An anonymous reader shares a report: An underground website called OnlyFake is claiming to use "neural networks" to generate realistic looking photos of fake IDs for just $15, radically disrupting the marketplace for fake identities and cybersecurity more generally. This technology, which 404 Media has verified produces fake IDs nearly instantly, could streamline everything from bank fraud to laundering stolen funds. In our own tests, OnlyFake created a highly convincing California driver's license, complete with whatever arbitrary name, biographical information, address, expiration date, and signature we wanted. The photo even gives the appearance that the ID card is laying on a fluffy carpet, as if someone has placed it on the floor and snapped a picture, which many sites require for verification purposes. 404 Media then used another fake ID generated by this site to successfully step through the identity verification process on OKX. OKX is a cryptocurrency exchange that has recently appeared in multiple court records because of its use by criminals. Rather than painstakingly crafting a fake ID by hand -- a highly skilled criminal profession that can take years to master -- or waiting for a purchased one to arrive in the mail with the risk of interception, OnlyFake lets essentially anyone generate fake IDs in minutes that may seem real enough to bypass various online verification systems. Or at least fool some people. "The era of rendering documents using Photoshop is coming to an end," an announcement posted to OnlyFake's Telegram account reads. As well as "neural networks," the service claims to use "generators" which create up to 20,000 documents a day. The service's owner, who goes by the moniker John Wick, told 404 Media that hundreds of documents can be generated at once using data from an Excel table.

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Social media company Snap said on Monday that it would lay off 10% of its global workforce, or around 500 employees, in part to "promote in-person collaboration." From a report: The company has executed multiple rounds of layoffs since 2022, most recently in November, when it trimmed a small number of product employees. The company expects it will incur charges ranging from $55 million to $75 million, according to a regulatory filing. The company's last major round of cuts was in August 2022, when it laid off 20% of staff and restructured its business lines.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Bethesda's upcoming Indiana Jones game is also tentatively set to launch on Sony's PlayStation 5 console. We got our first glimpse of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle during Microsoft's Xbox Developer Direct event last month, where it was announced for Xbox and PC. A source familiar with Microsoft's plans tells The Verge that Bethesda is also considering bringing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to PS5. A new multi-platform approach for certain Xbox games is emerging inside Microsoft, we're told, with the company weighing up which titles will remain exclusive and others that will appear on Switch or PS5 in the future. Indiana Jones appears to be part of this new wave of multi-platform games. While Bethesda will launch its Indiana Jones game first as an Xbox console exclusive, it's currently set to have a rather short period of exclusivity we're told. A release for PS5 is being considered for some months later, with Bethesda tentatively targeting a December 2024 launch for the Xbox and PC versions.

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The pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift that proliferated on social media late last month originated from an online challenge to break safety mechanisms designed to block people from generating lewd images with artificial intelligence, according to social network analysis company Graphika. Bloomberg: For weeks, users of internet forum 4chan have taken part in daily competitions to find words and phrases that could help them bypass the filters on popular image-generation services, which include Microsoft Designer and OpenAI's DALL-E, the researchers found. The ultimate goal was to create sexual images of prominent female figures such as singers and politicians. "While viral pornographic pictures of Taylor Swift have brought mainstream attention to the issue of AI-generated non-consensual intimate images, she is far from the only victim," said Cristina Lopez G., a senior analyst at Graphika, in an email. "In the 4chan community where these images originated, she isn't even the most frequently targeted public figure. This shows that anyone can be targeted in this way, from global celebrities to school children."

