Amazon plans to invest $12.7 billion into its cloud business in India by 2030, the e-commerce group said Thursday, as it pushes ahead to scale up the AWS infrastructure in the key overseas market at a time when it has pared back several other services in the region. From a report: The U.S. giant, which earlier invested $3.7 billion on AWS infra in India and currently maintains two data center regions in the South Asian market, said its spendings will support 131,700 full-time jobs across roles such as engineering, telecommunications and construction. Thursday's announcement is a noteworthy escalation in AWS's initial strategy. The cloud giant had earlier said that it will invest $4.4 billion on AWS in the South Asian economy.

Hanging on to your favorite wireless mouse just got a little easier thanks to a new partnership between Logitech and DIY repair specialists iFixit. The Verge: The two companies are working together to reduce unnecessary e-waste and help customers repair their own out-of-warranty Logitech hardware by supplying spare parts, batteries, and repair guides for "select products." Everything will eventually be housed in the iFixit Logitech Repair Hub, with parts available to purchase as needed or within "Fix Kits" that provide everything needed to complete the repair, such as tools and precision bit sets. Starting "this summer," Logitech's MX Master and MX Anywhere mouse models will be the first products to receive spare parts. Pricing information has not been disclosed yet, and Logitech hasn't mentioned any other devices that will receive the iFixit genuine replacement parts and repair guide treatment.

Google has agreed to an $8 million settlement with Texas over deceptive ads for its Pixel 4 smartphone, in which radio DJs were hired to provide testimonials without being given the phone to use. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made the announcement last week. Ars Technica reports: At issue was Google's trustworthiness as an advertiser after the tech giant "hired radio DJs to record and broadcast detailed testimonials about their personal experiences with the Pixel 4," but then "refused to provide the DJs with a phone for them to use," Paxton said. The tech giant had previously settled claims from the Federal Trade Commission and six other states for approximately $9 million, and Paxton seemed proud that his "settlement recovers $8 million for the State of Texas alone."

Paxton said that "if Google is going to advertise in Texas, their statements better be true." He decided to take action to hold Google "accountable for lying to Texans for financial gain," saying that large companies should not expect "special treatment under the law." "Texas will do whatever it takes to protect our citizens and our state economy from corporations' false and misleading advertisements," Paxton said.

Argentina's central bank on Monday hiked its benchmark interest rate by 600 basis points to 97%, according to an official announcement, as the country battles to bring down inflation that hit 109% on an annual basis in April. From a report: Reuters had reported the hike decision on Sunday, citing a source, as the government announced a package of measures to rein in soaring consumer prices and support the wobbly peso currency.

Ahead of Imgur's ban of sexually explicit content, Reddit announced Thursday that it will allow users to upload NSFW images from desktops in adult subreddits. The feature was already available on the social network's mobile app. TechCrunch reports: "This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already has this functionality. You must set your community to 18+ if your community's content will primarily be not safe for work (NSFW)," the company said.

Reddit's announcement comes days after Imgur said that the image hosting platform was banning explicit photos from May 15. At that time, the company said that explicit content formed a risk to Imgur's "community and its business." Banning this type of content would "protect the future of the Imgur community." Many of Reddit's communities rely on Imgur's hosting services. However, the social network allowing native NSFW uploads through desktop might be the most logical solution going forward.

From a Science magazine report, shared by schwit1: When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was "shocked" by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010 -- and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers' group report. "It is just too hard to believe" at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It's as if "somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic." His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills -- secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship.

"Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff," says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were "heavily compromised" by articles from paper mills. Sabel's tool relies on just two indicators -- authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn't a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues. Still, the detectors raise hopes for gaining the advantage over paper mills, which churn out bogus manuscripts containing text, data, and images partly or wholly plagiarized or fabricated, often massaged by ghost writers.

