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The U.S. General Services Administration has approved Meta's AI system Llama for use by federal agencies, declaring that it meets government security and legal standards. Reuters reports: "It's not about currying favor," [said Josh Gruenbaum, the GSA's procurement lead, when asked whether tech executives are giving the government discounts to get President Donald Trump's approval]. "It's about that recognition of how do we all lock in arms and make this country the best country it could possibly be." Federal agencies will be able to deploy the tool to speed up contract review or more quickly solve information technology hiccups, among other tasks, he said.

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The Trump administration has struck a deal requiring TikTok's algorithm to be copied, retrained, and operated in the U.S. using only U.S. user data, with Oracle auditing the system and U.S. investors forming a joint venture to oversee it. The BBC reports: It comes after President Donald Trump said a deal to prevent the app's ban in the US, unless sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, had been reached with China's approval. White House officials claim the deal will be a win for the app's US users and citizens. President Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week on the proposed deal, which will set out how it will comply with US national security demands. The order will also outline a 120-day pause to the enforcement deadline to allow the deal to close. It is unclear whether the Chinese government has approved this agreement, or begun to take regulatory steps required to deliver it. However, the White House appears confident it has secured China's approval. Data belonging to the 170m users TikTok says it has in the US is already held on Oracle servers, under an existing arrangement called Project Texas. It saw US user data siphoned off due to concerns it could fall into the hands of the Chinese government. A senior White House official said that under President Trump's deal, the company would take on a comprehensive role in securing the entirety of the app for American users. They said this would include auditing and inspecting the source code and recommendation system underpinning the app, and rebuilding it for US users using only US user data.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CalMatters: A California attorney must pay a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotations generated by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court and came with a blistering opinion (PDF) stating that 21 of 23 quotes from cases cited in the attorney's opening brief were made up. It also noted that numerous out-of-state and federal courts have confronted attorneys for citing fake legal authority. "We therefore publish this opinion as a warning," it continued. "Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations -- whether provided by generative AI or any other source -- that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified." The opinion, issued 10 days ago in California's 2nd District Court of Appeal, is a clear example of why the state's legal authorities are scrambling to regulate the use of AI in the judiciary. The state's Judicial Council two weeks ago issued guidelines requiring judges and court staff to either ban generative AI or adopt a generative AI use policy by Dec. 15. Meanwhile, the California Bar Association is considering whether to strengthen its code of conduct to account for various forms of AI following a request by the California Supreme Court last month. The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam. A three-judge panel fined him for filing a frivolous appeal, violating court rules, citing fake cases, and wasting the court's time and the taxpayers money, according to the opinion. Mostafavi told CalMatters he wrote the appeal and then used ChatGPT to try and improve it. He said that he didn't know it would add case citations or make things up.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max appear to provide little resistance to scratches and scuffs around the sharp edges of the camera bump. Tech blogger Zack Nelson demonstrates this weakness in a durability test on his JerryRigEverything YouTube channel, explaining that the anodized aluminium layer on the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max "does not stick to corners very well" -- creating a weak point in the coating. This is a known issue with the electrochemical anodizing process, so it was a design decision Apple knowingly made. "For some reason, Apple didn't add a chamfer, fillet, or radius around the camera plateau, and I think it was intentional, so it looks cooler," Nelson says in the video. "But that decision to look cool out of the box is going to plague everyone who owns this phone down the road." The video shows that everyday objects, like a coin or house key carried in the same pocket as the iPhone 17 Pro, can chip away at the anodized coating around the sharp corners of the camera bump. However, that same mildly aggressive scratching on the flat surface of the camera plateau only produced dust that could be easily wiped away.

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Version 6.0.0 of the RPM Package Manager has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for multiple OpenPGP signatures per package, the ability to update previously installed PGP keys, as well as support for RPM v4 and v6 packages. See the release notes for full details.

The rise of self-driving cars could eventually cost many ride-hailing drivers their jobs -- and that's a big problem, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said. From a report: Khosrowshahi spoke about the issue onstage this month at a summit hosted by the "All-In" podcast, which posted a video of the conversation on Wednesday. At the summit, Khosrowshahi was asked about concerns that gig workers, who have played a key role in Uber's development, will eventually lose their jobs as self-driving cars become more prevalent. The Uber CEO said he expects human drivers to continue working alongside self-driving cars in Uber's network in the coming years. "For the next five to seven years, we're going to have more human drivers and delivery people, just because we're going so quickly," Khosrowshahi said. "But, I think, 10 to 15 years from now, this is going to be a real issue," he said about drivers losing their jobs.

