An academic journal has retracted two papers because it determined their authors used unlicensed software. The Register: Elsevier's Ain Shams Engineering Journal withdrew two papers exploring dam failures after complaints from Flow Science, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based maker of a computational fluid dynamics application called FLOW-3D.

"Following an editorial investigation as a result of a complaint from the software distributor, the authors admitted that the use of professional software, FLOW-3D program for the results published in the article, was made without a license from the developer," a note from the journal's editor-in-chief explains.

"One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any intellectual property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner."

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to launch an investigation into anti-competitive practices at Microsoft's cloud computing business, Financial Times reported Thursday, as the US regulator continues to pursue Big Tech in the final weeks of Joe Biden's presidency. From the report: The FTC is examining allegations that Microsoft is abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to competitors' platforms, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After dragging its feet for years, Microsoft has finally released the first official Windows 11 ISOs for PCs with an Arm64 processor. This means users can now clean install Windows 11 using official offline media on an Arm64-based PC, including the latest Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs.

The ISOs contain version 24H2 can be downloaded from the official Microsoft website, and are around 5GB in size depending on the language you select. According to the company, the ISOs are primarily designed for running Windows 11 in a virtual machine on Arm64 PCs. However, it also mentions that you can use them to clean install Windows 11 directly onto Arm64 hardware too.Unfortunately, depending on the Arm64 PC you have, you may need to do some additional work to get the ISO bootable.

AMD has announced plans to cut 4% of its global workforce as it repositions to compete in the AI chip market dominated by Nvidia. The layoffs will affect approximately 1,040 employees of its 26,000-strong workforce reported at the end of 2023. CNBC adds: AMD produces powerful AI accelerators for data centers, including the MI300X, which companies such as Meta and Microsoft purchase as an alternative to Nvidia-based systems. But Nvidia dominates the market for powerful AI chips, with over 80% market share, partially because it developed the core software that AI engineers use to develop programs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Apple released Final Cut Pro 11 this week, marking the first major version change in over a decade for its professional video editing software. The update introduces several AI-powered features, including a new "Magnetic Mask" function that automatically tracks objects through video clips for targeted color grading and effects.

The suite now offers on-device automatic caption generation for dialogue tracks and adds support for spatial video editing compatible with Apple Vision Pro. Users can adjust the depth of titles and objects for 3D viewing. The update requires macOS 14.6 and at least 8GB of RAM, with some features exclusive to Apple silicon Macs.

Existing Final Cut Pro X users will receive the upgrade at no cost, while new users can purchase the software for $299. Accompanying updates include Final Cut Camera for iPhone, which now supports H.265 HEVC format for Apple Log footage on iPhone 15/16 Pro models, and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.1, featuring enhanced automated color grading tools and new creative assets.

Projects created on Mac remain incompatible with the iPad version, PetaPixel reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a general consensus that we won't be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It's still an open question, however, whether we could perform limited but useful calculations at an earlier point. IBM is one of the companies that's betting the answer is yes, and on Wednesday, it announced a series of developments aimed at making that possible. On their own, none of the changes being announced are revolutionary. But collectively, changes across the hardware and software stacks have produced much more efficient and less error-prone operations. The net result is a system that supports the most complicated calculations yet on IBM's hardware, leaving the company optimistic that its users will find some calculations where quantum hardware provides an advantage. [...]

Wednesday's announcement was based on the introduction of the second version of its Heron processor, which has 133 qubits. That's still beyond the capability of simulations on classical computers, should it be able to operate with sufficiently low errors. IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars that Revision 2 of Heron focused on getting rid of what are called TLS (two-level system) errors. "If you see this sort of defect, which can be a dipole or just some electronic structure that is caught on the surface, that is what we believe is limiting the coherence of our devices," Gambetta said. This happens because the defects can resonate at a frequency that interacts with a nearby qubit, causing the qubit to drop out of the quantum state needed to participate in calculations (called a loss of coherence). By making small adjustments to the frequency that the qubits are operating at, it's possible to avoid these problems. This can be done when the Heron chip is being calibrated before it's opened for general use.

Separately, the company has done a rewrite of the software that controls the system during operations. "After learning from the community, seeing how to run larger circuits, [we were able to] almost better define what it should be and rewrite the whole stack towards that," Gambetta said. The result is a dramatic speed-up. "Something that took 122 hours now is down to a couple of hours," he told Ars. Since people are paying for time on this hardware, that's good for customers now. However, it could also pay off in the longer run, as some errors can occur randomly, so less time spent on a calculation can mean fewer errors. Despite all those improvements, errors are still likely during any significant calculations. While it continues to work toward developing error-corrected qubits, IBM is focusing on what it calls error mitigation, which it first detailed last year. [...] The problem here is that using the function is computationally difficult, and the difficulty increases with the qubit count. So, while it's still easier to do error mitigation calculations than simulate the quantum computer's behavior on the same hardware, there's still the risk of it becoming computationally intractable. But IBM has also taken the time to optimize that, too. "They've got algorithmic improvements, and the method that uses tensor methods [now] uses the GPU," Gambetta told Ars. "So I think it's a combination of both."

Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software.

I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could.

I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday.

Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years.

As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so.

Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...]

Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."

If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music.

How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:

- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro free for personal use, allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Starting this week, the Pro versions and the two products will no longer be available under a paid subscription model.

"Effective immediately, both VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation will transition away from the paid subscription model, meaning you can now utilize these tools without any cost. The paid versions of these offerings -- Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro -- are no longer available for purchase," said Broadcom product marketing director Himanshu Singh. "If you're currently under a commercial contract, you can rest easy knowing that your agreement will remain in effect until the end of your term. You will continue to receive the full level of service and enterprise-grade support as per your contract."

While the free versions will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support ticketing for troubleshooting. Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and improvements and ensure that updates are rolled out promptly. "We're actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements," Singh added. "Our engineering teams are committed to maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance." You can download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation here (sign-in required).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock is one of the largest vendors of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. The company markets itself as having the goal to fully "eliminate crime" with the use of ALPRs and other connected surveillance cameras, a target experts say is impossible. [...] Flock and automated license plate reader cameras owned by other companies are now in thousands of neighborhoods around the country. Many of these systems talk to each other and plug into other surveillance systems, making it possible to track people all over the country.

"It went from me seeing 10 license plate readers to probably seeing 50 or 60 in a few days of driving around," [said Alabama resident and developer Will Freeman]. "I wanted to make a record of these things. I thought, 'Can I make a database of these license plate readers?'" And so he made a map, and called it DeFlock. DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock (PDF) to the posts holding up Huntsville's ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world. [...]

When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world. He said so far more than 1,700 cameras have been reported in the United States and more than 5,600 have been reported around the world. He has also begun scraping parts of Flock's website to give people a better idea of where to look to map them. For example, Flock says that Colton, California, a city with just over 50,000 people outside of San Bernardino, has 677 cameras.

People who submit cameras to DeFlock have the ability to note the direction that they are pointing in, which can help people understand how these cameras are being positioned and the strategies that companies and police departments are using when deploying them. For example, all of the cameras in downtown Huntsville are pointing away from the downtown core, meaning they are primarily focused on detecting cars that are entering downtown Huntsville from other areas.

Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs. From a report: The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance execution engines for AI. Neural Magic's software aims to process AI workloads on processors and GPUs at speeds equivalent to specialized AI chips (e.g. TPUs). By running models on off-the-shelf processors, which usually have more available memory, the company's software can realize these performance gains.

Big tech companies like AMD and a host of other startups, including NeuReality, Deci, CoCoPie, OctoML and DeepCube, offer some sort of AI optimization software. But Neural Magic is one of the few with a free platform and a collection of open source tools to complement it. Neural Magic had so far managed to raise $50 million in venture capital from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associations, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC and Ridgeline Ventures.

Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year. The Verge: The software giant has been moving existing users of these apps over to the new Outlook for Windows app in recent months, and now it has set an end of support date for the Mail, Calendar, and People apps of December 31st.

Once the apps reach end of support later this year, Microsoft warns that users who haven't moved to the new Outlook app "will no longer be able to send and receive email using Windows Mail and Calendar."

Microsoft has been rolling out the new Outlook for Windows app for years, with it officially reaching the general availability stage in August. The new web-based Outlook is designed to eventually replace the full desktop version of Outlook too, and Microsoft plans to provide enterprise customers a 12-month notice before it starts to move people away from the desktop version of Outlook.

zoobab writes: The US Senate to set to revive Software Patents with the PERA Bill, with a vote on Thursday, November 14, 2024.

A crucial Senate Committee is on the cusp of voting on two bills that would resurrect some of the most egregious software patents and embolden patent trolls. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would dismantle vital safeguards that prohibit software patents on overly broad concepts. If passed, courts would be compelled to approve software patents on mundane activities like mobile food ordering or basic online financial transactions. This would unleash a torrent of vague and overbroad software patents, which would be wielded by patent trolls to extort small businesses and individuals.

The EFF is inviting members of the public to contact their Senators.

GIMP 3.0, the long-awaited upgrade from the popular open-source image editor, has entered the release candidate phase, signaling that a stable version may be available by the end of this year or early 2025. Tom's Hardware reports: So, what has changed with the debut of GIMP 3? The new interface is still quite recognizable to classic GIMP users but has been considerably smoothed out and is far more scalable to high-resolution displays than it used to be. Several familiar icons have been carefully converted to SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics, enabling supremely high-quality, scalable assets.

While PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics, are also known to be high-quality due to their lack of compression, they are still suboptimal compared to SVGs when SVGs are applicable. The work of converting GIMP's tool icons to SVG is still in progress per the original blog post, but it's good that developer Denis Rangelov has already started on the work.

Many aspects of the GIMP 3.0 update are almost wholly on the backend for ensuring project and plugin compatibility with past projects made with previous versions of GIMP. To summarize: a public GIMP API is being stabilized to make it easier to port GIMP 2.10-based plugins and scripts to GIMP 3.0. Several bugs related to color accuracy have been fixed to improve color management while still maintaining compatibility with past GIMP projects. You can read the GIMP team's blog post here.

Google will require all new mobile chipsets launching with Android 15 to support its Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a significant shift in the operating system's security architecture. The mandate, reports AndroidAuthority that got a hold of Android's latest Vendor Software Requirements document, affects major chipmakers including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung's Exynos division. New processors like the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 must implement AVF support to receive Android certification.

AVF, introduced with Android 13, creates isolated environments for security-sensitive operations including code compilation and DRM applications. The framework also enables full operating system virtualization, with Google demonstrating Chrome OS running in a virtual machine on Android devices.

Google's head of research Yossi Matias maintains that learning to code remains "as important as ever" despite AI's growing role in software development. While AI tools have reduced coding time for some developers -- and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noting that AI now generates a quarter of all code, Matias stressed that human engineers still review and approve AI-generated code.

The Google executive, who also serves as a company VP, acknowledged that junior professionals have faced challenges gaining experience as AI handles entry-level tasks. Google has launched initiatives to support early-career employees through this transition. Matias compared coding literacy to basic mathematics, arguing it provides crucial understanding of technology regardless of career path.

A new article at Reason.com argues that U.S. courts "are coming for digital libraries." In September, a federal appeals court dealt a major blow to the Internet Archive — one of the largest online repositories of free books, media, and software — in a copyright case with significant implications for publishers, libraries, and readers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that found the Internet Archive's huge, digitized lending library of copyrighted books was not covered by the "fair use" doctrine and infringed on the rights of publishers. Agreeing with the Archive's interpretation of fair use "would significantly narrow — if not entirely eviscerate — copyright owners' exclusive right to prepare derivative works," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "Were we to approve [Internet Archive's] use of the works, there would be little reason for consumers or libraries to pay publishers for content they could access for free."
Others disagree, according to some links shared in a recent email from the Internet Archive. Public Knowledge CEO Chris Lewis argues the court's logic renders the fair use doctrine "almost unusuable". And that's just the beginning... This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities' reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach.
But lawyer/librarian Kyle K. Courtney writes that the case "is specific only to the parties, and does not impact the other existing versions of controlled digital lending." Additionally, this decision is limited to the 2nd Circuit and is not binding anywhere else — in other words, it does not apply to the 47 states outside the 2nd Circuit's jurisdiction. In talking with colleagues in the U.S. this week and last, many are continuing their programs because they believe their digital loaning programs fall outside the scope of this ruling... Moreover, the court's opinion focuses on digital books that the court said "are commercially available for sale or license in any electronic text format." Therefore, there remains a significant number of materials in library collections that have not made the jump to digital, nor are likely to, meaning that there is no ebook market to harm — nor is one likely to emerge for certain works, such as those that are no longer commercially viable...

This case represents just one instance in an ongoing conversation about library lending in the digital age, and the possibility of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court means the final outcome is far from settled.
Some more quotes from links shared by Internet Archive:

• "It was clear that the only reason all the big publishers sued the Internet Archive was to put another nail in the coffin of libraries and push to keep this ebook licensing scheme grift going. Now the courts have helped." — TechDirt

• "The case against the Internet Archive is not just a story about the ruination of an online library, but a grander narrative of our times: how money facilitates the transference of knowledge away from the public, back towards the few." — blogger Hannah Williams

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Salesforce "plans to hire more than 1,000 workers to sell its new generative AI agent product," reports Bloomberg: The hiring surge is aimed at capitalizing on "amazing momentum" for the new artificial intelligence product, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said in a message. "Agentforce became available just two weeks ago and we're already hearing incredible feedback from our customers."

The top seller of customer relations management software, Salesforce pivoted its AI strategy this year to focus on agents — tools that can complete tasks such as customer support or sales development without human supervision. It launched the product, dubbed Agentforce, last month, with initial pricing of about $2 per agent conversation.