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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals' repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require hospitals to enter into repair contracts with the manufacturer, which will ultimately drive up medical costs, a person familiar with the devices said. The company, Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a device called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which is used to reroute blood during open-heart surgeries and essentially keeps a patient alive during the surgery. Last month, the company sent hospitals a letter alerting them to the "discontinuation of certification classes," meaning it "will no longer offer certification classes for the repair and/or preventative maintenance of the System 1 and its components." This means it will no longer teach hospital repair techs how to maintain and fix the devices, and will no longer certify in-house hospital repair technicians. Instead, the company "will continue to provide direct servicing for the System 1 and its components." [...] In a brochure for hospitals, Terumo advertises both its device and its maintenance program: "Advanced, precision medical equipment requires genuine parts and top-quality, specialized service -- just as getting the best medical care from qualified specialists. Terumo Cardiovascular Service has the unrivaled expertise, experience, equipment, and parts to provide the optimal level of planned service and repairs needed. Use Terumo Cardiovascular Service and avoid exposure to liability issues." A spokesperson for Terumo told 404 Media that the company "saw declining participation in this program and determined that the best way forward was to require servicing through Terumo Cardiovascular's genuine in-house Service team to continue to ensure Terumo devices are properly maintained." "Terumo Cardiovascular's Biomed Certification Program was originally structured to train non-Terumo personnel (hospital Biomeds) to service Terumo heart-lung machines and associated hardware. Properly maintained medical devices are necessary for optimal performance which is essential for quality of patient care and outcomes," they added. "Hospitals' existing Terumo Cardiovascular Biomed certifications will remain valid through their expiration dates but will not be renewed once they expire." "It's no secret that America's healthcare system is the most expensive, and this is one of the reasons why. These machines are actually highly reliable, we've had a low cost of service for it over the last few years. And when something isn't right, we have people in-house who can fix it," a source familiar with Terumo machine repair said. "But the cost of having a service contract with a manufacturer, you're probably talking 10 times the cost. It's not a big deal having a contract for one device, but when that starts happening across many devices, it adds up in the end. If you took every hospital in America and said for every medical device in the hospital, you need to put it on an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] maintenance contract, it would tank your financial system. You just can't do that."

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In the aftermath of Israel's October 2023 ground invasion of Gaza, Google reportedly worked with the Israeli military to provide AI services while racing against Amazon for contracts. This comes despite publicly denying collaboration with the military and punishing employees protesting its involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing agreement with Israel. The Verge reports: In the weeks after Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel, employees at Google's cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) -- even as the company told both the public and its own employees that Google only worked with civilian government ministries, the documents reportedly show. Weeks after the war began, an employee with Google's cloud division escalated the IDF's military's requests for access to Google's AI technology, according to the Washington Post. In another document, an employee warned that Google needed to quickly respond to the military's requests, or else Israel would turn to Amazon for its cloud computing needs. In a November 2023 document, an employee thanks a coworker for handling the IDF's request. Months later, employees requested additional access to AI tools for the IDF.

