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For a moment there, it seemed like Amazon might pivot its Astro home robot to enterprise by giving it a better job as a camera-equipped patrol dog.

On September 25th, every one of the 20-pound wheeled robots will stop working, and Amazon will automatically issue full refunds for the $2,349.99 bot, plus a $300 credit.

Amazon isn’t commenting on how many business bots it actually sold since the November 2023 launch, but the company’s VP of hardware engineering, Lindo St. Angel, says he’s “increasingly convinced the progress we’re making in home robotics is where we should focus our resources.” We’re sharing his full internal memo below.

GeekWire first reported the news and said Amazon isn’t laying off any workers due to the pivot because they’ll just start working on home robots instead.

The Amazon Astro for Home robot is still listed as an invite-only Day 1 Edition product, years after its release.

Last year, leaked internal documents hinted at a new version with conversational generative AI that “remembers what it saw and understood,” is able to “engage in a Q&A dialogue on what it saw,” and can potentially spot hazards in a home like broken glass on the floor.

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Ever seen one of those “warranty void if removed” stickers covering the screw holes on a gadget?

Gigabyte includes: “If the manufacturing sticker inside the product was removed or damaged, it would no longer be covered by the warranty.”

“The Warranty Act prohibits warrantors of consumer products costing more than five dollars from conditioning their written warranties on a consumer’s use of any article or service, such as repair service, which is identified by brand, trade, or corporate name, unless (1) the warranty states the article or service will be provided to the consumer for free, or (2) the warrantor has been granted a waiver by the Commission,” the FTC writes.

“FTC investigators have copied and preserved the online pages in question, and we plan to review your company’s written warranty and promotional materials after 30 days,” the agency is telling each firm.

In 2018, the FTC put Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft on notice for doing the same thing with their game consoles, as well as Asus, HTC, and Hyundai.

iFixit has a blog on how “warranty void if removed” stickers may be legal in other parts of the world.

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Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.

Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened.

A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip — albeit not as quickly as its huge launch — while Musk hasn’t shared comparable metrics for X since he took over.

I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram.

And given Meta’s intentional decision to deprioritize politics and encourage lighthearted content, it could be a compelling place for advertisers looking for a more brand-safe alternative to X.

“It would be great if it gets really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in if it becomes culturally relevant and if it gets hundreds of millions of users,” the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told me when Threads first launched.

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A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

We do not wish to simply orphan the package, as we are afraid it would not receive proper care if taken by somebody else.

If there are potential maintainers interested in maintaining Python 2 in Fedora beyond Fedora 41, they can talk to us and demonstrate their ability and will to take care of Python 2 by joining the maintenance early.

Users who need to run their application in Python 2 should do so on a platform that offers support for it.

Developers who still need to test their software on Python 2 can use containers with older Fedora releases or unsupported CentOS/RHEL versions."

The F41 change proposal still needs the approval of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but it will presumably proceed – well, assuming GIMP 3.0 finally releases this summer so as to not block the Python 2.7 removal.

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Adoption of the two nonbinding resolutions shows that the United States and China, rivals in many areas, are both determined to be key players in shaping the future of the powerful new technology — and have been cooperating on the first important international steps.

Fu Cong, China’s U.N. ambassador, told reporters Monday that the two resolutions are complementary, with the U.S. measure being “more general” and the just-adopted one focusing on “capacity building.”

Nate Evans, spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said Tuesday that the Chinese-sponsored resolution “was negotiated so it would further the vision and approach the U.S. set out in March.”

The Chinese resolution calls on the international community “to provide and promote a fair, open, inclusive and nondiscriminatory business environment,” from AI’s design and development to its use.

China is actively participating in negotiations in Geneva on controlling lethal autonomous weapons, Fu said, adding that some countries are considering proposing a U.N. General Assembly resolution this year on the military dimension of AI — “and we are in broad support of that initiative.”

He said China also wanted to highlight the central role the United Nations should play in AI governance as “the most representative and most inclusive international forum.”

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A weird new app lets San Francisco residents monitor local bars via live video feed to see what’s happening there and to check how busy the venues are.

2Nite, which launched earlier this year, uses a network of cameras at various Bay Area establishments to provide remote insights into what’s happening at those locations.

In fact, some local bar patrons have predictably been a bit perturbed (creeped out, even) by an app that remotely monitors them and streams their drunken revelry to an unknown amount of strangers on the internet.