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From mergers to AI, the EU's aggressive rule-making hampers its ability to compete with China and the U.S. Greg Ip, writing for WSJ: These are humbling times for Europe. The continent barely escaped recession late last year as the U.S. boomed. It is losing out to the U.S. on artificial intelligence, and to China on electric vehicles. There is one field where the European Union still leads the world: regulation. Having set the standard on regulating mergers, carbon emissions, data privacy, and e-commerce competition, the EU now seeks to do the same on AI. In December it unveiled a sweeping draft law that bans certain types of AI, tightly regulates others, and imposes huge fines for violators. Its executive arm, the European Commission, might investigate Microsoft's tie-up with OpenAI as potentially anticompetitive. Never before has "America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates" so aptly captured each region's comparative advantage. The technocrats who staff the EU in Brussels aren't anti-free market. Just the opposite: they still believe in free trade, unlike the U.S. or China. Much of their regulation is aimed at protecting consumers and competition from meddling national governments. But there's a trade-off between consumer protection and the profit motive that drives investment and innovation, and the EU might be getting that trade-off wrong. For example, to preserve competition, European regulators have resisted mergers that leave just a handful of mobile phone carriers per market. As a result Europe now has 43 groups running 102 mobile operators serving a population of 474 million, while the U.S. has three major networks serving a population of 335 million, according to telecommunications consultant John Strand. China and India are even more concentrated. European mobile customers as a result pay only about a third of what Americans do. But that's why European carriers invest only half as much per customer and their networks are commensurately worse, Strand said: "Getting a 5G signal in Germany is like finding a Biden supporter at a Trump rally." Putting European networks on a par with the U.S. would cost about $300 billion, he estimated. This has knock-on effects on Europe's tech sector. Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson's sales in Europe suffer in part because many carriers are too small and unprofitable to update to the latest 5G networks. "Europe has prioritized shorter-term low consumer prices at the expense of quality infrastructure," chief executive Borje Ekholm told me in Davos earlier this month. "I'm very concerned about Europe. We need to invest much more in infrastructure, in being digital."

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How does Samsung defend itself against the notion that its phone cameras are spitting out fake AI photos of not only the Moon, but most anything else you'd care to aim them at these days? For starters, the company's head of product is saying that every photo is fake. The Verge: Samsung EVP Patrick Chomet told TechRadar recently: "There was a very nice video by Marques Brownlee last year on the moon picture. Everyone was like, 'Is it fake? Is it not fake?' There was a debate around what constitutes a real picture. And actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you're seeing], and it doesn't mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, 'I took that picture,' but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene -- is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop."

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The "technology building blocks" for space solar are already available, reports Clean Technica. "It's just a matter of scaling, systems integration, and adjustments for space-hardiness." And several groups are looking at it — including the U.S. Space Force To help push costs down, the California Institute of Technology has proposed a sandwich-type solar module that integrates solar harvesting along with conversion to a radio frequency into one compact package, accompanied by a built-in antenna. Last month researchers at the school wrapped up a months-long, in-space test of different types of solar cells. Another approach is illustrated by the Michigan startup Virtus Solis, an industry partner of the University of Bristol. Last June the company and the school received £3.3 million in funding from the UK Net Zero Innovation program, for developing an open-source model for testing the performance of large, centralized antennas in space. "The concept depends upon the use of gigascale antenna arrays capable of delivering over 2GW of power from space onto similar gigascale antenna arrays either at sea or on the ground," the school explained. As for how such a thing would be launched into space, that's where the U.S. Space Force comes in. Last August, the Space Force awarded a small business contract to the U.S. startup Orbital Composites. The company is tasked with the mission of developing its patented "quantum antenna" and in-space fabrication tools for secure communications in space applications, including space-to-space as well as space-to-Earth and vice versa. The basic idea is to let 3D printing doing much of the work in space. According to Orbital, in-space fabrication would save more than 100 times the cost of applying conventional fabrication methods to large-scale orbiting antennas. "By harnessing the potential of In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM), the company eyes the prospect of creating significantly larger space antennas," Orbital Composites explains. "By fabricating antennas in space, larger and more complex designs are possible that eliminate the constraints of launch and rocket fairings...." If you're guessing that a hookup between Virtus and Orbital is in the works, that's a good guess. On February 1, at the SpaceCOM conference in Orlando, Florida, Virtus Solis let slip that it is working with Orbital Composites on a space solar pilot project. If all goes according to plan, the project will be up and running in 2027, deploying Virtus's robot-enabled fabrication system with Orbital's 3D printing. As of this writing the two companies have not posted details, but Space News picked up the thread. "The 2027 mission is designed to showcase critical power-generation technologies including in-space assembly of solar panels and transmission of more than one kilowatt to Earth," Space News explained. "The news release calls the 2027 mission "a precursor to large-scale commercial megawatt-class solar installations in space by 2030...." To be clear, Orbital's press release about its new Space Force quantum antenna contract does not mention anything in particular about space solar. However, the pieces of the puzzle fit. Along with the Virtus and Grumman connections, in October of 2022 Orbital won a small business contract through SpaceWERX, the Space Force's innovative technologies funding arm, to explore the capabilities of ISAM systems. "SpaceWERX comes under the umbrella of the U.S. Air Force's AFWERX innovation branch, which has developed a program called SSPIDR, short for Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research Project," the article points out. (While Virtus believes most space-based solar power systems could deliver megawatt hours of electricity at prices comparable to today's market.)

