RSS 생중계

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has signed into law legislation banning the use of price-fixing software by landlords to set rental rates. From a report: New York is the first state to outlaw algorithmic pricing by landlords, following a number of city-wide bans in Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. Software companies such as RealPage offer landlords algorithms that can set rental prices. The software can also help determine the ideal number of people to live in a unit or the terms of a lease renewal. RealPage says it can help its clients "optimize rents to achieve the overall highest yield, or combination of rent and occupancy, at each property." But the "private data algorithms" advertised by these software companies, Hochul says, cause the "housing market distortion" that harms renters "during a historic housing supply and affordability crisis." Not only does the law outlaw setting rental terms with the software, it also says that any property owners who use the software will be considered colluding. In other words, two or more rental property owners or managers who set rents with an algorithm are, in practice, choosing to not compete with each other, whether they do so "knowingly or with reckless disregard," the law says. This is a distinct violation from simply using the software itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung Electronics will unveil its highly-anticipated trifold smartphone when world leaders and global dignitaries gather at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month. It will be the company's first device with two hinges -- allowing it to work as either a conventional smartphone or a significantly larger tablet when fully unfurled -- and will be displayed at an exhibition of cutting-edge Korean technology on the sidelines of the multilateral summit, according to a person familiar with the matter. For Samsung, the Gyeongju-hosted APEC event will provide a global spotlight for a product it hopes will burnish its reputation as an engineering pioneer. Alongside Huawei, Samsung has led the move to develop foldable phones, and Huawei introduced the world's first trifold device in China last year. The Korean company now has the opportunity to take the form factor global.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maj. Gen. William Taylor told reporters at the Association of the US Army Conference in Washington this week that he and the Eighth Army he commands out of South Korea are regularly using AI for decision-making. Taylor said he has been asking AI chatbots to help build models for personal decisions that affect his organization and overall readiness. The general referred to his chatbot companion as "Chat" and said the technology has been useful for predictive analysis in logistical planning and operational purposes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it's seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that's on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site. 404 Media: The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia. "We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow Sustainably," the Foundation's Senior Director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post. "With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ruby community has experienced some turbulence of late after Ruby Central took control of the GitHub repositories for a number of projects including RubyGems and Bundler. Those projects have historically been developed separately from Ruby itself. They are now being put under the control of Ruby's core team, according to Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. "Matz"):

To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community.

Ruby Central has also issued a statement.

Ruby libraries and applications are distributed via a packaging format called a gem. RubyGems.org has been the central hosting service for gems since about 2010. This article is part one of a two-part series on the RubyGems.org takeover by Ruby Central. Understanding the history of RubyGems.org, and the contributor community behind it, is vital to making sense of the current power struggle between Ruby Central and members of the Ruby community who have maintained those services and tools for many years.

