An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Walmart will be increasingly relying on automation at its stores in the coming years -- but that won't diminish the country's largest private employer's workforce, company leaders said during an investor event this week. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant recently made headlines when it announced that 65% of its stores will be "serviced by automation" by the end of fiscal year 2026. Walmart currently has more than 4,700 stores throughout the US and employs roughly 1.6 million people nationwide. More specifically, one area where Walmart is seeking to increase investment is in market fulfillment centers (MFCs), which are automated fulfillment centers built within, or added to, a store. Walmart piloted this concept at a store in Salem, New Jersey, in 2019, using automated robot technology from Alert Innovation -- a robotics company Walmart acquired in October 2022. Since then, Walmart has built MFCs at several stores, such as in Jacksonville, Florida, and Dallas, Texas. Those include "manual MFCs," where associates pick items for online orders but in a separate area from the sales floor. Walmart will still need at least the same level of workers to help in stores even as automation picks up, company leaders say. John Furner, Walmart US president and CEO, told investors this week that automation "helps" employees, as it will result in less manual labor. "Over time, we believe we'll have the same or more associates and a larger business overall," Furner said. "There will be new roles emerging that are less manual, better designed to serve customers, and pay more."

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Multiple employees of Samsung's Korea-based semiconductor business plugged lines of confidential code into ChatGPT, effectively leaking corporate secrets that could be included in the chatbot's future responses to other people around the world. PCMag reports: One employee copied buggy source code from a semiconductor database into the chatbot and asked it to identify a fix, according to The Economist Korea. Another employee did the same for a different piece of equipment, requesting "code optimization" from ChatGPT. After a third employee asked the AI model to summarize meeting notes, Samsung executives stepped in. The company limited each employee's prompt to ChatGPT to 1,024 bytes. Just three weeks earlier, Samsung had lifted its ban on employees using ChatGPT over concerns around this issue. After the recent incidents, it's considering re-instating the ban, as well as disciplinary action for the employees, The Economist Korea says. "If a similar accident occurs even after emergency information protection measures are taken, access to ChatGPT may be blocked on the company network," reads an internal memo. "As soon as content is entered into ChatGPT, data is transmitted and stored to an external server, making it impossible for the company to retrieve it." The OpenAI user guide warns users against this behavior: "We are not able to delete specific prompts from your history. Please don't share any sensitive information in your conversations." It says the system uses all questions and text submitted to it as training data.

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SpaceX plans to carry out a launch rehearsal next week of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, and its first test flight possibly the following week, the private space company said Thursday. Phys.Org reports: SpaceX published photos of the massive Starship, which is designed to eventually send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, on its launchpad at the company's base in Texas. "Starship fully stacked at Starbase," SpaceX said in a tweet. "Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week followed by Starship's first integrated flight test ~ week later pending regulatory approval." SpaceX will need a green light from the Federal Aviation Administration before being allowed to carry out the orbital test launch. SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of Starship in February. The 230-foot (69-meter) Super Heavy booster was anchored to the ground during the test-firing, called a static fire, to prevent it from lifting off.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said. A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. Studies into these vaccinations are also showing "tremendous promise", with some researchers saying 15 years' worth of progress has been "unspooled" in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab. Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for "all sorts of disease areas" in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumor types. Burton said: "We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world." He also said that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection -- allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) -- while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body's immune response against disease. Burton said :"I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology." But scientists warn that the accelerated progress, which has surged "by an order of magnitude" in the past three years, will be wasted if a high level of investment is not maintained.

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A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that "hear" you without speaking. Engadget reports: The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard. Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud -- and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. "Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible," said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. "We're moving sonar onto the body." The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user's speech patterns. Then, once it's ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time "with about 95 percent accuracy." The system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. "We're very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy," said Cheng Zhang. "It's small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world." "The team at Cornell's Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program," adds Engadget. "They're also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements." A video of the eyeglasses can be viewed here.

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Walmart plans to have its own network of electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 to tap into the growing adoption of EVs in the United States. Reuters reports: The new fast-charging stations will be placed at thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores, alongside nearly 1,300 it already offers as part of a deal with Volkswagen unit Electrify America, one of the country's largest open public EV networks. Walmart's more than 5,000 stores and Sam's Club warehouses are located within 10 miles of about 90% of Americans. "We have the ability to address range and charging anxiety in a way that no one else can in this country," Vishal Kapadia, Walmart's recently appointed senior vice president of Energy Transformation, said in an interview. Owning its chargers, instead of partnering with a network operator, will help Walmart address reliability and cost issues, Kapadia said. Kapadia said he expects the new charge points to be direct-current fast chargers, with about four chargers on average installed per store.

