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Cancer Patient Forced To Make Terrible Decision After Ransomware Attack On London Hospitals

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 23:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen. Hanna -- the name she goes by -- is now missing her right breast after her skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate breast reconstruction surgery was swapped out for a simple mastectomy at the last minute. The 36-year-old research culture manager at King's College London and former researcher in health sciences was diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer in late 2023. It's an aggressive form known for spreading faster and is more commonly recurring, which necessitates urgent treatment. Hanna soon began a course of chemotherapy following her diagnosis until she was able to have what will hopefully be the first and only major procedure to remove the disease. Between then and the operation, which was scheduled for June 7 -- four days after the ransomware attack was carried out -- she had been told repeatedly that the planned procedure was a skin-sparing mastectomy which would have allowed surgeons to cosmetically reconstruct her right breast immediately after the operation. How the ordeal actually unraveled, however, was an entirely different story. Hanna was given less than 24 hours by doctors to make the daunting decision to either accept a simple mastectomy or delay a life-changing procedure until Synnovis's systems were back online. The decision was thrust upon her on the Thursday afternoon before her Friday surgery. This was after she was forced to chase the medical staff for updates about whether the procedure was going ahead at all. Hanna was told on the Tuesday of that week, the day after Qilin's attack, that despite everything going on, the staff at St Thomas' hospital in London were still planning to go ahead with the skin-sparing mastectomy as previously agreed. Per the updates Hanna requested on Thursday, it was strongly suggested that the operation was going to be canceled. The hospital deemed the reconstruction part of the procedure too risky because Synnovis was unable to support blood transfusions until its systems were back online. The ransomware attack wasn't easy on hospitals. The situation was so dire that blood reserves were running low just a week after the attack, prompting an urgent appeal for O-type blood donations. For Hanna, though, this meant she had to make the unimaginably difficult choice between the surgery she wanted, or the surgery that would give her the best chance at survival. The mother of two young children, aged four and two, felt like she had no other choice but to accept the simple mastectomy, leaving her with only one breast. [...] At the time of writing, it's now nearly five weeks since Qilin's attack on Synnovis -- a pathology services partnership between Synlab, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The most recent update provided by the NHS said disruption to services was still evident across the region, although some services such as outpatient appointments are returning to near-normal levels. Between June 24-30, there were 1,517 cute outpatient appointments and 136 electric procedures that needed to be postponed across the two NHS trusts partnered with Synlab. "The total number of postponements for the entire month since the attack took hold (June 3-30) stand at 4,913 for acute outpatient appointments and 1,391 for elective procedures," notes the report.

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ITER Fusion Reactor To See Further Delays, With Operations Pushed To 2034

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 20:00
John Timmer reports via Ars Technica: On Tuesday, the people managing the ITER experimental fusion reactor announced (PDF) that a combination of delays and altered priorities meant that its first-of-its-kind hardware wouldn't see plasma until 2036, with the full-energy deuterium-tritium fusion pushed back to 2039. The latter represents a four-year delay relative to the previous roadmap. While the former is also a delay, it's due in part to changing priorities. ITER is an attempt to build a fusion reactor that's capable of sustaining plasmas that allow it to operate well beyond the break-even point, where the energy released by fusion reactions significantly exceeds the energy required to create the conditions that enable those reactions. It's meant to hit that milestone by scaling up a well-understood design called a tokamak. But the problem has been plagued by delays and cost overruns nearly from its start. At early stages, many of these stemmed from changes in designs necessitated by a better and improved understanding of plasmas held at extreme pressures and temperatures due to better modeling capabilities and a better understanding of the behavior of plasmas in smaller reactions. The latest delays are due to more prosaic reasons. One of them is the product of the international nature of the collaboration, which sees individual components built by different partner organizations before assembly at the reactor site in France. The pandemic, unsurprisingly, severely disrupted the production of a lot of these components, and the project's structure meant that alternate suppliers couldn't be used (assuming alternate suppliers of one-of-a-kind hardware existed in the first place). The second problem relates to the location of the reactor in France. The country's nuclear safety regulator had concerns about the assembly of some of the components and halted construction on the reactor.

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Capturing CO2 With Copper, Scientists Generate 'Green Methane'

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 17:00
Longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam shares a report from Phys.Org, with the caption: "It's not sequestration, but it is a closed carbon loop and can store energy from renewable sources to be released when they are not collecting energy." From the report: Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane -- a cleaner source of energy -- using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters. While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not. "On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it's a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it," says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. "But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane." By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and "recycled" back into methane. This would create a closed "carbon loop" that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.

