News

An anonymous reader shares a report: When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI's generative AI models, onstage at the company's first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to "accomplish all sorts of tasks" -- from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers. "Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you," Altman said. "You can build a GPT ... for almost anything." He wasn't kidding about the anything part. TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI's official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI's moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Readers waspleg and SpzToid shared the following report: Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent. Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor's terms of service changed to require all users to be verified. Ever since Glassdoor's integration with Fishbowl, Glassdoor's terms say that Glassdoor 'may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties. We may also use personal data you provide to us via your resume(s) or our other services.' This effort to gather information on Fishbowl users includes Glassdoor staff consulting publicly available sources to verify information that is then used to update Glassdoor users' accounts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The generative AI company helmed by Sam Altman is on track to put out GPT-5 sometime mid-year, likely during summer, according to two people familiar with the company. Some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model and its related enhancements to the ChatGPT tool, another person familiar with the process said. These people, whose identities Business Insider has confirmed, asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely. "It's really good, like materially better," said one CEO who recently saw a version of GPT-5. OpenAI demonstrated the new model with use cases and data unique to his company, the CEO said. He said the company also alluded to other as-yet-unreleased capabilities of the model, including the ability to call AI agents being developed by OpenAI to perform tasks autonomously. The company does not yet have a set release date for the new model, meaning current internal expectations for its release could change. OpenAI is still training GPT-5, one of the people familiar said. After training is complete, it will be safety tested internally and further "red teamed," a process where employees and typically a selection of outsiders challenge the tool in various ways to find issues before it's made available to the public.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Multiple security issues were discovered in Thunderbird, which could result in denial of service, the execution of arbitrary code or leaks of encrypted email subjects.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-5644-1

Multiple security issues have been found in the Mozilla Firefox web browser, which could potentially result in the execution of arbitrary code or information disclosure, bypass of content security policies or spoofing.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-5643-1

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Biden administration on Tuesday warned the nation's governors that drinking water and wastewater utilities in their states are facing "disabling cyberattacks" by hostile foreign nations that are targeting mission-critical plant operations. "Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States," Jake Sullivan, assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Michael S. Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in a letter. "These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities." [...] "Drinking water and wastewater systems are an attractive target for cyberattacks because they are a lifeline critical infrastructure sector but often lack the resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices," Sullivan and Regan wrote in Tuesday's letter. They went on to urge all water facilities to follow basic security measures such as resetting default passwords and keeping software updated. They linked to this list of additional actions, published by CISA and guidance and tools jointly provided by CISA and the EPA. They went on to provide a list of cybersecurity resources available from private sector companies. The letter extended an invitation for secretaries of each state's governor to attend a meeting to discuss better securing the water sector's critical infrastructure. It also announced that the EPA is forming a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force to identify vulnerabilities in water systems. The virtual meeting will take place on Thursday. "EPA and NSC take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems," Regan said in a separate statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims. "The study's findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says Gupta. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy." [...] Current cosmological models make the reasonable assumption that certain forces governing the interactions of particles have remained constant throughout time. Gupta challenges a specific example of this 'coupling constant', asking how it might affect the spread of space over exhaustively long periods of time. It's hard enough for any novel hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community. But Gupta's suggestion isn't even entirely new -- it's loosely based on an idea that was shown the door nearly a century ago. In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered if the reddened light of far distant objects was a result of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted by a long journey across the eons of space. His 'tired light' hypothesis was in competition with the now-accepted theory that light's red-shifted frequency is due to the cumulative expansion of space tugging at light waves like a stretched spring. The consequences of Gupta's version of the tired light hypothesis -- what is referred to as covarying coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL -- would affect the Universe expansion, doing away with mysterious pushing forces of dark energy and blaming changing interactions between known particles for the increased stretching of space. To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the cosmic microwave background. While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe's residual echoes