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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Telegraph: Volkswagen has teased plans for a "China-killer" electric vehicle that will cost just €20,000 ($20,664 USD or £16,700) as the German carmaker gears up to take on a flood of Beijing-backed low-cost rivals. The company on Thursday shared its first images of a new vehicle expected to be called the ID.1, which will go into production from 2027. The low-cost EV is intended to go head to head with all-electric brands from Chinese carmakers such as BYD, which overtook Tesla in British sales for the first time last month. Previous images of the vehicle suggest it will be an electric hatchback. Thomas Schäfer, the VW chief executive, said the new model would be "an affordable, high-quality, profitable electric Volkswagen from Europe, for Europe". Quentin Willson, the motoring journalist and founder of FairCharge, said the car could be a "possible China EV killer". Dan Caesar, of Electric Vehicles UK, added: "Cheaper EVs are exactly what legacy auto-makers need to be competitive during this critical time. We would expect the ID.1 to be warmly welcomed by motorists." Ginny Buckley, of consumer advice website Electrifying, said Volkswagen had been "clear about its intent to compete with China's low-cost EVs"... The German carmaker is planning to cut 35,000 jobs by 2030 as it grapples with stalled demand for EVs in Europe and growing competition from Chinese rivals. Volkswagen executives describe the upcoming EV will be a "true Volkswagen for everyone," according to the article It also notes that the number of EVs sold across Europe "fell by 3% to 3 million during 2024, according to data from analysts Rho Motion."

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The Free Software Foundation "hinted that it would organize an unprecedented virtual memorabilia auction" in March to celebrate this year's 40th anniversary, according to an announcement this week. Those hints "left collectors and free software fans wondering which of the pieces of the FSF's history would be auctioned off." But Tuesday the FSF "lifted the veil and gave a sneak peak of some of the more prestigious entries in the memorabilia auction." First of all, the memorabilia auction will feature an item that could be especially interesting for art collectors but will certainly also draw the attention of free software fans from all over: the original GNU head drawing by Etienne Suvasa, which became the blueprint for the iconic GNU logo present everywhere in the free software world. The list of memorabilia for sale also entails some rare and historic hardware, such as a "terminus-est" microcomputer, and an Amiga 3000UX that was used in the FSF's old office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early days of GNU, when these machines were capable of running a GNU-like operating system. Another meaningful item to be auctioned off, and one that collectors will want to keep a keen eye on, is the Internet Hall of Fame medal awarded to founder Richard Stallman. When Stallman was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, it was the ultimate recognition of free software's immense impact on the development and advancement of the Internet. This medal is definitely worthy of joining a fine historical collection...! [T]here are several more historic awards, more original GNU artwork, and a legendary katana [as seen in an XKCD comic] that became a lighthearted weapon in the fight for computer user freedom. The auction is only the opening act to a whole agenda of activities celebrating forty years of free software activism. In May, the FSF invites free software supporters all over the world to gather for local in-person community meetups to network, discuss what people can do next to make the world freer, and celebrate forty years of commitment to software freedom. Then, on the actual birthday of the FSF on October 4, 2025, the organization intends to bring the international free software community to Boston for a celebration featuring keynotes and workshops by prominent personalities of the free software movement. "The bidding will start as a virtual silent auction on March 17 and run through March 21, with more auction items revealed each day, and will culminate in an virtual live auction on March 23, 2025, 14:00 to 17:00 EDT," according to the announcement. "Register here to attend the live auction. There's no need to register for the silent auction; you can simply join the bidding on the FSF's LibrePlanet wiki."

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An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a new article from Ars Technica: On Thursday, mobile security company NowSecure reported that [DeepSeek] sends sensitive data over unencrypted channels, making the data readable to anyone who can monitor the traffic. More sophisticated attackers could also tamper with the data while it's in transit. Apple strongly encourages iPhone and iPad developers to enforce encryption of data sent over the wire using ATS (App Transport Security). For unknown reasons, that protection is globally disabled in the app, NowSecure said. Whatâ(TM)s more, the data is sent to servers that are controlled by ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok... [DeepSeek] is "not equipped or willing to provide basic security protections of your data and identity," NowSecure co-founder Andrew Hoog told Ars. "There are fundamental security practices that are not being observed, either intentionally or unintentionally. In the end, it puts your and your company's data and identity at risk...." This data, along with a mix of other encrypted information, is sent to DeepSeek over infrastructure provided by Volcengine a cloud platform developed by ByteDance. While the IP address the app connects to geo-locates to the US and is owned by US-based telecom Level 3 Communications, the DeepSeek privacy policy makes clear that the company "store[s] the data we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China...." US lawmakers began pushing to immediately ban DeepSeek from all government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party may have built a backdoor into the service to access Americans' sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.

