Tech

The federal government of Canada has ordered TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, citing national security concerns. However, Canadians will still be able to access the app and use it to create content. "The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice," said Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne. "We came to the conclusion that these activities that were conducted in Canada by TikTok and their offices would be injurious to national security. I'm not at liberty to go into much detail, but I know Canadians would understand when you're saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that's serious." CBC News reports: Champagne urged Canadians to use TikTok "with eyes wide open." Critics have claimed that TikTok users' data could be obtained by the Chinese government. "Obviously, parents and anyone who wants to use social platform should be mindful of the risk," he said. The decision was made in accordance with the Investment Canada Act, which allows for the review of foreign investments that may harm Canada's national security. Former CSIS director David Vigneault told CBC News it's "very clear" from the app's design that data gleaned from its users "is available to the government of China" and its large-scale data harvesting goals. "Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world," he said at the time. "As an individual, I would say that I would absolutely not recommend someone have TikTok." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has acquired the chat.com domain name, likely for well over $10 million. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a one-word tweet this morning, simply stating, "chat.com." Domain Name Wire reports: The chat.com domain name has changed hands for the third time in two years. HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah kicked off the buying last year, plunking down over $15.5 million for the domain name. He turned around and sold the domain shortly thereafter for a profit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Anthropic launched the latest version of its smallest AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, in a way that marks a departure from typical AI model pricing trends -- the new model costs four times more to run than its predecessor. The reason for the price increase is causing some pushback in the AI community: more smarts, according to Anthropic. "During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks -- at a fraction of the cost," Anthropic wrote in a post on X. "As a result, we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence." "It's your budget model that's competing against other budget models, why would you make it less competitive," wrote one X user. "People wanting a 'too cheap to meter' solution will now look elsewhere." On X, TakeOffAI developer Mckay Wrigley wrote, "As someone who loves your models and happily uses them daily, that last sentence [about raising the price of Haiku] is *not* going to go over well with people." In a follow-up post, Wrigley said he was not surprised by the price increase or the framing, but saying it out loud might attract ire. "Just say it's more expensive to run," he wrote. The new Haiku model will cost users $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, compared to 25 cents per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens for the previous Claude 3 Haiku version. Presumably being more computationally expensive to run, Claude 3 Opus still costs $15 per million input tokens and a whopping $75 per million output tokens. Speaking of Opus, Claude 3.5 Opus is nowhere to be seen, as AI researcher Simon Willison noted to Ars Technica in an interview. "All references to 3.5 Opus have vanished without a trace, and the price of 3.5 Haiku was increased the day it was released," he said. "Claude 3.5 Haiku is significantly more expensive than both Gemini 1.5 Flash and GPT-4o mini -- the excellent low-cost models from Anthropic's competitors." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A six-month German pilot of a four-day workweek across 45 companies demonstrated that most employees experienced reduced stress and maintained productivity, with some companies adopting optimized processes and digital tools to enhance efficiency. The report says 70% of the firms plan to continue the model. DW News reports: Earlier this year, some 45 German firms launched a 4-day workweek project to find out if such a fundamental change to how we work can achieve positive results for employers and employees. For six months, and closely watched by researchers from Munster University in Germany, the volunteer companies allowed their employees to work fewer hours without reducing their salaries. The pilot run was initiated by Berlin-based management consultancy, Intraprenor, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global (4DWG). [...] Julia Backmann, the scientific lead of the pilot study, says employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week, and, in some cases, were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health, she told DW, and showed less stress and burnout symptoms, as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes. According to Backmann's findings, two out of three employees reported fewer distractions because processes were optimized. Over half of the companies redesigned their meetings to make them less frequent and shorter, while one in four companies adopted new digital tools to boost efficiency. "The potential of shorter working hours seems to be stifled by complex processes, too many meetings, and low digitalization," said Carsten Meier from Intraprenor. The study has also shown that participants were more physically active during the 4-day workweek, and they slept an average of 38 minutes more per week than those in the five-day control group. However, monthly sick days only dropped slightly, a statistically insignificant difference compared to the same period a year ago. Marika Platz from Munster University, who analyzed the data, said she was surprised at the number of sick days because similar studies in other countries showed a significant reduction. Another surprise, she told DW, was the lack of environmental benefits from reduced working hours during the German test as other countries reported a positive impact from offices that could be shut down completely for one day, and fewer commutes to work that resulted in higher energy savings. The reason for this was probably that some German employees took advantage of the long weekends to travel, she said, which reduced any potential energy savings. Study director Backmann stressed that the study was not about advocating for a blanket rollout of the 4-day workweek across all sectors, but rather exploring "an innovative work-time model and its effects." Carsten Meier from the Intraprenor consultancy added that the positive results of the trial cannot be "automatically translated" into similar gains for every company in Germany. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D debuts with impressive performance gains, powered by advanced 3D V-Cache technology and improved thermal efficiency," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "While the CPU shines as a top choice right out of the gate, AMD's history of quick price cuts suggests waiting could yield even better value for savvy buyers." TechSpot reports: Today we're finally able to show you how AMD's new Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs, and spoiler alert -- it's a real weapon that solves the issues we encountered with the non-3D Zen 5 chips before this. Without question, this is the best CPU released since the 7800X3D, making this launch particularly exciting. [...] For now, the 9800X3D is mighty impressive, the undisputed king of gaming, and it marks a historic milestone. We don't think AMD has ever been this dominant over Intel, certainly not in the last 15 years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US supreme court grappled on Wednesday with a bid by Meta's Facebook to scuttle a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders who accused the social media platform of misleading them about the misuse of user data. The justices heard arguments in Facebook's appeal of a lower court's decision allowing the 2018 class action suit led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages in part to recoup the lost value of the Facebook stock held by the investors. It is one of two cases coming before them this month -- the other one involving artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on 13 November -- that could lead to rulings making it harder for private litigants to hold companies to account for alleged securities fraud. At issue is whether Facebook broke the law when it failed to detail the prior data breach in subsequent business-risk disclosures, and instead portrayed the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical. Facebook argued in a supreme court brief that it was not required to reveal that its warned-of risk had already materialized because "a reasonable investor" would understand risk disclosures to be forward-looking statements. "When we think about these questions, we're not looking only to lies or complete false statements," the liberal justice Elena Kagan told Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer for Facebook. "We're also looking to misleading statements or misleading omissions." The conservative justice Samuel Alito asked Shanmugam: "Isn't it the case that an evaluation of risks is always forward-looking?" "It is. And that is essentially what underlies our argument here," Shanmugam responded. The plaintiffs accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. They claimed the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica that affected more than 30 million Facebook users. Edward Davila, a US district judge, dismissed the lawsuit but the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals revived it. The supreme court's ruling is expected by the end of June. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK will bring in legislation to safeguard against the risks of AI in the next year, technology secretary Peter Kyle has said, as he pledged to invest in the infrastructure that will underpin the sector's growth. From a report: Kyle told the Financial Times' Future of AI summit on Wednesday that Britain's voluntary agreement on AI testing was "working, it's a good code" but that the long-awaited AI bill would be focused on making such accords with leading developers legally binding. The legislation, which Kyle said would be presented to MPs in the current parliament, will also turn the UK's AI Safety Institute into an arms-length government body, giving it "the independence to act fully in the interests of British citizens." At present, the body is a directorate of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. At the UK-organised AI safety summit last November, companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed a "landmark" but non-binding agreement allowing partner governments to test their forthcoming large language models for risks and vulnerabilities before they were released to consumers. Kyle said that while he was "not fatalistic" about advancements in AI, "citizens need to know that we are mitigating the potential risks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Curbside EV charging in Michigan should become easier in the coming months thanks to a new collaboration between telecom giant AT&T and lamppost EV charging startup Voltpost. The two have joined forces to bring internet connectivity to EV charging posts across Michigan and the Metro-Detroit area-this way, the operator knows immediately if a stall has gone offline and can send a team to fix it faster. Better uptime benefits both the company and the EV drivers who choose to top up their cars' batteries while parked. Voltpost's lamppost charging solution essentially turns existing street lights into EV chargers. The startup claims the installation of a single stall takes anywhere from one to two hours and that the costs are much lower than a conventional EV charging station. However, the caveat here is that the charging speeds are limited to what one would experience with a home charger. The AC Level 2 lamppost chargers are powered by the street lighting grid, which was never designed to sustain high loads, so expect to keep the car plugged in for hours. That said, the system can still come in handy when the owner of an EV goes to work and parks the car on the street. Or during a lengthy shopping trip topped off with an evening movie. It's no DC fast charger, but it doesn't claim to be one. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into Corning to determine whether it has broken antitrust rules with its dominant Gorilla Glass product. From a report: Corning's Alkali-aluminosilicate glass is used to protect most of the top phones and tablets, with both Samsung and Apple using it extensively across their range of devices. The EU is concerned that Corning has used a variety of exclusivity contracts to exclude rival glass makers from the phone market. "It is very frustrating and costly experience to break a mobile phone screen. Therefore, strong competition in the production of the cover glass used to protect such devices is crucial to ensure low prices and high-quality glass," says outgoing EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager. "We are investigating if Corning, a major producer of this special glass, may have tried to exclude rival glass producers, thereby depriving consumers from cheaper and more break-resistant glass." The Commission's concerns are centered on the agreements with mobile device makers and companies that produce raw glass. The EU is looking into exclusive sourcing obligations that have required device makers to source "all of nearly all" of their glass from Corning, enabled rebates for exclusivity deals, and forced device makers to report on competitive offers and only accept them if Corning failed to price match. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Workers at AI companies want Congress to grant them specific whistleblower protection, arguing that advancements in the technology pose threats that they can't legally expose under current law. From a report: "What people should be thinking about is the 100 ways in which these companies can lose control of these technologies," said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who represented OpenAI employees and former employees raising issues about the company. Current dangers range from deepfake videos to algorithms that discriminate, and the technology is quickly becoming more sophisticated. Lessig called the argument that big tech companies and AI startups can police themselves naive. "If there's a risk, which there is, they're not going to take care of it," he said. "We need regulation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.