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"Boeing said Friday it will cull 10 percent of its workforce — roughly 17,000 jobs," reports the Washington Post, "as the aviation giant grapples with mounting losses and manufacturing disruptions amid a machinists strike that has dragged into a fifth week." Executives, managers and production employees will be affected by the cuts, chief executive Kelly Ortberg informed employees Friday in a memo. Boeing will also delay the launch of its 777X plane until 2026 due to ongoing challenges, Ortberg wrote... The layoffs add to the pain at Boeing, where a stalemate between the company's largest employee union dovetails with ongoing legal troubles and safety woes. The strike has halted production of some of the company's best-selling jets, further adding to its financial troubles. In the past five years, Boeing has lost more than $25 billion... "Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together," Ortberg said in the memo. "The state of our business and our future recovery require tough actions...." Now at risk of a downgrade to its credit rating as its circumstances worsen, Boeing has taken other steps to reduce expenses, including imposing a hiring freeze and eliminating unnecessary travel. "The strike by Boeing machinists is costing the company roughly $1 billion a month, according to estimates from S&P Global..."

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The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly. From a report: Those magical AI PC boxes were supposed to fire up buyer enthusiasm and spur the somewhat listless market for desktop and laptop systems into significant growth territory, but that doesn't appear to be happening. According to the latest figures from Gartner, global PC shipments totaled 62.9 million units during Q3 of this year, representing a 1.3 percent decline compared with the same period last year. However, this does follow three consecutive quarters of modest growth. "Even with a full line-up of Windows-based AI PCs for both Arm and x86 in the third quarter of 2024, AI PCs did not boost the demand for PCs since buyers have yet to see their clear benefits or business value," commented Gartner Director Analyst Mikako Kitagawa. This is perhaps understandable when AI PCs are largely just a marketing concept, and vendors can't agree on exactly what the the definition of an AI PC should be. Even worse, some buyers of Arm-based Copilot+ machines discovered that their performance isn't actually very good with some applications.

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Imgur announced changes to its content moderation policies, no longer classifying memes with adult humor as mature. Going forward, only memes with sexualized or lewd content will receive the mature tag. The Verge reports: Imgur is making the changes after it collected feedback about its content moderation over the course of this year, including that its policies, "especially surrounding mature content, feel inconsistently applied, too subjective, or just rather confusing as a whole," according to a post from Imgur product manager Martyn O'Neill. Now, mature content consists "solely of sexualized or 'lewd'" content. Following the adjustments, O'Neill says that "warnings / post removals" are down nearly 35 percent month over month. Far fewer posts are being marked as mature as well; that stat has declined by almost 50 percent.

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NASA confirmed that it's working with international partners and standards organizations to create a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) for future lunar exploration. This time standard will account for relativity and be scalable for other celestial bodies, supporting long-term missions like Artemis and commercial space activities. From the report: The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth's globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon's surface will appear to 'tick' faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time. To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird's wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up. "For something traveling at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of approximately 168 football fields," said Cheryl Gramling, lead on lunar position, navigation, timing, and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "If someone is orbiting the Moon, an observer on Earth who isn't compensating for the effects of relativity over a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is approximately 168 football fields away from where the astronaut really is."

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Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are leading efforts to curb the sale of compounded GLP-1 medications. Lilly has issued hundreds of cease-and-desist letters to entities selling compounded tirzepatide, following the end of its FDA-declared shortage. Novo Nordisk, whose semaglutide drugs remain in shortage, is taking a different approach. The company published a peer-reviewed study in Pharmaceutical Research, highlighting quality concerns in compounded semaglutide samples, including lower-than-claimed strength and banned ingredients. These actions signal a broader industry pushback against compounders who entered the market during drug shortages. Wired adds: With mounting evidence that GLP-1s like tirzepatide are an effective treatment for other ailments beyond obesity and diabetes -- including addiction and Parkinson's disease -- demand is only expected to increase. It remains to be seen whether the pharmaceutical companies will be able to keep pace with the demand or if the meds will go back into shortage and compounders will be able to bound back into the market.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Imagine three people huddled in a circle so when one speaks, only one other hears. Scientists have created a device that works like that, ensuring sound waves ripple in one direction only. The device, developed by scientists at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, is made up of a disk-shaped cavity with three equally-spaced ports that can each send or receive sound. In an inactive state, sound transmitted from port 1 is audible to ports 2 and 3 at equal volumes. Sound waves bounce back to port 1 as an echo as well. When the system is running, however, only port 2 hears port 1's sounds. The trick is to blow swirling air into the cavity at a specific speed and intensity, which allows the sound waves to synchronize in a repeating pattern. That not only guides the sound waves in a single direction, but gives more energy to those oscillations so they don't dissipate. It's kind of like a roundabout for sound. The scientists say their technique may inform the design of future communications technologies. New metamaterials could be made to manipulate not just sound waves but potentially electromagnetic waves too. "This concept of loss-compensated non-reciprocal wave propagation is, in our view, an important result that can also be transferred to other systems," says senior researcher Nicolas Noiray. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Bluesky, the decentralized social network cofounded by Jack Dorsey, created a Threads account to court users frustrated by Meta's moderation issues. Thurrott reports: This week, the Bluesky team also used Threads to share some tips on how to get started on Bluesky, how to get more engagement, and more. The company also emphasized its decentralized structure and more extensive customization options, with the app recently introducing a new theme font, adjustable font sizing, and the ability to pin posts on top of profiles. Bluesky also couldn't resist to engage in some strange trolling this week. "We're not like the other girls ... we're not owned by a billionaire," the team wrote on Threads yesterday. Of course, this the post that got the most engagement on the Bluesky Threads account with close to 500 comments as of this writing.