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Thursday the White House "moved to halt a $5 billion initiative to build electric vehicle charging stations," reports Politico, "by instructing states not to spend federal funds previously allocated to them..." NPR described the move as "putting in limbo billions of dollars allocated to states with current and future projects..." Politico notes the move "appears to upend years of precedent in which federal promises of funds for highway projects had given states an all-but-guaranteed assurance that they were free to spend them. It also raises legal questions... Funding experts had told POLITICO last year that decades of legal precedent would largely insulate the charging money... Andrew Rogers [deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, or FHWA, in the Biden administration] said in a text message that the new letter "appears to ignore both the law and multiple restraining orders that have been issued by federal courts." Rogers, who is now a senior vice president at Boundary Stone Partners, said the move appears to be "in direct violation" of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a Watergate-era law that prohibits presidents from unilaterally canceling congressionally approved spending. Trump has contended that the law is unconstitutional. Politico also got a quote from the chief analyst at analytics firm Paren, who predicts lawsuits from affected states and that the final impact of the move will be "just causing havoc and slowing things down for awhile." [A letter to state transportation directors from the Federal Highway Administration] clarifies that states will be able to receive reimbursements for "existing obligations" to design and build stations "in order to not disrupt current financial commitments." According to the letter, FHWA plans to publish new draft guidance on the NEVI program in the spring, followed by a comment period, before issuing new final guidance. Only then will states be able to resubmit their annual implementation plans for all fiscal years of the program. "But that doesn't mean that the program is going to be sunset or the funds are not going to be made available again to the states," Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy consultancy told NPR: Several experts tell NPR that as a result of its overwhelming bipartisan support at the time, attempts to overturn it within the executive branch are likely to be challenged in court. Nigro believes the funding will resume eventually... So far, 56 stations [with multiple chargers] are up and running as a result of the program, while more than 900 sites in total have been "awarded" to date, according to Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, another research analytics firm. McDonald said several hundred of the awarded sites are currently under construction and expected to open this year. He does not believe the FHWA has the authority to pause or rescind any aspect of the NEVI program... "I assume lawsuits from states will start soon, and this will go to court and Congress," McDonald said in a statement. The move has "confounded states, which had been allocated billions of dollars by Congress for the program," the New York Times reported Friday. "[S]ome state officials said that as a result of the memo from the Trump administration, they had stopped work on the charging stations. Others said they intended to keep going." The Washington Post reports that a Texas Department of Transportation official "said it would continue to deploy federal funds for EV chargers until it receives further guidance," and that Ryan Gallentine, managing director at the national business association Advanced Energy United, said that states "are under no obligation to stop these projects based solely on this announcement." Politico adds: Also on Thursday, FHWA took down several internet pages providing information on NEVI and its sister program, the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program... Amid the confusion, at least six states — Alabama, Oklahoma, Missouri, Rhode Island, Ohio and Nebraska — have put their NEVI programs on hold, according to McDonald. Rhode Island and Ohio had been considered leading states in implementing the program.

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To celebrate 3035's newest arrivals in the public domain, the Internet Archive held a special in-person event at their San Francisco headquarters, as well as a virtual celebration online. (It opens with an absolutely gorgeous rendition of "Happy Days are Hear Again" played on a musical saw.) And somewhere in the festivities they announced the winners of this year's annual "Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest." These remarkable films not only reimagined and transformed public domain works but also demonstrated the boundless potential of remixing creative works to create something new... Explore all 140+ submissions at the 2025 Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest collection at the Internet Archive... "The jury was deeply impressed by Queline Meadows's inspired mix of movies, images, music and text woven into a subtle and emotionally affecting video expressing a strong sense of nostalgia and the irretrievable passage of time," said film archivist Rick Prelinger... Filmmaker Samantha Close expresses both the breadth of 1929's production and the eternal bounty of the public domain, using images from 1929's films and public domain images from elsewhere and elsewhen. One honorable mention entry was described as "an audacious and yes, dopey exploration of the essential greatness of Internet Archive and the dread near-infinity of copyright."

