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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting today, home Internet and mobile broadband providers in the US are required to display consumer labels with information on prices, speeds, and data allowances. "Today's nationwide launch of the Broadband Consumer Labels means internet service providers are now required to display consumer-friendly labels at the point of sale," the Federal Communications Commission said (PDF). "Labels are required for all standalone home or fixed Internet service or mobile broadband plans. Providers must display the label -- not simply an icon or link to the label -- in close proximity to an associated plan's advertisement."

The labels are required now for providers with at least 100,000 subscribers, while ISPs with fewer customers have until October 10, 2024, to comply. "If a provider is not displaying their labels or has posted inaccurate information about its fees or service plans, consumers can file a complaint with the FCC Consumer Complaint Center," an agency webpage says. The October 10 date will also bring an additional requirement that providers "make the labels machine-readable to enable third parties to more easily collect and aggregate data for the purpose of creating comparison-shopping tools for consumers," the FCC said.

The FCC issued a consumer advisory telling broadband users what to look for in the labels. Labels should include the monthly price, state whether it is an introductory rate, the amount of time that an introductory rate applies, and the price after any introductory rate expires. The labels must include any additional monthly charges, one-time fees, early termination fees, and taxes. Speed information should include typical download speed, upload speed, and latency. For data caps, the labels should state how much data is included with the monthly price and how much consumers have to pay for additional usage. Labels should also include links to information on discounts and service bundles, network management practices, and privacy policies.

It appears that a nearly eight-year-long battle by the FCC to require internet companies to display information on the costs, fees, and speeds of their broadband services is finally over. From a report: Starting on Wednesday, all but the smallest ISPs will be required to publish broadband "nutrition labels" on all of their plans, the regulator announced. [...] Each label will include monthly broadband prices, introductory rate details, data allowances, broadband speeds, and links to find out about any available discounts or service bundles. Links to network management practices and privacy policies should be listed as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cox Communications doesn't believe that ISPs should be held liable for the activities of their pirating subscribers. After a disappointing verdict from a Virginia jury and an unsatisfactory outcome at the Court of Appeals, the internet provider now intends to escalate the matter to the Supreme Court. If the present verdict stands, innocent people risk losing their Internet access, the ISP notes. [...] That's notable, as it would be the first time that a "repeat infringer" case ends up at the highest court United States. Cox asked the court of appeals to also stay its mandate pending its Supreme Court application, as this could steer the legal battle in yet another direction.

According to Cox, the Supreme Court has substantial reasons to take on the case. For one, there are currently conflicting court of appeals rulings on the "material contribution" aspect of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court could give more clarity on when a service, with a myriad of lawful uses, can be held liable for infringers. In addition, Cox also cites the recent 'Twitter vs. Taamneh' Supreme Court ruling, which held that social media platforms aren't liable for terrorists who use their network. While that's not a copyright case, it's relevant for the secondary liability question, the ISP argues. "Though Twitter was not a copyright case, it confronted a directly analogous theory of secondary liability: that social-media platforms, including Twitter and YouTube, could be liable for continuing to provide services to those they knew were using them for illegal purposes," Cox writes.

Finally, Cox notes that the Supreme Court should hear the case because it deals with an issue that's 'exceptionally important' to ISPs as well as the public. If the present verdict stands, Internet providers may be much more likely to terminate Internet access, even if the subscriber is innocent. "This Court's material-contribution standard provides powerful incentives for ISPs of all stripes to swiftly terminate internet services that have been used to infringe -- no matter the universe of lawful uses to which those services are put, or the consequences to innocent, non-infringing people who also use those services. "That is why a chorus of amici urged this Court not to adopt this standard at the panel and en banc stages, and will likely urge the Supreme Court to grant review as well," Cox adds, referring to the support it received from third-parties previously. "Cox hasn't filed a writ of certiorari yet and still has time, as it's due June 17, 2024," notes TorrentFreak. "The intention to go to the Supreme Court would be another reason to halt the new damages trial, according to Cox, but the court of appeals rejected the request."

"This means that the new damages trial can start, even if the case is still pending at the Supreme Court. However, it's clear that this legal battle is far from over yet."

