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AT&T and Verizon have successfully completed their first cellphone-to-satellite video calls using AST SpaceMobile's satellites, marking a significant step toward commercial satellite networks. The Verge reports: Verizon has completed its first cellphone-to-satellite video call, while AT&T has completed its first using satellites that will be used as part of a commercial network. [...] Verizon pulled off "a live video call between two mobile devices with one connected via satellite and the other connected via Verizon's terrestrial network connection," according to a company press release. In AT&T's case, "AT&T and AST SpaceMobile have successfully completed another video call by satellite to an everyday smartphone over AT&T spectrum," per AT&T's press release. Both phone companies relied on AST's constellation of five BlueBird satellites that were launched last September for the tests. AT&T's initial video call test happened in June 2023.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by exiles from OpenAI, has introduced the first AI model that can produce either conventional output or a controllable amount of "reasoning" needed to solve more grueling problems. Anthropic says the new hybrid model, called Claude 3.7, will make it easier for users and developers to tackle problems that require a mix of instinctive output and step-by-step cogitation. "The [user] has a lot of control over the behavior -- how long it thinks, and can trade reasoning and intelligence with time and budget," says Michael Gerstenhaber, product lead, AI platform at Anthropic. Claude 3.7 also features a new "scratchpad" that reveals the model's reasoning process. A similar feature proved popular with theChinese AI model DeepSeek. It can help a user understand how a model is working over a problem in order to modify or refine prompts. Dianne Penn, product lead of research at Anthropic, says the scratchpad is even more helpful when combined with the ability to ratchet a model's "reasoning" up and down. If, for example, the model struggles to break down a problem correctly, a user can ask it to spend more time working on it. [...] Penn says that Claude's reasoning mode received additional data on business applications including writing and fixing code, using computers, and answering complex legal questions. "The things that we made improvements on are ... technical subjects or subjects which require long reasoning," Penn says. "What we have from our customers is a lot of interest in deploying our models into their actual workloads." Anthropic says that Claude 3.7 is especially good at solving coding problems that require step-by-step reasoning, outscoring OpenAI's o1 on some benchmarks like SWE-bench. The company is today releasing a new tool, called Claude Code, specifically designed for this kind of AI-assisted coding. "The model is already good at coding," Penn says. But "additional thinking would be good for cases that might require very complex planning -- say you're looking at an extremely large code base for a company."

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Microsoft has quietly launched a new version of Microsoft Office for Windows that can be used to edit documents for free, no Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license key required. From a report: This free version of Office is based on the full desktop apps, but has most features locked behind the Microsoft 365 subscription. The free version of Office for Windows includes ads that are permanently on screen when within a document in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Additionally, this new free version of Office also only allows you to save files to OneDrive, meaning no support for editing local files. To access the free version of Office, just skip the prompt to sign-in when you first run an Office app. From there, you will be given the choice to continue to use Office for free in exchange for ads and limited features. In this mode, you can open, view, and even edit documents, just like you can with the web version of Office.

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Version 2.0 of the Aqualung gapless music player has been released. Aqualung supports playback of a wide range of audio formats, ripping CDs to WAV, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3, and subscribing to podcasts via RSS or Atom feeds. The primary change in this release is the migration from GTK2 to GTK3, and dropping support for custom skins as a result.

Major corporations are reshaping their workforces around AI with Salesforce announcing it will not hire software engineers in 2025 and other companies laying off thousands while shifting focus to AI-specific roles. Duolingo has laid off thousands after implementing ChatGPT-4, UPS cut 4,000 jobs in its largest layoff in 116 years, and IBM paused hiring for back-office and HR positions that AI can now handle. Amazon is redirecting staff from Alexa to AI areas, while Intuit is laying off 10% of its non-AI workforce. Cisco plans to cut 7% of employees in its second round of job cuts this year as it prioritizes AI and cybersecurity. Salesforce reports its AI platform is boosting software engineering productivity by 30%. SAP is restructuring 8,000 positions to focus on AI-driven business areas. The trend extends globally, with Microsoft relocating thousands during an "exodus" from China, while entry-level jobs on Wall Street are becoming obsolete. A study found that 3 out of 10 companies replaced workers with AI last year, with over one-third of firms using AI likely to automate more roles in 2025. Job listings at large privately-held AI companies have dropped 14.2% over six months, JP Morgan wrote in a note seen by Slashdot. The transformation is creating new opportunities, with rising demand for AI skills in job postings. A survey of more than 1,200 users found nearly two-thirds of young professionals use AI tools at work, with 93% not worried about job threats, as business leaders view Generation Z's digital skills as beneficial for leveraging AI.