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Earth's Core Has Slowed So Much It's Moving Backward, Scientists Confirm

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 13:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery. This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves -- its rotation speed and direction -- has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core's spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening -- and what it means. Part of the trouble is that Earth's deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core's motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core's position and calculate its spin. "Differential rotation of the inner core was proposed as a phenomenon in the 1970s and '80s, but it wasn't until the '90s that seismological evidence was published," said Dr. Lauren Waszek, a senior lecturer of physical sciences at James Cook University in Australia. But researchers argued over how to interpret these findings, "primarily due to the challenge of making detailed observations of the inner core, due to its remoteness and limited available data," Waszek said. As a result, "studies which followed over the next years and decades disagree on the rate of rotation, and also its direction with respect to the mantle," she added. Some analyses even proposed that the core didn't rotate at all. One promising model proposed in 2023 described an inner core that in the past had spun faster than Earth itself, but was now spinning slower. For a while, the scientists reported, the core's rotation matched Earth's spin. Then it slowed even more, until the core was moving backward relative to the fluid layers around it. At the time, some experts cautioned that more data was needed to bolster this conclusion, and now another team of scientists has delivered compelling new evidence for this hypothesis about the inner core's rotation rate. Research published June 12 in the journal Nature not only confirms the core slowdown, it supports the 2023 proposal that this core deceleration is part of a decades-long pattern of slowing down and speeding up. The new findings also confirm that the changes in rotational speed follow a 70-year cycle, said study coauthor Dr. John Vidale, Dean's Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

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Christie's Likens Microsoft's Work On MS-DOS To Einstein's Work In Physics

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 10:45
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If Einstein paved the way for a new era in physics," explains auction house Christie's in a promotion piece for its upcoming offering of 150+ "objects of scientific and historical importance" from the Paul G. Allen Collection (including items from the shuttered Living Computers Museum), "Mr. Allen and his collaborators ushered in a new era of computing. Starting with MS-DOS in 1981, Microsoft then went on to revolutionize personal computing with the launch of Windows in 1985." Christie's auction and characterization of MS-DOS as an Allen and Microsoft innovation comes 30 years after the death of Gary Kildall, whose unpublished memoir, the Seattle Times reported in Kildall's July 1994 obituary, called DOS "plain and simple theft" of Kildall's CP/M OS. PC Magazine's The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract notes that Paul Allen himself traced the genesis of MS-DOS back to a phone call Allen made to Seattle Computer Products owner Rod Brock in which Microsoft licensed Tim Paterson's CP/M-inspired QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $10,000 plus a royalty of $15,000 for every company that licensed the software. A shrewd buy-low-sell-high business deal, yes, but hardly an Einstein-caliber breakthrough idea.

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New SnailLoad Attack Exploits Network Latency To Spy On Users' Web Activities

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 10:02
Longtime Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov shares a report from The Hacker News: A group of security researchers from the Graz University of Technology have demonstrated a new side-channel attack known as SnailLoad that could be used to remotely infer a user's web activity. "SnailLoad exploits a bottleneck present on all Internet connections," the researchers said in a study released this week. "This bottleneck influences the latency of network packets, allowing an attacker to infer the current network activity on someone else's Internet connection. An attacker can use this information to infer websites a user visits or videos a user watches." A defining characteristic of the approach is that it obviates the need for carrying out an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack or being in physical proximity to the Wi-Fi connection to sniff network traffic. Specifically, it entails tricking a target into loading a harmless asset (e.g., a file, an image, or an ad) from a threat actor-controlled server, which then exploits the victim's network latency as a side channel to determine online activities on the victim system. To perform such a fingerprinting attack and glean what video or a website a user might be watching or visiting, the attacker conducts a series of latency measurements of the victim's network connection as the content is being downloaded from the server while they are browsing or viewing. It then involves a post-processing phase that employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with traces from an identical network setup to make the inference with an accuracy of up to 98% for videos and 63% for websites. In other words, due to the network bottleneck on the victim's side, the adversary can deduce the transmitted amount of data by measuring the packet round trip time (RTT). The RTT traces are unique per video and can be used to classify the video watched by the victim. The attack is so named because the attacking server transmits the file at a snail's pace in order to monitor the connection latency over an extended period of time.