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Microsoft is working on bringing support for setting a video as your desktop wallpaper on Windows 11. From a report: Hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, the feature lets you set an MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V, or MKV file as your wallpaper, which will play the video whenever you view the desktop. For many years, users have wanted the ability to set a video as a desktop background. It's a feature that many Linux distributions support, and macOS also supports the ability to set a moving background as your lock screen. Windows Vista did support setting videos as your wallpaper, but only as part of the Ultimate SKU via a feature called DreamScene.

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Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the AI lab builds data centers requiring 10 gigawatts of power capacity. The 10-gigawatt deployment equals 4 to 5 million GPUs -- the same number Nvidia will ship globally this year. Building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs $50 to $60 billion, including approximately $35 billion for Nvidia chips and systems. The first phase begins in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems. The investment adds Nvidia to OpenAI's investor roster alongside Microsoft, SoftBank, and Thrive Capital at a $500 billion valuation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the investment as "additive to everything that's been announced and contracted."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they've suspected for a while: China's dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable. A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with startup investors, and interviewed founders of companies. They knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and "everything around energy," but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs and Barclays who's now a partner at Kompas VC. "Everyone needs to take this kind of trip," she said.

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Subscribing to an online service is often as easy as a click of a button. Is it illegal if it takes a maze of clicks to cancel? That issue is at the heart of a civil trial beginning this week that will scrutinize the tactics Amazon uses to entice consumers to sign up for its signature Prime service -- and to steer them away from leaving. WSJ: The Federal Trade Commission alleges the online giant has duped nearly 40 million customers, in violation of consumer-protection laws. It is seeking civil penalties, refunds to consumers and a court order prohibiting Amazon from using subscription practices that could confuse or deceive customers. The case, which will unfold in a Seattle courtroom, is a top test of the agency's enforcement campaign against allegedly deceptive digital subscription practices. Amazon's Prime membership, the largest paid subscription program in the world with at least 200 million users, has helped the company become an integral part of consumers' shopping habits. The FTC, which sued Amazon in 2023, alleges the company tricked people into signing up for the service without their knowledge or consent, including by obscuring details about billing and the terms of free trials. It says Amazon created a labyrinth to make it hard to cancel, which the company dubbed "Iliad," a reference to Homer's epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. The FTC says Amazon required customers to navigate four webpages and chose from 15 options to cancel a Prime membership. The company streamlined the process in April 2023, ahead of the filing of the criminal complaint. The FTC won an initial pretrial victory last week when a federal judge ruled that Amazon did violate consumer-protection laws by taking Prime members' billing information before disclosing the terms of the membership. But he said jurors still would have to consider whether the customers gave their consent to enroll and whether Amazon provided a simple cancellation mechanism.

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Major U.S. corporations are mandating more office time but seeing minimal compliance changes. Companies now require 12% more in-office days than in early 2024, according to Work Forward data tracking 9,000 employers. Yet Americans continue working from home approximately 25% of the time, unchanged from 2023, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom's monthly survey of 10,000 Americans shows. The New York Times ordered opinion and newsroom staff to four days weekly starting November. Microsoft mandates three days beginning February for Pacific Northwest employees. Paramount and NBCUniversal gave staff ultimatums: commit to five and four days respectively or take buyouts. Amazon faced desk and parking shortages after its full-time mandate, temporarily backpedaling in Houston and New York. Nearly half of senior managers would accept pay cuts to work remotely, a BambooHR survey of 1,500 salaried employees found.

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Computers were once relatively static devices; if a peripheral was present at boot, it was unlikely to disappear while the system was operating. Those days are far behind us, though; devices can come and go at any time, often with no notice. That impermanence can create challenges for kernel code, which may not be expecting resources it is managing to make an abrupt exit. The revocable resource management patch set from Tzung-Bi Shih is meant to help with the creation of more robust — and more secure — kernel subsystems in a dynamic world.

The US will charge companies $100,000 for each new H-1B visa starting February 2026 under Project Firewall. According to a new analysis, the fee exceeds average H-1B salaries at firms like TCS where engineers earn $105,000 annually. Previous visa costs ranged from $2,000 to $33,000. Indians hold an estimated 70% of H-1B visas. The fee eliminates five to six years of profit per engineer. Typical engineers deployed to American client sites generate $150,000 to $200,000 in annual billings at 10% operating margins, producing $15,000 to $20,000 in yearly profit. J.P. Morgan states the move "prices out the utility of H-1B as a source of labor supply." But it might not be bad for the IT giants. Major Indian IT firms derive only 0.2% to 2.2% of their workforce from H-1B approvals after years of reducing visa dependence, according to India Dispatch. New approvals alone account for under 0.4% of headcount. Morgan Stanley estimates companies could offset 60% of the financial impact through increased offshoring and selective price increases. The net damage to operating profit would stay contained at around 50 basis points or a 3% to 4% hit to earnings spread across the renewal cycle. Companies plan to accelerate geographic arbitrage by routing more work to India, Canada, and Latin America. Firms can maintain their existing visa holder base while letting normal turnover occur over three to six years.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, jetty12, jetty9, jq, and pam), Fedora (curl, libssh, podman-tui, and prometheus-podman-exporter), Oracle (firefox, gnutls, kernel, and thunderbird), and SUSE (bluez, cairo, chromium, cmake, cups, firefox, frr, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, mariadb, mybatis, ognl, python-h2, and rke2).

