In a change that reflects AI's growing influence -- and potentially disruptive power -- in Hollywood, Netflix added generative AI to the list of potential risk factors on its annual report filed with the SEC. From a report: In Netflix's 10-K report filed Friday, it added this new section to the long section of risk factors (which are required under SEC rules) in the section about video competition: "[N]ew technological developments, including the development and use of generative artificial intelligence, are rapidly evolving. If our competitors gain an advantage by using such technologies, our ability to compete effectively and our results of operations could be adversely impacted." Netflix also added this wording: "In addition, the use or adoption of new and emerging technologies may increase our exposure to intellectual property claims, and the availability of copyright and other intellectual property protection for AI-generated material is uncertain." Aside from those two sections, the risk factors on Netflix's 10-K for 2023 -- totaling some 10,000 words -- remained largely the same. To be sure, the changes here are very small, in the grand scheme of things. And keep in mind that these are all the potential risk factors that companies like Netflix must communicate to investors.

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Bank of America is cracking down on employees who aren't following its return-to-office mandate, sending "letters of education" warnings of disciplinary action to employees who have been staying home. The Guardian: Some employees at the bank received letters that said they had failed to meet the company's "workplace excellence guidelines" despite "requests and reminders to do so," according to the Financial Times. The letter warned employees that failure to follow return-to-office expectations could lead to "further disciplinary action."

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Fossil Group has decided to call it quits on smartwatches. The company announced Friday that it would leave the smartwatch business and redirect resources to its less-smart goods instead. From a report: The company has been one of the most prolific makers of Wear OS smartwatches over the years, and its absence will leave a large gap in the market. "As the smartwatch landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years, we have made the strategic decision to exit the smartwatch business," Fossil spokesperson Amanda Castelli tells The Verge. "Fossil Group is redirecting resources to support our core strength and the core segments of our business that continue to provide strong growth opportunities for us: designing and distributing exciting traditional watches, jewelry, and leather goods under our own as well as licensed brand names." This means that the Gen 6, which first launched in 2021, will be the last Fossil smartwatch. Castelli says the company will continue to keep existing Wear OS watches updated "for the next few years."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The creator of an audio deepfake of US President Joe Biden urging people not to vote in this week's New Hampshire primary has been suspended by ElevenLabs, according to a person familiar with the matter. ElevenLabs' technology was used to make the deepfake audio, according to Pindrop Security, a voice-fraud detection company that analyzed it. ElevenLabs was made aware this week of Pindrop's findings and is investigating, the person said. Once the deepfake was traced to its creator, that user's account was suspended, said the person, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public. ElevenLabs, a startup that uses artificial intelligence software to replicate voices in more than two dozen languages, said in a statement that it couldn't comment on specific incidents. But added, "We are dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools and take any incidents of misuse extremely seriously."