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Friday on a Washington Post podcast, their columnists discussed the hybrid/remote work trend, asking why it "seems to be reversing". Molly Roberts: Why have some companies decided finally that having offices full of employees is better for them? Heather Long: It's a loaded question, but I would say, unfortunately, 2025 is the year of operational efficiency, and that's corporate speak for save money at all costs. How do you save money? The easiest way is to get people to quit. What are these return to office mandates, particularly the five day a week in office mandates? We have a lot of data on this now, and it shows people will quit and you don't even have to pay them severance to do it. Molly Roberts: It's not about productivity for the people who are in the office, then, you think. It's more about just cutting down on the size of the workforce generally. Heather Long: I do think so. There has been a decent amount of research so far on fully remote, hybrid and fully in office. It's a mixed bag for fully remote. That's why I think if you look at the Fortune 500, only about 16 companies are fully remote, but a lot of them are hybrid. The reason that so much companies are hybrid is because that's the sweet spot. There is no productivity difference between the hybrid schedule and fully in the office five days a week. But what you do see a big difference is employee satisfaction and happiness and employee retention.... I think if what we're talking about is places that have been able to do work from home successfully for the past several years, why are they suddenly in 2025, saying the whole world has changed and we need to come back to the office five days a week? You should definitely be skeptical. "Who are the first people to leave in these scenarios? It's star employees who know they can get a job elsewhere," Long says (adding later that "There's also quantifiable data that show that, particularly parents, the childcare issues are real.") Long also point out that most of Nvidia's workforce is fully remote — and that housing prices have spiked in some areas where employers are now demanding people return to the office. But employers also know hiring rates are now low, argues Long, so they're pushing their advantage — possibly out of some misplaced nostalgie. "[T]here's a huge, huge perception difference between what managers, particularly senior leaders in an organization, how effective they think in offices versus what the rank and file people think. Rank and file people tend to prefer hybrid because they don't want their time wasted." Their discussion also notes a recent Harvard Business School survey that found that 40% of people would trade 5% or more of their salaries to work from home....

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you watched the 2007 documentary King of Kong or followed the controversy surrounding score-chaser Billy Mitchell, you know all about Donkey Kong's famous kill screen. For over four decades, no one was able to pass the game's 117th screen (aka level 22-1) due to a glitch in the game's bonus timer that kills Mario well before he can reach the top of the stage's girders. That was true until last weekend, when Mario speedrunner Kosmic shared the news that he had passed the kill screen using a combination of frame-perfect emulator inputs, a well-known ladder movement glitch, and a bit of luck. And even though Kosmic's trick is functionally impossible to pull off with human reflexes on real hardware, the method shows how the game's seemingly insurmountable kill screen actually can be overcome without modifying the code on an official Donkey Kong arcade board.

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After the powerful solar storm of May 2024, scientists detected two new temporary radiation belts around Earth -- one of which contained something we had never seen before: energetic protons. ScienceAlert reports: "These are really high-energy electrons and protons that have found their way into Earth's inner magnetic environment," says astronomer David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who was not involved with the research. "Some might stay in this place for a very long time." In fact, the belts remained intact for much longer than previous temporary radiation belts generated by solar storms: three months, compared to the weeks we'd normally expect. Subsequent solar storms in June and August of 2024 knocked most of the particles out of orbit, significantly diminishing the density of the belts. A small amount, however, still remains up there, hanging out with Earth. What's more, the proton belt may remain intact for over a year. Ongoing measurements will help scientists measure its longevity and decay rate. This is important information to have: particles in Earth orbit can pose a hazard to satellites hanging out up there, so knowing the particle density and the effects solar storms can have thereon can help engineers design mitigation strategies to protect our technology. At the moment, though, the hazard posed by the new radiation belts is unquantified. Future studies will be needed to determine the risks these, and future belts, might pose. The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