of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter is also a thing. The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union has agreed to launch four Galileo navigation satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at a 30 percent premium over the standard launch price. Ars Technica reports: According to Politico, the security agreement permits staff working for the EU and European Space Agency to have access to the launch pad at all times and, should there be a mishap with the mission, the first opportunity to retrieve debris. With the agreement, final preparations can begin for two launches of two satellites each, on the Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. These Galileo missions will occur later this year. The satellites, which each weigh about 700 kg, will be launched into an orbit about 22,000 km above the planet. The heightened security measures are due to the proprietary technology incorporated into the satellites, which cost hundreds of millions of euros to build; they perform a similar function to US-manufactured Global Positioning System satellites. The Florida launches will be the first time Galileo satellites, which are used for civilian and military purposes, have been exported outside of European territory. Due to the extra overhead related to the national security mission, the European Union agreed to pay 180 million euros for the two launches, or about $196 million. This represents about a 30 percent premium over the standard launch price of $67 million for a Falcon 9 launch. Over the past two years, the European Space Agency (ESA) had to rely on SpaceX for several launches, including significant projects like the Euclid space telescope and other ESA satellites, due to the cessation of collaborations with Roscosmos after the invasion of Ukraine and delays in the Ariane 6 rocket's development. With the Ariane 5 retired and no immediate replacement, Europe's access to space was compromised. That said, the Ariane 6 is working towards a launch window in the coming months, promising a return to self-reliance for ESA with a packed schedule of missions ahead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Only seven countries are meeting an international air quality standard, with deadly air pollution worsening in places due to a rebound in economic activity and the toxic impact of wildfire smoke, a new report has found. Of 134 countries and regions surveyed in the report, only seven -- Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius and New Zealand -- are meeting a World Health Organization (WHO) guideline limit for tiny airborne particles expelled by cars, trucks and industrial processes. The vast majority of countries are failing to meet this standard for PM2.5, a type of microscopic speck of soot less than the width of a human hair that when inhaled can cause a myriad of health problems and deaths, risking serious implications for people, according to the report by IQAir, a Swiss air quality organization that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world. While the world's air is generally much cleaner than it was in much of the past century, there are still places where the pollution levels are particularly dangerous. The most polluted country, Pakistan, has PM2.5 levels more than 14 times higher than the WHO standard, the IQAir report found, with India, Tajikistan and Burkina Faso the next most polluted countries. But even in wealthy and fast-developing countries, progress in cutting air pollution is under threat. Canada, long considered as having some of the cleanest air in the western world, became the worst for PM2.5 last year due to record wildfires that ravaged the country, sending toxic spoke spewing across the country and into the US. In China, meanwhile, improvements in air quality were complicated last year by a rebound in economic activity in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the report finding a 6.5% increase in PM2.5 levels. The most polluted urban area in the world last year was Begusarai in India, the sixth annual IQAir report found, with India home to the four most polluted cities in the world. Much of the developing world, particularly countries in Africa, lacks reliable air quality measurements, however. The WHO lowered its guideline for "safe" PM2.5 levels in 2021 to five micrograms per cubic meter and by this measure many countries, such as those in Europe that have cleaned up their air significantly in the past 20 years, fall short. But even this more stringent guideline may not fully capture the risk of insidious air pollution. Research released by US scientists last month found there is no safe level of PM2.5, with even the smallest exposures linked to an increase in hospitalizations for conditions such as heart disease and asthma.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Haje Jan Kamps writes via TechCrunch: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) -- often referred to as "strong AI," "full AI," "human-level AI" or "general intelligent action" -- represents a significant future leap in the field of artificial intelligence. Unlike narrow AI, which is tailored for specific tasks (such as detecting product flaws, summarize the news, or build you a website), AGI will be able to perform a broad spectrum of cognitive tasks at or above human levels. Addressing the press this week at Nvidia's annual GTC developer conference, CEO Jensen Huang appeared to be getting really bored of discussing the subject -- not least because he finds himself misquoted a lot, he says. The frequency of the question makes sense: The concept raises existential questions about humanity's role in and control of a future where machines can outthink, outlearn and outperform humans in virtually every domain. The core of this concern lies in the unpredictability of AGI's decision-making processes and objectives, which might not align with human values or priorities (a concept explored in depth in science fiction since at least the 1940s). There's concern that once AGI reaches a certain level of autonomy and capability, it might become impossible to contain or control, leading to scenarios where its actions cannot be predicted or reversed. When sensationalist press asks for a timeframe, it is often baiting AI professionals into putting a timeline on the end of humanity -- or at least the current status quo. Needless to say, AI CEOs aren't always eager to tackle the subject. Predicting when we will see a passable AGI depends on how you define AGI, Huang argues, and draws a couple of parallels: Even with the complications of time-zones, you know when new year happens and 2025 rolls around. If you're driving to the San Jose Convention Center (where this year's GTC conference is being held), you generally know you've arrived when you can see the enormous GTC banners. The crucial point is that we can agree on how to measure that you've arrived, whether temporally or geospatially, where you were hoping to go. "If we specified AGI to be something very specific, a set of tests where a software program can do very well -- or maybe 8% better than most people -- I believe we will get there within 5 years," Huang explains. He suggests that the tests could be a legal bar exam, logic tests, economic tests or perhaps the ability to pass a pre-med exam. Unless the questioner is able to be very specific about what AGI means in the context of the question, he's not willing to make a prediction. Fair enough.