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Cargo theft from freight trains in the Los Angeles area has surged, with detectives estimating over 90 containers being opened daily and that theft on their freight trains in the Union Pacific area was up some 160 percent from the previous year. Nationally, cargo theft neared $1 billion in losses last year. Companies decline comment but California's governor publicly questioned the widespread railroad theft. Most arrested were not organized; many were homeless people nearby opportunistically taking fallen boxes off tracks. Theft stems largely from e-commerce boom that reshaped freight shipping to meet consumer demand, opening vulnerabilities. Railroad police forces and online retailers aim to combat this but concede difficulty tracking stolen goods resold anonymously online. Some products stolen from containers even get resold back on Amazon. The New York Times Magazine: Sometimes products stolen out of Amazon containers are resold by third-party sellers back on Amazon in a kind of strange ouroboros, in which the snakehead of capitalism hungrily swallows its piracy tail. Last June, California's attorney general created what was touted as a first-of-its-kind agreement among online retailers that committed them to doing a better job tracking, reporting and preventing stolen items from being resold on their platforms. While declining to comment on specific cases, a spokesperson for Amazon told me that the company is working to improve the process of vetting sellers: The number of "bad actor attempts" to create new selling accounts on Amazon decreased to 800,000 in 2022 from six million in 2020.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is widely expected to unveil major new artificial intelligence features with iOS 18 in June. Code found by 9to5Mac in the first beta of iOS 17.4 shows that Apple is continuing to work on a new version of Siri powered by large language model technology, with a little help from other sources. In fact, Apple appears to be using OpenAI's ChatGPT API for internal testing to help the development of its own AI models. According to this code, iOS 17.4 includes a new SiriSummarization private framework that makes calls to the OpenAI's ChatGPT API. This appears to be something Apple is using for internal testing of its new AI features. There are multiple examples of system prompts for the SiriSummarization framework in iOS 17.4 as well. This includes things like "please summarize," "please answer this questions," and "please summarize the given text." Apple is unlikely to use OpenAI models to power any of its artificial intelligence features in iOS 18. Instead, what it's doing here is testing its own AI models against ChatGPT. For example, the SiriSummarization framework can do summarization using on-device models. Apple appears to be using its own AI models to power this framework, then internally comparing its results against the results of ChatGPT. In total, iOS 17.4 code suggests Apple is testing four different AI models. This includes Apple's internal model called "Ajax," which Bloomberg has previously reported. iOS 17.4 shows that there are two versions of AjaxGPT, including one that is processed on-device and one that is not.

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Apple's new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS. Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it's "extremely disappointed" with the way things turned out. From a report: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps," DeMonte says. "The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear." In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari. The change opens the door for other popular engines, such as Blink, which is used by Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as Gecko, the engine used by Firefox. It also means third-party browsers could become fully functional on iOS without any of the limitations that come along with WebKit.

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California lawmakers are drawing up multiple plans to require watermarks on content created by AI to curb the abuses within the emerging technology, which has affected sectors from political races to the stock market. From a report: At least five lawmakers have promised or are considering different proposals that would require AI companies to implement some type of verification that a video, photo, or written work was made by the technology. The activity comes as advanced AI has rapidly evolved to create realistic images or audio on an unprecedented level. Advocates worry the technology could be ripe for abuse and lead to a wider proliferation of deepfakes, where a person's likeness is digitally manipulated to typically misrepresent them -- with it already being used in the presidential race. But such measures are likely to face scrutiny by the tech sector. Amid a pivotal election year and an online world full of disinformation, the ability to know what's real or not is crucial, said Drew Liebert, director of the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy. The harm from AI is already happening, with Liebert noting the aftermath of an AI-generated photo that went viral in May of last year that falsely portrayed another terrorist attack in the US. "The famous photograph now that was put on the internet that alleged that the Pentagon was attacked, that actually caused momentarily a [$500 billion] dollar loss in the stock market," he said. The loss would not as been as severe, he said, "if people would have been able to instantly determine that it was not a real image at all." Ask Slashdot:Could a Form of Watermarking Prevent AI Deep Faking?

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Global regulators, aviation security specialists and manufacturers failed to reach an agreement on a quick technical fix to the problem of GPS spoofing near war zones, instead calling for better training of pilots to deal with the issue, Reuters reports, citing sources briefed on the talks. From the report: Airlines have been urging quick action after a series of incidents where navigation systems were disrupted to show a false location or wrong time, though aircraft flight controls remained intact. Spoofing might involve one country's military sending false Global Positioning System signals to an enemy plane or drone to hinder its ability to function, which has a collateral effect on nearby airliners. GPS jamming and spoofing have grown worse in Eastern Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East, according to industry group OpsGroup. GPS is a growing part of aviation infrastructure as it replaces traditional radio beams used to guide planes towards landing. The first international meeting bringing together the sector was held on Thursday in Cologne, Germany, organized by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and international trade group the International Air Transport Association (IATA). GPS interference "can pose significant challenges to aviation safety," and requires that airlines increase data-sharing on jamming and spoofing events, EASA and IATA said in a joint statement.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm can relate to Americans' anxiety over electric vehicles. The former governor of Michigan and longtime EV owner (who currently drives a Ford Mach-E) says she has experienced her own challenges with public charging on road trips. She has heard from drivers who are reluctant to give up their eight-cylinder engines and large trucks and SUVs for an electric model. But she is convinced that more Americans will soon realize the benefits of owning one, helping to change the current anti-EV rhetoric in this country. [...] "All of those factories that I was talking about regarding building electric vehicles and electric vehicle batteries, 60% of them are going into red states. So, you know, people in red states love their EVs, too, and are working at these factories," Granholm said. "I just think that over time, the political nonsense about it will die down and people's experience will speak much more loudly."