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Oracle founder Larry Ellison's agricultural technology venture Sensei Ag has largely failed to deliver on its ambitious goals despite costing more than half a billion dollars, more than he spent to purchase Hawaii's Lanai island itself. Eight years after its founding, little of the revolutionary technology Sensei promised - including AI crop breeding, robotic harvesting, and advanced sensors - is being utilized in its six greenhouses on Lanai, according to WSJ. The company has faced numerous setbacks, including greenhouses that weren't built to withstand Lanai's strong winds, solar panels that malfunctioned, and executives with limited agricultural experience. Far from its original mission to "feed the world," Sensei currently grows lettuce and cherry tomatoes primarily for Hawaii's local market, while its Canadian operations supply some East Coast supermarkets. The company has pivoted to focus on developing software and robotics at test centers in Southern California, aiming to eventually license technology packages to other indoor farms.

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More than half the world's countries have no plans to protect 30% of land and sea for nature, despite committing to a global agreement to do so less than three years ago, new analysis shows. From a report: In late 2022, nearly every country signed a once-in-a-decade UN deal to halt the destruction of Earth's ecosystems. It included a headline target to protect nearly a third of the planet for biodiversity by the end of the decade -- a goal known as "30 by 30." But as country leaders gather in Rome to conclude Cop16 negotiations to save nature, analysis of countries' plans by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that many countries are will fall short. More than half are either pledging to protect less than 30% of their territory or are not setting a numerical target.

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Cloud communications software firm Bird, one of the Netherlands' most prominent tech startups, plans to move most of its operations out of Europe, its CEO said, citing restrictive regulations and difficulties hiring skilled technology workers. From a report: "We are mostly leaving Europe as it lacks the environment we need to innovate in an AI-first era of technology," CEO Robert Vis told Reuters on Monday. "We foresee that regulations in Europe will block true innovation in a global economy moving extremely fast to AI," he said in a text message response to Reuters queries. Bird's operations in future will be mostly split between New York, Singapore and Dubai, he said.

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The kernel's slab allocator is responsible for the allocation of small (usually sub-page) chunks of memory. For many workloads, the speed of object allocation and freeing is one of the key factors in overall performance, so it is not surprising that a lot of effort has gone into optimizing the slab allocator over time. Now that the kernel is down to a single slab allocator, the memory-management developers have free rein to add complexity to it; the latest move in that direction is the per-CPU sheaves patch set from slab maintainer Vlastimil Babka.

Microsoft has canceled some leases for US data center capacity, according to TD Cowen, raising broader concerns over whether it's securing more AI computing capacity than it needs in the long term. From a report: OpenAI's biggest backer has voided leases in the US totaling "a couple of hundred megawatts" of capacity -- the equivalent of roughly two data centers -- canceling agreements with at least a couple of private operators, the US brokerage wrote Friday, citing "channel checks" or inquiries with supply chain providers. TD Cowen said its checks also suggest Microsoft has pulled back on converting so-called statements of qualifications, agreements that usually lead to formal leases. Microsoft in a statement on Monday reiterated its spending target for the fiscal year ending June, but declined to comment on TD Cowen's note. Exactly why Microsoft may be pulling some leases is unclear. TD Cowen posited in a second report on Monday that OpenAI is shifting workloads from Microsoft to Oracle as part of a relatively new partnership. The tech giant is also among the largest owners and operators of data centers in its own right and is spending billions of dollars on its own capacity. TD Cowen separately suggested that Microsoft may be reallocating some of that in-house investment to the US from abroad.