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christopher Harper reports via Tom's Hardware: Earlier this month, Danluu.com released an exhaustive 23-page analysis/op-ed/manifesto on the current status of unoptimized web pages and web app performance, finding that just loading a web page can even bog down an entry-level device that can run the popular game PUBG at 40 fps. In fact, the Wix webpage requires loading 21MB of data for one page, while the more famous websites Patreon and Threads load 13MB of data for one page. This can result in slow load times that reach up to 33 seconds or, in some cases, result in the page failing to load at all. As the testing above shows, some of the most brutally intensive websites include the likes of... Quora, and basically every major social media platform. Newer content production platforms like Squarespace and newer Forum platforms like Discourse also have significantly worse performance than their older counterparts, often to the point of unusability on some devices. The Tecno S8C, one of the prominent entry-level phones common in emerging markets, is one particularly compelling test device that stuck. The device is actually quite impressive in some ways, including its ability to run PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile at 40 FPS -- but the same device can't even run Quora and experiences nigh-unusable lag when scrolling on social media sites. That example is most likely the best summation of the overall point, which is that modern web and app design is increasingly trending toward an unrealistic assumption of ever-increasing bandwidth and processing. Quora is a website where people answer questions -- there is absolutely no reason any of these websites should be harder to run than a Battle Royale game.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Job openings across the country are seemingly endless," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "Millions of jobs are listed, but are they real? Companies may post job openings with no intent to ever fill it. These are known as ghost jobs and there are more than most people realize. The BBC reports: Clarify Capital, a New York-based business loan provider, surveyed 1,000 hiring managers, and found nearly seven in 10 jobs stay open for more than 30 days, with 10% unfilled for more than half a year. Half the respondents reported they keep job listings open indefinitely because they "always open to new people." More than one in three respondents said they kept the listings active to build a pool of applicants in case of turnover -- not because a role needs to be filled in a timely manner. The posted roles are more than just a talent vacuum sucking up resumes from applicants. They are also a tool for shaping perception inside and outside of the company. More than 40% of hiring managers said they list jobs they aren't actively trying to fill to give the impression that the company is growing. A similar share said the job listings are made to motivate employees, while 34% said the jobs are posted to placate overworked staff who may be hoping for additional help to be brought on. "Ghost jobs are everywhere," says Geoffrey Scott, senior content manager and hiring manager at Resume Genius, a US company that helps workers design their resumes. "We discovered a massive 1.7 million potential ghost job openings on LinkedIn just in the US," says Scott. In the UK, StandOut CV, a London-based career resources company, found more than a third of job listings in 2023 were ghost jobs, defined as listings posted for more than 30 days. "Experts caution not every posting that seems like a ghost job is one," notes the report. "Still, whether these postings are ghost jobs -- or simply look and feel like them -- the result is similar. Jobseekers end up discouraged and burnt out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they're seeing isn't real. YouTube says it applies to "realistic" altered media such as "making it appear as if a real building caught fire" or swapping"the face of one individual with another's." The new policy shows YouTube taking steps that could help curb the spread of AI-generated misinformation as the US presidential election approaches. It is also striking for what it permits: AI-generated animations aimed at kids are not subject to the new synthetic content disclosure rules. YouTube's new policies exclude animated content altogether from the disclosure requirement. This means that the emerging scene of get-rich-quick, AI-generated content hustlers can keep churning out videos aimed at children without having to disclose their methods. Parents concerned about the quality of hastily made nursery-rhyme videos will be left to identify AI-generated cartoons by themselves. YouTube's new policy also says creators don't need to flag use of AI for "minor" edits that are "primarily aesthetic" such as beauty filters or cleaning up video and audio. Use of AI to "generate or improve" a script or captions is also permitted without disclosure. [...] The exemption for animation in YouTube's new policy could mean that parents cannot easily filter such videos out of search results or keep YouTube's recommendation algorithm from autoplaying AI-generated cartoons after setting up their child to watch popular and thoroughly vetted channels like PBS Kids or Ms. Rachel. Some problematic AI-generated content aimed at kids does require flagging under the new rules. In 2023, the BBC investigated a wave of videos targeting older children that used AI tools to push pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, including climate change denialism. These videos imitated conventional live-action educational videos -- showing, for example, the real pyramids of Giza -- so unsuspecting viewers might mistake them for factually accurate educational content. (The pyramid videos then went on the suggest that the structures can generate electricity.) This new policy would crack down on that type of video. "We require kids content creators to disclose content that is meaningfully altered or synthetically generated when it seems realistic," says YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez. "We don't require disclosure of content that is clearly unrealistic and isn't misleading the viewer into thinking it's real."