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"Thieves has discovered new ways to steal cars by pulling off smart devices (like smart headlights) to get at and attack via the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus," writes longtime Slashdot reader KindMind. The Register reports: A Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is present in nearly all modern cars, and is used by microcontrollers and other devices to talk to each other within the vehicle and carry out the work they are supposed to do. In a CAN injection attack, thieves access the network, and introduce bogus messages as if it were from the car's smart key receiver. These messages effectively cause the security system to unlock the vehicle and disable the engine immobilizer, allowing it to be stolen. To gain this network access, the crooks can, for instance, break open a headlamp and use its connection to the bus to send messages. From that point, they can simply manipulate other devices to steal the vehicle. "In most cars on the road today, these internal messages aren't protected: the receivers simply trust them," [Ken Tindell, CTO of Canis Automotive Labs] detailed in a technical write-up this week. The discovery followed an investigation by Ian Tabor, a cybersecurity researcher and automotive engineering consultant working for EDAG Engineering Group. It was driven by the theft of Tabor's RAV4. Leading up to the crime, Tabor noticed the front bumper and arch rim had been pulled off by someone, and the headlight wiring plug removed. The surrounding area was scuffed with screwdriver markings, which, together with the fact the damage was on the kerbside, seemed to rule out damage caused by a passing vehicle. More vandalism was later done to the car: gashes in the paint work, molding clips removed, and malfunctioning headlamps. A few days later, the Toyota was stolen. Refusing to take the pilfering lying down, Tabor used his experience to try to figure out how the thieves had done the job. The MyT app from Toyota -- which among other things allows you to inspect the data logs of your vehicle -- helped out. It provided evidence that Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in the RAV4 had detected malfunctions, logged as Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), before the theft. According to Tindell, "Ian's car dropped a lot of DTCs." Various systems had seemingly failed or suffered faults, including the front cameras and the hybrid engine control system. With some further analysis it became clear the ECUs probably hadn't failed, but communication between them had been lost or disrupted. The common factor was the CAN bus.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Russian government has banned more than 10,000 websites for content about the war in Ukraine since Moscow launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The blacklist includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and independent news outlets. Over the past year, Russians living inside the country have turned to censorship circumvention tools such as VPNs to pierce through the information blockade. But as dozens of virtual private networks get blocked, leaving users scrambling to maintain their access to free information, local activists and developers are coming up with new solutions. One of them is Amnezia VPN, a free, open source VPN client. "We even do not advertise and promote it, and new users are still coming by the hundreds every day," says Mazay Banzaev, Amnezia VPN's founder. Unlike commercial VPNs that route users through company servers, which can be blocked, Amnezia VPN makes it simple for users to buy and set up their own servers. This allows them to choose their own IP address and use protocols that are harder to block. "More than half of the commercial VPNs in Russia have been blocked because it's easy enough to block them: They do not block them by protocols, but by IP addresses," says Banzaev. "[Amnezia] is an order of magnitude more resilient than a typical commercial VPN." Amnezia VPN is similar to Outline, a free and open source tool developed by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google. Amnezia was created in 2020 during a hackathon supported by Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda. Even then, "it was clear that things were moving toward stricter censorship," says Banzaev. [...] It is unclear how many users the service has, since the organization doesn't have a way to monitor user numbers, Banzaev says. However, Amnezia offers a Telegram bot called AmneziaFree, which shares VPN configurations that help users access blocked platforms and news; it has almost 100,000 users. The bot is currently struggling with overload, and users are complaining about spotty service. Banzaev says the Amnezia team is working to add new servers on a limited budget, and that they are also working on a new version of the service. "Amnezia is not only used in Russia," notes Wired. "The service has spread to Turkmenistan, Iran, China, and other countries where users have been struggling with free access to the web."

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The company behind ChatGPT will propose measures to resolve data privacy concerns that sparked a temporary Italian ban on the artificial intelligence chatbot, regulators said Thursday. The Associated Press reports: In a video call late Wednesday between the watchdog's commissioners and OpenAI executives including CEO Sam Altman, the company promised to set out measures to address the concerns. Those remedies have not been detailed. The Italian watchdog said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but stressed to OpenAI the importance of complying with the 27-nation EU's stringent privacy rules. The regulators imposed the ban after some users' messages and payment information were exposed to others. They also questioned whether there's a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to train ChatGPT's algorithms and raised concerns the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals. Other regulators in Europe and elsewhere have started paying more attention after Italy's action. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it's "following up with the Italian regulator to understand the basis for their action and we will coordinate with all EU Data Protection Authorities in relation to this matter." France's data privacy regulator, CNIL, said it's investigating after receiving two complaints about ChatGPT. Canada's privacy commissioner also has opened an investigation into OpenAI after receiving a complaint about the suspected "collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent." In a blog post this week, the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office warned that "organizations developing or using generative AI should be considering their data protection obligations from the outset" and design systems with data protection as a default. "This isn't optional -- if you're processing personal data, it's the law," the office said. In an apparent response to the concerns, OpenAI published a blog post Wednesday outlining its approach to AI safety. The company said it works to remove personal information from training data where feasible, fine-tune its models to reject requests for personal information of private individuals, and acts on requests to delete personal information from its systems.