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The AlmaLinux project has published a request for comments (RFC) on rebuilding Fedora's Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), which provides additional software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives, to support older x86_64 hardware that is not supported by EPEL 10. While this may sound simple on the surface, the proposed rebuild carries a few potential risks that the AlmaLinux and EPEL contributors would like to avoid. The AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee (ALESCo) is currently considering feedback and will vote on the RFC in March.

Financial Times: Venture capitalists have always been happy to back pre-profit companies. Back in the halcyon ZIRP era, they became happy to finance pre-revenue companies. But at least even Juicero, Wag and the Fyre Festival had an actual product. From Bloomberg over the weekend: "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising more than $1 billion for his start-up at a valuation of over $30 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter -- vaulting the nascent venture into the ranks of the world's most valuable private technology companies. Greenoaks Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, is leading the deal for the start-up, Safe Superintelligence, and plans to invest $500 million, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Greenoaks is also an investor in AI companies Scale AI and Databricks. The round marks a significant valuation jump from the $5 billion that Sutskever's company was worth before, according to Reuters, which earlier reported some details of the new funding. The financing talks are ongoing and the details could still change." OK, so a jump from a $5bn valuation less than half a year ago to $30bn must mean that Safe Superintelligence has an absolutely killer product right? SSI focuses on developing safe AI systems. It isn't generating revenue yet and doesn't intend to sell AI products in the near future. "This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then," Sutskever told Bloomberg in June. "It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race."

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The Emacs extensible text editor (among other things) has made a security release to address two vulnerabilities. Emacs 30.1 has fixes for CVE-2025-1244, which is a shell-command-injection flaw in the man.el man page browser and for CVE-2024-53920, which is a code-execution vulnerability in the flymake syntax-checking mode. LWN covered the flymake problems back in December.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.18, libpq, mysql, postgresql, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), Debian (fort-validator, gnutls28, krb5, libxml2, and python-werkzeug), Fedora (chromium, openssh, proftpd, python3.8, vaultwarden, and vim), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, bind9.18, libpq, libsoup, mysql, mysql:8.0, nodejs:18, nodejs:22, postgresql, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), Red Hat (mysql, mysql:8.0, and python3), SUSE (chromedriver, dcmtk, grub2, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-23-openjdk, luanti, openssh, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, proftpd, radare2, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, netty, and nginx).

Google is preparing to abandon SMS verification codes for Gmail authentication in favor of QR codes, Gmail spokesperson Ross Richendrfer told Forbes. The move aims to address significant security vulnerabilities inherent in SMS-based verification while combating fraudulent exploitation of Google's messaging infrastructure, he said. "Just like we want to move past passwords with the use of things like passkeys, we want to move away from sending SMS messages for authentication," Richendrfer said. The transition will target "rampant, global SMS abuse" that undermines security and enables criminal schemes. SMS verification currently serves dual purposes at Google: confirming user identity and preventing service abuse. However, these codes are vulnerable to phishing, dependent on carrier security practices, and frequently exploited in "traffic pumping" scams where fraudsters profit from artificially triggered SMS messages. The forthcoming implementation will display QR codes that users scan with their phone cameras instead of entering six-digit codes. This approach eliminates shareable verification codes and reduces dependency on telecom carriers. The changes will roll out "over the next few months," the company said.