Intel on Tuesday unveiled its new "Gaudi 3" AI chip that the company claims is over twice as power-efficient and can run AI models one-and-a-half times faster than Nvidia's H100 GPU. "It also comes in different configurations like a bundle of eight Gaudi 3 chips on one motherboard or a card that can slot into existing systems," adds CNBC. From the report: Intel tested the chip on models like Meta's open-source Llama and the Abu Dhabi-backed Falcon. It said Gaudi 3 can help train or deploy models, including Stable Diffusion or OpenAI's Whisper model for speech recognition. Intel says its chips use less power than Nvidia's. Intel said that the new Gaudi 3 chips would be available to customers in the third quarter, and companies including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Supermicro will build systems with the chips. Intel didn't provide a price range for Gaudi 3.

Gaudi 3 is built on a five nanometer process, a relatively recent manufacturing technique, suggesting that the company is using an outside foundry to manufacture the chips. In addition to designing Gaudi 3, Intel also plans to manufacture AI chips, potentially for outside companies, at a new Ohio factory expected to open in 2027 or 2028, CEO Patrick Gelsinger told reporters last month. "We do expect it to be highly competitive" with Nvidia's latest chips, said Das Kamhout, vice president of Xeon software at Intel, on a call with reporters. "From our competitive pricing, our distinctive open integrated network on chip, we're using industry-standard Ethernet. We believe it's a strong offering."

The Federal Communications Commission chair decided not to impose Universal Service fees on Internet service, rejecting arguments for new assessments to shore up an FCC fund that subsidizes broadband network expansions and provides discounts to low-income consumers. From a report: The $8 billion-a-year Universal Service Fund (USF) pays for FCC programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a "Universal Service" line item on telephone bills.

Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund's size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services. Some consumer advocates want the FCC to increase the fund in order to replace the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a different government program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes but is about to run out of money because of inaction by Congress. The Universal Service funding question is coming up now because, on April 25, the FCC is scheduled to vote on reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service in order to re-impose the net neutrality rules scrapped during the Trump era. Imposing Universal Service charges on broadband would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's net neutrality proposal takes the same stance against requiring Universal Service contributions that the FCC took in 2015 when it first imposed the net neutrality rules.

Windows Report speculates on what Microsoft may be working on next based on a recently-published patent for "performant sound recognition AI technologies" (dated April 2, 2024): Microsoft's new technology can recognize different types of sounds, from doorbells to babies crying, or dogs barking, but not limited to them. It can also recognize sounds of coughing or breathing difficulties, or unusual noises, such as glass breaking. Most intriguing, it can recognize and monitor environmental sounds, and they can be further processed to let users know if a natural disaster is about to happen...

The neural network generates scores and probabilities for each type of sound event in each segment. This is like guessing what type of sound each segment is and how sure it is about the guess. After that, the system does some post-processing to smooth out the scores and probabilities and generate confidence values for each type of sound for different window sizes.

Ultimately, this technology can be used in various applications. In a smart home device, it can detect when someone breaks into the house, by recognizing the sound of glass shattering, or if a newborn is hungry, or distressed, by recognizing the sounds of baby crying. It can also be used in healthcare, to accurately detect lung or heart diseases, by recognizing heartbeat sounds, coughing, or breathing difficulties. But one of its most important applications would be to prevent casual users of upcoming natural disasters by recognizing and detecting sounds associated with them.
Thanks to Slashdot reader John Nautu for sharing the article.

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 writes: Could you imagine discovering that your identity had been used to take out fraudulent loans and when you tried to resolve the issue by providing your state ID and Social Security card you were instead arrested, charged with multiple felonies, jailed for over a year, incarcerated in a mental hospital and given psychotropic drugs, eventually to be released with a criminal record and a judge's order that you could no longer use your real name? As dystopian as this might sound, it actually happened. And it was only after the victim learned his oppressor worked for The University of Iowa Hospital and contacted their security department was the investigation taken seriously leading to the perpetrator's arrest. The Gazette reports: Matthew David Keirans, 58, was convicted of one count of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution -- punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison -- and one count of aggravated identity theft -- punishable by up to two years in federal prison. Keirans worked as a systems architect in the hospital's IT department from June 28, 2013 to July 20, 2023, when he was terminated for misconduct related to the identity theft investigation. Keirans worked at the hospital under the name William Donald Woods, an alias he had been using since about 1988, when he worked with the real William Woods at a hot dog cart in Albuquerque, N.M. [...] By 2013, Keirans had moved to eastern Wisconsin. He started his IT job with UI Hospitals and worked remotely. He earned more than $700,000 in his 10 years working for the hospital. In 2023, his salary was $140,501, according to the hospital.