It's not just glitches at the launch of the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses... The New York Times remains skeptical of its market share: [Meta's] smart glasses remain a niche. As of February, Meta had sold about two million of its $300 Ray-Ban Meta camera glasses since their 2023 debut, and it hopes to sell 10 million annually by the end of 2026, which is a tiny amount for a company this size. In the last decade, Meta has spent over $100 billion on its virtual and augmented reality division, which includes its smart glasses and is not profitable. Last quarter, the division reported a $4.5 billion loss, nearly the same as a year ago. "Meta's Smart Glasses Might Make You Smarter. They'll Certainly Make You More Awkward," joked a recent Wired headline. But the Wall Street Journal does report there's "a growing group of blind users... finding the devices to be more of a life-enhancing tool than a cool accessory." Jonathan Mosen, executive director at the nonprofit National Federation of the Blind said he'd like to see Meta continue to invest in the glasses. "It's giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford." He has used them a few times to record video of ride-share drivers refusing to give him and his wife a ride because she travels with a guide dog. Denying rides to people with service animals is illegal in many countries, including the U.S. Another concern for blind users is that AI assistants in general are prone to making errors, or so-called hallucinations, which may not be apparent. Aaron Preece, who is blind and editor in chief of American Foundation for the Blind's AccessWorld magazine, said Meta's glasses recently failed to correctly read the number on the door to his home. "I just can't trust it," he said. "It's more of a novelty than something I'd use on a day-to-day basis." When it comes to innovative technology, CNET seems more excited about Meta's display-controlling "neural wristband" accessory. Instead of camera-based hand tracking, these muscle-sensing bands "can register gestural moves like pinches, taps, thumb swipes, and maybe even typing over time..."

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Reddit's content became AI training data last year when Google signed a $60 million-per-year licensing agreement. But now Reddit is "in early talks" about a new deal seeking "deeper integration with Google's AI products," reports Bloomberg (citing executives familiar with the discussions). And Reddit also wants "a deal structure that could allow for dynamic pricing, where the social platform can be paid more" — with both Google and OpenAI — to "adequately reflect how valuable their data has been to these platforms..." Such licensing agreements are becoming more common as AI companies seek legal ways to train their models. OpenAI has also struck a series of partnership agreements with major media publishers such as Axel Springer SE, Time and Conde Nast to use their content in ChatGPT... Reddit remains among the most cited sources across AI platforms, according to analytics company Profound AI. However, Reddit executives have noticed that traffic coming from Google has limited value, as users seeking answers to a specific question often don't convert into becoming active Redditors, the people said. Now, Reddit is engaging with product teams at Google in hopes of finding ways to send more of its users deeper into its ecosystem of community forums, according to the executives. In return, Reddit is looking for ways to provide more high-quality data to its AI partners. Discussions between Reddit and Google have been productive, the people said. "We're midflight in our data licensing deals and still learning, but what we have seen is that Reddit data is highly cited and valued," Reddit Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong said on July 31 during a call with investors. "We'll continue to evaluate as we go."

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"New research suggests ash and soot from burning wildlands has caused more than 41,000 excess deaths annually from 2011 to 2020," reports the Los Angeles Times: By 2050, as global warming makes large swaths of North America hotter and drier, the annual death toll from smoke could reach between 68,000 and 71,000, without stronger preventive and public health measures... In the span studied, millions of people were exposed to unhealthful levels of air pollution. When inhaled, this microscopic pollution not only aggravates people's lungs, it also enters the bloodstream, provoking inflammation that can induce heart attacks and stroke. For years, researchers have struggled to quantify the danger the smoke poses. In the paper published in Nature, they report it's far greater than public health officials may have recognized. Yet most climate assessments "don't often include wildfire smoke as a part of the climate-related damages. And it turns out, by our calculation, this is one of the most important climate impacts in the U.S." The study also estimates a higher number of deaths than previous work in part because it projected mortality up to three years after a person has been exposed to wildfire smoke. It also illustrates the dangers of smoke drifting from fire-prone regions into wetter parts of the country, a recent phenomenon that has garnered more attention with large Canadian wildfires contributing to hazy skies in the Midwest and East Coast in the last several years. "Everybody is impacted across the U.S.," said Minghoa Qiu [lead author and assistant professor at Stony Brook University]. "Certainly the Western U.S. is more impacted. But the Eastern U.S. is by no means isolated from this problem."

