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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta on Friday published an update on how it plans to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European law that aims to promote competition in digital marketplaces, where the law concerns the company's messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp. As Meta notes in a blog post, the DMA requires that it provide an option in WhatsApp and Messenger to connect with interoperable third-party messaging services and apps. Meta says it's building notifications into WhatsApp and Messenger to inform users about these third-party integrations and alert them when a newly compatible third-party messaging app comes online. The company also says it's introducing an onboarding flow in WhatsApp and Messenger where users can learn more about third-party chats and switch them on. From the flow, users will be able to set up a designated folder for third-party messages or, alternatively, opt for a combined inbox. In 2025, Meta will roll out group functionality for third-party chats, and, in 2027, it'll launch voice and video calling in accordance with the DMA. And at some unspecified point in the future, Meta will bring "rich messaging" features for third-party chats to WhatsApp and Messenger, like reactions, direct replies, typing indicators and read receipts, the company says. "We will keep collaborating with third-party messaging services in order to provide the safest and best experience," Meta wrote in the post. "Users will start to see the third-party chat option when a third-party messaging service has built, tested and launched the necessary technology to make the feature a positive and secure user experience."

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An intense heatwave across the US west has brought unusually warm temperatures to the region -- some of the highest of the season -- and broken heat records. From a report: Millions of Americans from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Seattle are under heat alerts. Even before this latest bout of extreme weather, which began on Wednesday and is expected to last through the weekend, summer 2024 was already considered the hottest summer on record. In California, the desert city of Indio saw its hottest 5 September at 121F (49.4C), breaking a previous record of 120 from 2020, while Palm Springs tied its heat record for the day at 121F. The city recorded its all-time high of 124F in July. The Los Angeles region has not yet broken any records -- although Burbank tied for its all-time high of 114F -- the area is bracing for a days-long stretch of triple-digit temperatures. This week Phoenix marked 100 straight days at 100F or more and its hottest 5 September at 116F. In the Pacific north-west, schools around Portland closed early due to the heat and the typically cool Seattle broke its daily temperature record on Thursday at 89F. This summer was the hottest on record across the world and the Earth saw its hottest day in recorded history on 22 July, which broke a record set the previous day. Heatwaves are growing more frequent, more extreme and longer-lasting in the US west and across the world as the climate crisis drives increasingly severe and dangerous weather conditions. Heatwaves are the weather event most directly affected by the climate crisis, an expert told the Guardian in July.

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Code review is in high demand, and short supply, for most open-source projects. Reviewer time is precious, so any tool that can lighten the load is worth exploring. That is why Jesse Brandeburg and Kamel Ayari decided to test whether tools like ChatGPT could review patches to provide quick feedback to contributors about common problems. In a talk at the Netdev 0x18 conference this July, Brandeburg provided an overview of an experiment using machine learning to review emails containing patches sent to the netdev mailing list. Large-language models (LLMs) will not be replacing human reviewers anytime soon, but they may be a useful addition to help humans focus on deeper reviews instead of simple rule violations.

Kaspersky has reached an agreement to transfer its U.S. customers to UltraAV, a Boston-based antivirus provider. The move comes in the wake of a White House ban on Kaspersky products. Under the deal, U.S. users will maintain their existing subscriptions and receive "reliable anti-virus protection" through UltraAV, which will offer additional features such as VPN and identity theft protection. Kaspersky will contact customers in the coming days with instructions for activating their new accounts.

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When most students get As, grading loses all meaning as a way to encourage exceptional work and recognize excellence. From a report: Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8. The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A. Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement. If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend -- to themselves and to others -- that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses. All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book "Academically Adrift," the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students "showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing," with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been a rough week for OSOM Products. The company has been embroiled in legal controversy stemming from a lawsuit filed by a former executive. Now, Android Authority has learned that the company is effectively shutting down later this week. OSOM Products was formed in 2020 following the disbanding of Essential, a smartphone startup led by Andy Rubin, the founder of Android. Essential collapsed following the poor sales of its first smartphone, the Essential Phone, as well as a loss of confidence in Rubin due to allegations of sexual misconduct at his previous stint at Google. Although Essential as a company was on its way out after Rubin's departure, many of its most talented hardware designers and software engineers remained at the company, looking for another opportunity to build something new. In 2020, the former head of R&D at Essential, Jason Keats, along with several other former executives and employees came together to form OSOM, which stands for "Out of Sight, Out of Mind." The name reflected their desire to create privacy-focused products such as the OSOM Privacy Cable, a USB-C cable with a switch to disable data signaling, and the OSOM OV1, an Android smartphone with lots of privacy and security-focused features.