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According to Downdetector, PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down since 6 PM ET, with Sony assuring users that they're working to fix the problem "as soon as possible." For gaming specifically, Sony says that "you might have difficulty launching games, apps, or network features." "We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN," Sony said in an 8:46PM ET post on X. No further details were made available. An r/PlayStation thread has more than 10,000 comments. As of 11:35 PM PST, the service remains down.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In today's issue of Nature, a team at Oxford University describes using quantum teleportation to link two pieces of quantum hardware that were located about 2 meters apart, meaning they could easily have been in different rooms entirely. Once linked, the two pieces of hardware could be treated as a single quantum computer, allowing simple algorithms to be performed that involved operations on both sides of the 2-meter gap. [...] The Oxford team was simply interested in a proof-of-concept, and so used an extremely simplified system. Each end of the 2-meter gap had a single trap holding two ions, one strontium and one calcium. The two atoms could be entangled with each other, getting them to operate as a single unit. The calcium ion served as a local memory and was used in computations, while the strontium ion served as one of the two ends of the quantum network. An optical cable between the two ion traps allowed photons to entangle the two strontium ions, getting the whole system to operate as a single unit. The key thing about the entanglement processes used here is that a failure to entangle left the system in its original state, meaning that the researchers could simply keep trying until the qubits were entangled. The entanglement event would also lead to a photon that could be measured, allowing the team to know when success had been achieved (this sort of entanglement with a success signal is termed "heralded" by those in the field). The researchers showed that this setup allowed them to teleport with a specific gate operation (controlled-Z), which can serve as the basis for any other two-qubit gate operation -- any operation you might want to do can be done by using a specific combination of these gates. After performing multiple rounds of these gates, the team found that the typical fidelity was in the area of 70 percent. But they also found that errors typically had nothing to do with the teleportation process and were the product of local operations at one of the two ends of the network. They suspect that using commercial hardware, which has far lower error rates, would improve things dramatically. Finally, they performed a version of Grover's algorithm, which can, with a single query, identify a single item from an arbitrarily large unordered list. The "arbitrary" aspect is set by the number of available qubits; in this case, having only two qubits, the list maxed out at four items. Still, it worked, again with a fidelity of about 70 percent. While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware-agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at various distances, all using hardware that doesn't require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate. That said, the error rate of the teleportation steps may still be a problem, even if it was lower than the basic hardware rate in these experiments. The fidelity there was 97 percent, which is lower than the hardware error rates of most qubits and high enough that we couldn't execute too many of these before the probability of errors gets unacceptably high.

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Maine's overwhelmingly popular right-to-repair law is under attack by automakers through lawsuits and lobbying efforts aimed at weakening or delaying enforcement. While the law remains in limbo due to industry influence and legal challenges, broader enforcement issues persist across multiple states, with corporations often ignoring right-to-repair laws despite their legal passage. Techdirt reports: A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to consumers and third-party independent repair shops. But as we've seen with other states that have passed right to reform laws (most notably New York), passing the law isn't the end of the story. Corporate lobbyists have had great success not just watering these laws down before passage, but after voters approve them. They've also been swarmed by coordinated industry lawsuits and falsehood-spewing attacks. Maine's popular right to repair law just took effect after a year of hashing out the fine details, but the bill's still being changed as the state tries to sort out enforcement. Large automakers have been looming over that process to try and weaken the law. But the Alliance For Automotive Innovation also just filed a new lawsuit saying the law isn't fully cooked and therefore violates the law: "This is an example of putting the cart before the horse. Before automakers can comply, the law requires the attorney general to first establish an 'independent entity' to securely administer access to vehicle data. The independent entity hasn't been established. That's not in dispute. Compliance with the law right now is not possible."