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The Los Angeles Times publishes a weekly "Boiling Point" newsletter about climate change and energy issues. And this week they examined whether the scientific fact of a change climate is reflected in the mass media: For the second year running, nonprofit consulting firm Good Energy applied its Climate Reality Check to the actual Oscar-nominated films [which] tests whether a movie and its characters acknowledge global warming... Of last year's 13 Oscar-nominated films that met Good Energy's criteria (feature-length movies set in present-day or near-future Earth) three passed the test. This year, there were 10 eligible films. Only "The Wild Robot" passed... Maybe a few years from now, studios will release a torrent of movies and shows reflecting the realities of a scary-but-still-salvageable world, helmed by producers and writers jolted into renewed awareness by the infernos. But for now, the picture is bleak. A peer-reviewed study slated for publication this month, led by Rice University English and environmental studies professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, analyzes climate change mentions in 250 of the most popular movies of the last decade. The authors found that just 12.8% of the films allude to global warming. Just 3.6% depict or mention the climate crisis in two or more scenes. "A lot of times, it's really being mentioned in passing," Schneider-Mayerson said... [Good Energy Chief Executive Anna Jane Joyner] pointed to another analysis led by Schneider-Mayerson, which found that movies passing the Climate Reality Check and released in theaters earned 10% more at the box office, on average, than films failing the test. Netflix, meanwhile, says on its website that 80% of its customers "choose to watch at least one story on Netflix that helps them better understand climate issues or highlight hopeful solutions around sustainability...." [Netflix's "Sustainability Stories" collection includes Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and Waterworld] Sponsors are interested in selling audiences on climate-friendly products, too. I was sitting in a movie theater last weekend enjoying "Captain America: Brave New World" — the latest entry in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe — when, to my surprise, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) got out of his SUV and pulled his iconic red-white-and-blue shield out of the front trunk. Yes, a front trunk, where an internal combustion engine would normally be. That meant Captain America was driving an electric vehicle, right? Indeed, he was. I did some research after I got home and learned that Wilson was driving a GMC Hummer EV, the result of a paid partnership between Marvel Studios and GMC parent company General Motors. Ironically, the movie does not at any point acknowledge global warming, the article points out (adding "Also, SUVs kill more pedestrians and cyclists than smaller cars.") "But the more movies and TV shows spotlight climate solutions — electric vehicles, solar panels, induction stoves — the more likely people are to support those solutions. For Hollywood, that's a step in the right direction."

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Apple said it planned to hire an additional 20,000 staff in the US over the next four years as part of a $500 billion American investment plan. Financial Times: The $500 billion figure [non-paywalled source], spread over Trump's second term in office, includes regular spending on thousands of US suppliers, data centres and corporate facilities, as well as new initiatives such as an academy in Michigan "to train the next generation of US manufacturers." Apple will also open a manufacturing facility in Houston to build servers that can support its artificial intelligence ambitions.

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After completing a journalism graduate degree, Carla McCanna took a job "training AI models to optimize accuracy and efficiency," according an article by Nieman Journalism Lab: Staff jobs are scarce... and the competition for them is daunting. (In 2024, the already beleaguered U.S. news industry cut nearly 5,000 jobs, up 59% from the previous year, according to an annual report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas....) For the past couple months, McCanna has been working close to full-time for [AI training data company] Outlier, picking up projects on its gig platform at about $35 per hour. Data work has quickly become her primary source of income and a hustle she's recommended [to her journalism program classmates]. "A lot of us are still looking for jobs. Three times I told someone what I do, and they're like, please send it to me," she said. "It's hard right now, and a lot of my colleagues are saying the same thing." McCanna is just one of many journalists who has been courted by Outlier to take on part-time, remote data work over the past year... Several of them told me they have taken on Outlier projects to supplement their income or replace their work in journalism entirely, because of dwindling staff jobs or freelance assignments drying up. Some are early-career journalists like McCanna, but others are reporters with over a decade of experience. One thing they all had in common? Before last year they'd never heard of Outlier or even knew that this type of work existed. Launched back in 2023, Outlier is a platform owned and managed by Scale AI, a San Francisco-based data annotation company valued at $13.8 billion. It counts among its customers the world's largest AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Outlier, and similar platforms like CrowdGen and Remotasks, use networks of remote human workers to improve the AI models of their clients. Workers are paid by the hour for tasks like labeling training data, drafting test prompts, and grading the factual accuracy and grammar of outputs. Often their work is fed back into an AI model to improve its performance, through a process called reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). This human feedback loop has been core to building models like OpenAI's GPT and Meta's Llama. Aside from direct recruitment messages, I also found dozens of recent public job postings that underscore this growing trend of hiring journalists for data work... Rather than training a replacement, McCanna sees her data work as an asset, growing her knowledge of AI tools as they continue to embed in the workplace. "Actually doing this work you realize AI models still need us ... I think it's going to be a really, really long time until they can truly write like humans."