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With no discussion, the Arkansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would require social media users in The Natural State to verify they're 18 years old or older to use the platforms. Arkansas Times reports: The proposal, backed by Gov. Sarah Sanders, is aimed at shielding minors from the harmful effects of social media. Young folks could use the platforms, but only if parents provide consent. Senate Bill 396, sponsored by Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Springdale) and Rep. Jon Eubanks (R-Paris), would require social media companies including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to contract with third-party companies to perform age verification. Users would have to provide the third-party company with a digital driver's license. Dees also sponsored a bill, now law, that requires anyone who wants to watch online pornography to verify they're an adult. The social media bill squeaked through the Senate with 18 yes votes, the bare minimum, but passed the House 82-10 with four voting present (same as no). No one asked any questions of Eubanks -- who assured his colleagues that Facebook had "the AI and algorithms" to keep track of what users had parental consent without holding on to sensitive data -- but because it was amended (to among other things exempt LinkedIn, the most boring social media platform), the bill has to go back to the Senate, where perhaps it will meet some resistance. Utah's governor signed two bills into law last month requiring companies like Meta, Snap and TikTok to get parents permission before teens could create accounts on their platforms. "The laws also require curfew, parental controls and age verification features," adds Engadget.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: An Apple Store at the Alderwood Mall was burgled last weekend, with thieves infiltrating the location through a nearby coffee shop. According to Seattle's King 5 News, thieves broke into Seattle Coffee Gear, went into the bathroom, and cut a hole in the wall to get to the Apple Store backroom. The burglars were able to bypass the Apple Store's security system by using the adjacent coffee shop, stealing a total of 436 iPhones that were worth around $500,000. According to Seattle Coffee Gear manager Eric Marks, the coffee shop is not noticeably adjacent to the Apple Store because of the way that the store is laid out. "I would have never suspected we were adjacent to the Apple Store, how it wraps around I mean," Marks told King 5 News. "So, someone really had to think it out and have access to the mall layout." Police were able to obtain surveillance footage of the theft, but as it is part of an active investigation, it has not yet been released. Nothing was stolen from the coffee shop, but it will cost $1,500 to replace locks and repair the bathroom wall.

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A NASA instrument to provide unprecedented resolution of monitoring major air pollutants -- down to four square miles -- lifted off on its way to geostationary orbit at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space. From a report: "The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution -- it's about improving life on Earth for all. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and protect our planet," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. [...] From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles -- far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the effects of fertilizer application. TEMPO's observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution -- including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde -- not only over the continental United States, but also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola. "Our TEMPO slogan is 'It's about time,' which hints at TEMPO's ability to provide hourly air pollution data," said Xiong Liu, deputy principal investigator for TEMPO at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "After working on the TEMPO for more than 10 years, it is about time to launch TEMPO to produce real TEMPO data and start the new era of air quality monitoring over North America."

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The world needs a "business mindset" to tackle the climate crisis, the president of the next UN climate summit has said. From a report: Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of the Cop28 summit to be hosted in the United Arab Emirates later this year, said he aimed to use the UN talks to set out how the private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions and give businesses and governments a clear set of tasks and targets. "We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone," Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28 role. "The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action," he said. "Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies] and an ambitious action-oriented agenda." Al Jaber, as well as being the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology, is better known as a businessman, chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc, one of the world's biggest oil and gas producers, and the founding chief executive of its renewable energy company Masdar.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2020, we reported that emulator developers were using a hole in the Xbox Store's app distribution system to get around Microsoft's longstanding ban on emulators running on Xbox consoles. This week, though, many of the emulators that were distributed through that workaround have stopped working, the apparent victims of a new crackdown by Microsoft. Xbox emulator makers and users can't say they weren't warned. In the "Gaming and Xbox" section of Microsoft's official Store Policies, section 10.13.10 clearly states that "products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family." Microsoft's enforcement of this clause has historically focused on removing emulators published as "private" UWP apps to the Xbox Store. Those apps could be distributed to whitelisted users via direct links accessed on the system's Edge browser, getting around the usual approval process for a public store listing. Previously, users who downloaded one of these "hidden" emulator listings before Microsoft's inevitable takedown could run that emulator on an unmodified retail system indefinitely. That is no longer the case; trying to launch downloaded versions of emulators like Xenia or Retrospection on an Xbox console now generates an error saying, "Unable to launch this game or app. The game or app you're trying to launch violates Microsoft Store policy and is not supported."