Some papers are endorsed by unrigorous reviewers solicited by the authors. Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews. The recent advent of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has amplified the concern. To fight back, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), representing 120 publishers, is leading an effort called the Integrity Hub to develop new tools. STM is not revealing much about the detection methods, to avoid tipping off paper mills. "There is a bit of an arms race," says Joris van Rossum, the Integrity Hub's product director. He did say one reliable sign of a fake is referencing many retracted papers; another involves manuscripts and reviews emailed from internet addresses crafted to look like those of legitimate institutions. Twenty publishers -- including the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley -- are helping develop the Integrity Hub tools, and 10 of the publishers are expected to use a paper mill detector the group unveiled in April.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: This year's DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others. The collaborative event, which AI Village organizers describe as "the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models," will host "thousands" of people, including "hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities," all of whom will be tasked with finding flaws in LLMs that power today's chat bots and generative AI. Think: traditional bugs in code, but also problems more specific to machine learning, such as bias, hallucinations, and jailbreaks -- all of which ethical and security professionals are now having to grapple with as these technologies scale. DEF CON is set to run from August 10 to 13 this year in Las Vegas, USA.

For those participating in the red teaming this summer, the AI Village will provide laptops and timed access to LLMs from various vendors. Currently this includes models from Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Stability. The village people's announcement also mentions this is "with participation from Microsoft," so perhaps hackers will get a go at Bing. We're asked for clarification about this. Red teams will also have access to an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI. There will be a capture-the-flag-style point system to promote the testing of "a wide range of harms," according to the AI Village. Whoever gets the most points wins a high-end Nvidia GPU. The event is also supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy; America's National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate; and the Congressional AI Caucus.

Slack sees the future: Imagine if every time you hop into a channel, you'll be able to get up to speed on unread Slack messages in one click — whether you're jumping in midway through a project or catching up from being out of the office. In the future, with generative AI built seamlessly into the user experience, conversation summaries will be there when you need them, the moment you start scrolling through a channel.

With AI assistance built natively into Slack's message composer and canvas, a new surface for curating information, Slack GPT could also help you tweak your drafts until the words are just right. In a few clicks, you'll be able to distill content, adjust the tone, and more, right from where you're already writing.
In fact, Slack "previewed generative AI tools on Thursday," reports the Register, "currently under development and bundled under the banner Slack GPT." Customers will be able to use large language models like Anthropic's Claude as well as OpenAI's GPT to instruct the chatbots to perform other tasks, like search or answering questions.

Slack is also working on Workflow Builder — a no-code automation tool that will enable users to add generative prompts to automatically perform tasks for them, like setting up alerts or writing and sharing documents... Other tools, like its forthcoming Einstein GPT app, are aimed at supporting existing Salesforce services in its CRM software. Users of Salesforce Customer 360 data and Data Cloud — like customer service agents, sales reps, or marketers — can access language models to generate leads, write emails, schedule meetings, or draft plans. Einstein GPT will also be able to handle code, so developers can ask chatbots to write short programs or fix bugs.

It's not clear when Slack GPT or Einstein GPT will be generally available. Integration with Anthropic's Claude, however, is available now, whilst integration with ChatGPT is currently in beta. Workflow Builder is scheduled to be released in summer this year.
From Slack's announcement: Say you have a workflow that alerts you when a new lead comes in from Sales Cloud, ensuring sales reps can quickly respond. Imagine if ChatGPT could take your workflow a few steps further, using CRM data from a sales lead to draft a personalized prospecting email for you? Put it in a document, share it in a channel, and every sales rep now has a head start when they follow up on the lead.

Following the announcement of the bill in March, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele signed a law today eliminating income, property, capital gains, and other tariffs on technology innovations. Watcher Guru reports: The announcement reinforces El Salvador's perspective as a haven for technology development. Additionally, Bukele stated that the new act protects "technology innovations, software and app programming, AI, computer, and communications hardware manufacturing."

The Innovations and Technology Manufacturing Incentives Act will likely attract tech developments to the country. Moreover, the elimination of taxes presents an economic benefit to a host of companies. Conversely, El Salvador continues to maintain its commitment to a variety of tech innovations that are being developed.

