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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Will Google ever launch its "Find My" network? The Android ecosystem was supposed to have its own version of Apple's AirTags by now. Google has had a crowd-sourced device-tracking network sitting dormant on 3 billion Android phones since December 2022. Partners have been ready to go with Bluetooth tag hardware since May 2023! This was all supposed to launch a year ago, but Google has been in a holding pattern. The good news is we're finally seeing some progress after a year of silence. The reason for Google's lengthy delay is actually Apple. A week before Google's partners announced their Android network Bluetooth tags, Google and Apple jointly announced a standard to detect "unknown" Bluetooth trackers and show users alerts if their phone thinks they're being stalked. Since you can constantly see an AirTag's location, they can be used for stalking by just covertly slipping one into a bag or car; nobody wants that, so everyone's favorite mobile duopoly is teaming up. Google did its half of this partnership and rolled out AirTag detection in July 2023. At the same time, Google also announced: "We've made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS." Surely Apple would be burning the midnight oil to launch iOS Android tag detection as soon as possible so that Google could start competing with AirTags. It looks like iOS 17.5 is the magic version Google is waiting for. The first beta was released to testers recently, and 9to5Mac recently spotted strings for detecting "unwanted" non-Apple tracking devices that were suddenly following you around. This 17.5 update still needs to ship, and the expectation is sometime in May. That would be 11 months after Google's release. [...] With the impending iOS release, Google seems to be getting its ducks in a row as well. 9to5Google has a screenshot of the new Find My Device settings page that is appearing for some users, which gives them a chance to opt out of the anonymous tracking network. That report also mentions that some users received an email Thursday of an impending tracking network launch, saying: "You'll get a notification on your Android devices when this feature is turned on in 3 days. Until then, you can opt out of the network through Find My Device on the web." The vast majority of Android users have not gotten this email, though, suggesting maybe it was a mistake. It's very weird to announce a launch in "days remaining" rather than just saying what date something will launch, and this email went out Thursday, which would mean a bizarre Sunday launch when everyone is off for the weekend.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Best Buy is conducting mass layoffs of Geek Squad employees this week, according to former employees who lost their jobs. Workers told 404 Media they were told by the company to stay at home Tuesday and to wait for a call from their bosses about whether they had been let go. Best Buy did not respond to a request for comment, so we don't know how many people lost their jobs. But a laid-off worker we talked to said "it's definitely company wide and bigger than the cuts last summer." [...] The r/GeekSquad subreddit, an unofficial community for Geek Squad workers, is full of posts about the layoffs, with many users posting photos of their Geek Squad badges and noting that they are agents "going sleeper," a Sleeper Cell reference meaning they've been laid off.

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AMD plans to document and open source its Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware for GPUs, giving users more control over Radeon graphics cards. From a report: It's part of a larger effort AMD confirmed earlier this week about making its GPUs more open source at both a software level in respect to the ROCm stack for GPU programming and a hardware level. Details were scarce with this initial announcement, and the only concrete thing it introduced was a GitHub tracker. However, yesterday AMD divulged more details, specifying that one of the things it would be making open source was the MES firmware for Radeon GPUs. AMD says it will be publishing documentation for MES around the end of May, and will then release the source code some time afterward. For one George Hotz and his startup, Tiny Corp, this is great news. Throughout March, Hotz had agitated for AMD to make MES open source in order to fix issues he was experiencing with his RX 7900 XTX-powered AI server box. He had talked several times to AMD representatives, and even the company's CEO, Lisa Su.

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The nominations have closed and campaigning is underway to see who will be the next Debian Project Leader (DPL). This year, two candidates are campaigning for the position Jonathan Carter has held for four eventful years: Sruthi Chandran and Andreas Tille. Topics that have emerged so far include how the prospective DPLs would spend project money, their opinions on handling controversial topics, and project diversity.

Meta is updating its AI-generated content policy and will add a "Made with AI" label beginning next month, the company announced. The policy will apply to content on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. From a report: Acknowledging that its current policy is "too narrow," Meta says it will start labeling more video, audio, and image content as being AI-generated. Labels will be applied either when users disclose the use of AI tools or when Meta detects "industry standard AI image indicators," though the company didn't provide more detail about its detection system. The changes are informed by recommendations and feedback from Meta's Oversight Board and update the manipulated media policy created in 2020. The old policy prohibits videos created or edited using AI tools that make a person say something they didn't but doesn't cover the wide range of AI-generated content that has recently flooded the web. "In the last four years, and particularly in the last year, people have developed other kinds of realistic AI-generated content like audio and photos, and this technology is quickly evolving," Meta wrote in a blog post. "As the Board noted, it's equally important to address manipulation that shows a person doing something they didn't do."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all. Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they've spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming's limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army. Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer -- supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. "We've grown rather than shrunk," Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me. And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists -- especially when it has champions. Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: "If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours," he told IGN last year. "[Y]ou own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution."

