A federal jury in Illinois on Wednesday said Amazon Web Services owes tech company Kove $525 million for violating three patents relating to its data-storage technology. From the report: The jury determined (PDF) that AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that Kove said had become "essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data." An Amazon spokesperson said the company disagrees with the verdict and intends to appeal. Kove's lead attorney Courtland Reichman called the verdict "a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting IP (intellectual property) rights for start-up companies against tech giants." Kove also sued Google last year for infringing the same three patents in a separate Illinois lawsuit that is still ongoing.

Android 15's first public beta is available to download now, provided you have a Pixel phone. From a report: It's the first consumer-facing release after two developer previews, and while we have a good idea of what to expect from Google's next mobile OS version, we'll certainly hear more at the company's annual developer conference soon enough. The blog post highlighting updates in today's release covers some pretty pedestrian stuff. Apps will scale edge to edge by default and will draw behind translucent system bars on the top and bottom of the screen, rather than around them. There's OS-level support for app archiving and unarchiving so third-party app stores can take advantage of this feature. Android 15 will also provide better support for Braille displays.M

Apple, aiming to boost sluggish computer sales, is preparing to overhaul its entire Mac line with a new family of in-house processors designed to highlight AI. Bloomberg News: The company, which released its first Macs with M3 chips five months ago, is already nearing production of the next generation -- the M4 processor -- according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven't been announced.

The new Macs are underway at a critical time. After peaking in 2022, Mac sales fell 27% in the last fiscal year, which ended in September. In the holiday period, revenue from the computer line was flat. Apple attempted to breathe new life into the Mac business with an M3-focused launch event last October, but those chips didn't bring major performance improvements over the M2 from the prior year. Apple also is playing catch-up in AI, where it's seen as a laggard to Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and other tech peers. The new chips are part of a broader push to weave AI capabilities into all its products. Apple is aiming to release the updated computers beginning late this year and extending into early next year.

Computational scientist and mathematician Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton has won the 2023 A.M. Turing Award. From a report: The prize, which is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to a computer scientist for their contributions to the field, comes with $1 million thanks to Google. It is named in honor of the British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped develop a theoretical foundation for understanding machine computation. Wigderson is being honored "for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science." He also won the prestigious Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science -- the first person to be so doubly honored.

Amazon on Thursday added Andrew Ng, the computer scientist who led AI projects at Alphabet's Google and China's Baidu, to its board amid rising competition among Big Techs to add users for their GenAI products. From a report: Amazon's cloud unit is facing pressure from Microsoft's early pact with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and integration of its technology into Azure, while Alexa voice assistant is in race with genAI chat tools from OpenAI and Google.

The appointment, effective April 9, also follows job cuts across Amazon, which has seen enterprise cloud spending and e-commerce sales moderate due to macroeconomic factors such as inflation and high interest rates. "As we look toward 2024 (and beyond), we're not done lowering our cost to serve," CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to shareholders on Thursday.

Starting May 15th, almost all Google Photos users will be able to access the AI photo editing features previously limited to Pixel owners and Google One subscribers. All you'll need is a device with at least a 64-bit chip, 4GB of RAM, and either iOS 15 or Android 8.0. The Verge reports: Magic Editor is Google's generative AI photo editing tool, and it debuted as one of the headline AI features on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Those kinds of features typically remain exclusive to new Pixels for six months after launch, and right on time, Google's bringing it to previous Pixel phones. But it's not stopping there; any Google Photos user with an Android or iOS device that meets the minimum requirements will be able to use it without a Google One subscription -- you'll just be limited to 10 saved edits per month. Pixel owners and paid subscribers, however, will get unlimited use.

Older features like Photo Unblur and Magic Eraser -- which used to be available only to Pixel owners and certain Google One subscribers -- will be free for all Photos users. Google has a full list of these features on its Photos community site, and it includes things like editing portrait mode blur and lighting effects (useful, but not the cutting-edge stuff, for better or worse). Other generative AI features that launched with the Pixel 8 series, like Best Take and Audio Magic Eraser, are remaining exclusive to those newest Pixels, at least for now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet's Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies. The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a "choice screen." [...]

Cyprus-based Aloha Browser said users in the EU jumped 250% in March -- one of the first companies to give monthly growth numbers since the new regulations came in. Founded in 2016, Aloha, which markets itself as a privacy focused alternative to browsers owned by big tech, has 10 million monthly average users and earns money through paid subscriptions, rather than selling ads by tracking users. "Before, EU was our number four market, right now it's number two," Aloha CEO Andrew Frost Moroz said in an interview. Norway's Vivaldi, Germany's Ecosia and U.S.-based Brave have also seen user numbers rise following the new regulation. U.S.-based DuckDuckGo, which has about 100 million users, and its bigger rival, Norway-based Opera (OPRA.O), opens new tab are also seeing growth in users, but said the choice screen rollout is still not complete. "We are experiencing record user numbers in the EU right now," said Jan Standal, vice president at Opera, which counts over 324 million global users.