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Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. From a report: They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven't been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely. Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not 'til September 29th. Existing Dropcam cameras will keep working until April 8th, 2024, after which you won't be able to access them from the Nest app. To soften the blow, Google's offering a free indoor wired Nest Cam to Dropcam owners who subscribe to Nest Aware. Nonsubscribers will get a 50 percent-off coupon. The promotion runs until May 7, 2024, so you can keep using your Dropcam until it stops working.

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Samsung Electronics will cut back on chip production, as it faces a sharp decline in global demand for semiconductors that has sent prices plunging. From a report: The world's biggest memory chip maker said it would make a "meaningful" cut to chip output after sales dropped sharply and it flagged a 96% drop in first-quarter profits, worse than expected. The fellow South Korean firm SK Hynix and Micron Technology of the US have also reduced production. "Samsung talking about production cuts is evidence of how bad the current slump really is," said Greg Roh, the head of research at Hyundai Motor Securities. Smartphone and personal computer makers ramped up purchases of chips during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for consumer electronics soared as people were stuck at home during lockdowns. This led to a global chip shortage. However, demand has waned as consumers cut back on bigger purchases amid the cost of living crisis, with food and energy bills soaring. Samsung said demand had dropped because of a weaker world economy and companies buying fewer chips as they run down their inventories. "We are lowering the production of memory chips by a meaningful level, especially that of products with supply secured," the company said, referring to customers with sufficient inventories.

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Startups and other companies trying to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom sparked by OpenAI are running into a problem: They can't find enough specialized computers to make their own AI software. The Information: A spike in demand for server chips that can train and run machine-learning software has caused a shortage, prompting major cloud-server providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle to limit their availability for customers, according to interviews with the cloud companies and their customers. Some customers have reported monthslong wait times to rent the hardware. "All the startups who are trying to get into this space...maybe they can get one [server] but there's no way they're going to get five," said Johnny Dallas, founder and CEO of Zeet, which sells software that makes it easier for engineers to run apps across multiple clouds. The server chip shortage is a frustrating hangup for software developers trying to build AI tools hinging on recent advancements in machine-learning models. These programmers, at small and big companies alike, are developing large-language models to make personalized writing coaches or search engines that respond to questions with written answers rather than links, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Many others are licensing and augmenting software from OpenAI and its rivals to create specialized customer service chatbots and research tools for corporate employees. For instance, OpenAI software is helping Morgan Stanley bankers find the best locations to auction a work of art, based on the bank's myriad internal reports on art markets.

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Here's a good reason to use Google Pay: Google might send you a bunch of free money. From a report: Many users report that Google accidentally deposited cash in their accounts -- anywhere from $10 to $1,000. Android researcher Mishaal Rahman got hit with the bug and shared most of the relevant details on Twitter. The cash arrived via Google Pay's "reward" program. Just like a credit card, you're supposed to get a few bucks back occasionally for various promotions, but nothing like this. Numerous screenshots show users receiving loads of "Reward" money for what the message called "dogfooding the Google Pay Remittance experience." "Dogfooding" is tech speak for "internally beta testing pre-release software," so if a message like this was ever supposed to go out, it should have only gone out to Google employees and/or some testing partners. Many regular users received multiple copies of this message with multiple payouts.

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Multi-brand consumer megacorp Unilever says it has become a "cloud-only enterprise" with the help of Accenture and Microsoft. From a report: One of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the retail goods industry, according to the company, will give Unilever "resilient, secure and optimised operations" as well as "a platform to drive innovation and growth." The Anglo-Dutch biz owns more than 400 brands, which include everything from ice cream to shampoo to toilet cleaner, and is set to use Microsoft's Azure as its "primary cloud platform." According to the corporate blurb, the move will see Unilever employ "industrial metaverse technologies" that use real-time data from factory digital twins. It musn't have got the memo from Microsoft, which recently put a bullet in its own industrial metaverse masterplan. The cloud contract is also expected to help "achieve perpetual breakthroughs in research and development," says Unilver. Lastly, through Microsoft's partnership with the controversial GPT maker, it will use "Azure OpenAI Service across Unilever's business to drive increased automation, enabling better customer and employee experiences."

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MSI has confirmed it suffered a data breach after a ransomware gang claimed it stole files from the PC maker. The company published a Taiwanese stock exchange filing about experiencing a âoecyber attack,â although the company is thin on details. From a report: "After detecting some information systems being attacked by hackers, MSI's IT department has initiated information security defense mechanism and recovery procedures," the PC maker said. The company also reported the incident to authorities. MSI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, making it unclear whether customer data is affected. But in the stock exchange filing, the PC maker says it anticipates the breach having "no significant impact" on its financials or operations. A new ransomware group called Money Message claims it breached the PC maker to steal the company's source code, including the framework for the BIOS used in MSI products.

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