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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a copyright infringement verdict against Internet provider Grande, which failed to take action against allegedly pirating subscribers. The jury's $47 million damages award in favor of the major music label plaintiffs is vacated. According to the Court (PDF), individual tracks that are part of an album, should not be counted as separate works. TorrentFreak reports: After hearing both sides, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the jury verdict yesterday. Grande's arguments, suggesting that the district court mistakenly upheld the verdict earlier, were rejected. "The district court did not err in upholding the jury's unanimous liability verdict because Plaintiffs satisfied each element legally and factually," the decision reads. "The court correctly interpreted the law and instructed the jury on the relevant legal standards in light of the factual issues disputed by the parties, and Plaintiffs introduced ample evidence from which a reasonable jury could find in Plaintiffs' favor." [...] In addition to the material contribution challenge, Grande and its supporters also pointed out that terminating Internet access isn't a "simple measure," as the jury concluded. Instead, it is drastic and overbroad, which could also impact innocent subscribers. The Court of Appeals rejects this reasoning. Instead, it states that the jury could and did conclude that terminations are a simple measure. There is no evidence to reach a different conclusion. All in all, the Court sees no reason to reverse the jury's verdict that Grande is liable for contributory infringement. This means that the jury verdict is affirmed.

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Casio confirmed it suffered a ransomware attack earlier this month, resulting in the theft of personal and confidential data from employees, job candidates, business partners, and some customers. Although customer payment data was not compromised, Casio warns the impact may broaden as the investigation continues. BleepingComputer reports: The attack was disclosed Monday when Casio warned that it was facing system disruption and service outages due to unauthorized access to its networks during the weekend. Yesterday, the Underground ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack, leaking various documents allegedly stolen from the Japanese tech giant's systems. Today, after the data was leaked, Casio published a new statement that admits that sensitive data was stolen during the attack on its network. As to the current results of its ongoing investigation, Casio says the following information has been confirmed as likely compromised: - Personal data of both permanent and temporary/contract employees of Casio and its affiliated companies. - Personal details related to business partners of Casio and certain affiliates. - Personal information of individuals who have interviewed for employment with Casio in the past. - Personal information related to customers using services provided by Casio and its affiliated companies. - Details related to contracts with current and past business partners. - Financial data regarding invoices and sales transactions. - Documents that include legal, financial, human resources planning, audit, sales, and technical information from within Casio and its affiliates.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR : For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns. The confidential material was part of a more than two-year investigation into TikTok by 14 attorneys general that led to state officials suing the company on Tuesday. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok was designed with the express intention of addicting young people to the app. The states argue the multi-billion-dollar company deceived the public about the risks. In each of the separate lawsuits state regulators filed, dozens of internal communications, documents and research data were redacted -- blacked-out from public view -- since authorities entered into confidentiality agreements with TikTok. But in one of the lawsuits, filed by the Kentucky Attorney General's Office, the redactions were faulty. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied-and-pasted excerpts of the redacted material, bringing to light some 30 pages of documents that had been kept secret. A group of more than a dozen states sued TikTok on Tuesday, alleging the app was intentionally designed to addict teens, something authorities say is a violation of state consumer protection laws. After Kentucky Public Radio published excerpts of the redacted material, a state judge sealed the entire complaint following a request from the attorney general's office "to ensure that any settlement documents and related information, confidential commercial and trade secret information, and other protected information was not improperly disseminated," according to an emergency motion to seal the complaint filed on Wednesday by Kentucky officials. NPR reviewed all the portions of the suit that were redacted, which highlight TikTok executives speaking candidly about a host of dangers for children on the wildly popular video app. The material, mostly summaries of internal studies and communications, show some remedial measures -- like time-management tools -- would have a negligible reduction in screen time. The company went ahead and decided to release and tout the features. Separately, under a new law, TikTok has until January to divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or face a nationwide ban. TikTok is fighting the looming crackdown. Meanwhile, the new lawsuits from state authorities have cast scrutiny on the app and its ability to counter content that harms minors.