“You should be able to let loose in a bar where Big Brother isn’t watching you,” a young woman told the Standard when asked about the app.

Lucas Harris, the co-founder of 2Nite, has said that businesses that partner with the app are in control of the cameras and that the feeds are mainly meant to “offer a glimpse of live shows at bars, clubs, and other event venues,” the Standard writes.

Harris and his co-founder, Francesco Bini, also told the outlet they had introduced live stream blurring to anonymize the feeds and keep individual partygoers from being identified.

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According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand “due to a structural failure.”

Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site.

The statement from Space Pioneer sought to downplay the incident, saying it had implemented safety measures before the test, and there were no casualties as a result of the accident.

Located in the Henan province in eastern China, alongside the Yellow River, Gongyi has a population of about 800,000 people.

Typically, during a static fire test, the mass of propellant on board a vehicle combined with strong clamps hold a rocket down.

This was a notable achievement, but the rocket’s engines were provided by a Chinese state-operated firm, the Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology, rather than the private company.

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A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.

Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is a board member) hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology in a way that seemed designed to make its investors whole.

Last Friday, Amazon announced that it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another would-be OpenAI competitor that raised about $400 million from top-tier investors to build, in the words of CEO David Luan, “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.”

In an internal memo published by GeekWire’s Taylor Soper, SVP Rohit Prasad said that, like Microsoft with Inflection, Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology to “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”

Adept’s corporate blog post about the news suggests it was running out of money: “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.” Recent reports say the company has been looking to sell itself.

Reid Hoffman, meanwhile, should probably be congratulated for more than just an accurate prediction about the future of these deals — one of Adept’s earliest investors was none other than his venture capital firm, Greylock.

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Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on.

“Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”

The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods.

This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38367, resided in the session_controller class of the trunk server source code, which handles the session validation URL.

The trunk server relies on RFC822 formalized in 1982 to verify the uniqueness of registered developer email addresses and check if they follow the correct format.

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The European Commission writes in a preliminary ruling that the “pay or consent” advertising model that launched last year for Facebook and Instagram users runs afoul of Article 5(2) of the DMA by not giving users a third option that uses less data for ad targeting but is still free to use.

Regulators found in their investigation that Meta gives users a “binary choice” that forces them to either choose to pay a monthly subscription fee to get the ad-free version of Facebook and Instagram or consent to the ad-supported version.

Where Meta runs afoul of its rules, it says, is by not letting users opt for a free version that “uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the ‘personalised ads’ based service” and by not allowing them to “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data.”

“Our preliminary view is that Meta’s advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act,” wrote Margrethe Vestager, who leads the region’s competition policy.

“Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and complies with the DMA,” Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard told The Verge in an email.

The commission asserted last week that Apple’s App Store “steering” policies don’t allow sufficient competition.

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The $3 trillion company intends to mass-produce revamped earbuds with built-in infrared cameras by 2026, according to a new report from analyst and longtime Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo.

The cameras could help Apple shore up its current and future augmented-reality headsets with enhanced spatial audio features, the analyst wrote.

Citing a supply-chain survey, Kuo indicated that pairing these enhanced buds with Vision Pro goggles could make Apple’s spatial-computing experience more lifelike.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo.

The analyst’s report follows an earlier story from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

After turning its minimalistic white buds into status symbol in the iPod era, Apple has gradually made them smarter over the years, adding features such as wireless connectivity, noise cancellation, head tracking, touch controls and voice commands.

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If you’re disappointed that the only AI model that will integrate with Apple devices so far will be ChatGPT, it sounds like you won’t have to wait long for that to change.

Apple will announce “at least” one other deal — to add Google Gemini, too — this fall, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter today.

Anthropic has been mixed up in these rumors as well, and Gurman also suggests Apple could announce a deal with that company at some point, if not this fall.

Beyond chatbot integration lies Apple Intelligence, which is only supposed to emerge, initially, in beta form this fall.

Apple reportedly wants to make AI an avenue for direct profits, not just as a set of features aimed at moving hardware products.

As part of that, Gurman suggests that the company “could eventually” roll out subscription-only Apple Intelligence features.

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A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.

The move attracted the attention of critics including Representative Ilhan Omar, who spoke out in Congress against Shirion’s screening of the footage to the University of California, Los Angeles protest encampment.