Under the new EU rules, mobile software makers are required to show a choice screen where users can select a browser, search engine and virtual assistant as they set up their phones. Previously, tech companies such as Apple and Google loaded phones with default settings that included their preferred services, such as the voice assistant Siri for iPhones. Changing these settings required a more complicated process. Apple is now showing up to 11 browsers in addition to Safari in the choice screens curated for each of the 27 countries in the EU, and will update those screens once every year for each country. While DuckDuckGo and Opera are offered in Apple's list, opens new tab in all 27 countries, Aloha is in 26 countries, Ecosia is in 13 and Vivaldi in 8. Google is currently showing browser choices on devices made by the company and said new devices made by other companies running Android operating system will also display choice screen in the coming months. A Google spokesperson said they do not have data on choice screens to share yet.

Meta Platforms is planning to launch two small versions of its forthcoming Llama 3 large-language model next week, The Information has reported [non-paywalled link]. From the report: The models will serve as a precursor to the launch of the biggest version of Llama 3, expected this summer. Release of the two small models will likely help spark excitement for the forthcoming Llama 3, which will be coming out roughly a year after Llama 2 launched last July.

It comes as several companies, including Google, Elon Musk's xAI and Mistral, have released open-source LLMs. Meta hopes Llama 3 will catch up with OpenAI's GPT-4, which can answer questions based on images users upload to the chatbot. The biggest version will be multimodal, which means it will be capable of understanding and generating both texts and images. In contrast, the two small models to be released next week won't be multimodal, the employee said.

Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google's enterprise-focused AI development platform. From a report: The company announced the news during its annual Cloud Next conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google's Gemini family of generative AI models. Undoubtedly its headlining feature is the amount of context that it can process: between 128,000 tokens to up to 1 million tokens, where "tokens" refers to subdivided bits of raw data (like the syllables "fan," "tas" and "tic" in the word "fantastic").

One million tokens is equivalent to around 700,000 words or around 30,000 lines of code. It's about four times the amount of data that Anthropic's flagship model, Claude 3, can take as input and about eight times as high as OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo max context. A model's context, or context window, refers to the initial set of data (e.g. text) the model considers before generating output (e.g. additional text). A simple question -- "Who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election?" -- can serve as context, as can a movie script, email, essay or e-book.

Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. From a report: Based on Arm's Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances. [...] "Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year," Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said. Maybe the chips aren't even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips and, more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. "The ethos that we have is, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids," she says. "No video production is required."

Based on what I've seen of Vids so far, it appears to be roughly what you'd get if you transformed Google Slides into a video app. You collect assets from Drive and elsewhere and assemble them in order -- but unlike the column of slides in the Slides sidebar, you're putting together a left-to-right timeline for a video. Then, you can add voiceover or film yourself and edit it all into a finished video. A lot of those finished videos, I suspect, will look like recorded PowerPoint presentations or Meet calls or those now-ubiquitous training videos where a person talks to you from a small circle in the bottom corner while graphics play on the screen. There will be lots of clip art-heavy product promos, I'm sure. But in theory, you can make almost anything in Vids. ou can either do all this by yourself or prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Gemini can build a storyboard; it can write a script; it can read your script aloud with text-to-speech; it can create images for you to use in the video. The app has a library of stock video and audio that users can add to their own Vids, too.

The capability of new AI models will surpass human intelligence by the end of next year [non-paywalled link], so long as the supply of electricity and hardware can satisfy the demands of the increasingly powerful technology, according to Elon Musk. From a report: "My guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year," said the billionaire entrepreneur, who runs Tesla, X and SpaceX. Within the next five years, the capabilities of AI will probably exceed that of all humans, Musk predicted on Monday during an interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, the chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management.

Musk has been consistently bullish on the development of so-called artificial general intelligence, AI tools so powerful they can beat the most capable individuals in any domain. But Monday's prediction is ahead of schedules he and others have previously forecast. Last year, he predicted "full" AGI would be achieved by 2029. Some of Musk's boldest predictions, such as rolling out self-driving Teslas and landing a rocket on Mars, have not yet been fulfilled. A number of AI breakthroughs over the past 18 months, including the launch of video generation tools and more capable chatbots, have pushed the frontier of AI forward faster than expected. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google's DeepMind, predicted earlier this year that AGI could be achieved by 2030.