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Ecovacs robot vacuums have been hacked across the U.S. to shout racial slurs at unsuspecting people. VICE News reports: The issue is specifically with Ecovacs' Deebot X2 model. The hackers gained control of the devices and used the onboard speakers to blast racial slurs at anyone within earshot. One such person was a lawyer from Minnesota named Daniel Swenson. He was watching TV when he heard some odd noises coming from the direction of his vacuum. He changed the password and restarted it. But then the odd sounds started up again. And then it started shouting racial slurs at him like a surly disgruntled maid. There were multiple reports of similar incidents across the United States and around the same time. One of them happened in Los Angeles, where a vacuum chased a dog while spewing hate. Another happened in El Paso, where the vac spewed slurs until it's owner turned it off. The attacks are apparently quite easy to pull off thanks to several known security vulnerabilities in Ecovacs, like a bad Bluetooth connector and a defective PIN system that is intended to safeguard video feeds and remote access but actually doesn't do any of that at all. A pair of cybersecurity researchers released a report on Ecovacs detailing the brand's multiple security flaws earlier this year.

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In response to California's new law targeting "false advertising" of "digital goods," Valve has added the following language to its checkout page: "A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam." Ars Technica reports: California's AB2426 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Sept. 26, excludes subscription-only services, free games, and digital goods that offer "permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet." Otherwise, sellers of digital goods cannot use the terms "buy, purchase," or related terms that would "confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good." And they must explain, conspicuously, in plain language, that "the digital good is a license" and link to terms and conditions. Which is what Valve has now added to its cart page before enforcement of these terms was due to start next year. The company has long made it clear, deeper inside its End User License Agreement (EULA), that a purchase is a license, and those licenses cannot be resold, which avoids issues of one's right to resell a game. Now it is something that every user sees on every purchase, however quickly they click-through to get to their download.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In late September, Shield AI cofounder Brandon Tseng swore that weapons in the U.S. would never be fully autonomous -- meaning an AI algorithm would make the final decision to kill someone. "Congress doesn't want that," the defense tech founder told TechCrunch. "No one wants that." But Tseng spoke too soon. Five days later, Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey expressed an openness to autonomous weapons -- or at least a heavy skepticism of arguments against them. The U.S.'s adversaries "use phrases that sound really good in a sound bite: Well, can't you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and dies?" Luckey said during a talk earlier this month at Pepperdine University. "And my point to them is, where's the moral high ground in a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?" When asked for further comment, Shannon Prior, a spokesperson for Anduril said that Luckey didn't mean that robots should be programmed to kill people on their own, just that he was concerned about "bad people using bad AI." In the past, Silicon Valley has erred on the side of caution. Take it from Luckey's cofounder, Trae Stephens. "I think the technologies that we're building are making it possible for humans to make the right decisions about these things," he told Kara Swisher last year. "So that there is an accountable, responsible party in the loop for all decisions that could involve lethality, obviously." The Anduril spokesperson denied any dissonance between Luckey (pictured above) and Stephens' perspectives, and said that Stephens didn't mean that a human should always make the call, but just that someone is accountable. Last month, Palantir co-founder and Anduril investor Joe Lonsdale also showed a willingness to consider fully autonomous weapons. At an event hosted by the think tank Hudson Institute, Lonsdale expressed frustration that this question is being framed as a yes-or-no at all. He instead presented a hypothetical where China has embraced AI weapons, but the U.S. has to "press the button every time it fires." He encouraged policymakers to embrace a more flexible approach to how much AI is in weapons. "You very quickly realize, well, my assumptions were wrong if I just put a stupid top-down rule, because I'm a staffer who's never played this game before," he said. "I could destroy us in the battle." When TC asked Lonsdale for further comment, he emphasized that defense tech companies shouldn't be the ones setting the agenda on lethal AI. "The key context to what I was saying is that our companies don't make the policy, and don't want to make the policy: it's the job of elected officials to make the policy," he said. "But they do need to educate themselves on the nuance to do a good job." He also reiterated a willingness to consider more autonomy in weapons. "It's not a binary as you suggest -- 'fully autonomous or not' isn't the correct policy question. There's a sophisticated dial along a few different dimensions for what you might have a soldier do and what you have the weapons system do," he said. "Before policymakers put these rules in place and decide where the dials need to be set in what circumstance, they need to learn the game and learn what the bad guys might be doing, and what's necessary to win with American lives on the line." [...] "For many in Silicon Valley and D.C., the biggest fear is that China or Russia rolls out fully autonomous weapons first, forcing the U.S.'s hand," reports TechCrunch. "At the Hudson Institute event, Lonsdale said that the tech sector needs to take it upon itself to 'teach the Navy, teach the DoD, teach Congress' about the potential of AI to 'hopefully get us ahead of China.' Lonsdale's and Luckey's affiliated companies are working on getting Congress to listen to them. Anduril and Palantir have cumulatively spent over $4 million in lobbying this year, according to OpenSecrets."

