In a rare display of sanity in the automotive space, British Columbia has banned autonomous cars from its highways after years of watching autonomous cars hamper emergency response efforts in California and outright kill a pedestrian in Arizona. Let’s hope this regulatory trend continues and moves into the human space by pulling licenses of drivers with a known history of poor driving.

While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds. Since last month openSUSE Factory has been producing bit-by-bit reproducible builds sans the likes of embedded signatures. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed packages for that rolling-release distribution are being verified for bit-by-bit reproducible builds. SUSE/openSUSE is still verifying all packages are yielding reproducible builds but so far it’s looking like 95% or more of packages are working out.

Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity. “The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.” “There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years until the next thing comes.”

To document his team’s discovery as well as the process behind their work, which Dr. Buhler cautions is in no way affiliated with NASA or the U.S. Government, the outwardly amiable researcher presented his findings at a recent Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC). Filled with both highly-credentialed career engineers and propulsion hobbyists, APEC is an organization The Debrief once referred to as the World’s Most Exclusive (And Strange) Anti-Gravity Club. In conjunction with that presentation, “The Discovery of Propellantless Propulsion: The Direct Conversion of Electrical Energy into Physical Thrust,” Dr. Buhler also sat down with APEC co-founder and moderator Tim Ventura to explain how his past in electrostatics, which is his primary area of expertise, ended up being a key component of his discovery of this new force. […]

Up next, Buhler says his team is seeking funding to test their devices in space to better understand the force at work. “We’re hoping to do some demos,” said Buhler. “Some space demos. That’s what we’re trying to get some funding to do. I think that would be a great way to show off the technology.” Besides proving once and for all that the force they are seeing is real, the accomplished engineer believes that such tests could encourage other scientists to search for an explanation of what exactly it is they are seeing. “I think it’s a good opportunity for people to run these tests, look at them, watch them go in space, watch it move in space, and then say, “what does it imply? What are the implications?’" Until that time, Buhler says he believes his work proves that the force they are seeing is “fundamental” and that understanding it is the next logical step. “You can’t deny this,” he told Ventura. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.”

So, while his team believes their experiments speak for themselves, the veteran scientist says he also believes it is the job of science to analyze and understand this discovery. If successful, he thinks it may even address some of the harder questions in science, including the nature of dark energy or even space/time itself. “It’s easy to make these things,” he said, “so it’s a tool for the scientific community to use to try to explore those hard questions.”

U.S. government officials were scrambling Friday night to prevent what they fear could be a significant loss of access to critical national security information, after two major U.S. communications providers said they would stop complying with orders under a controversial surveillance law that is set to expire at midnight, according to five people familiar with the matter.

One communications provider informed the National Security Agency that it would stop complying on Monday with orders under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables U.S. intelligence agencies to gather without a warrant the digital communications of foreigners overseas — including when they text or email people inside the United States. Another provider suggested that it would cease complying at midnight Friday unless the law is reauthorized, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The companies’ decisions, which were conveyed privately and have not previously been reported, have alarmed national security officials, who strongly disagree with their position and argue that the law requires the providers to continue complying with the government’s surveillance orders even after the statute expires. That’s because a federal court this month granted the government a one-year extension to continue intelligence collection.

What Jennifer Did shot to the top spot in Netflix’s global top 10 when it debuted in early April, attracting swarms of true crime fans who wanted to know more about why Pan paid hitmen $10,000 to murder her parents. But quickly the documentary became a source of controversy, as fans started noticing glaring flaws in images used in the movie, from weirdly mismatched earrings to her nose appearing to lack nostrils, the Daily Mail reported, in a post showing a plethora of examples of images from the film. […]

Jeremy Grimaldi — who is also the crime reporter who wrote a book on the case and provided the documentary with research and police footage — told the Toronto Star that the images were not AI-generated. Grimaldi confirmed that all images of Pan used in the movie were real photos. He said that some of the images were edited, though, not to blur the lines between truth and fiction, but to protect the identity of the source of the images. “Any filmmaker will use different tools, like Photoshop, in films,” Grimaldi told The Star. “The photos of Jennifer are real photos of her. The foreground is exactly her. The background has been anonymized to protect the source.” While Grimaldi’s comments provide some assurance that the photos are edited versions of real photos of Pan, they are also vague enough to obscure whether AI was among the “different tools” used to edit the photos.

Google’s Arif Dikici confirmed on LinkedIn this week that Android is now using VideoLAN’s (the makers of VLC) “dav1d” software decoder to allow AV1 to work on more devices. This is now available on all devices running Android 12 or higher via a software update. Mishaal Rahman points out that this started to roll out with the March 2024 Google Play system update.

Dikici says that “most” devices can at least support 720p at 30 frames per second, but that apps will need to opt in “for now” to support AV1 via software decoding. One app that has opted in is YouTube, which now uses AV1 on all compatible devices (though it may have reverted this). This may result in increased power usage depending on your device, though. Improvements on that front may be coming, though, says VideoLAN on Twitter/X.