The pace of development has been slowed by a bottleneck in the supply of microchips, particularly those produced by Nvidia, which are essential for training and running AI models. Those constraints were easing, Musk said, but new models are now testing other data centre equipment and the electricity grid. "Last year it was chip constrained ... people could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it's transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two [the constraint is] just electricity supply," he said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for "AI PCs" next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks. After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft's latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it's planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have "faster app emulation than Rosetta 2" -- the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple's own processors.

App emulation has been a big problem for Windows on Arm over the past decade, but Microsoft did deliver x64 app emulation for Windows 11 more than two years ago. This helps ensure apps can run on Windows on Arm devices when there isn't a native ARM64 version. Native Arm apps are key for improved performance on upcoming Windows on Arm laptops, and Google has just recently released its own ARM64 version of Chrome ready for these upcoming devices.

It's the world's most widely used vulnerability database, reports SC Magazine, offering standards-based data on CVSS severity scores, impacted software and platforms, contributing weaknesses, and links to patches and additional resources.

But "there is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities" submitted to America's National Vulnerability Database and "requiring analysis", according to a new announcement from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards. "This is based on a variety of factors, including an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support." From SC Magazine: According to NIST's website, the institute analyzed only 199 of 3370 CVEs it received last month. [And this month another 677 came in — of which 24 have been analyzed.]

Other than a short notice advising it was working to establish a new consortium to improve the NVD, NIST had not provided a public explanation for the problems prior to a statement published [April 2]... "Currently, we are prioritizing analysis of the most significant vulnerabilities. In addition, we are working with our agency partners to bring on more support for analyzing vulnerabilities and have reassigned additional NIST staff to this task as well."

NIST, which had its budget cut by almost 12% this year by lawmakers, said it was committed to continuing to support and manage the NVD, which it described as "a key piece of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure... We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD," the statement said. "We will provide more information as these plans develop..."

A group of cybersecurity professionals have signed an open letter to Congress and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in which they say the enrichment issue is the result of a recent 20% cut in NVD funding.
The article also cites remarks from NVD program manager Tanya Brewer (reported by Infosecurity Magazine) from last week's VulnCon conference on plans to establish a NVD consortium. "We're not going to shut down the NVD; we're in the process of fixing the current problem. And then, we're going to make the NVD robust again and we'll make it grow."

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

On Mozilla's blog, engineer Martin Thomson explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" initiative (which proposes sharing a subset of private user information — but without third-party cookies).

The blog post concludes that Google's Protected Audience "protects advertisers (and Google) more than it protects you." But it's not all bad — in theory: The idea behind Protected Audience is that it creates something like an alternative information dimension inside of your (Chrome) browser... Any website can push information into that dimension. While we normally avoid mixing data from multiple sites, those rules are changed to allow that. Sites can then process that data in order to select advertisements. However, no one can see into this dimension, except you. Sites can only open a window for you to peek into that dimension, but only to see the ads they chose...

Protected Audience might be flawed, but it demonstrates real potential. If this is possible, that might give people more of a say in how their data is used. Rather than just have someone spy on your every action then use that information as they like, you might be able to specify what they can and cannot do. The technology could guarantee that your choice is respected. Maybe advertising is not the first thing you would do with this newfound power, but maybe if the advertising industry is willing to fund investments in new technology that others could eventually use, that could be a good thing.
But here's some of the blog post's key criticisms:

• "[E]ntities like Google who operate large sites, might rely less on information from other sites. Losing the information that comes from tracking people might affect them far less when they can use information they gather from their many services... [W]e have a company that dominates both the advertising and browser markets, proposing a change that comes with clear privacy benefits, but it will also further entrench its own dominance in the massively profitable online advertising market..."

• "[T]he proposal fails to meet its own privacy goals. The technical privacy measures in Protected Audience fail to prevent sites from abusing the API to learn about what you did on other sites.... Google loosened privacy protections in a number of places to make it easier to use. Of course, by weakening protections, the current proposal provides no privacy. In other words, to help make Protected Audience easier to use, they made the design even leakier..."

• "A lot of these leaks are temporary. Google has a plan and even a timeline for closing most of the holes that were added to make Protected Audience easier to use for advertisers. The problem is that there is no credible fix for some of the information leaks embedded in Protected Audience's architecture... In failing to achieve its own privacy goals, Protected Audience is not now — and maybe not ever — a good addition to the Web."

While the European Parliament passed a wide-ranging "AI Act" in March, "Leaders from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have all called for AI regulations in the U.S.," writes CIO magazine. Even the Chamber of Commerce, "often opposed to business regulation, has called on Congress to protect human rights and national security as AI use expands," according to the article, while the White House has released a blueprint for an AI bill of rights.

But even though the U.S. Congress hasn't passed AI legislation — 16 different U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023." Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board."
There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias, requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues."

