consider using "Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents," a Microsoft service that allows chatbots like ChatGPT to augment AI-generated responses with "real-time public web data." Some developers view the AI-centric alternative as an insufficient replacement. Larger customers like DuckDuckGo told Wired they won't be affected.

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Google has warned that the hacker group known as "Scattered Spider," which recently disrupted UK retailer Marks & Spencer, is now targeting U.S. retailers with aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks. "U.S. retailers should take note. These actors are aggressive, creative, and particularly effective at circumventing mature security programs," John Hultquist, an analyst at Google's cybersecurity arm, said in an email sent on Wednesday. The Guardian reports: Scattered Spider is widely reported to have been behind the particularly disruptive hack at M&S, one of the best-known names in British business, whose online operations have been frozen since 25 April. It has a history of focusing on a single sector at a time and is likely to target retail for a while longer, Hultquist said. Just a day before Google's warning, M&S announced that some customer data had been accessed, but this did not include usable payment or card details, or any account passwords. The Guardian understands the details taken are names, addresses and order histories. M&S said personal information had been accessed because of the "sophisticated nature of the incident." "Today, we are writing to customers informing them that due to the sophisticated nature of the incident, some of their personal customer data has been taken," the company said. Hackers from the Scattered Spider ecosystem have been behind a slew of disruptive break-ins on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2023, hackers tied to the group made headlines for hacking the casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. Law enforcement has struggled to get a handle on the Scattered Spider hacking groups, in part because of their amorphousness, the hackers' youth, and a lack of cooperation from cybercrime victims.

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Netflix said its cheaper, ad-supporter tier now has 94 million monthly active users -- an increase of more than 20 million since its last public tally in November. CNBC reports: The company and its peers have been increasingly leaning on advertising to boost the profitability of their streaming products. Netflix first introduced the ad-supported plan in November 2022. Netflix's ad-supported plan costs $7.99 per month, a steep discount from its least-expensive ad-free plan, at $17.99 per month. Netflix also said its cheapest tier reaches more 18- to 34-year-olds than any U.S. broadcast or cable network. "When you compare us to our competitors, attention starts higher and ends much higher," Netflix president of advertising Amy Reinhard said in a statement. "Even more impressive, members pay as much attention to mid-roll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves."

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Apple's smartphone shipments in China plunged nearly 50% year-over-year in March 2025, as domestic brands like Huawei and Vivo surged ahead -- now controlling 92% of the market. MacRumors reports: The steep decline saw shipments fall to just 1.89 million units, down from 3.75 million during the same period last year. That shrinks Apple's share of the Chinese market to approximately 8%, while domestic brands now control 92% of smartphone shipments. For the entire first quarter, non-Chinese brand shipments declined over 25%, while total smartphone shipments in China actually increased by 3.3%. Apple's struggles come as domestic competitors have gained ground. Counterpoint Research reports Huawei now leads with a 19.4% share, followed by Vivo (17%), Xiaomi (16.6%), and Oppo (14.6%). Apple has slipped to fifth place with 14.1%. Several factors are driving Apple's declining fortunes. The company faces competition from rejuvenated local brands like Huawei, which has rebounded with proprietary chips and its HarmonyOS Next software. Chinese government policies appear to be playing a role too. Under government subsidies, consumers of electronics get a 15% refund of products that are priced under 6,000 yuan ($820). Apple's standard iPhone 16 starts at 5,999 yuan.

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