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"When Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO in February 2014, the software company was mired in mediocrity," writes CNBC, noting that Microsoft's market cap was just over $300 billion. "A decade later, Microsoft's valuation has swelled tenfold, to $3.06 trillion, making it the world's most valuable public company, ahead of Apple." (And it's also "firmly entrenched as a leader in key areas, such as cloud and artificial intelligence.") As Nadella marks his 10-year anniversary at the helm, he's widely praised across the tech industry for changing the narrative at Microsoft, whose stock fell 30% during Ballmer's 14 years at the top. In that era, the company was squelched by Google in web search and mobile and was completely left behind in social media. Many tech industry analysts and investors would say that, thanks largely to Nadella, Microsoft is now set up to be a powerhouse for the foreseeable future... In a 2020 interview, Pat Gelsinger, then CEO of VMware, said offering his company's software on Microsoft's Azure cloud was akin to a "Middle East peace treaty...." In the Nadella age, Microsoft has also contributed to open-source projects, released software under open-source licenses and released a version of its Teams communications app for Linux... In 2018, Nadella came to believe in the idea of buying GitHub just 20 minutes after Nat Friedman, then a Microsoft corporate vice president, started pitching him on it. Right away, Nadella suggested that Friedman become GitHub's new CEO, Friedman said. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for the code-storage startup... While Nadella may not bring as much entertainment value, he's proven to be more effective than Ballmer when it comes to dealmaking. In addition to GitHub, Nadella has made pricey acquisitions such as LinkedIn, Minecraft parent Mojang, and Nuance Communications that have contributed to Microsoft's top line. More recently, Nadella helped Microsoft land the $75 billion acquisition of game publisher Activision Blizzard... The article also adds that Microsoft "looked at buying TikTok in the U.S. in 2020, but nothing came of those discussions."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Drive: General Motors was one of the first to foray into plug-in hybrids, but it abandoned them amid the hype for electric vehicles. Now that automakers are running up against the current limits of EV demand though, they're looking for other ways to curb fleet emissions. In GM's case, that way is an about-face and return to PHEVs after completely dismissing their potential just a few years ago. "Our forward plans include bringing our plug-in hybrid technology to select vehicles in North America," said GM CEO Mary Barra during a Q4 earnings call transcribed by Automotive News. Barra added that GM still aimed to eliminate its light-duty vehicles' emissions by 2035, but said that hybrids will fill in the gaps where needed "from a compliance perspective." She didn't specify which segments they may occupy, but going by GM's history, they'll probably be brilliantly engineered and utterly neglected by marketing... GM's EV ambitions have been tempered by recalls and lukewarm product launches such as the GMC Hummer EV and aforementioned ">Blazer EV. Now, with EV demand potentially plateauing (at least for now), automakers are returning to the proven, less compromising option of hybrids.