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An Ethiopian bank has put up posters shaming customers it says have not returned money they gained during a technical glitch. From a report: Notices bearing their names and photos could be seen outside branches of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) on Friday. The bank says it has recovered almost three-quarters of the $14m it lost, its head said last week. He warned that those keeping money that is not theirs will be prosecuted. Last month, an hours-long glitch allowed customers at the CBE, Ethiopia's largest commercial bank, to withdraw or transfer more than they had in their accounts.

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AI will lead to many companies employing fewer people in the next five years, staffing provider Adecco Group said on Friday, in a new survey highlighting the upheaval AI will bring to the workplace. From a report: Some 41% of senior executives expect to have smaller workforces because of AI technology, Adecco said in a report based on a survey of executives at 2,000 large companies worldwide. Generative AI, which can create text, photos and videos in response to open-ended prompts, has spurred both hope it could eliminate repetitive tasks and fear it will make some jobs obsolete. [...] The Adecco survey is one of the largest into the AI topic, and follows a 2023 World Economic Forum study which said 25% of companies expected AI to trigger job losses, while 50% expected the technology to create new roles.

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The UK government has admitted its negotiating power over billions of pounds of cloud infrastructure spending has been inhibited by vendor lock-in. From a report: A document from the Cabinet Office's Central Digital & Data Office, circulated within Whitehall, seen by The Register, says the "UK government's current approach to cloud adoption and management across its departments faces several challenges" which combined result "in risk concentration and vendor lock-in that inhibit UK government's negotiating power over the cloud vendors." The paper also says that if the UK government -- which has spent tens of billions on cloud services in the last decade -- does not change its approach, "the existing dominance of AWS and Azure in the UK Government's cloud services is set to continue." Doing nothing would mean "leaving the government with minimal leverage over pricing and product options. "This path forecasts a future where, within a decade, the public sector could face the end of its ability to negotiate favourable terms, leading to entrenched vendor lock-in and potential regulatory scrutiny from [UK regulator] the Competition and Markets Authority." The document has been circulated under the heading "UK Public Sector Cloud Marketplace." It is authored by Chris Nesbitt-Smith, a CDDO consultant, and sponsored by CDDO principal technical architect Edward McCutcheon and David Knott, CDDO chief technical officer.

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OpenBSD 7.5 has been released. The list of changes and improvements is, as usual, long; it includes the pinsyscalls() functionality covered here in January.

China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned. From a report: The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company's threat intelligence team published on Friday. "As populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections," the report reads. Microsoft said that "at a minimum" China will create and distribute through social media AI-generated content that "benefits their positions in these high-profile elections." The company added that the impact of AI-made content was minor but warned that could change. "While the impact of such content in swaying audiences remains low, China's increasing experimentation in augmenting memes, videos and audio will continue -- and may prove effective down the line," said Microsoft. Microsoft said in the report that China had already attempted an AI-generated disinformation campaign in the Taiwan presidential election in January. The company said this was the first time it had seen a state-backed entity using AI-made content in a bid to influence a foreign election.

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The Eclipse Foundation, the organization behind the Eclipse IDE and many other software projects, announced a collaboration between several different open-source-software foundations to create a specification describing secure software development best practices. This work is motivated by the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

The leading open source communities and foundations have for years developed and practised secure software development processes. These are processes that have often defined or set industry best practices around things such as coordinated disclosure, peer review, and release processes. These processes have been documented by each of these communities, albeit sometimes using different terminology and approaches. We hypothesise that the cybersecurity process technical documentation that already exists amongst the open source communities can provide a useful starting point for developing the cybersecurity processes required for regulatory compliance.

(Thanks to Martin Michlmayr.)

An anonymous reader writes: Variety reports that following the massive box office success of Dune: Part Two, Legendary has tapped Denis Villeneuve for a third installment that would presumably continue the story of how Paul Atreides goes on to conquer the galaxy. Earlier this year, Villeneuve told Empire that he had already "put words on paper" thinking about where he would like to take the Dune franchise going forward. Legendary has yet to announce any sort of timeline for when production on Dune 3 might begin. But the studio intends for the movie to debut before its next project with Villeneuve -- an adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen's 2024 Pulitzer Prize-nominated nonfiction book about how nuclear war scenarios would likely play out.