Apple and Google said on Tuesday that they were working together to prevent lost item trackers like Apple's AirTag from being used to track people without their permission. From a report: The companies came together to draft a new industry standard that will add the ability to alert victims to unwanted trackers in Android and iOS, the companies said. Apple's AirTag is intended to help people find lost items such as keys by displaying an item's nearly real-time location inside an iPhone app. But there have been many reports about the $30 coin-sized device being used to stalk people since it went on sale in 2021. In response, Apple previously built detection features into iPhones that allow users to detect unfamiliar AirTags in the user's area. Tuesday's announcement suggests that Android phones will also soon gain the ability to warn their users if they are being tracked by an AirTag.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Not everyone trusts OpenAI's ChatGPT. While the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot has proved popular with some businesses looking to automate business tasks, other companies, such as banks, have avoided adopting ChatGPT for fear that their employees would inadvertently give the chatbot proprietary information when they use it. Microsoft, which has the rights to resell the startup's technology, has a plan to win over the holdouts.

Later this quarter Microsoft's Azure cloud server unit plans to sell a version of ChatGPT that runs on dedicated cloud servers where the data will be kept separate from those of other customers, according to two people with knowledge of the upcoming announcement. The idea is to give customers peace of mind that their secrets won't leak to the main ChatGPT system, the people said. But it will come at a price: The product could cost as much as 10 times what customers currently pay to use the regular version of ChatGPT, one of these people said.

Venmo soon will allow users to transfer their Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash to outside wallets -- as well as to other users of the popular payment app. From a report: The feature will roll out starting in May, according to a statement from PayPal, which acquired Venmo in 2013. Users can also transfer crypto to their PayPal wallets, which released a similar ability for users in 2022. Crypto transfers on Venmo will be irreversible, just like crypto transactions more broadly -- a function of cryptocurrency's use of blockchains, or immutable public ledgers. To roll out the transfer system, PayPal is partnering with Paxos, a crypto firm that specializes in stablecoins.

"We're excited to connect Venmo's customers to the community, other wallets and exchanges, and we intend to continue to roll out additional crypto products and services in the year ahead," PayPal said in its statement. The announcement from PayPal is one of the first drips of crypto updates from the payments giant since February, when it was reported that the publicly traded company was pausing work on its own stablecoin after reports that Paxos, its partner in the effort, was under investigation from the New York Department of Financial Services, a key player among U.S. cryptocurrency regulators.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously -- the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn't been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now.

The move is also going to be disastrous for the continuity of the internet. Like Photobucket before it, Imgur has been widely used to host millions of photos that are linked to, embedded, or used elsewhere, and lots of these photos were uploaded by people who didn't bother to sign up for accounts. Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit, meaning the content of those old posts could suddenly disappear off the internet. The move will likely also break embeds in various forum posts and blog posts all over the internet, creating an unpleasant form of link rot. (The Archive Team, generally a harbinger of shuttering sites, is working on backing up this material, according to an announcement on Reddit.)

Satellite manufacturer AST SpaceMobile partnered with AT&T to make the first two-way audio call using satellites with a standard smartphone. "The initial call was placed using AT&T's networks in Midland, Texas, to mobile carrier Ratuken in Japan on an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone using AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 satellite," reports Engadget. AST SpaceMobile claims to be building "the first and only space-based cellular broadband network." From the report: AT&T aims to use satellites to provide global cellular broadband from 2G to 5G. "Achieving what many once considered impossible, we have reached the most significant milestone to date in our quest to deliver global cellular broadband from space," Abel Avellan, CEO and chairman of AST SpaceMobile, said in a release. "While we take a moment to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment, we remain focused on the path ahead and pivotal next steps that get us closer to our goal of transforming the way the world connects."

It's unclear whether satellite access would come at an extra cost. In AT&T's original AST SpaceMobile partnership announcement, the company couldn't say whether existing plans would include satellite coverage. [...] While satellite offerings aren't available for consumers yet, this successful test brings widespread access one step closer to becoming a reality.

"Thousands of stunned guests were on hand Saturday night to watch a Disneyland malfunction for the ages," writes SFGate — when a 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon burst into flames, and continued burning for several minutes in front of the stunned crowd.

SFGate reports: The fire occurred during the 10:30 p.m. performance of Fantasmic, a show staged on the Rivers of America. The elaborate show uses ships, barges, projections on the water and fire effects to tell the story of Mickey Mouse's dreams and nightmares. Near the end of the show, the dragon form of Maleficent from "Sleeping Beauty," emerges from the island.