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Nvidia Forecasted To Make $12 Billion Selling GPUs In China

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 09:20
Nvidia is expected to earn $12 billion from GPU sales to China in 2024, despite U.S. trade restrictions. Research firm SemiAnalysis says the GPU maker will ship over 1 million units of its new H20 model to the Chinese market, "with each one said to cost between $12,000 and $13,000 apiece," reports The Register. From the report: This figure is said by SemiAnalysis to be nearly double what Huawei is likely to sell of its rival accelerator, the Ascend 910B, as reported by The Financial Times. If accurate, this would seem to contradict earlier reports that Nvidia had moved to cut the price of its products for the China market. This was because buyers were said to be opting instead for domestically made kit for accelerating AI workloads. The H20 GPU is understood to be the top performing model out of three Nvidia GPUs specially designed for the Chinese market to comply with rules introduced by the Biden administration last year that curb performance. In contrast, Huawei's Ascend 910B is claimed to have performance on a par with that of Nvidia's A100 GPU. It is believed to be an in-house design manufactured by Chinese chipmaker SMIC using a 7nm process technology, unlike the older Ascend 910 product. If this forecast proves accurate, it will be a relief for Nvidia, which earlier disclosed that its sales in China delivered a "mid-single digit percentage" of revenue for its Q4 of FY2024, and was forecast to do the same in Q1 of FY 2025. In contrast, the Chinese market had made up between 20 and 25 percent of the company's revenue in recent years, until the export restrictions landed.

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YouTube's Updated Eraser Tool Removes Copyrighted Music Without Impacting Other Audio

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 08:40
YouTube has released an AI-powered eraser tool to help creators easily remove copyrighted music from their videos without affecting other audio such as dialog or sound effects. TechCrunch's Ivan Mehta reports: On its support page, YouTube still warns that, at times, the algorithm might fail to remove just the song. "This edit might not work if the song is hard to remove. If this tool doesn't successfully remove the claim on a video, you can try other editing options, such as muting all sound in the claimed segments or trimming out the claimed segments," the company said. Alternatively, creators can choose to select "Mute all sound in the claimed segments" to silence bits of video that possibly has copyrighted material. Once the creator successfully edits the video, YouTube removes the content ID claim -- the company's system for identifying the use of copyrighted content in different clips. YouTube shared a video describing the feature on its Creator Insider channel.

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Popular Pirate Site Animeflix Shuts Down 'Voluntarily'

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 08:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: With dozens of millions of monthly visits, Animeflix positioned itself as one of the most popular anime piracy portals. The site also has an active Discord community of around 35k members, who actively participate in discussions, art competitions, even a chess tournament. While rightsholders take no offense at these side-projects, the site's core business was streaming pirated videos. That hasn't gone unnoticed; last December Animeflix was listed as one of the shutdown targets of anti-piracy coalition ACE. Whether these early enforcement efforts were responsible for the site's closure is unclear. In May, rightsholders increased the pressure through the High Court of India, obtaining a broad injunction that effectively suspended Animeflix's main domain name; Animeflix.live. This follow-up action didn't seem to hurt the site too much. It simply moved to new domains, Animeflix.gg and Animeflix.li, informing its users that the old domain name had become "unavailable." Yesterday, the site became unreachable again, initially returning a Cloudflare error message. This time, the domain wasn't the problem but, for reasons unknown, the team decided to shut down the site without prior notice. "It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Animeflix. After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down our service effective immediately. We deeply appreciate your support and enthusiasm over the years." "Thank you for being a part of our journey. We hope the joy and excitement of anime continue to brighten your days through other wonderful platforms," the Animeflix team adds. The Animeflix team doesn't provide any insight into its reasoning, but it's clear that keeping a site like that online isn't without challenges. And, when a pirate site shuts down, voluntarily or not, copyright issues typically play a role. It's clear that rightsholders were keeping an eye on the site, and were actively seeking out options to take it offline. That might have played a role in the shutdown decision but without more information from the team, we can only speculate.

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Japan Introduces Enormous Humanoid Robot To Maintain Train Lines

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 07:20
An anonymous reader shares a report: It resembles an enormous, malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind. Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck -- which can drive on rails -- will be put to use for maintenance work on the company's network. Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot's eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely. With a vertical reach of 12 metres (40ft), the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as 40kg (88lb), hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw. For now, the robot's primary task will focus on trimming tree branches along rails and painting metal frames that hold cables above trains, the company said. The technology will help fill worker shortages in ageing Japan as well as reduce accidents such as workers falling from high places or suffering electric shocks, the company said.