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At Galaxy Unpacked today in San Jose, California, Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy S25 series of flagship smartphones loaded with AI capabilities and LLMs. "Currently, the Galaxy S25 range is comprised of the Galaxy S25 ($800), Galaxy S25+ ($1,000), and Galaxy S25 Ultra ($1,300)," reports Wired. "The phones are available for preorder today and will officially go on sale February 7." Since the hardware is relatively unchanged from last year's Galaxy S24 series, here's what Wired has to say about the new AI smarts: The Galaxy S25 is a tale of two AIs: Gemini and Bixby. Yes, while Google's Gemini AI assistant sits at the forefront -- it can finally be triggered through a long press of the power button-- Samsung is bringing its original Bixby voice assistant out from the shadows. Bixby has been enhanced with large language models but is still designed to handle phone functions, like changing device settings. Gemini is meant to be used for general web queries and more complex actions. You can even have two hot words, one for each assistant. I foresee all of this being confusing [...]. The highlight AI feature debuting on the Galaxy S25 series is "cross-app experiences." These are tasks you can ask Gemini to perform, even if the task requires multiple apps. For example, you can ask for the schedule of this season's Arsenal matches and then add it to your calendar; Gemini will then search and add every Arsenal FC game in the season to your schedule. Or you can ask it to find pet-friendly vegan restaurants nearby and text the list to a friend. It even works with images too -- snap a pic of your fridge and ask Gemini to find you a recipe based on the available ingredients. These cross-app experiences work with Google apps, Samsung's Galaxy apps, and select third-party apps, like WhatsApp and Spotify. All these AI features have culminated in a new app: Now Brief. Samsung calls this proactive assistance (remember Google's Now on Tap?) where a morning brief arrives with the weather, upcoming calendar events, stock details, news articles, and suggestions to trigger routines. There's also an evening brief with a summary of the day's events with photos. Since the feature can plug into email, it'll send reminders about expiring coupons and upcoming travel tickets. Samsung claims it can even suggest changing an 8:45 am alarm even earlier if it sees a 9 am meeting on the schedule. On the lock screen, a "Now Bar" widget persists at the bottom, much like Apple's Live Activities. It'll offer quick access to the Now Brief app, but it will also show updates for favorite sports teams, along with glanceable directions from Google Maps. The rest of the AI features are playing a bit of catch-up to Apple and Google's Pixel phones. There's Drawing Assist, a generative AI tool to craft new images in different art styles based on sketches or text prompts. AI Select works with the S Pen stylus on the S25 Ultra and understands what is selected -- for example, if a video is selected, it will suggest turning it into a GIF. Audio Eraser is an editing tool to cut out background noise in videos post-capture, canceling out the sound of a crowd's chatter or an ambulance's siren. Finally, Samsung's Generative Edit feature, which lets you erase unwanted objects in images, now works locally on the device and is much more accurate and faster. A full list of specs can be found here. You can watch a recording of the event on YouTube.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities "in almost everything" within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Speaking at Journal House in Davos, Amodei said, "I don't know exactly when it'll come, I don't know if it'll be 2027. I think it's plausible it could be longer than that. I don't think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics." Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and five other former OpenAI employees. Not long after, Anthropic emerged as a strong technological competitor to OpenAI's AI products (such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT). Most recently, its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model has remained highly regarded among some AI users and highly ranked among AI benchmarks. During the WSJ interview, Amodei also spoke some about the potential implications of highly intelligent AI systems when these AI models can control advanced robotics. "[If] we make good enough AI systems, they'll enable us to make better robots. And so when that happens, we will need to have a conversation... at places like this event, about how do we organize our economy, right? How do humans find meaning?" He then shared his concerns about how human-level AI models and robotics that are capable of replacing all human labor may require a complete re-think of how humans value both labor and themselves. "We've recognized that we've reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there's huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labor, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth," he added. "Once that idea gets invalidated, we're all going to have to sit down and figure it out." The eye-catching comments, similar to comments about AGI made recently by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, come as Anthropic negotiates a $2 billion funding round that would value the company at $60 billion. Amodei disclosed that Anthropic's revenue multiplied tenfold in 2024. Further reading: Salesforce Chief Predicts Today's CEOs Will Be the Last With All-Human Workforces

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A security researcher discovered and fixed a critical domain name server misconfiguration in Mastercard's systems that persisted undetected for nearly five years, potentially exposing the credit card giant to traffic interception risks. Philippe Caturegli, founder of security firm Seralys, found that one of Mastercard's five DNS servers incorrectly pointed to "akam.ne" instead of "akam.net" from June 2020 to January 2025. He spent $300 to register the domain through Niger's domain authority to prevent potential exploitation. Mastercard said the typo has been corrected, insisting there was "not a risk to our systems."

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YouTube Premium subscribers can now stream music videos at 256kbps bitrate audio quality, matching the high-fidelity standard previously exclusive to YouTube Music, the video platform said. The audio upgrade comes as part of an expanded experimental features program that allows Premium users to test multiple new features simultaneously, departing from its previous single-experiment limitation, the company said.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Wednesday that current business leaders may be the last generation to manage an exclusively human workforce, as AI transforms the workplace. "We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together," he told Axios. His company's Agentforce platform, launched in September, has taken over many customer support tasks, prompting plans to move support staff into sales roles. Speaking to Axios at the World Economic Forum, Benioff dismissed Microsoft's AI CoPilot as disappointing and promised to defend his employees against discrimination amid political debates over corporate diversity programs.

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The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that it has undertaken a project to deliver zero-trust builds commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA).

The Zero-Trust Build project is scheduled from Jan-Aug 2025 and centers on the FreeBSD build process, and in particular, release building. The primary goal of this work is to enable the entire release process to run without requiring root access, and that build artifacts build reproducibly – that is, that a third party can build bit-for-bit identical artifacts.

Additionally, the project aims to enhance build process documentation, ensuring that release building is straightforward and does not require specialized knowledge. The work is targeted for completion prior to the release of FreeBSD 15.0.

The Foundation says that updates should not impact users of FreeBSD release images, but it may have an impact on developers basing projects or products on FreeBSD that make modifications to its release process.

Santee Cooper, the big power provider in South Carolina, has tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. From a report: The state-owned utility is betting interest will be strong, with tech giants such as Amazon.com and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel data centers for artificial-intelligence capabilities. The details Santee Cooper announced Wednesday it is seeking proposals for buyers to complete the project at South Carolina's sprawling V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, confirming an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal. The utility is working with bankers at Centerview Partners, which will accept proposals until May 5. Santee Cooper will likely look to tap a consortium that could include a construction firm, a tech company that will use the power and an additional partner for capital, according to people familiar with the matter. It is also looking for another power company partner because it doesn't plan to own or operate the units once they are up and running.

