Technology

Intel has announced plans for a substantial workforce reduction, surpassing initial expectations, as part of a comprehensive strategy to bolster its financial position and streamline operations. The company intends to lay off over 16,000 employees, representing more than 1% of its global workforce, with the majority of these cuts slated for completion by the end of 2024, according to the firm's second-quarter earnings report released on Thursday. Concurrent with the workforce reductions, Intel has outlined plans to significantly curtail its capital expenditures, projecting a decrease of over 20% to a range of $25 to $27 billion in 2024, with further reductions anticipated in 2025. This shift in focus towards capital efficiency comes as the company achieves its goal of developing five process nodes in four years, signaling a recalibration of investment levels to align with market demands. As part of its financial restructuring, Intel has also made the decision to suspend its quarterly dividend starting in the fourth quarter of 2024, prioritizing liquidity to support strategic investments. The cumulative effect of these cost-saving initiatives is expected to yield over $10 billion in savings by 2025.

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According to Statcounter, Linux use hit another all-time high in July. For July 2024, the statistics website is showing Linux at 4.45%, climbing almost a half a percentage point from June's 4.05% high. Is 2024 truly the year of Linux on the desktop?

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, US Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act of 2024. The bipartisan legislation, up for consideration in the US Senate, aims to protect individuals from unauthorized AI-generated replicas of their voice or likeness. The NO FAKES Act would create legal recourse for people whose digital representations are created without consent. It would hold both individuals and companies liable for producing, hosting, or sharing these unauthorized digital replicas, including those created by generative AI. Due to generative AI technology that has become mainstream in the past two years, creating audio or image media fakes of people has become fairly trivial, with easy photorealistic video replicas likely next to arrive. [...] To protect a person's digital likeness, the NO FAKES Act introduces a "digital replication right" that gives individuals exclusive control over the use of their voice or visual likeness in digital replicas. This right extends 10 years after death, with possible five-year extensions if actively used. It can be licensed during life and inherited after death, lasting up to 70 years after an individual's death. Along the way, the bill defines what it considers to be a "digital replica": "DIGITAL REPLICA.-The term "digital replica" means a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual that- (A) is embodied in a sound recording, image, audiovisual work, including an audiovisual work that does not have any accompanying sounds, or transmission- (i) in which the actual individual did not actually perform or appear; or (ii) that is a version of a sound recording, image, or audiovisual work in which the actual individual did perform or appear, in which the fundamental character of the performance or appearance has been materially altered; and (B) does not include the electronic reproduction, use of a sample of one sound recording or audiovisual work into another, remixing, mastering, or digital remastering of a sound recording or audiovisual work authorized by the copyright holder." The NO FAKES Act "includes provisions that aim to balance IP protection with free speech," notes Ars. "It provides exclusions for recognized First Amendment protections, such as documentaries, biographical works, and content created for purposes of comment, criticism, or parody."

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Argentina's security forces have announced plans to use AI to "predict future crimes" in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens' rights. From a report: The country's far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use "machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes." It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify "wanted persons," patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities. While the ministry of security has said the new unit will help to "detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances," the Minority Report-esque resolution has sent alarm bells ringing among human rights organisations. Experts fear that certain groups of society could be overly scrutinised by the technology, and have also raised concerns over who -- and how many security forces -- will be able to access the information.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long term partnership. As part of the deal, Microsoft runs OpenAI's models across its enterprise and consumer products, and is OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider. However, the tech giant called the startup a "competitor" for the first time in an SEC filing on Tuesday. In Microsoft's annual 10K, OpenAI joined long list of competitors in AI, alongside Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta. OpenAI was also listed alongside Google as a competitor to Microsoft in search, thanks to OpenAI's new SearchGPT feature announced last week. It's possible Microsoft is trying to change the narrative on its relationship with OpenAI in light of antitrust concerns -- the FTC is currently looking into the relationship, alongside similar cloud provider investments into AI startups.