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the New York Times, Saudi Arabia's government plans to create a fund of about $40 billion to invest in artificial intelligence. Reuters reports: Representatives of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) have discussed a potential partnership with U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and other financiers in recent weeks, the newspaper reported. Andreessen Horowitz and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan have discussed the possibility of the U.S. firm setting up an office in Riyadh, according to the report. PIF officials also discussed what role Andreessen Horowitz could play and how such a fund would work, the newspaper said, adding the plans could still change. Other venture capitalists may participate in kingdom's artificial intelligence fund, which is expected to commence in the second half of 2024, the newspaper said. Saudi representatives have indicated to potential partners that the country is interested in supporting a variety of tech start-ups associated with artificial intelligence, including chip makers and large-scale data centers, the report added. Last month, PIF's Al-Rumayyan pitched the kingdom as a prospective hub for artificial intelligence activity outside U.S., citing its energy resources and funding capacity. Al-Rumayyan had said the kingdom had the "political will" to make artificial intelligence projects happen and ample funds it could deploy to nurture the technology's development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Academics in the artificial intelligence field have started using generative AI services to help them review the machine learning work of their peers. In a new paper on arXiv, researchers analyzed the peer reviews of papers submitted to leading AI conferences, including ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023, CoRL 2023 and EMNLP 2023. The Register reports on the findings: The authors took two sets of data, or corpora -- one written by humans and the other one written by machines. And they used these two bodies of text to evaluate the evaluations -- the peer reviews of conference AI papers -- for the frequency of specific adjectives. "[A]ll of our calculations depend only on the adjectives contained in each document," they explained. "We found this vocabulary choice to exhibit greater stability than using other parts of speech such as adverbs, verbs, nouns, or all possible tokens." It turns out LLMs tend to employ adjectives like "commendable," "innovative," and "comprehensive" more frequently than human authors. And such statistical differences in word usage have allowed the boffins to identify reviews of papers where LLM assistance is deemed likely. "Our results suggest that between 6.5 percent and 16.9 percent of text submitted as peer reviews to these conferences could have been substantially modified by LLMs, i.e. beyond spell-checking or minor writing updates," the authors argued, noting that reviews of work in the scientific journal Nature do not exhibit signs of mechanized assistance. Several factors appear to be correlated with greater LLM usage. One is an approaching deadline: The authors found a small but consistent increase in apparent LLM usage for reviews submitted three days or less before the deadline. The researchers emphasized that their intention was not to pass judgment on the use of AI writing assistance, nor to claim that any of the papers they evaluated were written completely by an AI model. But they argued the scientific community needs to be more transparent about the use of LLMs. And they contended that such practices potentially deprive those whose work is being reviewed of diverse feedback from experts. What's more, AI feedback risks a homogenization effect that skews toward AI model biases and away from meaningful insight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: AT&T says a massive trove of data impacting 71 million people did not originate from its systems after a hacker leaked it on a cybercrime forum and claimed it was stolen in a 2021 breach of the company. While BleepingComputer has not been able to confirm the legitimacy of all the data in the database, we have confirmed some of the entries are accurate, including those whose data is not publicly accessible for scraping. The data is from an alleged 2021 AT&T data breach that a threat actor known as ShinyHunters attempted to sell on the RaidForums data theft forum for a starting price of $200,000 and incremental offers of $30,000. The hacker stated they would sell it immediately for $1 million. AT&T told BleepingComputer then that the data did not originate from them and that its systems were not breached. "Based on our investigation today, the information that appeared in an internet chat room does not appear to have come from our systems," AT&T told BleepingComputer in 2021. When we told ShinyHunters that AT&T said the data did not originate from them, they replied, "I don't care if they don't admit. I'm just selling." AT&T continues to tell BleepingComputer today that they still see no evidence of a breach in their systems and still believe that this data did not originate from them. Today, another threat actor known as MajorNelson leaked data from this alleged 2021 data breach for free on a hacking forum, claiming it was the data ShinyHunters attempted to sell in 2021. This data includes names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, encrypted date of birth, encrypted social security numbers, and other internal information. However, the threat actors have decrypted the birth dates and social security numbers and added them to another file in the leak, making those also accessible. BleepingComputer has reviewed the data, and while we cannot confirm that all 73 million lines are accurate, we verified some of the data contains correct information, including social security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers. Furthermore, other cybersecurity researchers, such as Dark Web Informer, who first told BleepingComputer about the leaked data, and VX-Underground have also confirmed some of the data to be accurate. Despite AT&T's statement, BleepingComputer says if you were an AT&T customer before and through 2021, it's "[safe] to assume that your data was exposed and can be used in targeted attacks." Have I Been Pwned's Troy Hunt writes: "I have proven, with sufficient confidence, that the data is real and the impact is significant."