"A federal jury in San Diego awarded Taction Technology more than $5.7 billion in damages Friday after finding that Apple infringed claims from two haptics patents," reports CNBC: Taction sued Apple in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The company alleged that Apple was...
A new Brookings Institution study notes the "strikingly physical" economic footprint of AI's buildout, from specialized chips and electricity to purpose-built data centers. (Two-thirds of a data center's costs are IT equipment, with one-third going to real estate and its associated power infrastructure.) "At an...
Waymo's self-driving car technology "continues to outperform human benchmarks," the company claimed this week. "It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes - an 82% reduction compared to human drivers." Electrek reports: We've seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That's...
"OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest AI models," reports the Associated Press, "as reports of AI agents going rogue mount." The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal...
Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports: Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy "hot electrons..." When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start...
The United States and China have agreed to "launch a dialogue" on AI, reports Reuters. On artificial intelligence, the two sides agreed to hold a dialogue on the technology's risks and benefits, with the next round of discussions set for November, and to set up a communication channel for AI-related incidents, the...
Last weekend KDE's annual Akademy conference included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE," writes The Register. This led KDE developer Nate Graham to open a discussion about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions which "rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments...
Microsoft's senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that "Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell." But that's now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists. "You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or...
"Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli AI has transformed bug discovery from "a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine," notes Canonical's blog, leading to a "recent explosion in the volume...
"Copilot+ PCs" were Microsoft's official branding for Windows 11 "AI PCs" that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch "didn't go smoothly," writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed "Recall" feature was woefully insecure: This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand...
53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data - and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites. While posted as links that weren't publicly listed, "the images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly...
A New Mexico jury on Friday "found Facebook liable for deceiving users" about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press. A New Mexico newspaper calls it "another massive legal victory" against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook "had committed tens of millions of violations of the state's...
"Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys - and it doesn't require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude. There's "a gap in...
"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid - (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 - by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com. Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the...
Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings "jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6...