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Many Apple Watches will soon be able to alert users about possible high blood pressure, reports Reuters — culminating six years of research and development: Apple used AI to sort through the data from 100,000 people enrolled in a heart and movement study it originally launched in 2019 to see whether it could find features in the signal data from the watch's main heart-related sensor that it could then match up with traditional blood pressure measurements, said Sumbul Ahmad Desai [Apple's vice president of health]. After multiple layers of machine learning, Apple came up with an algorithm that it then validated with a specific study of 2,000 participants. Apple's privacy measures mean that "one of the ironies here is we don't get a lot of data" outside of the context of large-scale studies, Desai said. But data from those studies "gives us a sense of, scientifically, what are some other signals that are worth pulling the thread on ... those studies are incredibly powerful." The feature, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, does not measure blood pressure directly, but notifies users that they may have high blood pressure and encourages them to use a cuff to measure it and talk to a doctor. Apple plans to roll out the feature to more than 150 countries, which Ami Bhatt, chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology, said could help people discover high blood pressure early and reduce related conditions such as heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease. Bhatt, who said her views are her own and do not represent those of the college, said Apple appears to have been careful to avoid false positives that might alarm users. But she said the iPhone maker should emphasize that the new feature is no substitute for traditional measurements and professional diagnosis. The article notes that the feature will be available in Apple Watch Series 11 models that go on sale on Friday, as well as models back to the Apple Watch Series 9.

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"Astronomers have spotted a quasi-moon near Earth," reports CNN, "and the small space rock has likely been hanging out near our planet unseen by telescopes for about 60 years, according to new research." The newly discovered celestial object, named 2025 PN7, is a type of near-Earth asteroid that orbits the sun but sticks close to our planet. Like our world, 2025 PN7 takes one year to complete an orbit around the sun... The newly found 2025 PN7 is just one of a handful of known quasi-moons with orbits near our planet, including Kamo'oalewa, which is also thought to be an ancient lunar fragment. Kamo'oalewa is one of the destinations of China's Tianwen-2 mission launched in May, which aims to collect and return samples from the space rock in 2027. The Pan-STARRS observatory located on the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii captured observations of 2025 PN7 on August 29. Archival data revealed that the object has been in an Earth-like orbit for decades. The quasi-moon managed to escape the notice of astronomers for so long because it is small and faint, said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher on the faculty of mathematical sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid who recently authored a paper about the space rock. The paper was published on September 2 in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, which is for timely non-peer-reviewed astronomical observations. The space rock swings within 186,000 miles (299,337 kilometers) of us during its closest pass of our planet, de la Fuente Marcos said.... "It can only be detected by currently available telescopes when it gets close to our planet as it did this summer," de la Fuente Marcos explained. "Its visibility windows are few and far between. It is a challenging object...." Astronomers are still trying to figure out 2025 PN7's size. About 98 feet (30 meters) across is a reasonable estimate, de la Fuente Marcos said. It also has the potential to be 62 feet (19 meters) in diameter, according to EarthSky. The space rock is currently the smallest-known quasi-moon to have orbited near Earth, de la Fuente Marcos said.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Over at the Communications of the ACM, Bard College CS Prof Valerie Barr explains why she's Feeling Cranky About AI and CS Education. Having seen CS education go through a number of we-have-to-teach-this moments over the decades — introductory programming languages, the Web, Data Science, etc. — Barr turns her attention to the next hand-wringing "what will we do" CS education moment with AI. "We're jumping through hoops without stopping first to question the run-away train," Barr writes... Barr calls for stepping back from "the industry assertion that the ship has sailed, every student needs to use AI early and often, and there is no future application that isn't going to use AI in some way" and instead thoughtfully "articulate what sort of future problem solvers and software developers we want to graduate from our programs, and determine ways in which the incorporation of AI can help us get there." From the article: In much discussion about CS education: a.) There's little interest in interrogating the downsides of generative AI, such as the environmental impact, the data theft impact, the treatment and exploitation of data workers. b.) There's little interest in considering the extent to which, by incorporating generative AI into our teaching, we end up supporting a handful of companies that are burning billions in a vain attempt to each achieve performance that is a scintilla better than everyone else's. c.) There's little interest in thinking about what's going to happen when the LLM companies decide that they have plateaued, that there's no more money to burn/spend, and a bunch of them fold—but we've perturbed education to such an extent that our students can no longer function without their AI helpers.

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