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The proposal to add a more general facility for string formatting to Python, which we looked at in August 2024, has changed a great deal since, so it merits another look. The changes take multiple forms: a new title for PEP 750 ("Template Strings"), a different mechanism for creating and using templates, a new Template type to hold them, and several additional authors for the PEP. Meanwhile, one controversial part of the original proposal, lazy evaluation of the interpolated values, has been changed so that it requires an explicit opt-in (via lambda); template strings are a generalization of f-strings and lazy evaluation was seen by some as a potentially confusing departure from their behavior.

Search in Premiere Pro has been updated with AI-powered visual recognition, allowing users to find videos by describing the contents of the footage. From a report: It's just one of several quality-of-life features Adobe is adding to Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io that aim to save video editors time on their projects. Users can enter search terms like "a person skating with a lens flare" to find corresponding clips within their media library. Adobe says the media intelligence AI can automatically recognize "objects, locations, camera angles, and more," alongside spoken words -- providing there's a transcript attached to the video. The feature doesn't detect audio or identify specific people, but it can scrub through any metadata attached to video files, which allows it to fetch clips based on shoot dates, locations, and camera types. The media analysis runs on-device, so doesn't require an internet connection, and Adobe reiterates that users' video content isn't used to train any AI models.

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Microsoft will pay to restore parts of Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic forests [non-paywalled source] in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of carbon credits, becoming the latest Big Tech player to bet that nature-based solutions can offset an artificial intelligence-driven surge in greenhouse gas emissions. Financial Times: The $3.2tn US company told the Financial Times it had signed a deal to buy 3.5mn credits over 25 years from Re.green, a Brazilian start-up which buys up farming and cattle land. It restores the land by planting native tree species, in projects financed through carbon credits and timber sales. Neither company disclosed a value for the deal, but recent market analysis suggests it could be worth around $200mn. Microsoft's recent dealmaking has made it one of the biggest buyers of nature-based carbon removals globally. The deal comes as groups including Microsoft, Google and Amazon invest heavily in data centres to cope with the huge demand stemming from the growth of generative AI. But the buildout is leading to a surge in their energy usage and complicating their pledges to investors to curb emissions.

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OpenAI will release "Operator" this week, letting ChatGPT users automate web tasks through a built-in browser, The Information reported Wednesday. The feature handles restaurant bookings, travel planning, shopping and deliveries, asking follow-up questions like party size for reservations. Users can watch Operator work, take control mid-task, and share workflows with others.

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Streaming platform Plex has introduced public reviews and user profiles, expanding social features launched last October. Users can now comment on others' reviews and make their profiles, watchlists and viewing history searchable, with customizable privacy settings ranging from public to private. Plex Pass subscribers are additionally also gaining access to HEVC encoding for improved visual quality.

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The computer mouse is a wonderful invention, but for the past few months I've been working to use mine as little as possible for productivity and ergonomic reasons. It should not be surprising that there are quite a few open-source applications, utilities, and configuration options that are either designed to or incidentally assist in creating a keyboard-driven desktop. This includes tiling window management with PaperWM, the Vimium browser extension, Input Remapper, and more.

The Vox Pupuli project has announced the first release of OpenVox, a "soft-fork" of the Puppet automation framework. The intention to fork was announced in December 2024.

OpenVox 8.11 is functionally equivalent to Puppet and should be a drop-in replacement. Be aware, of course, that even though you can type the same commands, use all the same modules and extensions, and configure the same settings, OpenVox is not yet tested to the same standard that Puppet is. [...]

Please don't use these packages on critical production infrastructures yet, unless you're comfortable with troubleshooting and reporting back on the silly errors we've made while rebranding and rebuilding.

Netflix will raise prices on most U.S. and Canadian subscription tiers after adding a record 19 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, bringing its global total to 302 million users. The standard plan without ads will increase to $17.99 from $15.49, while its premium tier rises $2 to $24.99. The ad-supported tier will cost $7.99, up $1. The streaming service's quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, jumping 16%, while operating income rose 52% to $2.3 billion. The company credited recent successes including the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match and "Squid Game" season two for the subscriber surge.

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Version 10.0 of the Wine Windows compatibility layer is out. "This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes". Those changes include full support for the Arm64EC architecture, better high-DPI display support, Wayland enabled by default, and more.

Alphabet's Google is backing AI developer Anthropic with a further $1 billion, building its stake in one of the most promising rivals to OpenAI. From a report: The new funding comes in addition to more than $2 billion that Google has already invested in Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. Google has a business agreement with Anthropic that covers the use of a suite of online tools and services. Amazon counts among its biggest backers. San Francisco-based Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT. Like its peers, the company has been raising significant sums to sustain investment in expanding its computing capabilities and keep pace in a race to advance AI. The new deal comes weeks after Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value the startup at $60 billion.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (snapcast), Fedora (python-jinja2), Mageia (rsync), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, gh, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, and pam_u2f), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-6.11 and vim).