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The NGINX team has announced that official NGINX open-source development has moved away from Mercurial to GitHub, and the project will now be taking contributions in the form of pull requests:

Additionally, starting today, we will begin accepting bugs reports, feature requests and enhancements directly through GitHub, under the "Issues" tab. Moreover, we've moved our community forums to the GitHub "Discussions" area, where you will now be able to engage in conversation, ask, and answer questions.

[...] We understand that changes like these may require adjustment, so to give you more time, we will continue accepting patches and provide community support via mailing lists until December 31st, 2024.

An anonymous reader shares a report: ChatGPT's 200 million weekly active users have helped propel OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, to a $100 billion valuation. But outside the mainstream there's still plenty of money to be made -- especially if you're catering to the underworld. Illicit large language models (LLMs) can make up to $28,000 in two months from sales on underground markets, according to a study published last month in arXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University. That's just the tip of the iceberg, according to the study, which looked at more than 200 examples of malicious LLMs (or malas) listed on underground marketplaces between April and October 2023. The LLMs fall into two categories: those that are outright uncensored LLMs, often based on open-source standards, and those that jailbreak commercial LLMs out of their guardrails using prompts. "We believe now is a good stage to start to study these because we don't want to wait until the big harm has already been done," says Xiaofeng Wang, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, and one of the coauthors of the paper. "We want to head off the curve and before attackers can incur huge harm to us." While hackers can at times bypass mainstream LLMs' built-in limitations meant to prevent illegal or questionable activity, such instances are few and far between. Instead, to meet demand, illicit LLMs have cropped up. And unsurprisingly, those behind them are keen to make money off the back of that interest.

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PwC has demanded staff spend less time working from home -- and it's going to start tracking their location to ensure they comply. From a report: The accountancy firm informed its 26,000 U.K. employees in a memo that from January they'll be expected to be at their desks -- or with clients -- at least three days a week, or for 60% of their time. Previously staff were expected to spend two to three days working in-person. What's more, to ensure staffers are not secretly working from home (or at a beach) when they shouldn't be, the company will monitor how often they're working from the office, in the same way it monitors how many chargeable hours they work. Every month, workers will be sent information about their "individual working location data" which will even be shared with their in-house career coaches, according to the Financial Times.

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The electric revolution has given way to a gradual transformation, but the groundwork is already being laid for the future. From a report: The Department of Energy recently highlighted this by noting the number of publicly available EV chargers has doubled since President Biden was inaugurated on January 20, 2021. According to the government, there are now more than 192,000 publicly available charging ports in the United States and around 1,000 are being added every week. The Department of Energy credited the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as aiding the buildout, which is helping to bring charging infrastructure to rural, suburban, and urban communities. The law provided funding for a $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program. A big chunk of that money is now heading out as the Biden administration recently announced $521 million in grants to support projects in 29 states as well as the District of Columbia and a few tribal areas. This will result in more than 9,200 charging ports being added, which means each one will cost roughly $56,630 -- although California's West Coast Truck Charging and Fueling Corridor Project also includes a hydrogen component.

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Typing skills among Generation Z have declined sharply, despite their digital nativity, according to recent data. The U.S. Department of Education reports that only 2.5% of high school graduates in 2019 took a keyboarding course, down from 44% in 2000. Many educators assume Gen Z already possesses typing skills due to their familiarity with technology. However, access to devices doesn't automatically translate into proficiency, WSJ reports. Some schools are addressing this gap by introducing typing competitions and formal instruction when students receive Chromebooks. The shift towards mobile devices is contributing to the decline in traditional typing skills. Canvas, an online learning platform, reports that 39% of student assignments between March and May were uploaded from mobile devices, contrasting sharply with teachers who completed over 90% of their work on computers.