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Unfortunately for Elena, the laboratory information management system (LIMS) her team used was being sunsetted by the vendor, Initech. She's a biochemist working in a pathology department, and this software is vital to tracking the tests need, the tests already run, and providing critical notifications about abnormal test results.

Since Initech was sunsetting its products, the hospital system put out an RFQ for a replacements, and after a multi-year bidding process, offered the contract for replacing the software to Initech.

And thus, IniLab went away, and was replaced by IniHeal. Gone was the classic terminal interface that everyone had learned to use, and in its place was a "user friendly" GUI- a GUI that buried functionality behind fifteen clicks, had no meaningful keyboard shortcuts, and was constantly changing as they pushed updates, making it impossible to adjust to.

Also gone was the IniLab scripting language. IniLab's scripting language was how they had assembled workflows for laboratory processes. You could have fine grained control of which scripts tied to which kinds of tests, and even build custom workflows as one-offs, if necessary. They had many thousands of lines of code that needed to be ported over into IniHeal. The problem was IniHeal's approach to scripting was… well, bad.

First, IniHeal doesn't allow you write scripts. Instead, it has a pair of "rule" files. The marketing copy calls these "declarative", and promises that they're an upgrade. In practice, these are gigantic files that contain a set of rules that are evaluated for every test and every sample.

But the worse problem in IniHeal is how it lets you handle data. In IniLab, if you wanted tho patient's age, you might reference the field by name: Patient.age. In IniLab, you need to use the PPPPLL. What is the PPPPLL?

PPPPLL stands for "position" and "length". Instead of referencing a field by name, you have to reference the field by its byte offset and length. So Patient.age might be [091001]. And no, there's no easy way to create constants or variables to hold your PPPPLLs, you just have to know that [091001] is age, and hope that the input data never changes its layout.

Now, one of the things Elena noticed while techs were on-site is that the length of the date time fields was 32 bits, and the data was seconds since the Unix epoch. So she asked one of the senior developers "Hey, is this software Year 2038 safe?"

The developer laughed. "I'll be retired by then."

The final insult to injury is that this software wasn't installed on any laboratory workstations. Instead, they had to use Remote Desktop to access it inside of a VM. While the environment was theoretically locked down so that the only program you could run was IniHeal, in practice it was trivially easy to get to a desktop inside the VM.

Curious, Elena poked around. She not only found the installation logs from her lab's deployment, but the installation logs from several other labs. These logs included various internal and private details, including account passwords. Somehow, log files from client installs had ended up in their installation media and were deployed to every client site.

Elena reported the potential data breach. The final finding was that the password in question was long defunct, which led management to decide "well, that's no problem then."

IniHeal has a slogan about equipping customers with innovative tools, but Elena proposes a new one:

"The Q in IniHeal is for Quality."

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Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue shared this report from WION: : The Hong Kong branch of a multinational company has lost $25.6 million after a scammer used deepfake technology to pose as the firm's chief financial officer (CFO) in a video conference call and ordered money transfers, according to the police, in what is being highlighted as first of its kind cases in the city. The transaction was ordered during a meeting where it was found that everyone present on the video call except the victim were deepfakes of real people, said the Hong Kong police, on Friday (Feb 2)... Scammers in this case used deepfake technology to turn publicly available video and other footage of staff members into convincing meeting participants.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer Microsoft released the first Windows Server 2025 Insider preview build last week. However, soon after, a newer version was leaked online. As first reported by Windows Latest, the leaked version contains some new in-development features, including new settings for a Windows 'sudo' command. These settings are only available after enabling developer mode, and the sudo command does not currently work from the command line yet, showing it is early in development. However, the sudo settings provide some clues as to how the command will work, with the ability to run sudo applications 'In a new windows', 'With input disabled', and 'Inline'.... It is important to note that Microsoft commonly tests new features in preview builds that do not make it into the production builds. Obligatory XKCD.