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When it comes to application packaging, earlier this month the site Its FOSS complained that Fedora Flatpaks "are often unmaintained or broken, leading to a poor experience for users who aren't usually aware they're using them." And this apparently created friction with OBS Studio, the free/open-source screencasting and streaming app. "We are now considering the Fedora Flatpaks distribution of OBS Studio a hostile fork," OBS Studio lead Joel Bethke posted in on GitLab's page for Fedora Flatpaks. They said they were making "a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project, from your distribution. Failure to comply may result in further legal action taken...." (Issues with Fedora's packaging led "to users complaining upstream thinking they are being served the official package..." Bethke said in his original Issue. "I would also like some sort of explanation on why someone thought it was a good idea to take a Flatpak that was working perfectly fine, break it, and publish it at a higher priority to our official builds.") 23 people clicked "Like" on the original Issue — but threatening legal action only happened after Bethke felt Fedora was unresponsive, according to It's FOSS: In a comment on a video by Brodi Robertson (check pinned comment), Joel shared that folks from Fedora were not taking this issue seriously, with one of them even resorting to name-calling by labeling the OBS Studio devs as being "terrible maintainers". Since then, a major step has been taken by Neal Gompa, a well-known Fedora contributor and member of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). He has opened a new issue to remove Fedora's OBS Studio flatpak from the registry as soon as possible. But by Tuesday Bethke posted in a new comment on GitLab announcing that "a very good conversation" with the Flatpak SIG and Fedora Project Leader seemed to have cleared the tension. "We discussed the issues, how we got here, and what next steps are... [T]he OBS Project is no longer requesting a removal of IP or rebrand of the OBS Studio application provided by Fedora Flatpaks." To the issue of not knowing where to report bugs for the downstream package, "We had some very good discussion on how this might be accomplished in the medium-long term, but don't consider it a blocker at this point." As for other issues with Fedora's Flatpak for OBS Studio, "The discussion was positive and they are actively working to resolve..." And similar sentiments were echoed on Fedora's own issue tracker. "We had a good conversation today, and there is a hopeful path forward that does not require the OBS Project distancing itself from Fedora Flatpaks..."

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"A line idle for decades has been accused of starting the LA area's deadly Eaton Fire," writes Bloomberg, describing California's abandoned power lines as "a fire risk hiding in plain sight." [Abandoned power lines] fall out of use, either because they've been replaced or because the power plants they once connected to the grid shut down... Sometimes the utilities that own idled lines disconnect them from the power grid, cutting off the flow of electricity through the cables. Other times, they don't, keeping them energized. California regulations require the companies to remove power lines they don't anticipate using again, but there's no set deadline. The companies can keep idled lines in place if they foresee needing them in the future, so long as they're regularly inspected and maintained. Even those that have been unplugged from the grid can potentially pose a danger. The line under scrutiny due to the Eaton Fire is owned by Edison International's Southern California utility and was retired in 1971. Under normal circumstances, it carries no electricity, according to the company. Lawyers suing Edison allege that a January 7 power surge on a nearby, active line created a magnetic field that briefly re-energized the dormant cable, setting off the sparks that ignited the blaze. Edison said in a state filing that it is investigating that theory. State investigators have yet to announce a cause for the fire. A 2019 fire that burned 77,700 acres (31,444 hectares) was started by an old power line for a plant that closed in 2001, according to the article. PG&E, the state's largest utility, "hadn't removed it, and it stayed connected to the grid, energized." [PG&E] agreed to remove 72 permanently abandoned transmission lines — representing about 260 miles (418 kilometers) of dormant cables. The work could cost as much as $268 million spread over 10 years, the company estimated at the time. PG&E had removed 64 of the idled lines by the end of 2024, according to a spokesman. "At the right conditions, failing idle facilities can pose significant wildfire and safety risks," PG&E said in its plan to remove the equipment. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader larryjoe for sharing the news.

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