The big finale went awry Saturday, and flames engulfed the entire dragon. Video taken by shocked spectators shows the fire beginning on the dragon's face and rapidly spreading down its body as chunks of flaming debris fall to the ground. Smoke and heavy flames billow from the prop as firefighters begin hosing down the dragon. The remainder of the show was canceled, and guests were escorted out of the immediate area...

The dragon, one of the most memorable parts of Disneyland's beloved nighttime spectacular, has jokingly been referred to as Murphy, a reference to Murphy's law. Over the decades, it's been part of countless malfunctions and mishaps, although none quite so destructive as this. Though it is supposed to breathe fire, there are times when the effect doesn't work at all.
"Disneyland employees armed with garden hoses and fire extinguishers were no match for the inferno," reports the Orange County Register. "The dragon's head erupted into a fireball and a flamethrower effect from the dragon's mouth shot directly toward the stage, according to MiceChat."

The newspaper has a picture of the charred mechanical skeleton that was still lying on the ground Sunday on Tom Sawyer Island — and a 146-second video of the blaze. (Apparently realizing they're witnessing an unplanned fire, one spectator can be heard telling another one wryly, "Happy birthday, Danny.")

"Some spectators thought it was part of the show," reports the New York Times. One visitor told the newspaper, "My sister and I were talking about how it was impressive. I was like, 'Man, they can set that head on fire and it just stays perfectly intact?' So we were kind of amazed at Disney at first..."

When interviewed by the Associated Press, Ryan Laux, a frequent Disneyland visitor, "said Mickey vanished from the stage as soon as the dragon's head became engulfed in flames."

Then a voice over a loudspeaker announced the show wouldn't continue "due to unforeseen circumstances..." (as heard in the video). "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause — and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening here at Disneyland. Once again, this performance cannot continue due to unforeseen circumstances. Thank you." At that moment the head burst into more flames, some members of the audience gasped in unison — and the announcement continued playing in Spanish. ("No podemos continuar con este presentacion...") Then cheery banjo music began playing.

At least six workers were eventually treated for smoke inhalation from the burning dragon prop, reports the New York Times.

In a statement Disney said they were now "temporarily suspending fire effects" in "select" shows in their parks around the world — "out of an abundance of caution."

Last year Python's massive PyPI repository of pre-written software packages had 235.7 billion downloads — a 57% annual growth in its download counts and bandwidth. So now Python's nonprofit Python Software Foundation has an announcement.

Their director of infrastructure said today that they're rolling out "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI, while simultaneously giving our users one of our most requested features: organization accounts." Organizations on PyPI are self-managed teams, with their own exclusive branded web addresses. Our goal is to make PyPI easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.

We're making organizations available to community projects for free, forever, and to corporate projects for a small fee. Additional priority support agreements will be available to all paid subscribers, and all revenue will go right back into PyPI to continue building better support and infrastructure for all our users... Having more people using and contributing to Python every year is an fantastic problem to have, but it is one we must increase organizational capacity to accommodate. Increased revenue for PyPI allows it to become a staffed platform that can respond to support requests and attend to issues in a timeframe that is significantly faster than what our excellent (but thinly spread) largely volunteer team could reasonably handle.

We want to be very clear — these new features are completely optional. If features for larger projects don't sound like something that would be useful to you as a PyPI maintainer, then there is no obligation to create an organization and absolutely nothing about your PyPI experience will change for you.

We look forward to discussing what other features PyPI users would like to see tackled next...

An anonymous reader shared this scathing rant from the Verge: It's a truth universally acknowledged that smart speakers should just shut up. I don't want to know when Siri / Alexa / Google has locked my front door — I just asked it to do that and I expect it to happen. (We'll put a pin in the fact that it doesn't always do this). So Google's announcement this week that it's taking more steps to stop its Google Assistant from chattering away to you every time you send a command to a Nest smart speaker is a welcome one.

The Assistant already stays schtum when you ask it to turn the lights off in the room you're in, sending a gentle chime to let you know it was successful. (You know, in case THE LIGHTS TURNING OFF didn't alert you to this fact.) However, it still loves to have a good old chat when you ask it to do something like change the temperature of your thermostat. "Okay, setting the living room AC to 76 degrees." This new change will, according to a community blog post from Google, roll out over the next few weeks. It will make the speaker chime instead of starting a conversation when you ask it to control smart devices, including switches, plugs, fans, blinds, TVs, and speakers.