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Wimbledon Employs AI To Protect Players From Online Abuse

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 06:41
An anonymous reader writes: The All England Lawn Tennis Club is using AI for the first time to protect players at Wimbledon from online abuse. An AI-driven service monitors players' public-facing social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different languages. High-profile players who have been targeted online such as the former US Open champion Emma Raducanu and the four-time grand slam winner Naomi Osaka have previously spoken out about having to delete Instagram and Twitter, now called X, from their phones. Harriet Dart, the British No 2, has said she only uses social media from time to time because of online "hate." Speaking on Thursday after her triumph against Katie Boulter, the British No 1, Dart said: "I just think there's a lot of positives for it [social media] but also a lot of negatives. I'm sure today, if I open one of my apps, regardless if I won, I'd have a lot of hate as well." Jamie Baker, the tournament's director, said Wimbledon had introduced the social media monitoring service Threat Matrix. The system, developed by the AI company Signify Group, will also be rolled out at the US Open. [...] He said the AI-driven service was supported by people monitoring the accounts. Players can opt in for a fuller service that scans abuse or threats via private direct messaging. Baker, a former British No 2, said Wimbledon would consult the players about the abuse before reporting it to tech companies for removal or to the police if deemed necessary.

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Samsung Stock Hits Three-Year High With Boost From AI

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 06:02
Samsung said it expects a 1,452% profit increase for the second quarter, causing shares to climb 2.24% to a high of 86,500 Korean won ($62.73). CNBC reports: Samsung issued guidance on Friday, saying operating profit for the April to June quarter is projected to be about 10.4 trillion won ($7.54 billion) -- that's a jump of about 1,452% from 670 billion won a year ago. The expected operating profit beat a LSEG estimate of 8.51 trillion won. The firm also said it expects revenue for the second quarter to be between 73 trillion to 75 trillion won, from 60.01 trillion won a year ago. This is in line with the 73.7 trillion won estimated by LSEG analysts. Business for the world's largest memory chip maker rebounded as memory chip prices recovered on AI optimism last year. The South Korean electronics giant saw record losses in 2023 as the industry reeled from a post-Covid slump in demand for memory chips and electronics. Its memory chips are commonly found in a wide range of consumer devices including smartphones and computers. Samsung said in April it expects the second quarter to be driven mostly by demand for generative AI, while mobile demand remains stable. "Samsung announces earnings surprise but mainly the earnings upside is from memory price high. So ironically, Samsung is lagging behind in HBM (high-bandwidth memory) production. So supply to Nvidia -- the qualification -- has been delayed," SK Kim, executive director of Daiwa Capital Markets, told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia" on Friday.

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384,000 Sites Pull Code From Sketchy Code Library Recently Bought By Chinese Firm

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 05:25
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 384,000 websites are linking to a site that was caught last week performing a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites, researchers said. For years, the JavaScript code, hosted at polyfill[.]com, was a legitimate open source project that allowed older browsers to handle advanced functions that weren't natively supported. By linking to cdn.polyfill[.]io, websites could ensure that devices using legacy browsers could render content in newer formats. The free service was popular among websites because all they had to do was embed the link in their sites. The code hosted on the polyfill site did the rest. In February, China-based company Funnull acquired the domain and the GitHub account that hosted the JavaScript code. On June 25, researchers from security firm Sansec reported that code hosted on the polyfill domain had been changed to redirect users to adult- and gambling-themed websites. The code was deliberately designed to mask the redirections by performing them only at certain times of the day and only against visitors who met specific criteria. The revelation prompted industry-wide calls to take action. Two days after the Sansec report was published, domain registrar Namecheap suspended the domain, a move that effectively prevented the malicious code from running on visitor devices. Even then, content delivery networks such as Cloudflare began automatically replacing pollyfill links with domains leading to safe mirror sites. Google blocked ads for sites embedding the Polyfill[.]io domain. The website blocker uBlock Origin added the domain to its filter list. And Andrew Betts, the original creator of Polyfill.io, urged website owners to remove links to the library immediately. As of Tuesday, exactly one week after malicious behavior came to light, 384,773 sites continued to link to the site, according to researchers from security firm Censys. Some of the sites were associated with mainstream companies including Hulu, Mercedes-Benz, and Warner Bros. and the federal government. The findings underscore the power of supply-chain attacks, which can spread malware to thousands or millions of people simply by infecting a common source they all rely on.

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Amazon Injects Ads Into Fire TV Downtime

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 04:45
Amazon has introduced new advertising strategies for its Fire TV platform, displaying full-screen ads before screensavers activate on idle devices, CordCutters reports. Users have observed ads from various brands during these pre-screensaver intervals, the report added.