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Version 7.0 of the FFmpeg audio/video toolkit is out. "The most noteworthy changes for most users are a native VVC decoder (currently experimental, until more fuzzing is done), IAMF support, or a multi-threaded ffmpeg CLI tool". There's also the usual list of new formats and codecs, and a few deprecated features have been removed.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cockpit), Mageia (python-pygments), Red Hat (nodejs), Slackware (httpd and nghttp2), SUSE (avahi, gradle, gradle-bootstrap, and squid), and Ubuntu (xorg-server, xwayland).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen. As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.

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Google has introduced a new JPEG library called Jpegli, which reduces noise and improves image quality over traditional JPEGs. Proponents of the technology said it has the potential to make the Internet faster and more beautiful. InfoWorld reports: Announced April 3 and accessible from GitHub, Jpegli maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio at high-quality compression settings, Google said. Jpegli works by using new techniques to reduce noise and improve image quality. New or improved features include adaptive quantization heuristics from the JPEG XL reference implementation, improved quantization matrix selection, calculation of intermediate results, and the possibility to use more advanced colorspace. The library provides an interoperable encoder and decoder complying with the original JPEG standard and its most convenient 8-bit formalism and API/ABI compatibility with libjeg-turbo and MozJPEG. When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psycho-visually effective computations are also performed; images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts. While improving on the density ratio of image quality and compression, Jpegli's coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches such as MozJPEG, according to Google. Web developers can thus integrate Jpegli into existing workflows without sacrificing coding speed, performance, or memory use. Jpegli can be encoded with 10-plus bits per component. The 10-bit encoding happens in the original 8-bit formalism and the resulting images are interoperable with 8-bit viewers. The 10-bit dynamics are available as an API extension and application code changes are necessary to apply it. Also, Jpegli compresses images more efficiently than traditional JPEG codecs; this can save bandwidth and storage space and make web pages faster, Google said.

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Elizabeth Rayne reports via Ars Technica: Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO2 ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller. "Sublimation of CO2 ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars," Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment. [...] To recreate a part of the red planet's landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO2 ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO2 ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized. For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO2 ice. No flows were produced by either. "For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO2 sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions," the researchers said in the study. Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs' findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.

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An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film. The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...] When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

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Plex is a multi-functional streaming platform that allows users to watch, organize, and curate their favorite media entertainment. Sharing Plex libraries is also an option; one that comes with piracy concerns. In an effort to "avoid the growth of piracy," Plex asked GitHub to remove a repository that allows people to reshare libraries that were not originally theirs. TorrentFreak reports: The Swiss company, which is headquartered in the U.S., asked GitHub to remove a "Plex Reshare" repository, alleging that it may contribute to its piracy problem. "Plex Reshare" doesn't host any copyright-infringing material and, as far as we've seen, it doesn't reference any either. Its main purpose is to allow Plex users to make shared Plex directories browsable on the web, which allows people to "reshare" them without being the original owner. "The reason behind this project is to make available your PLEX shares to other friends unrelated to the person who owns the original library," Plex Reshare developer Peter explains. While the repository doesn't host or link to copyright-infringing material, Plex argues that it can be used to 'grow' piracy. "We have found infringing material in your website which indeed is OTHER 'Plex Server'. The material that is claimed to be infringing is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled immediately and avoid the growth of piracy," the takedown notice reads. The first part of the sentence is somewhat confusing. Plex-reshare is not a Plex server but the company may use "OTHER Plex Server" as an internal classification category. In any case, Plex alleges that the repository can contribute to the growth of piracy on its platform. Citing the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, Plex urges GitHub to take immediate action, or else it may be held liable. It's not clear what this liability claim rests on, as there are no actual copyright infringements mentioned in the takedown notice. Despite the broad nature of this claim, GitHub has indeed taken the repository offline, replacing it with a DMCA takedown reference. This likely wasn't a straightforward decision as GitHub is known to put developers first with these types of issues. In this case, it took more than three weeks before GitHub took action, which is much longer than usual. This suggests that GitHub allowed the developer to respond and may have sought legal advice from in-house lawyers, to ensure that the rights of all parties are properly considered. The report notes that the Plex-reshare code is listed on Docker Hub as well, which means it may face a similar fate.

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