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The Orange County Register reports: The new Pixar Place Hotel next door to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure is designed to look like you've walked onto the Pixar Animation Studios campus in Emeryville with concept drawings, character maquettes and final designs sprinkled throughout the hotel. "For those of you who are into the creative process, I think you'll be really happy. This hotel really celebrates that," Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter said during the opening ceremony for the hotel. "You get to see rough drawings, color studies and animation sketches as the animators were working. It really feels like you're walking into Pixar in a way when you step in here." The multimillion-dollar transformation of the former Paradise Pier Hotel into the new Pixar Place Hotel debuted on Tuesday, January 30 after three years in the making at the Disneyland resort in Anaheim. The front lobby of the hotel is intended to feel like a gallery of curated artwork and custom creations inspired by Pixar's famed studio in Northern California. The rear lobby takes visitors through the animated filmmaking process from hand-drawn sketches to wire-frame character designs. Red, yellow and blue bursts of primary colors serve as bold accents at the front desk in contrast to the muted colors of modern hotel designs. More details from the Los Angeles Times: The showcase piece of the lobby is a large mobile, situated above the Pixar lamp and ball, with abstracted, stained glass-like figures from "The Incredibles," "Wall-E," "Finding Nemo" and more. They are flanked by colored panels, which react to the music played in the area, an effect that is of course better seen in the evening. "Pixar is a balance of sophistication and whimsy that really is core to their values," said Kirstin Makela, an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's secretive arm devoted to theme park experiences. "They're a studio that's been at the cutting edge of what they do. They take it very seriously that their characters are represented in that high esteem that they deserve because they are works of art. "So it really is about creating a space that feels like a living art gallery that allows for the work to be elevated and feel celebrated, and allows for the work to get that dynamic pop of color and energy," Makela continued... [I]ncluded in the rooms is the hardbound "The Art of Pixar" book, and various depictions of the Pixar lamp and ball, from an actual lamp on the desk to traces of the ball and the lamp in the bedding, carpeting and decorative pillows... In a sampling of room rates throughout the year, I found nothing lower than $405 per night for a standard room, and about $100 more for high-traffic holiday months.

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Slashdot reader Unpopular Opinions requests suggestions from the Slashdot community: Lately a boom of companies decided to play their "nice guy" card, providing us with a trove of information about our own sites, DNS servers, email servers, pretty much anything about any online service you host. Which is not anything new... Companies have been doing this for decades, except as paid services you requested. Now the trend is basically anyone can do it over my systems, and they are always more than happy to sell anyone, me included, my data they collected without authorization or consent. It's data they never had the rights to collect and/or compile to begin with, including data collected thru access attempts via known default accounts (Administrator, root, admin, guest) and/or leaked credentials provided by hacked databases when a few elements seemingly match... "Just block those crawlers"? That's what some of those companies advise, but not only does the site operator have to automate it themself, not all companies offer lists of their source IP addresses or identify them. Some use multiple/different crawler domain names from their commercial product, or use cloud providers such as Google Cloud, AWS and Azure â" so one can't just block access to their company's networks without massive implications. They also change their own information with no warning, and many times, no updates to their own lists. Then, there is the indirect cost: computing cost, network cost, development cost, review cycle cost. It is a cat-and-mice game that has become very boring. With the raise of concerns and ethical questions about AI harvesting and learning from copyrighted work, how are those security companies any different from AI, and how could one legally put a stop on this? Block those crawlers? Change your Terms of Service? What's the best fix... Share your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments. How can you stop security firms from harvesting your data?