joshuark writes: Not all jobs are created equal, according to the new American Job Quality Study. The nationally representative survey of roughly 18,000 Americans finds that just 40% of U.S. workers hold "quality jobs," "Quality jobs" are defined as roles with fair compensation, safe environments, growth opportunities, agency and manageable schedules. Quality jobs are linked to higher satisfaction and wellbeing, yet most U.S. workers face gaps in pay, advancement, scheduling and fairness. As former obsolete technology COM guru Don Box stated: COM sucks but pays my bucks. Now it sucks and no bucks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and libssh), Debian (firefox-esr and pgpool2), Mageia (varnish & lighttpd), Red Hat (python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, and python39:3.9), SUSE (expat, gstreamer-plugins-rs, kernel, openssl1, pgadmin4, python311-ldap, and squid), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10 and mupdf).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: The European Commission has revised the Ecodesign requirements for external power supplies (EPS). The new rules aim to increase consumer convenience, resource efficiency, and energy efficiency. Manufacturers have three years to prepare for the changes. The new regulations apply to external power supplies that charge or power devices such as laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and computer monitors. Starting in 2028, these products must meet higher energy efficiency standards and become more interoperable. Specifically, USB chargers on the EU market must have at least one USB Type-C port and function with detachable cables. With the regulation, the EU is also establishing minimum requirements for the efficiency of power supplies with an output power of up to 240 watts that charge via USB Power Delivery (USB-PD), among other things, under other things, minimum requirements. Power supplies with an output power exceeding 10 watts will also have to meet minimum energy efficiency values in partial load operation (10 percent of rated power) in the future, which is intended to reduce unnecessary energy losses. The EU Commission says the new requirements are expected to save around 3% of energy consumption over the lifecycle of external chargers by 2035. Additionally, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to decrease by 9% and pollutant emissions by about 13%. "The EU also calculates that consumer spending could decrease by around 100 million euros per year by 2035," reports Heise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Physicists using SLAC's X-ray free-electron laser discovered two new laser phenomena that allowed them to generate the shortest, highest-energy X-ray pulses ever recorded (60-100 attoseconds). These breakthroughs could let scientists observe electron motion and chemical bond formation in real time. Physicists Uwe Bergmann and Thomas Linker write in an article for The Conversation: In this new study we used X-rays, which have 100 million times shorter wavelengths than microwaves and 100 million times more energy. This meant the resulting new X-ray laser pulses were split into different X-ray wavelengths corresponding to Rabi frequencies in the extreme ultraviolet region. Ultraviolet light has a frequency 100 million times higher than radio waves. This Rabi cycling effect allowed us to generate the shortest high-energy X-ray pulses to date, clocking in at 60-100 attoseconds. While the pulses that X-ray free-electron lasers currently generate allow researchers to observe atomic bonds forming, rearranging and breaking, they are not fast enough to look inside the electron cloud that generates such bonds. Using these new attosecond X-ray laser pulses could allow scientists to study the fastest processes in materials at the atomic-length scale and to discern different elements. In the future, we also hope to use much shorter X-ray free-electron laser pulses to better generate these attosecond X-ray pulses. We are even hoping to generate pulses below 60 attoseconds by using heavier materials with shorter lifespans, such as tungsten or hafnium. These new X-ray pulses are fast enough to eventually enable scientists to answer questions such as how exactly an electron cloud moves around and what a chemical bond actually is. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Popular Mechanics: [I]n a new study published in the journal Nature Materials, scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) have now found yet another phase, appropriately named Ice XXI. At the heart of the experiment, scientists used diamond anvil cells (DACs) -- a common device used in materials science for squeezing samples under immense pressure -- to subject water to 2 gigapascals (20,000 times higher than normal atmosphere) of pressure in just 10 milliseconds. The scientists call this kind of water "supercompressed," and it's metastable, meaning it persists for a time even when another form of ice would be more stable. And because of the immense pressure, ice forms at room temperature but the molecules are much more densely packed. "Rapid compression of water allows it to remain liquid up to higher pressures, where it should have already crystallized to ice VI," Geun Woo Lee, a co-author of the study from RISS, said in a press statement. "The structure in which liquid H2O crystallizes depends on the degree of supercompression of the liquid."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: I realize that, at this point, there are already far too many shows. Every channel, every streaming service is teeming with content demanding your attention, and there are simply too few hours in the day to watch them all. However, with that in mind, may I recommend a new show called Space Live? There's only one episode. The only potential downside is that the episode literally lasts for ever. Actually, that's inaccurate. Space Live isn't a show, it's a channel. It launched on Wednesday morning, tucked away on ITVX, and consists only of live footage of Earth broadcast from the International Space Station. It's beguiling to watch, especially for anyone who didn't realize that a person can be awestruck and bored simultaneously. It's billed as a world first. ITV has partnered with British space media company Sen to use live 4K footage from its proprietary SpaceTV-1 video camera system, mounted on the International Space Station, giving us three camera views: one of the station's docking ports, a horizon view able to show sunrises and storms, and a camera pointing straight down as the ISS passes across the planet. A tracker in the corner of the screen shows the live location of the ISS, while a real-time AI information feed provides facts about our geography and weather systems. Of course, if you wanted to be picky, you could argue it isn't exactly new. Nasa's YouTube channel has been streaming live footage from the ISS for years, and uniformly draws an audience of a few thousand. But Space Live is, if nothing else, slightly snazzier. The footage is certainly nicer: at 8.30am on Wednesday, Space Live showed gorgeous images of the sun's glare bouncing off the sea around the Bay of Biscay, while all Nasa could offer was a piece of cloth with the word "Flap" written on it. There's even a soundtrack, a constant, soothing kind of hold music that loops and loops without ever becoming fully annoying. It's an improvement, in other words. And, at least for the first orbit, it is absolutely spellbinding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.