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The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Google's overhaul of Chrome's extension architecture continues to pose problems for developers of ad blockers, content filters, and privacy tools. [...] While Google's desire to improve the security, privacy, and performance of the Chrome extension platform is reasonable, its approach -- which focuses on code and permissions more than human oversight -- remains a work-in-progress that has left extension developers frustrated. Alexei Miagkov, senior staff technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who oversees the organization's Privacy Badger extension, told The Register, "Making extensions under MV3 is much harder than making extensions under MV2. That's just a fact. They made things harder to build and more confusing." Miagkov said with Privacy Badger the problem has been the slowness with which Google addresses gaps in the MV3 platform. "It feels like MV3 is here and the web extensions team at Google is in no rush to fix the frayed ends, to fix what's missing or what's broken still." According to Google's documentation, "There are currently no open issues considered a critical platform gap," and various issues have been addressed through the addition of new API capabilities. Miagkov described an unresolved problem that means Privacy Badger is unable to strip Google tracking redirects on Google sites. "We can't do it the correct way because when Google engineers design the [chrome.declarativeNetRequest API], they fail to think of this scenario," he said. "We can do a redirect to get rid of the tracking, but it ends up being a broken redirect for a lot of URLs. Basically, if the URL has any kind of query string parameters -- the question mark and anything beyond that -- we will break the link." Miagkov said a Chrome developer relations engineer had helped identify a workaround, but it's not great. Miagkov thinks these problems are of Google's own making -- the company changed the rules and has been slow to write the new ones. "It was completely predictable because they moved the ability to fix things from extensions to themselves," he said. "And now they need to fix things and they're not doing it."

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OpenAI says it's investigating after a hacker claimed to have stolen login credentials for 20 million OpenAI accounts and advertised the data for sale on a dark web forum. Though security researchers doubt on the legitimacy of the breach, the AI company stated that it takes the claims seriously, advising users to enable two-factor authentication and stay vigilant against phishing attempts. Decrypt reports: Daily Dot reporter Mikael Thalan wrote on X that he found invalid email addresses in the supposed sample data: "No evidence (suggests) this alleged OpenAI breach is legitimate. At least two addresses were invalid. The user's only other post on the forum is for a stealer log. Thread has since been deleted as well." "We take these claims seriously," the spokesperson said, adding: "We have not seen any evidence that this is connected to a compromise of OpenAI systems to date."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Hospital Sisters Health System notified over 882,000 patients that an August 2023 cyberattack led to a data breach that exposed their personal and health information. Established in 1875, HSHS works with over 2,200 physicians and has around 12,000 employees. It also operates a network of physician practices and 15 local hospitals across Illinois and Wisconsin, including two children's hospitals. The non-profit healthcare system said in data breach notifications sent to those impacted that the incident was discovered on August 27, 2023, after detecting that the attacker had gained access to HSHS' network. After the security breach, its systems were also impacted by a widespread outage that took down "virtually all operating systems" and phone systems across Illinois and Wisconsin hospitals. HSHS also hired external security experts to investigate the attack, assess its impact, and help its IT team restore affected systems. [...] While the incident and the resulting outage have all the signs of a ransomware attack, no ransomware operation has claimed the breach. Following the forensic investigation, HSHS found that the attackers had accessed files on compromised systems between August 16 and August 27, 2023. The information accessed by the threat actors while inside HSHS' systems varies for each impacted individual, and it includes a combination of name, address, date of birth, medical record number, limited treatment information, health insurance information, Social Security number, and/or driver's license number. While HSHS added that there is no evidence that the victims' information has been used in fraud or identity theft attempts, it warned affected individuals to monitor their account statements and credit reports for suspicious activity. The health system also offers those affected by the breach one year of free Equifax credit monitoring.

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The Register highlights concerns raised at a recent UK parliamentary committee regarding AI companies' exploitation of copyrighted content without permission or payment. From the report: The Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Science, Innovation and Technology Committee asked composer Max Richter how he would know if "bad-faith actors" were using his material to train AI models. "There's really nothing I can do," he told MPs. "There are a couple of music AI models, and it's perfectly easy to make them generate a piece of music that sounds uncannily like me. That wouldn't be possible unless it had hoovered up my stuff without asking me and without paying for it. That's happening on a huge scale. It's obviously happened to basically every artist whose work is on the internet." Richter, whose work has been used in a number of major film and television scores, said the consequences for creative musicians and composers would be dire. "You're going to get a vanilla-ization of music culture as automated material starts to edge out human creators, and you're also going to get an impoverishing of human creators," he said. "It's worth remembering that the music business in the UK is a real success story. It's 7.6 billion-pound income last year, with over 200,000 people employed. That is a big impact. If we allow the erosion of copyright, which is really how value is created in the music sector, then we're going to be in a position where there won't be artists in the future." Speaking earlier, former Google staffer James Smith said much of the damage from text and data mining had likely already been done. "The original sin, if you like, has happened," said Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Human Native AI. "The question is, how do we move forward? I would like to see the government put more effort into supporting licensing as a viable alternative monetization model for the internet in the age of these new AI agents." Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the Financial Times, said: "We can only deal with what we see in front of us and [that is] people taking our content, using it for the training, using it in substitutional ways. So from our perspective, we'll prosecute the same argument in every country where we operate, where we see our content being stolen." The risk, if the situation continued, was a hollowing out of creative and information industries, he said. [...] "The problem is we can't see who's stolen our content. We're just at this stage where these very large companies, which usually make margins of 90 percent, might have to take some smaller margin, and that's clearly going to be upsetting for their investors. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't. It's just a question of right and wrong and where we pitch this debate. Unfortunately, the government has pitched it in thinking that you can't reduce the margin of these big tech companies; otherwise, they won't build a datacenter."