In 2019, the real William Woods was homeless, living in Los Angeles. He went to a branch of the national bank and explained that he recently discovered someone was using his credit and had accumulated a lot of debt. Woods didn't want to pay the debt and asked to know the account numbers for any accounts he had open at the bank so he could close them. Woods gave the bank employee his real Social Security card and an authentic California Identification card, which matched the information the bank had on file. Because there was a large amount of money in the accounts, the bank employee asked Woods a series of security questions that he was unable to answer. The bank employee called Keirans, whose the phone number was connected to the accounts. He answered the security questions correctly and said no one in California should have access to the accounts. The employee called the Los Angeles Police Department, and officers spoke with Woods and Keirans. Keirans faxed the Los Angeles officers a copy of Woods' Social Security card and birth certificate, as well as a Wisconsin driver's license Keirans had acquired under Woods' name. The driver's license had the name William David Woods -- David is Keirans' real middle name -- rather than William Donald Woods. When questioned, Keiran told an LAPD officer he sometimes used David as a middle name, but his real name was William Donald Woods. The real Woods was arrested and charged with identity theft and false impersonation, under a misspelling of Keirans' name: Matthew Kierans.

Because Woods continued to insist, throughout the judicial process, that he was William Woods and not Matthew Kierans, a judge ruled in February 2020 that he was not mentally competent to stand trial and he was sent to a mental hospital in California, where he received psychotropic medication and other mental health treatment. In March 2021, Woods pleaded no contest to the identity theft charges -- meaning he accepted the conviction but did not admit guilt. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment with credit for the two years he already served in the county jail and the hospital and was released. He was also ordered to pay $400 in fines and to stop using the name William Woods. He did not stop. Woods continued to attempt to regain his identity by filing customer disputes with financial organizations in an attempt to clear his credit report. He also reached out to multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Hartland Police Department in Wisconsin, where Keirans lived. Woods eventually discovered where Keirans was working, and in January 2023 he reached out to the University of Iowa Hospitals' security department, who referred his complaint to the University of Iowa Police Department.

University of Iowa Police Detective Ian Mallory opened an investigation into the case. Mallory found the biological father listed on Woods' birth certificate -- which both Woods and Keirans had sent him an official copy of -- and tested the father's DNA against Woods' DNA. The test proved Woods was the man's son. On July 17, 2023, Mallory interviewed Keirans. He asked Keirans what his father's name was, and Keirans accidentally gave the name of his own adoptive father. Mallory then confronted Keirans with the DNA evidence, and Keirans responded by saying, "my life is over" and "everything is gone." He then confessed to the prolonged identity theft, according to court documents. The full story can be ready via The Gazette.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, got a "copyright infringement notice" from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal: "We're reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in relation to an image connected to our client," it read. [...] In this case, though, the email didn't demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a "visible and clickable link" beneath the photo in question to a website called "tech4gods" or the law firm would "take action." Smith began looking into the law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images of its "lawyers" are AI generated.

The threat to "activate the case No. 86342" is obviously nonsense. Beyond that, Commonwealth Legal's website looks generic and is full of stock photos, though I've seen a lot of generic template websites for real law firms. All of its lawyers have vacant, thousand-yard stares that are commonly generated by websites like This Person Does Not Exist, none of them come up in any attorney or LinkedIn searches, and the only reverse image search results for them are for a now-broken website called Generated.Photos, which offered a service to "use AI to generate people online that don't exist, change clothing and modify face and body traits. Download generated people in different postures." "All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model," Ali Shahriyari, cofounder and CTO of the AI detection startup Reality Defender told 404 Media. Commonwealth Legal's listed address is the fourth floor of a one-story building that looks nothing like the image on its website, and both of its phone numbers are disconnected. No one responded to the contact form that I filled out. Smith realized that what's happening here isn't a copyright enforcement or copyright trolling attempt at all. Instead, it's a backlink SEO scam, where a website owner tries to improve their Google ranking by asking, paying, or threatening someone to link to their website.