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the San Francisco Chronicle's senior political writer: The next House member representing Silicon Valley wants to change a key piece of federal law that shields internet companies like X, Facebook and Snapchat from lawsuits over content their users post. That protection is considered the lifeblood of social media. The top eight Democratic candidates vying to succeed Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo in her very blue district agree that something has to change with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was created in 1996, back when lawmakers shied away from doing anything that could limit the growth of the industry. Their unanimity is a sign that Eshoo's successor won't be a tool for the hometown industry. At least not on this issue. The challenge is what to do next. Whoever is elected, their actions as the voice of Silicon Valley will carry outsize weight in Congress. They can lead the charge to actually do something to clean up the bile on social media... The good news is that they will have bipartisan support to address the bile and disinformation online. The bad news is that finding the right solution will still be hard.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Slate: Last November, the American Ornithological Society, or AOS, announced that it would change the common names of all American birds named after people. There are 152 such "eponymic" names (that is, birds that are named after a specific person, like Bicknell's Thrush) on the AOS' official checklist, and the group is planning to start with between 70 and 80 species predominantly found in the U.S. and Canada. In the coming years, birds like Cooper's Hawk, Wilson's Snipe, and Lincoln's Sparrow will be stripped of their eponyms and given new common English names. The eponymic naming issue has been heating up in the bird world for a few years now. Birds got their English names when they were "discovered" by Western scientists, or otherwise identified as a new species. This meant ornithologists had the honor of coming up with whatever moniker they wanted, and frequently named birds in honor of a benefactor, a friend, or the person who shot the first known specimen. But a growing number of ornithologists and nonscientist birders are questioning why we're stuck with names decided on a whim hundreds of years ago, especially when the names aren't very good... Rather than attempt the impossible task of reviewing the people with birds named after them one by one, the AOS said it would just scrap them all and start from scratch. But that's where the real challenge comes in — because lots of bird names are pretty bad. Not offensive bad, like named after a Confederate general, but just unsatisfactory bad. There was never any standardization for how common bird names were granted, which means those names are all over the place and provide little guidance for what renaming should look like. Birds are named after their identifying features, size, habitat, the sound they make, or where they were first discovered. So the American Ornithological Society announced it will "conduct an open, inclusive, and scientifically rigorous pilot program in 2024 to develop its new approach to English bird names in the U.S. and Canada." [T]here are few specifics yet, and no easy way to organize the public and whittle down suggestions in the lawless and nonsensical world of bird names. But the AOS has committed to change: Unlike the closed-door decisions of the past, this will be a public process. The plan is to take suggestions — from field marks, Indigenous names, colloquialisms ... from anywhere — narrow it down, somehow, to a few options, and let people decide... Our new bird names won't be ideal — none of them are — but, for the first time, they will belong to us.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from USA Today: A nationwide analysis by USA TODAY shows local governments are banning green energy faster than they're building it. At least 15% of counties in the U.S. have effectively halted new utility-scale wind, solar, or both, USA TODAY found. These limits come through outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build... In the past decade, about 180 counties got their first commercial wind-power project. But in the same period, more than twice as many blocked wind development. And while solar power has found more broad acceptance, 2023 was the first year to see almost as many individual counties block new solar projects as the ones adding their first project. The result: Some of the nation's areas with the best sources of wind and solar power have now been boxed out. Because large-scale solar and wind projects typically are built outside city limits, USA TODAY's analysis focuses on restrictions by the county-level governments that have jurisdiction. In a few cases, such as Connecticut, Tennessee and Vermont, entire states have implemented near-statewide restrictions. While 15% of America's counties might sound like a small portion, the trend has significant consequences, says Jeff Danielson, a former four-term Iowa state senator now with the Clean Grid Alliance. "It's 15% of the most highly productive areas to develop wind and solar," he said. "Our overall goals are going to be difficult to achieve if the answer is 'No' in county after county...." [T]he number of new wind projects opening annually peaked in the early 2010s, according to inventory data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and has slowed since then. Wind power is expected to grow 11% by 2025 from last year's levels. In the past 10 years, 183 counties saw their first wind project come online. However, USA TODAY's analysis found that in the same period, nearly 375 counties have essentially blocked new wind development. That's almost as many as the 508 counties — out of 3,144 total in the U.S. — currently home to an operational wind turbine.... Of the 116 counties implementing bans or impediments to utility-scale solar plants, half did so in 2023 alone. This surge in obstacles is unprecedented since green-energy technology gained broad acceptance... The article points out that counties sometimes also limit the size of solar farms — making them impractical to build. "Other jurisdictions create shadow bans of sorts. Projects might not technically be banned, but officials simply reject all green energy plans on a case-by-case basis..." "USA TODAY's findings were supported by research published in late January by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Energy developers reported one third of the wind and solar siting applications they had submitted in the past five years were canceled, while about half were delayed for six months or more. Zoning issues and community opposition were two of the top reasons." The article also quotes an Ohio farmer who complained that "You live in the country, and you want to be away from all the hustle and bustle. I kind of look at it as if they're sticking a warehouse or a factory here." Last September, his county's commissioners banned all new large-scale wind and solar projects.