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man has been sentenced for cyber flashing in England for the first time. From a report: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, from Basildon in Essex, was jailed for 66 weeks at Southend Crown Court today after he sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on 9 February. The older victim took screenshots of the offending image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to the police the same day. Cyber flashing became a criminal offence in England with the passage of the Online Safety Act on 31 January. It has been a crime in Scotland since 2010. The offence covers the sending of an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media, dating apps, text message or data-sharing services such as Bluetooth and AirDrop. Victims of cyber flashing get lifelong anonymity from the time they report the offence, as it also falls under the Sexual Offences Act.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soccer teams are always looking to get an edge over their rivals. Whether it's studying players' susceptibility to injury, or opponents' tactics -- top clubs look at reams of data to give them the best shot of winning. They might want to add a new AI assistant developed by Google DeepMind to their arsenal. From a report: It can suggest tactics for soccer set-pieces that are even better than those created by professional club coaches. The system, called TacticAI, works by analyzing a dataset of 7,176 corner kicks taken by players for Liverpool FC, one of the biggest soccer clubs in the world. Corner kicks are awarded to an attacking team when the ball passes over the goal line after touching a player on the defending team. In a sport as free-flowing and unpredictable as soccer, corners -- like free kicks and penalties -- are rare instances in the game when teams can try out pre-planned plays. TacticAI uses predictive and generative AI models to convert each corner kick scenario -- such as a receiver successfully scoring a goal, or a rival defender intercepting the ball and returning it to their team -- into a graph, and the data from each player into a node on the graph, before modeling the interactions between each node. The work was published in Nature Communications today. Using this data, the model provides recommendations about where to position players during a corner to give them, for example, the best shot at scoring a goal, or the best combination of players to get up front. It can also try to predict the outcomes of a corner, including whether a shot will take place, or which player is most likely to touch the ball first.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla Firefox 124 looks like a small update that only updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API to prevent devices from dimming or locking the screen when an application needs to keep running. The Firefox View feature has been updated as well in this release to allow users to sort open tabs by either recent activity (default setting) or tab order. Also, Firefox 124 expands Qwant's availability to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. This release also adds support for using HTTP(S) and relative URLs when creating WebSockets, as well as support for the AbortSignal: any() static method, which takes an iterable of abort signals and returns an AbortSignal (more details are available here). For Android users, Firefox 124 enables the Pull to Refresh feature, which is now more robust than ever, by default and adds support for the HTML drag and drop API when using a mouse, which accepts plain text or HTML text by the drop operation from external apps. For macOS users, this release uses the fullscreen API for all types of full-screen windows, promising a better match to the expected macOS user experience for full-screen spaces, the Menubar, and the Dock. If you want to disable this feature, you'll need to set the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen preference to false in about:config. For Windows users, this release adds the ability to populate the Windows taskbar jump list more efficiently. According to Mozilla, this change should allow for a "smoother overall browsing experience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has named Mustafa Suleyman head of its consumer artificial intelligence business, hiring most of the staff from his Inflection AI startup as the software giant seeks to fend off Alphabet's Google in the fiercely contested market for AI products. From a report: Suleyman, who co-founded Google's DeepMind, will report to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and oversee a range of projects, such as integrating an AI Copilot into Windows and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine. His hiring will put Microsoft's consumer AI work under one leader for the first time. Inflection, a rival of Microsoft's key AI partner OpenAI, is exiting its Pi consumer chatbot effort and shifting to selling AI software to businesses. Karen Simonyan, Inflection's co-founder, will join Microsoft as chief scientist for the new consumer AI group. In the past year, Nadella has been revamping his company's major products around artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI. Under the Copilot brand, Microsoft has blended an AI assistant into products including Windows, consumer and enterprise Office software, Bing and security tools. With Google and others trying to catch up, Nadella's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI has given Microsoft a first-mover advantage. And yet, 13 months after unveiling an AI-enhanced Bing search, the company has made few gains in that market, which remains dominated by Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.