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The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too? Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published this week in the journal Nature Aging. From a report: The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country's life expectancy is lower. The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate. The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what's possible for average life span. "We're basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we're going to live," said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years -- approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women -- an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.

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An APT hacking group known as GoldenJackal has successfully breached air-gapped government systems in Europe using two custom toolsets to steal sensitive data, like emails, encryption keys, images, archives, and documents. From a report: According to an ESET report, this happened at least two times, one against the embassy of a South Asian country in Belarus in September 2019 and again in July 2021, and another against a European government organization between May 2022 and March 2024. In May 2023, Kaspersky warned about GoldenJackal's activities, noting that the threat actors focus on government and diplomatic entities for purposes of espionage. Although their use of custom tools spread over USB pen drives, like the 'JackalWorm,' was known, cases of a successful compromise of air-gapped systems were not previously confirmed.

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penciling_in writes: Ukrainian authorities have arrested a 28-year-old man in Khmelnytskyi for running an illegal VPN service that allowed users to bypass Ukrainian sanctions and access the Russian internet (Runet). The VPN, active since Russia's invasion, enabled Russian sympathizers and people in occupied territories to reach blocked Russian government sites, social media, and news. Handling over 100GB of data daily and linking to 48 million Russian IP addresses, the VPN may have been exploited by Russian intelligence. Ukrainian cyber police, in collaboration with the National Security Service, seized servers and equipment in multiple locations. The suspect faces charges under Part 5 of Article 361 of Ukraine's Criminal Code, which could lead to a 15-year prison sentence. Investigations are ongoing into further connections and funding sources. The case highlights the growing role of VPNs in the ongoing cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia.

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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt urged prioritizing AI infrastructure over climate goals at a Washington AI summit this week. Schmidt, who led Google until 2011, argued that AI's rapid growth will outpace environmental mitigation efforts. "We're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it," Schmidt told attendees, addressing concerns about AI's surging energy demands. Data centers powering AI are projected to consume 35 gigawatts annually by 2030, up from 17 gigawatts in 2023, according to McKinsey. Schmidt, now heading AI drone company White Stork, suggested AI could ultimately solve climate issues, stating, "I'd rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it."

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A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, "a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia." From a report: The group's goal is to protect one of the world's largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals. "A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar 'styles' using ChatGPT," Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. "Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques." In many cases, WikiProject AI Cleanup finds AI-generated content on Wikipedia with the same methods others have used to find AI-generated content in scientific journals and Google Books, namely by searching for phrases commonly used by ChatGPT. One egregious example is this Wikipedia article about the Chester Mental Health Center, which in November of 2023 included the phrase "As of my last knowledge update in January 2022," referring to the last time the large language model was updated.

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Microsoft will offer direct game purchases through its Xbox app for Android starting November, following a U.S. court ruling against Google's app store monopoly. The move allows Microsoft to circumvent Google's revenue cut on in-app purchases and signals renewed focus on mobile gaming, bolstered by its recent $75.4 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition.

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U.S. officials are racing to understand the full scope of a China-linked hack of major U.S. broadband providers, as concerns mount from members of Congress that the breach could amount to a devastating counterintelligence failure. From a report: Federal authorities and cybersecurity investigators are probing the breaches of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies. A stealthy hacking group known as Salt Typhoon tied to Chinese intelligence is believed to be responsible. The compromises may have allowed hackers to access information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Among the concerns are that the hackers may have essentially been able to spy on the U.S. government's efforts to surveil Chinese threats, including the FBI's investigations. The House Select Committee on China sent letters Thursday asking the three companies to describe when they became aware of the breaches and what measures they are taking to protect their wiretap systems from attack. Spokespeople for AT&T, Lumen and Verizon declined to comment on the attack. A spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington has denied that Beijing is responsible for the alleged breaches. Combined with other Chinese cyber threats, news of the Salt Typhoon assault makes clear that "we face a cyber-adversary the likes of which we have never confronted before," Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee Committee on China, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the panel's top Democrat, said in the letters. "The implications of any breach of this nature would be difficult to overstate," they said. Hackers still had access to some parts of U.S. broadband networks within the last week, and more companies were being notified that their networks had been breached, people familiar with the matter said. Investigators remain in the dark about precisely what the hackers were seeking to do, according to people familiar with the response.

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