Tech4Gods.com is a gadget review website run by a man named Daniel Barczak, whose content is "complemented by AI writing assistants." In this case, the photo that Smith had "infringed" was a photo downloaded from the royalty free, free-to-use website Unsplash, which 404 Media also sometimes uses. The image was not taken by Barczak, and has nothing to do with him, he told me in an email: "I certainly don't own any images on the web," he said. The original photographer did not respond to a request for comment sent through Unsplash. Barczak told me that he had been previously buying backlinks to his website for SEO, but said he wasn't aware of who was doing this or why. "I have no idea; it certainly has nothing to do with me," he said. "However, recently, someone has been building spammy links against my site that I have been dealing with." "I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately, I buy links due to a lack of time," he added. "In the past, I had a bad link builder. I wonder if it's him going mad at me for letting him go It's hard to say the web is massive, and everyone can link whenever they want." Link building is an SEO strategy devised to get outside websites to link to your website. He added that "bad links may damage [the site's] profile in Google's eyes." In this case, however, the "lawyers" were threatening a well-established tech blogger, and a link from Tedium would likely be treated as a positive in the search algorithm's eyes.

Jessica Lyons reports via The Register: The FCC appears to finally be stepping up efforts to secure decades-old flaws in American telephone networks that are allegedly being used by foreign governments and surveillance outfits to remotely spy on and monitor wireless devices. At issue are the Signaling System Number 7 (SS7) and Diameter protocols, which are used by fixed and mobile network operators to enable interconnection between networks. They are part of the glue that holds today's telecommunications together. According to the US watchdog and some lawmakers, both protocols include security weaknesses that leave folks vulnerable to unwanted snooping. SS7's problems have been known about for years and years, as far back as at least 2008, and we wrote about them in 2010 and 2014, for instance. Little has been done to address these exploitable shortcomings.

SS7, which was developed in the mid-1970s, can be potentially abused to track people's phones' locations; redirect calls and text messages so that info can be intercepted; and spy on users. The Diameter protocol was developed in the late-1990s and includes support for network access and IP mobility in local and roaming calls and messages. It does not, however, encrypt originating IP addresses during transport, which makes it easier for miscreants to carry out network spoofing attacks. "As coverage expands, and more networks and participants are introduced, the opportunity for a bad actor to exploit SS7 and Diameter has increased," according to the FCC [PDF].

On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers' locations. The FCC has also asked carriers to detail any exploits of the protocols since 2018. The regulator wants to know the date(s) of the incident(s), what happened, which vulnerabilities were exploited and with which techniques, where the location tracking occurred, and -- if known -- the attacker's identity. This time frame is significant because in 2018, the Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee to the FCC, issued several security best practices to prevent network intrusions and unauthorized location tracking. Interested parties have until April 26 to submit comments, and then the FCC has a month to respond.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Communications Commission has scheduled an April 25 vote to restore net neutrality rules similar to the ones introduced during the Obama era and repealed under former President Trump. The text of the pending net neutrality order wasn't released today. The FCC press release said it will prohibit broadband providers "from blocking, slowing down, or creating pay-to-play Internet fast lanes" and "bring back a national standard for broadband reliability, security, and consumer protection."

[...] Numerous consumer advocacy groups praised the FCC for its plan today. Lobby groups representing Internet providers expressed their displeasure. While there hasn't been a national standard since then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal in 2017, Internet service providers still have to follow net neutrality rules because California and other states impose their own similar regulations. The broadband industry's attempts to overturn the state net neutrality laws were rejected in court.

Although ISPs seem to have been able to comply with the state laws, they argue that the federal standard will hurt their businesses and consumers. "Reimposing heavy-handed regulation will not just hobble network investment and innovation, it will also seriously jeopardize our nation's collective efforts to build and sustain reliable broadband in rural and unserved communities," cable lobbyist Michael Powell said today. Powell, the CEO of cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, was the FCC chairman under President George W. Bush. Powell said the FCC must "reverse course to avoid years of litigation and uncertainty" in a reference to the inevitable lawsuits that industry groups will file against the agency.

smooth wombat writes: Chase bank announced a new program that will allow brands to target Chase customers based on the customer's purchases. According to the press release, the new program is called Chase Media Solutions and "serves as a key conduit for brands, connecting them with consumers' personal passions and interests. In turn, Chase customers benefit from personalized offers and the ability to earn cash back with brands they love or are discovering for the first time."

The bank is hoping to combine insights from its large customer base and 6 million small business customers as part of its efforts to build out its own two-sided commerce platform and bring in benefits to both business clients and banking customers. Chase Media Solutions follows from the integration of card-linked marketing platform Figg, which JPMorgan Chase & Co. acquired in 2022, the bank said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November.