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A blockbuster prisoner exchange between the United States, Russia and Germany on Thursday included at least two prominent cybercriminals held by the U.S. on charges of financially motivated cybercrime and hacking to facilitate insider trading. Cyberscoop reports: The prisoners were part of a deal that freed 16 people from Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. A White House spokesperson confirmed that as part of the deal, the U.S. released convicted Russian cybercriminals Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin. Seleznev is a notorious Russian hacker known for running extensive cybercrime operations. He was involved in numerous cyberattacks, including credit card fraud, theft, and selling stolen credit card information on "Carder[dot]su," a cybercriminal forum ring. Seleznev conducted his criminal activities under the alias "Track2" and "nCux." He is the son of Valery Seleznev, a prominent member of the Russian Duma, the country's parliament. Seleznev was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for his involvement in a massive credit-card computer fraud scheme. Klyushin was extradited to the U.S. for his involvement in an elaborate hack-to-trade scheme that netted approximately $93 million through securities trades based on confidential corporate information stolen from U.S. computer networks. With insider knowledge of companies' financial performance, Klyushin and his co-conspirators predicted stock price movements and traded on stolen information. They used accounts in multiple countries, including Cyprus, Denmark, Portugal, Russia, and the U.S., misleading brokerage firms about their activities.

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A U.S. judge has thrown out a Republican National Committee lawsuit accusing Alphabet's Google of intentionally misdirecting the political party's email messages to users' spam folders. From a report: U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, on Wednesday dismissed the RNC's lawsuit for a second time, and said the organization would not be allowed to refile it. While expressing some sympathy for the RNC's allegations, he said it had not made an adequate case that Google violated California's unfair competition law. The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations. Google denied any wrongdoing.

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Open-source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. From a report: StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build applications. This encompasses everything from which front-end JavaScript framework to use to which cloud provider to use for specific tasks.

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Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page. From a report: The tool, which Google is calling "tab compare," will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view. But while it's potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare product information -- which might be especially worrying for independent publishers that are already struggling to be seen on Google. I'm also skeptical that Google will correctly pull all of the finer details about various products into the tables it creates with tab compare. I don't always trust Google's accuracy right now! There are some limits on what tab compare can do. The tables it creates are limited to 10 items because "we've just found the column layout doesn't scale very well beyond that," Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz tells The Verge.

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AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. From a report: In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music. "Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.

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Mozilla is following in Google Chrome's footsteps in officially distrusting Entrust as a root certificate authority (CA) following what it says was a protracted period of compliance failures. From a report: A little over a month ago, Google was the first to make the bold step of dropping Entrust as a CA, saying it noted a "pattern of concerning behaviors" from the company. Entrust has apologized to Google, Mozilla, and the wider web community, outlining its plans to regain the trust of browsers, but these appear to be unsatisfactory to both Google and Mozilla. In an email shared by Mozilla's Ben Wilson on Wednesday, the root store manager said the decision wasn't taken lightly, but equally Entrust's response to Mozilla's concerns didn't inspire confidence that the situation would materially change for the better. "Mozilla previously requested that Entrust provide a detailed report on these recent incidents and their root causes, an evaluation of Entrust's recent actions in light of their previous commitments given in the aftermath of similarly serious incidents in 2020, and a proposal for how Entrust will re-establish Mozilla's and the community's trust," said Wilson.

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After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data. From a report: "Without these agreements, we don't have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it's used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven't been willing to come to terms with how we'd like our data to be used or not used," Huffman said in an interview this week. He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been "a real pain in the ass to block these companies." Reddit has been escalating its fight against crawlers in recent months. At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn't have agreements with. Then people began noticing that Reddit results were only visible in Google results -- where Reddit is paid for its data to be shown -- and not other search engines like Bing. Huffman said that Microsoft has been using Reddit's data to train its AI and summarizing its content in Bing results "without telling us" and that Reddit's data has also been sold through the Bing API to other search engines.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: Over the past few years, scores of California tech workers have ended up in the exact same position: laid-off, looking for work on LinkedIn and sick of it. LinkedIn, part job site and part social network, has become an all but necessary tool for the office-job-seeking masses in the Bay Area and beyond. As tech companies gut their workforces, people who would otherwise give the blue-and-white site a wide berth feel compelled to scroll for hours every day for job opportunities. LinkedIn is a dominant force in the professional world, with more than 1 billion users and 67 million weekly job searchers. That scale, plus the torrent of self-promotion and corporate platitudes fueling the platform, has long made it a symbol of modern capitalism. Now, in the age of tech's layoffs, it's also a symbol of dread. The platform's specter looms so large because it does exactly what it needs to. Tech workers are stuck on Linkedin: In a competitive job market rife with spam listings, the free platform's networking-focused features set it a peg above competitors like Indeed, Dice and Levels.fyi in the search for full-time work. Since February, SFGATE has spoken with 10 recently laid-off tech workers; most of them see LinkedIn as painful but necessary and have locked up new jobs in part thanks to the platform. Tech worker Kyle Kohlheyer told SFGATE that returning to LinkedIn after losing his job at Cruise in December felt like "salt in the wound" and called the job site a "cesspool" of wannabe thought leaders and "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." "I found success on their platform, but I f-king hate LinkedIn," Kohlheyer said. "It sucks. It is a terrible place to exist every day and depend on a job for. [...] There's just such a capitalist-centric mindset on there that is so annoying as a worker who has been fundamentally screwed by companies," he said. "Wading" through LinkedIn, he said, it's hard to tell if people feel like an alternative to the top-heavy, precarious tech economy is even possible. Another tech worker, Mark Harris, added: "Is [LinkedIn] a terrible sign that we live in a capitalist hellscape? Hell yes! But we do live in a capitalist hellscape, and girl's gotta eat."