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The non-profit Linux Foundation Energy hopes to develop energy-sector solutions (including standards, specifications, and software) supporting rapid decarbonization by collaborating with industry stakeholders. And now they're involved in a new partnership with America's Joint Office of Energy — which facilitates collaboration between the federal Department of Energy and its Department of Transportation. The partnership's goal? To "build open-source software tools to support communications between EV charging infrastructure and other systems." The Buildout reports: The partnership and effort — known as "Project EVerest" — is part of the administration's full-court press to improve the charging experience for EV owners as the industry's nationwide buildout hits full stride. "Project EVerest will be a game changer for reliability and interoperability for EV charging," Gabe Klein, executive director of the administration's Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, said yesterday in a post on social media.... Administration officials said that a key driver of the move to institute broad standards for software is to move beyond an era of unreliable and disparate EV charging services throughout the U.S. Dr. K. Shankari, a principal software architect at the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, said that local and state governments now working to build out EV charging infrastructure could include a requirement that bidding contractors adhere to Project EVerest standards. That, in turn, could have a profound impact on providers of EV charging stations and services by requiring them to adapt to open source standards or lose the opportunity to bid on public projects. Charging availability and reliability are consistently mentioned as key turnoffs for potential EV buyers who want the infrastructure to be ready, easy, and consistent to use before making the move away from gas cars. Specifically, the new project will aim to create what's known as an open source reference implementation for EV charging infrastructure — a set of standards that will be open to developers who are building applications and back-end software... And, because the software will be available for any company, organization, or developer to use, it will allow the creation of new EV infrastructure software at all levels without software writers having to start from scratch. "LF Energy exists to build the shared technology investment that the entire industry can build on top of," said Alex Thompson of LF Energy during the web conference. "You don't want to be re-inventing the wheel." The tools will help communication between charging stations (and adjacent chargers), as well as vehicles and batteries, user interfaces and mobile devices, and even backend payment systems or power grids. An announcement from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation says this software stack "will reduce instances of incompatibility resulting from proprietary systems, ultimately making charging more reliable for EV drivers." "The Joint Office is paving the way for innovation by partnering with an open-source foundation to address the needs of industry and consumers with technical tools that support reliable, safe and interoperable EV charging," said Sarah Hipel, Standards and Reliability Program Manager at the Joint Office.... With this collaborative development model, EVerest will speed up the adoption of EVs and decarbonization of transportation in the United States by accelerating charger development and deployment, increase customizability, and ensure high levels of security for the nation's growing network. Linux Foundation Energy adds that reliable charging "is key to ensuring that anyone can confidently choose to ride or drive electric," predicting it will increase customizability for different use cases while offering long-term maintainability, avoiding vendor-lock in, and ensuring high levels of security. This is a pioneering example of the federal government collaborating to deploy code into an open source project... "The EVerest project has been demonstrated in pilots around the world to make EV charging far more reliable and reduces the friction and frustration EV drivers have experienced when a charger fails to work or is not continually maintained," said LF Energy Executive Director Alex Thornton. "We look forward to partnering with the Joint Office to create a robust firmware stack that will stand the test of time, and be maintained by an active and growing global community to ensure the nation's charging infrastructure meets the needs of a growing fleet of electric vehicles today and into the future." Thanks to Slashdot reader ElectricVs for sharing the article.