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Apple faces strong action if changes to its App Store do not meet incoming European Union regulations, the bloc's industry chief said on Friday. Reuters: In a move designed to comply with the EU's incoming Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company will soon allow software developers to distribute their apps to Apple devices via alternative stores. From early March, developers will be able to offer alternative app stores on iPhones and opt out of using Apple's in-app payment system, which charges commissions of up to 30%. However, critics have said the changes do not go far enough, arguing Apple's fee structure remains unfair, and that the changes may be in violation of the DMA. Asked about Apple's plans, EU industry chief Thierry Breton exclusively told Reuters: "The DMA will open the gates of the internet to competition so that digital markets are fair and open. Change is already happening. As from 7 March we will assess companies' proposals, with the feedback of third parties." He added: "If the proposed solutions are not good enough, we will not hesitate to take strong action."

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prisoninmate shares a 9to5linux report: Flathub is currently one of the most popular app stores for Linux serving 1.6 billion downloads of over 2,400 apps in the Flatpak format, of which more than 850 apps have been verified by their original authors. And now, Flathub proudly announced today that it surpassed 1 million active users of Flatpak apps. The team believes that the recent growth in users comes from several factors, including the availability of some very popular apps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Spotify, OBS Studio, Google Chrome, Telegram), support for new and verified apps, the inclusion of Flathub as the default app source for the Steam Deck's desktop mode, as well as the growing adoption among many popular GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora Linux, Linux Mint, KDE neon, and others.

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Astronomers have discovered a mysterious group of giant elderly stars at the heart of the Milky Way that are emitting solar system-sized clouds of dust and gas. The stars, which have been named "old smokers," sat quietly for many years, fading almost to invisibility, before suddenly puffing out vast clouds of smoke. The discovery was made during the monitoring of almost a billion stars in infrared light during a 10-year survey of the night sky. The Guardian: The astronomers had set out to capture rarely seen newborn stars -- known as protostars -- while undergoing the equivalent of a stellar growth spurt. During these periods, young stars rapidly acquire mass by gorging on surrounding star-forming gas, leading to a sudden increase in luminosity. The team tracked hundreds of millions of stars and identified 32 erupting protostars that increased in brightness at least 40-fold and in some cases more than 300-fold. Another group of red giant stars near the centre of the Milky Way unexpectedly showed up in the analysis, however. When they were studied in more detail using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, seven of the stars were deemed to be a new type of red giant star, which the researchers named "old smokers." Convection currents and instabilities within the star could trigger the release of enormous columns of smoke, Prof Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire, who led the observations, suggested.

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Nintendo plans to launch a new 8-inch LCD-equipped Switch game console this year, well-regarded analyst firm Omdia said Friday [unpaywalled-link]. Bloomberg: The new device from the Kyoto-based games maker will be responsible for a doubling in shipments of so-called amusement displays in 2024, Hayase said in Tokyo on Friday. His research focuses on small and medium displays and he bases annual forecasts on checks with companies in the supply chain. Nintendo's seven-year-old Switch has sold over 132 million units and is approaching the end of its life cycle. The company has been tight-lipped about any potential successor, but expectations have narrowed to this year's holiday period for the release of the next generation.

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