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Eton Replaces First-Year Student Smartphones With Nokia 'Brick' Phones

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 04:05
An anonymous reader shares a report: Eton College, one of the world's most prestigious boarding schools, is planning to ban smartphones for its incoming first-year students and replace these with old-school Nokia phones instead, a spokesperson for the school confirmed to Business Insider. The new policy comes as the UK-based school grapples with managing student's educations alongside technological developments. "Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools," a spokesperson told BI. "From September those joining in Year 9 will receive a 'brick' phone for use outside the school day, as well as a School-issued iPad to support academic study. Age-appropriate controls remain in place for other year groups," they added. Eton College is an exclusive boarding school located outside London, near Windsor. Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston, and Eddie Redmayne are among its best-known alumni.

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Minecraft Seeks New Revenue as Gaming Growth Slows

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 03:22
Mojang Studios, the creator of the globally popular video game Minecraft, is diversifying its revenue streams amid slowing growth in the gaming industry. Chief Executive Asa Bredin revealed in an interview that the company is exploring new partnerships in merchandising, education, and content streaming. The company is also venturing into film and television, with a Warner Bros. movie adaptation set to premiere in April and a Netflix series in development. From a report: Mojang's push follows repeated forays by Nintendo and Sony Group to broaden the appeal of their gaming properties at a time that spending in the industry has hit a lull. Nintendo is developing a live-action film based on the Legend of Zelda franchise, following the blockbuster success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, while Sony has turned The Last of Us into an HBO series and created games based on the Spider-Man movies.

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British Airways Owner Warns Airfares Must Rise To Fund Carbon Cuts

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 02:45
Airlines in Europe will be forced to raise prices to fund the cost of cutting carbon emissions, the boss of British Airways owner IAG said. From a report: Luis Gallego told the Financial Times that switching to cleaner, more expensive sustainable fuel would "have a big impact" on the industry [the link may be paywalled] and put some people off flying. "Flying is going to be more expensive. That is an issue, we are trying to improve efficiency to mitigate that, but it will have an impact on demand," he said. He added that European airlines could become less competitive because of the bloc's tough net zero targets, which include a requirement for 6 per cent of jet fuel to be from sustainable sources by 2030. "We agree with decarbonisation ... but I think we need to do it in a consistent way worldwide not to jeopardise European aviation," Gallego said. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is made from a range of non-fossil fuel sources, from waste cooking oil to crops, and can emit 70 per cent less carbon dioxide than traditional jet fuel. But very little of it is being produced -- less than 1 per cent of total aviation fuel consumption last year was from sustainable sources -- meaning it is far more expensive than jet fuel. IAG itself used 12 per cent of the world's SAF last year across its five airlines, which include British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.

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Google Struggles to Lessen Reliance on Apple Safari

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 02:05
Google is intensifying efforts to decrease its dependency on Apple's Safari browser, as a U.S. antitrust lawsuit threatens its default search engine status on iPhones. The tech giant has been trying to shift more iPhone searches to its own apps, with the percentage rising from 25% five years ago to the low 30s recently, The Information reported Friday. Progress has stalled in recent months, however. To attract users, Google has run advertising campaigns showcasing unique features like Lens image search. The company recently hired former Instagram executive Robby Stein to lead this initiative, potentially leveraging AI to enhance its apps' appeal. Google paid Apple over $20 billion last year for default status on Safari. Reducing this dependency could protect Google's mobile search advertising revenue if the antitrust ruling goes against it. The report adds: Google executives considered having its new AI Overviews feature, which shows AI-generated responses to search queries, appear on its mobile apps but not on Safari, people who have worked on the product said. But Google ultimately decided against that move.

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Google Paper: AI Potentially Breaking Reality Is a Feature Not a Bug

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 01:22
An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI could "distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus," and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI. The paper, "Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data," [PDF] was co-authored by researchers at Google's artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024. Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the "existential risk" artificial general intelligence poses to humanity, Google's research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get worse in the future. Namely, that generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos. Much like another Google research paper about the dangers of generative AI I covered recently, Google's methodology here likely undercounts instances of AI-generated harm. But the most interesting observation in the paper is that the vast majority of these harms and how they "undermine public trust," as the researchers say, are often "neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools' content policies or terms of service." In other words, that type of content is a feature, not a bug.

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China Dominates Generative AI Patent Filings, UN Says

Slashdot - 6 July, 2024 - 00:42
China has requested significantly more generative AI patents than any other country, the U.N. intellectual property agency (the World Intellectual Property Organization) is reporting. According to WIPO's first-ever report on GenAI patents, China submitted over 38,200 inventions in the past decade, dwarfing the United States' 6,300 filings. South Korea, Japan, and India rounded out the top five. The study tracked approximately 54,000 GenAI-related patent applications from 2014 to 2023, with over a quarter emerging in the last year alone.

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