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A German court has ruled that Amazon's Prime Video service violates a Nokia-owned patent, ordering Amazon to stop streaming in its current form or face fines of 250,000 euros per violation. However, Amazon assured customers in a statement on Friday that there is no risk of losing access to Prime Video because the decision affects only a limited functionality related to casting videos between devices. "Prime Video will comply with this local judgement and is currently considering next steps. However, there is absolutely no risk at all for customers losing access to Prime Video," Amazon's Prime Video spokesperson told Reuters. Meanwhile, Nokia's chief licensing officer, Arvin Patel, said: "...the innovation ecosystem breaks down if patent holders are not fairly compensated for the use of their technologies, as it becomes much harder for innovators to fund the development of next generation technologies."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica written by Kevin Purdy: There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia's "List of video games notable for negative reception." Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them. Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that "following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration," Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was "too far away from the standards you deserve," so they are focusing on the 2026 version. [...] The developer's statement notes that preorder customers are getting refunds. Answering a question that has always been obvious to fans but never publishers, the company notes that, no, Football Manager 2024 will not get an update with the new season's players and data. The company says it is looking to extend the 2024 version's presence on subscription platforms, like Xbox's Game Pass, and will "provide an update on this in due course." Fans eager to build out their dynasty team and end up with Bukayo Saka may be disappointed to miss out this year. But a developer with big ambitions to meaningfully improve and rethink a long-running franchise deserves some consideration amid the consternation.

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Software companies are under pressure to invest in new AI capabilities without denting profits. One increasingly popular strategy to keep costs low is to shift hiring outside the US. From a report:Â Salesforce and Workday are simultaneously cutting jobs and highlighting the cost savings from adding workers internationally. "Do we need to hire everybody in San Francisco?" Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham said at an event hosted by Barclays in December. "Or can we think about other locations that are cheaper where we can get really incredible labor like India and Mexico City." US-based employees at Salesforce dropped to 51% from 58% in the four years ending in January 2024. In early 2023, it announced a reduction of roughly 8,000 jobs. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the San Francisco-based software company would cut more than 1,000 positions in large part to make room for new AI-focused hiring. [...] Human resources software maker Workday, based in Pleasanton, California, announced Wednesday that it would eliminate about 1,750 jobs. Last year, Chief Executive Officer Carl Eschenbach emphasized a new focus on expanding margins, saying hiring more in countries like Costa Rica would help in this effort.Â

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Users are now receiving notifications regarding their Microsoft 365 subscriptions and must take action if they wish to avoid Copilot and its extra charges. The email from Microsoft warns that the cost of a 365 Personal Subscription will jump, however, there is no need to worry -- Microsoft knows what's best and will increase your payment in return for all those AI-powered Copilot services it knows you want. We noted the upcoming increases last month and how users could turn off the generative AI assistant. At the time, Microsoft said users would be able to switch to plans without Copilot. However, unless a user takes action, the price they pay for their "Current Subscription" will increase, and AI-powered delights will be added to their plan.

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Most Britons support strict controls on AI systems that could surpass human capabilities, according to a YouGov poll, highlighting a growing divide between public opinion and government policy. The survey of 2,344 adults found 87% back laws requiring AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release, while 60% favor banning the development of "smarter-than-human" AI models. Only 9% trust tech CEOs to act in the public interest on AI regulation.

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