However, this is still only for the room you and the speaker are in. So, when I'm in bed at night and softly request my Nest Hub to turn off the living room lights, it will still loudly respond, "TURNING OFF LIVING ROOM LIGHTS." Sigh.
The article argues the problem is specific to Google's speakers. "Knowing when to be silent is something every other smart speaker manufacturer figured out a while back."

America's Department of Homeland Security "will establish a new task force to examine how the government can use artificial intelligence technology to protect the country," reports CNBC.

The task force was announcement by department secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Friday during a speech at a Council on Foreign Relations event: "Our department will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland," Mayorkas said, while also pledging to defend "against the malicious use of this transformational technology." He added, "As we do this, we will ensure that our use of AI is rigorously tested to avoid bias and disparate impact and is clearly explainable to the people we serve...."

Mayorkas gave two examples of how the task force will help determine how AI could be used to fine-tune the agency's work. One is to deploy AI into DHS systems that screen cargo for goods produced by forced labor. The second is to use the technology to better detect fentanyl in shipments to the U.S., as well as identifying and stopping the flow of "precursor chemicals" used to produce the dangerous drug.

Mayorkas asked Homeland Security Advisory Council Co-Chair Jamie Gorelick to study "the intersection of AI and homeland security and deliver findings that will help guide our use of it and defense against it."
The article also notes that earlier this week America's defense department hired a former Google AI cloud director to serve as its first advisor on AI, robotics, cloud computing and data analytics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says. The site has more than 20 million registered users. Stack Overflow's decision to seek compensation from companies tapping its data, part of a broader generative AI strategy, has not been previously reported. It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June.

"Community platforms that fuel LLMs absolutely should be compensated for their contributions so that companies like us can reinvest back into our communities to continue to make them thrive," Stack Overflow's Chandrasekar says. "We're very supportive of Reddit's approach." Chandrasekar described the potential additional revenue as vital to ensuring Stack Overflow can keep attracting users and maintaining high-quality information. He argues that will also help future chatbots, which need "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward. They need new knowledge to be created." But fencing off valuable data also could deter some AI training and slow improvement of LLMs, which are a threat to any service that people turn to for information and conversation. Chandrasekar says proper licensing will only help accelerate development of high-quality LLMs.

Chandrasekar says that LLM developers are violating Stack Overflow's terms of service. Users own the content they post on Stack Overflow, as outlined in its TOS, but it all falls under a Creative Commons license that requires anyone later using the data to mention where it came from. When AI companies sell their models to customers, they "are unable to attribute each and every one of the community members whose questions and answers were used to train the model, thereby breaching the Creative Commons license," Chandrasekar says. Neither Stack Overflow nor Reddit has released pricing information. "Both Stack Overflow and Reddit will continue to license data for free to some people and companies," notes Wired. "Chandrasekar says Stack Overflow only wants remuneration only from companies developing LLMs for big, commercial purposes."

"When people start charging for products that are built on community-built sites like ours, that's where it's not fair use," he says.

BuzzFeed is shutting down BuzzFeed News and laying off 15% of its employees, or about 180 people. CEO Jonah Peretti made the announcement in a memo on Thursday. Variety reports: Going forward, BuzzFeed will concentrate its news efforts in a single profitable news organization -- HuffPost, which it acquired from Verizon in 2020, per Peretti's memo. The company's flagship BuzzFeed.com site will remain in place. "While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we've determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization," Peretti wrote.

BuzzFeed News launched in 2012 under then-editor in chief Ben Smith. In the memo, Peretti said, "I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn't provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media." HuffPost is "a brand that is profitable with a highly engaged, loyal audience that is less dependent on social platforms," than BuzzFeed News, according to Peretti.

Peretti also wrote, "we will bring more innovation to clients in the form of creators, AI and cultural moments that can only happen across BuzzFeed, Complex, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast." According to a BuzzFeed spokesperson, no jobs are being replaced by AI. The company recently started using AI to assist in creating some content, including quizzes, and Peretti said the technology would become "part of our core business."