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In the company's second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Meta's Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss of $4.48 billion. CNBC reports: Since late 2020, the Reality Labs unit has generated cumulative losses of about $50 billion, underscoring CEO Mark Zuckerberg's massive investments into the hardware and software that underpins what he says will be the next era of personal computing. Revenue in Reality Labs, largely derived from the company's Quest family of VR headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, came in at $353 million, representing growth of 28% from $276 million a year earlier. Analysts were expecting the unit to bring in $371 million.

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Physicists have been exploring the theoretical possibility of warp drives, which could propel spaceships faster than light by compressing spacetime. A new study published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics simulates the gravitational waves such a drive might emit if it failed, showing potential detectable signals by future high-frequency instruments and advancing our understanding of exotic spacetimes. Phys.Org reports: The results are fascinating. The collapsing warp drive generates a distinct burst of gravitational waves, a ripple in spacetime that could be detectable by gravitational wave detectors that normally target black hole and neutron star mergers. Unlike the chirps from merging astrophysical objects, this signal would be a short, high-frequency burst, and so current detectors wouldn't pick it up. However, future higher-frequency instruments might, and although no such instruments have yet been funded, the technology to build them exists. This raises the possibility of using these signals to search for evidence of warp drive technology, even if we can't build it ourselves. The study also delves into the energy dynamics of the collapsing warp drive. The process emits a wave of negative energy matter, followed by alternating positive and negative waves. This complex dance results in a net increase in the overall energy of the system, and in principle could provide another signature of the collapse if the outgoing waves interacted with normal matter.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: With thousands of species at risk of extinction, scientists have devised a radical plan: a vault filled with preserved samples of our planet's most important and at-risk creatures located on the moon. An international team of experts says threats from climate change and habitat loss have outpaced our ability to protect species in their natural habitats, necessitating urgent action. A biorepository of preserved cells, and the crucial DNA within them, could be used to enhance genetic diversity in small populations of critically endangered species, or to clone and create new individuals in the worst-case scenario of extinction. The proposed lunar biorepository, as described in the journal BioScience, would be beyond the reach of climate breakdown, geopolitical events or other Earth-based disasters. The moon's naturally frigid environment means samples would remain frozen year-round without the need for human involvement or an energy source. By taking advantage of deep craters near the polar regions that are never exposed to sunlight, the moon is one of few places that can provide the ultra-low temperature of -196C necessary to preserve the samples in a way suitable for future cloning. [...] Besides those facing the imminent risk of extinction, the proposed repository would prioritize species with important functions in their environment and food webs. Through careful selection, those housed could be used to re-establish an extinct population on Earth or even to terraform another planet. Dr Mary Hagedorn of the Smithsonian's national zoo and conservation biology institute and the proposal's lead author believes the biorepository proposal will come to fruition, although perhaps not in our lifetime: "We know how to do this and can do this and will do this, but it may take decades to finally achieve," she said. The report says the next steps "will be to develop packaging for the cryopreserved samples that can withstand the conditions of space, and to work out the logistics of transporting samples to the moon."