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Craig Newmark posted an announcement last week on LinkedIn. "Okay, my deal is that I'm contributing another $10 million so that the City University of New York journalism grad school can go tuition-free for half the student body next year... "Tuition-free means more seriously good journalism education for students from all income backgrounds..." More details from the Observer: The New York City-based institution today announced plans to grow its endowment to $60 million by 2026 to cover the tuition of its full student body in perpetuity. Founded in 2006, the Newmark Journalism School has long offered a public alternative to private, elite journalism programs across the nation, according to its dean Graciela Mochkofsky. "After the pandemic, we realized that even though we were one of the most affordable schools in the country, we were seeing an increasing need from our students," Mochkofsky told Observer. "We started thinking about how to get to tuition-free...." "One-time grants to schools and newsrooms are an important piece of the puzzle," Newmark told Observer. "But if we're serious about the future of trustworthy journalism as democracy's immune system, we've got to create ways to make the pipeline and product more resilient to economics and shifting moods. Endowments help do that...." The Newmark Journalism School has been gradually inching towards free tuition for some time. Tuition was covered for 20 percent of students in the class of 2023, 25 percent of the program's current class and 35 percent of the new class being enrolled. If the school's goal of raising $30 million in the next two years is achieved, this figure will reach 100 percent by its 20th anniversary in 2026... It is additionally fundraising for other initiatives related to research, faculty, facilities and new programs. Curriculums that reflect the emergence of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the technology's effect on journalism are of particular interest.

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In the behavior of tech companies, the Atlantic's executive editor warns us about "a clear and coherent ideology that is seldom called out for what it is: authoritarian technocracy. As the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley have matured, this ideology has only grown stronger, more self-righteous, more delusional, and — in the face of rising criticism — more aggrieved." The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values — reason, progress, freedom — but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs.... above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they've built or are building — to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more — impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs. The article calls out Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto for saying "We believe in adventure... rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community..." (The Atlantic concludes Andreessen's position "serves only to absolve him and the other Silicon Valley giants of any moral or civic duty to do anything but make new things that will enrich them, without consideration of the social costs, or of history.") The article notes that Andreessen "also identifies a list of enemies and 'zombie ideas' that he calls upon his followers to defeat, among them 'institutions' and 'tradition.'" But the Atlantic makes a broader critique not just of Andreessen but of other Silicon Valley elites. "The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us..." None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability — that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. "In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments," [Sam] Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI's attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: "Isn't it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? ... If we didn't do this someone else would have done it." The article includes this damning chat log from a 2004 conversation Zuckerberg had with a friend: Zuckerberg: If you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Zuckerberg: Just ask. Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS Friend: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. Zuckerberg: I don't know why. Zuckerberg: They "trust me" Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks.' But the article also reminds us that in Facebook's early days, "Zuckerberg listed 'revolutions' among his interests." The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political, at least not in the traditional sense. Still, a select few already have authoritarian control, more or less, to establish the digital world's rules and cultural norms, which can be as potent as political power... [I]n recent years, it has become clear that regulation is needed, not least because the rise of technocracy proves that Silicon Valley's leaders simply will not act in the public's best interest. Much should be done to protect children from the hazards of social media, and to break up monopolies and oligopolies that damage society, and more. At the same time, I believe that regulation alone will not be enough to meaningfully address the cultural rot that the new technocrats are spreading.... We do not have to live in the world the new technocrats are designing for us. We do not have to acquiesce to their growing project of dehumanization and data mining. Each of us has agency. No more "build it because we can." No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don't let them. The article specifically recommends "challenging existing norms about the use of apps and YouTube in classrooms, the ubiquity of smartphones in adolescent hands, and widespread disregard for individual privacy. People who believe that we all deserve better will need to step up to lead such efforts.""Universities should reclaim their proper standing as leaders in developing world-changing technologies for the good of humankind. (Harvard, Stanford, and MIT could invest in creating a consortium for such an effort — their endowments are worth roughly $110 billion combined.)"

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