A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back. Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.

"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.

Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. From a report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an "embodied AI character" that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services.

The Xbox AI chatbot is connected to Microsoft's support documents for the Xbox network and ecosystem, and can respond to questions and even process game refunds from Microsoft's support website. "This agent can help you with your Xbox support questions," reads a description of the Xbox chatbot internally at Microsoft. Microsoft expanded the testing pool for its Xbox chatbot more broadly in recent days, suggesting that this prototype "Xbox Support Virtual Agent" may one day handle support queries for all Xbox customers. Microsoft confirmed the existence of its chatbot to The Verge.

"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix: NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years.

Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9.
"A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did."

Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."

A Linux Foundation subsidiary has developed a free and open-source 3D game engine distributed under the Apache license. And last week the Open 3D Foundation announced "a big step forward, showcasing the power of open-source technologies in giving gamers around the globe unforgettable gaming experiences."

"We are proud to unveil MadWorld as the first mobile title powered by O3DE," said Joe Bryant, Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation, "demonstrating the large potential of open-source technologies in game development."

And then this week Los Angeles Business Journal reported that El Segundo-based gaming studio Carbonated Inc. "has raised $11 million of series A funding to finance the development and release of its debut game title... Prior to its most recent round, Carbonated closed an $8.5 million seed funding round in 2020, which also included participation from Andreessen and Bitkraft." Since its founding [in 2015], the company has been focusing on research and development for its upcoming first title, called "MadWorld." The third-person, multiplayer shooter game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment features. Players of the game will battle for land control in a dystopian setting. Using a combination of open-source mapping tools and Carbonated's proprietary custom operations technology, called Carbyne, the game's world is designed around real-life cities and locations. Players are initially dropped into the game's version of their own real-time location.

The game allows players to optionally engage using blockchain technology with a digital asset-ownership layer powered by a blockchain network called XPLA.
Earlier this month Madworld "opened up for Early Access registration," reports the egamers web site, arguing that the game "is set to redefine the gaming landscape and will make its public debut later this year." After a catastrophic event named "The Collapse," MadWorld takes place in a desolate Earth where players engage in a battle for survival, highlighting the game's unique setting and immersive experience. The game's world is intricately designed with 250,000 land plots mapped out on a hexagonal grid, each presenting unique resources and strategic benefits. This innovative approach to game design enhances the gameplay experience and introduces a new layer of strategy and competition.

MadWorld's gameplay is centered around integrating Web3 technologies, which allows for the ownership, enhancement, and trading of tokenized representations of real-world locations. This feature encourages players to create clans and work together or compete for essential resources that are spread across the vast game world. Clans can acquire these resources by paying tributes to NFT landowners using "Rounds," the in-game currency. This mechanism not only fosters a sense of community and teamwork but also creates unique economic opportunities within the game by blending traditional gaming elements with the emerging field of digital assets.
"With its use of O3DE, Carbonated can enhance the game's visual fidelity, performance, and scalability," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement, "in order to deliver a fast-paced adventure on mobile platforms." O3DE is an open-source game engine developed by a collaborative community of industry experts. It includes state-of-the-art rendering capabilities, dynamic lighting, and realistic physics simulation. These features have enabled Carbonated to build realistic dystopian environments and create action-packed gameplay in MadWorld.
According to its official site, MadWorld "is set to be released to the public sometime in 2024 and is currently being tested on iOS and Android operating systems."

Carbonated's CEO Travis Boatman made this prediction to the site Decrypt. "We think mobile is where the breakout will happen for Web3."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."

Global bank messaging network SWIFT is planning a new platform in the next one to two years to connect the wave of central bank digital currencies now in development to the existing finance system, it has told Reuters. From the report: The move, which would be one of the most significant yet for the nascent CBDC ecosystem given SWIFT's key role in global banking, is likely to be fine-tuned to when the first major ones are launched. Around 90% of the world's central banks are now exploring digital versions of their currencies. Most don't want to be left behind by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but are grappling with technological complexities.

SWIFT's head of innovation, Nick Kerigan, said its latest trial, which took 6 months and involved a 38-member group of central banks, commercial banks and settlement platforms, had been one of the largest global collaborations on CBDCs and "tokenised" assets to date. It focused on ensuring different countries' CBDCs can all be used together even if built on different underlying technologies, or "protocols", thereby reducing payment system fragmentation risks.