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Shareholders have sued CrowdStrike on Tuesday, claiming the cybersecurity company defrauded them by concealing how its inadequate software testing could cause the global software outage earlier this month that crashed millions of computers. Reuters reports: In a proposed class action filed on Tuesday night in the Austin, Texas federal court, shareholders said they learned that CrowdStrike's assurances about its technology were materially false and misleading when a flawed software update disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency lines around the world. They said CrowdStrike's share price fell 32% over the next 12 days, wiping out $25 billion of market value, as the outage's effects became known, Chief Executive George Kurtz was called to testify to the U.S. Congress, and Delta Air Lines reportedly hired prominent lawyer David Boies to seek damages. The complaint cites statements including from a March 5 conference call where Kurtz characterized CrowdStrike's software as "validated, tested and certified." The lawsuit led by the Plymouth County Retirement Association of Plymouth, Massachusetts, seeks unspecified damages for holders of CrowdStrike Class A shares between Nov. 29, 2023 and July 29, 2024. Further reading: Delta CEO Says CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage Cost the Airline $500 Million

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Taco Bell's parent company, Yum! Brands, announced today that the fast-food chain will expand its Voice AI technology to "hundreds" of chains around the country by the end of the year. A global expansion of the service will follow. Fortune reports: Right now, more than 100 Taco Bell locations in 13 states rely on AI to take customer orders at the drive-thru. Company officials say that has resulted in improved order accuracy, shorter wait times, and higher profits. Human workers, the company says, will be freed up to focus on other tasks, ranging from interacting with guests who opt to order from the restaurant counter to preparing food. "Yum! Brands is integrating digital and technology into all aspects of our business with exciting new capabilities, and AI is a core piece of that strategy," said Lawrence Kim, chief innovation officer at Yum! Brands, in a statement. "With over two years of fine-tuning and testing the drive-thru Voice AI technology, we're confident in its effectiveness in optimizing operations and enhancing customer satisfaction."

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The results of Los Angeles' 12-month guaranteed income pilot program show that it was "overwhelmingly beneficial (source may be paywalled; alternative source)," reports the Los Angeles Times. The program, which involved giving L.A.'s poorest families cash assistance of $1,000 a month with no strings attached, significantly improved participants' financial stability, job opportunities, and overall well-being. From the report: The Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot, or BIG:LEAP, disbursed $38.4 million in city funds to 3,200 residents who were pregnant or had at least one child, lived at or below the federal poverty level and experienced hardship related to COVID-19. Participants were randomly selected from about 50,000 applicants and received the payments for 12 months starting in 2022. The city paid researchers $3.9 million to help design the trial and survey participants throughout about their experiences. [Dr. Amy Castro, co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Guaranteed Income Research] and her colleagues partnered with researchers at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health to compare the experiences of participants in L.A.'s randomized control trial -- the country's first large-scale guaranteed-income pilot using public funds -- with those of nearly 5,000 people who didn't receive the unconditional cash. Researchers found that participants reported a meaningful increase in savings and were more likely to be able to cover a $400 emergency during and after the program. Guaranteed-income recipients also were more likely to secure full-time or part-time employment, or to be looking for work, rather than being unemployed and not looking for work, the study found. In a city with sky-high rents, participants reported that the guaranteed income functioned as "a preventative measure against homelessness," according to the report, helping them offset rental costs and serving as a buffer while they waited for other housing support. It also prevented or reduced the incidence of intimate partner violence, the analysis found, by making it possible for people and their children to leave and find other housing. Intimate partner violence is an intractable social challenge, Castro said, so to see improvements with just 12 months of funding is a "pretty extraordinary change." People who had struggled to maintain their health because of inflexible or erratic work schedules and lack of child care reported that the guaranteed income provided the safety net they needed to maintain healthier behaviors, the report said. They reported sleeping better, exercising more, resuming necessary medications and seeking mental health therapy for themselves and their children. Compared with those who didn't receive cash, guaranteed income recipients were more likely to enroll their kids in sports and clubs during and after the pilot.

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Italian app developer Bending Spoons has bought file-sharing platform WeTransfer, the companies said in a joint statement on Wednesday, as the Milan-based tech company presses ahead with a string of deals for software firms. From a report: The deal, for which financial details were not disclosed, is the fifth acquisition this year by Bending Spoons, which in February raised $155 million through a capital increase, taking the company's valuation to $2.55 billion. [...] The WeTransfer service enables its users to transfer large files online. It has 600,000 subscribers and 80 million monthly active users, according to data included in the statement. WeTransfer is the latest of several acquisitions by Bending Spoons. It bought note-taking service Evernote in November 2022.

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