And since late last year, it has claimed to have developed an AI technology, Project Maccabee, whose goal it has described as “Hitting and creating AGI for the PROTECTION and survival of our people”, and “EXPOSING these putrid antisemites”.

On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days!, and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.

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You can transform it from a sleek work laptop to a decent gaming machine in two minutes flat, one which charges with the world’s first 180W USB-C power adapter.

The product gave me multiple Blue Screens of Death, glitched, felt flimsy in places, and ran hotter and louder than its performance would suggest.

I’m happy to say I’ve only seen the computer fail once during that entire month — an “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly” error I haven’t been able to reproduce.

We even figured out my mystery issue where the excellent 2560 x 1600 screen would suddenly seem to wash out — that’s due to AMD’s Vari-Bright setting, which attempts to save battery when the integrated GPU is in command.

Despite this replacement coming with a slightly weaker 7840HS, I’ve measured 100.8°C at peak while playing a game — and as high as 92.5°C one day when I was just writing a story in a web browser.

After a month, I’ve decided I could live with the lid flex and the uneven surfaces created by Framework’s modular spacers and touchpad.

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PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams.

The just-released PipeWire 1.2 announcement sums up the major changes in this new version as: - Support for asynchronous processing has been implemented.

This adds one cycle of latency but it can avoid having some nodes blocking the processing graph.

Non realtime streams and filters now also use this asynchronous processing instead of their own slightly broken version.

One use case is the explicit sync support that requires 2 extra fds for the timelines.

• The log levels in the pulse server can be dynamically changed with a /core message.

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“Since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT there have been lots of anecdotal reports about students submitting AI-generated work as their exam assignments and getting good grades.

His team created over 30 fake psychology student accounts and used them to submit ChatGPT-4-produced answers to examination questions.

The anecdotal reports were true—the AI use went largely undetected, and, on average, ChatGPT scored better than human students.

Scarfe’s team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Shorter submissions were prepared simply by copy-pasting the examination questions into ChatGPT-4 along with a prompt to keep the answer under 160 words.

Turnitin’s system, on the other hand, was advertised as detecting 97 percent of ChatGPT and GPT-3 authored writing in a lab with only one false positive in a hundred attempts.

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Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.

Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:

Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.

Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.

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Like in past versions of the survey, battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles performed worse than their gas equivalents in just about every repair category measured by JD Power.

“Owners of cutting edge, tech-filled BEVs and PHEVs are experiencing problems that are of a severity level high enough for them to take their new vehicle into the dealership at a rate three times higher than that of gas-powered vehicle owners,” Frank Hanley, senior director of auto benchmarking at JD Power, said in a statement.

JD Power attributes this to major design changes in Teslas, such as the removal of traditional feature controls like turn signal and wiper stalks.

And when car owners try to find relief from terrible native software experiences by mirroring their smartphones, they run into even more obstacles.

Someone who buys a Ram truck every few years is going to report way fewer problems with their experience than someone who is taking a risk on a new brand — or even a new powertrain.

We’re in the midst of a huge shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to high-powered computers that run on enormous batteries.

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The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features.

With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

With the code in Linux 6.10 when DRM Panic is triggered, an ASCII art version of Linux’s mascot, Tux the penguin, is rendered as part of the display.

If ASCII art on error messages doesn’t satisfy your tastes in 2024+, the DRM Panic code will be able to support a monochrome graphical logo that leverages the Linux kernel’s boot-up logo support.

This monochrome logo support in the DRM Panic handler was sent out as part of this week’s drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window in July.

This week’s drm-misc-next material also includes TTM memory management improvements, various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers, and also the previously talked about monochrome TV support for the Raspberry Pi.

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Digging further into the ad shows that it was purchased by an entity called Coles & Co, an advertiser identity Google claims to have verified.

The reason for this is to bypass a macOS security mechanism that prevents apps from being installed unless they’re digitally signed by a developer Apple has vetted.

The address happens to host the control panel for Poseidon, the name of a stealer actively sold in criminal markets.

The discovery comes a month after Malwarebytes identified a separate batch of Google ads pushing a fake version of Arc for Windows.

Like most other large advertising networks, Google Ads regularly serves malicious content that isn’t taken down until third parties have notified the company.

They should also be wary of any instructions that direct Mac users to install apps through the right-click method mentioned earlier.

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