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Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the Linux man pages for the last four years, has announced that he will have to stop that work.

I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Work on realtime preemption for the Linux kernel got its start almost exactly 20 years ago (though it had its roots in earlier work, of course). It is fair to say that finishing that job has taken a bit longer than anybody involved would have expected. Now, though, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has posted a brief patch series making it possible to enable realtime preemption in the mainline kernel on three architectures.

With the printk bits merged, PREEMPT_RT could be enabled on X86, ARM64 and Risc-V. These three architectures merged required changes over the years leaving me in a position where I have no essential changes in the queue that would affect them.

Congratulations are due to the many developers who have worked on this project for the last two decades.

OpenAI plans to launch a new AI model, GPT-Next, by year-end, promising a 100-fold increase in power over GPT-4 without significantly higher computing demands, according to a leaked presentation by an OpenAI Japan executive. The model, codenamed "Strawberry," incorporates "System 2 thinking," allowing for deliberate reasoning rather than mere token prediction, according to previous reports. GPT-Next will also generate high-quality synthetic training data, addressing a key challenge in AI development. Tadao Nagasaki of OpenAI Japan unveiled plans for the model, citing architectural improvements and learning efficiency as key factors in its enhanced performance.

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Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bubblewrap, flatpak), Debian (libxml2), Fedora (lua-mpack, mingw-python3, python-django, python-django4.2, python3.11, python3.13, and python3.9), Oracle (bubblewrap, flatpak), Red Hat (fence-agents, python-urllib3, resource-agents, and wget), Slackware (expat and mozilla), SUSE (buildah, chromium, firefox, gradle, java-1_8_0-ibm, kubernetes1.26, postgresql16, python-Django, python312-pip, and systemd), and Ubuntu (python-aiohttp).

Ben Werdmuller, an entrepreneur who leads tech for ProPublica, writes on the trust crisis brewing in Meta's Threads app. He posted a quick comment about the Internet Archive's legal troubles, only to find it blew up in unexpected ways. Turns out, Threads' algorithm tossed his post to folks way outside his usual crowd, and they weren't happy about the lack of context. He writes: The comments that really surprised me were the ones that accused me of engagement farming. I've never received these before, and it made me wonder about the underlying assumptions. Why would this be engagement farming? Why would someone do this? Why would they assume that about me? Turns out, Meta's been secretly paying select "creators" up to $5,000 per viral post, turning the platform into a digital gold rush. Now, every post is suspect.

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The largest dam removal project in U.S. history has been completed with the demolition of four dams on the Klamath River, marking a significant victory for tribal nations on the Oregon-California border who have long fought to restore the river to its natural state. However, as CNN's Rachel Ramirez and the BBC's Lucy Sherriff both highlight, the restoration of salmon populations and surrounding ecosystems is "only just beginning." From the report: The removal of the four hydroelectric dams -- Iron Gate Dam, Copco Dams 1 and 2, and JC Boyle Dam -- allows the region's iconic salmon population to swim freely along the Klamath River and its tributaries, which the species have not been able to do for over a century since the dams were built. Mark Bransom, chief executive officer of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit group created to oversee the project, said it was a "celebratory moment," as his staff members, conservationists, government officials and tribal members gathered and cheered on the bank of the river near where the largest of the dams, Iron Gate, once stood. [...] The Yurok Tribe in Northern California are known as the "salmon people." To them, the salmon are sacred species that are central to their culture, diet and ceremonies. As the story goes, the spirit that created the salmon also created humans and without the fish, they would cease to exist. Amy Bowers-Cordalis, a member of and general counsel for the Yurok Tribe, said seeing those dams come down meant "freedom" and the start of the river's "healing process." [...] The utility company PacifiCorps -- a subsidiary of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Energy -- built the dams in the early to mid-1900s, without tribal consent, to generate electricity for parts of the growing West. But the dams severely disrupted the lifecycle of the salmon, blocking the fish from accessing their historic spawning grounds. Then there's the climate crisis: Warm water and drought-fueled water shortages in the Klamath River killed salmon eggs and young fish due to low oxygen and lack of food and allowed the spread of viruses. [...] As for the reason the dams were constructed in the first place -- electricity -- removing them won't hurt the power supply much, experts say. Even at full capacity, all four dams produced less than 2% of PacifiCorp's energy, according to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation. Up next is ramping up restoration work. Bransom said they plan to put down nearly 16 billion seeds of almost 100 native species across 2,200-acres of land in the Klamath River Basin. And after more than a century, the fish can now swim freely. Yurok's Bowers-Cordalis said seeing the river reconnected is a form of giving their land back, which is really the "ultimate reward."