One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical harms."

Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment "underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent framework for AI usage."

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

In Communication of the ACM, Google's VP of Education notes how calculators impacted math education — and wonders whether generative AI will have the same impact on CS education: Teachers had to find the right amount of long-hand arithmetic and mathematical problem solving for students to do, in order for them to have the "number sense" to be successful later in algebra and calculus. Too much focus on calculators diminished number sense. We have a similar situation in determining the 'code sense' required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes it's not the first time the Google executive has had to consider "iterating" curriculum: The CACM article echoes earlier comments Google's Education VP made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit. (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q&A, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world as described — and the Google VP concedes there may not be.

Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: A study has concluded that Apple's privacy practices aren't particularly effective, because default apps on the iPhone and Mac have limited privacy settings and confusing configuration options. The research was conducted by Amel Bourdoucen and Janne Lindqvist of Aalto University in Finland. The pair noted that while many studies had examined privacy issues with third-party apps for Apple devices, very little literature investigates the issue in first-party apps -- like Safari and Siri. The aims of the study [PDF] were to investigate how much data Apple's own apps collect and where it's sent, and to see if users could figure out how to navigate the landscape of Apple's privacy settings.

The lengths to which Apple goes to secure its ecosystem -- as described in its Platform Security Guide [PDF] -- has earned it kudos from the information security world. Cupertino uses its hard-earned reputation as a selling point and as a bludgeon against Google. Bourdoucen and Janne Lindqvist don't dispute Apple's technical prowess, but argue that it is undermined by confusing user interfaces. "Our work shows that users may disable default apps, only to discover later that the settings do not match their initial preference," the paper states. "Our results demonstrate users are not correctly able to configure the desired privacy settings of default apps. In addition, we discovered that some default app configurations can even reduce trust in family relationships."

The researchers criticize data collection by Apple apps like Safari and Siri, where that data is sent, how users can (and can't) disable that data tracking, and how Apple presents privacy options to users. The paper illustrates these issues in a discussion of Apple's Siri voice assistant. While users can ostensibly choose not to enable Siri in the initial setup on macOS-powered devices, it still collects data from other apps to provide suggestions. To fully disable Siri, Apple users must find privacy-related options across five different submenus in the Settings app. Apple's own documentation for how its privacy settings work isn't good either. It doesn't mention every privacy option, explain what is done with user data, or highlight whether settings are enabled or disabled. Also, it's written in legalese, which almost guarantees no normal user will ever read it. "We discovered that the features are not clearly documented," the paper concludes. "Specifically, we discovered that steps required to disable features of default apps are largely undocumented and the data handling practices are not completely disclosed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Will Google ever launch its "Find My" network? The Android ecosystem was supposed to have its own version of Apple's AirTags by now. Google has had a crowd-sourced device-tracking network sitting dormant on 3 billion Android phones since December 2022. Partners have been ready to go with Bluetooth tag hardware since May 2023! This was all supposed to launch a year ago, but Google has been in a holding pattern. The good news is we're finally seeing some progress after a year of silence. The reason for Google's lengthy delay is actually Apple. A week before Google's partners announced their Android network Bluetooth tags, Google and Apple jointly announced a standard to detect "unknown" Bluetooth trackers and show users alerts if their phone thinks they're being stalked. Since you can constantly see an AirTag's location, they can be used for stalking by just covertly slipping one into a bag or car; nobody wants that, so everyone's favorite mobile duopoly is teaming up.

Google did its half of this partnership and rolled out AirTag detection in July 2023. At the same time, Google also announced: "We've made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS." Surely Apple would be burning the midnight oil to launch iOS Android tag detection as soon as possible so that Google could start competing with AirTags. It looks like iOS 17.5 is the magic version Google is waiting for. The first beta was released to testers recently, and 9to5Mac recently spotted strings for detecting "unwanted" non-Apple tracking devices that were suddenly following you around. This 17.5 update still needs to ship, and the expectation is sometime in May. That would be 11 months after Google's release. [...]

With the impending iOS release, Google seems to be getting its ducks in a row as well. 9to5Google has a screenshot of the new Find My Device settings page that is appearing for some users, which gives them a chance to opt out of the anonymous tracking network. That report also mentions that some users received an email Thursday of an impending tracking network launch, saying: "You'll get a notification on your Android devices when this feature is turned on in 3 days. Until then, you can opt out of the network through Find My Device on the web." The vast majority of Android users have not gotten this email, though, suggesting maybe it was a mistake. It's very weird to announce a launch in "days remaining" rather than just saying what date something will launch, and this email went out Thursday, which would mean a bizarre Sunday launch when everyone is off for the weekend.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.