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Researchers have discovered that people with depression have an expanded brain network, specifically the frontostriatal salience network, which is 73% larger compared to healthy individuals. "It's taking up more real estate on the brain surface than we see is typical in healthy controls," said Dr Charles Lynch, a co-author of the research, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. He added that expansion meant the size of other -- often neighboring -- brain networks were smaller. The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal Nature, Lynch and colleagues report how they used precision functional mapping, a new approach to brain imaging that analyses a host of fMRI (functional MRI) scans from each individual. The team applied this method to 141 people with depression and 37 people without it, enabling them to measure accurately the size of each participant's brain networks. They then took the average size for each group. They found that a part of the brain called the frontostriatal salience network was expanded by 73% on average in participants with depression compared with healthy controls. These findings were supported by an analysis of single brain scans previously collected from 932 healthy people and 299 with depression. The team said the size of this brain network in people with depression did not change with time, mood or transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment. However, brain signals between different parts of the network became less synchronised when participants had certain symptoms of depression, with these changes also associated with the severity of future symptoms. The team added that an analysis of brain scans from 57 children who went on to develop depression as adolescents revealed this brain network was expanded years before their symptoms developed, while it was also expanded in adults with late onset depression. The researchers said this suggested an expanded brain network could be a risk factor for developing depression, rather than a consequence of the condition. However, they said it was unclear to what extent this enlarged network was the result of genetics or experiences, and whether the association with depression arose from this expansion or from other brain networks consequently being smaller. The team added that their results could offer a way to explore whether certain people may be at increased risk of developing depression, and could help develop personalised treatments.

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Qualcomm has explored the possibility of acquiring portions of Intel's design business to boost the company's product portfolio, Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The mobile chipmaker has examined acquiring different pieces of Intel, which is struggling to generate cash and looking to shed business units and sell off other assets, the people said. Intel's client PC design business is of significant interest to Qualcomm executives, one of the sources said, but they are looking at all of the company's design units. Other pieces of Intel such as the server segment would make less sense for Qualcomm to acquire, another source with knowledge of Qualcomm's operations said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells. But given a chance, what might this web of impulses do if granted a moment of freedom? An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University in the US and the University of Florence in Italy took steps to find out, putting a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface. Through a series of experiments, the researchers showed it was possible to use the mushroom's electrophysiological activity as a means of translating environmental cues into directives, which could, in turn, be used to drive a mechanical device's movements. "By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment," says senior researcher Rob Shepherd, a materials scientist at Cornell. By applying algorithms based on the extracellular electrophysiology of P. eryngii mycelia and feeding the output into a microcontroller unit, the researchers used spikes of activity triggered by a stimulus -- in this case, UV light -- to toggle mechanical responses in two different kinds of mobile device. In controlled experiments, the team used the signals from a fungal culture to govern the movements of a five-limbed soft robot and a four-wheeled untethered vehicle. They were able to influence and override the 'natural' impulses produced by the fungi, demonstrating an ability to harness the system's sensory abilities to meet an end goal. "This kind of project is not just about controlling a robot," says Cornell bioroboticist Anand Mishra. "It is also about creating a true connection with the living system. Because once you hear the signal, you also understand what's going on. Maybe that signal is coming from some kind of stresses. So you're seeing the physical response, because those signals we can't visualize, but the robot is making a visualization." The research has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

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