Mozilla has announced Firefox Nightly for ARM64. This release will cater to the growing demand for support on ARM64 platforms, commonly referred to as AArch64. Feedback from the community has led Mozilla to expand the availability of Firefox Nightly. Users can now access the browser as both .tar archives and .deb packages, depending on their preference and requirements for installation.

For those who favor traditional methods, the .tar.bz2 binaries are accessible through Mozilla’s downloads page by selecting the option for Firefox Nightly for Linux ARM64/AArch64. Meanwhile, users looking to utilize updates and installation through Mozilla’s APT repository can follow specific instructions to install the firefox-nightly package.

The Dutch privacy watchdog AP on Friday said it was recommending that government organizations should stop using Facebook as long as it is unclear what happens with personal data of users of the government’s Facebook pages. “People that visit a government’s page need to be able to trust that their personal and sensitive data is in safe hands,” AP chairman Aleid Wolfsen said in a statement. Junior minister for digitalization Alexandra van Huffelen said Facebook parent company Meta had to make clear before the summer how it could take away the government’s concerns on the safety of data. “Otherwise we will be forced to stop using Facebook, in line with this advice,” she said.

Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe, is considering a proposal to take the genetic testing company private after its stock price tumbled more than 95% from its 2021 highs. A late Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said Wojcicki is working with advisors and plans to speak with possible financing sources and partners. She “wishes to maintain control” of the company and will “not be willing to support any alternative transaction,” the filing said. […] In November, 23andMe received a deficiency letter from the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Department, which said the company had 180 days to bring its share price back above $1. The company’s board of directors formed a “Special Committee” in late March to help explore options that could juice the stock.

A press release on Thursday said the committee was made aware of Wojcicki’s interest in acquiring all of 23andMe’s outstanding shares. Wojcicki owns shares that make up more than 20% of those outstanding, which equates to about 49% of voting power, the release said. “The Special Committee will carefully review Ms. Wojcicki’s proposal when and if it is made available and evaluate it in light of other available strategic alternatives, including continuing to operate as a publicly traded company,” the committee said in the release. “The Special Committee is committed to acting in the best interests of 23andMe and its shareholders.” The committee has engaged Wells Fargo as its financial advisor, and it said there is “no assurance” that Wojcicki’s offer would result in the proposed outcome.

WWC was started 2011 by engineers who “were seeking connection and support for navigating the tech industry” in San Francisco. It became a nonprofit organization in 2013 and expanded globally. In a post announcing its closure, it said it had held more than 20,000 events and given out $3.5m in scholarships. A month before the closure, WWC had announced a conference for May, which has now been cancelled.

A spokesperson for WWC said: “We kept our programming moving forward while exploring all options.” They would not comment on questions about the charity’s funding. The most recent annual report, for 2022, showed the charity made almost $4m that year, while its expenses were just under $4.2m. WWC said that “while so much has been accomplished,” their mission was not complete. It continued: “Our vision of a tech industry where diverse women and historically excluded people thrive at every level is not fulfilled.”

In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash — and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world’s dominant social-media empire — was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win. That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports — soccer, football, basketball — and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating. […]

Elo ratings don’t inherently have anything to do with chess. They’re based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition — which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams — a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver’s 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system’s shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game. Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game.

The Biden administration is designating two “forever chemicals,” man-made compounds that are linked to serious health risks, as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, shifting responsibility for their cleanup to polluters from taxpayers. The new rule announced on Friday empowers the government to force the many companies that manufacture or use perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA, and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, known as PFOS, to monitor any releases into the environment and be responsible for cleaning them up. Those companies could face billions of dollars in liabilities.

[…] The announcement follows an extraordinary move last week from the E.P.A. mandating that water utilities reduce the PFAS in drinking water to near-zero levels. The agency has also proposed to designate seven additional PFAS chemicals as hazardous waste. “President Biden understands the threat that forever chemicals pose to the health of families across the country,” Michael S. Regan, the administrator of the E.P.A., said. “Designating these chemicals under our Superfund authority will allow E.P.A. to address more contaminated sites, take earlier action, and expedite cleanups, all while ensuring polluters pay for the costs to clean up pollution threatening the health of communities.”

Torvalds snarked, “It’s hilarious to watch. Maybe I’ll be replaced by an AI model!” As for Hohndel, he thinks most AI today is “autocorrect on steroids.” Torvalds summed up his attitude as, “Let’s wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these crazy announcements.”

That’s not to say the two men don’t think AI will be helpful in the future. Indeed, Torvalds noted one good side effect already: “NVIDIA has gotten better at talking to Linux kernel developers and working with Linux memory management,” because of its need for Linux to run AI’s large language models (LLMs) efficiently.

Torvalds is also “looking forward to the tools actually to find bugs. We have a lot of tools, and we use them religiously, but making the tools smarter is not a bad thing. Using smarter tools is just the next inevitable step. We have tools that do kernel rewriting, with very complicated scripts, and pattern recognition. AI can be a huge help here because some of these tools are very hard to use because you have to specify things at a low enough level.” Just be careful, Torvalds warns of “AI BS.” Hohndel quickly quipped, “He meant beautiful science. You know, “Beautiful science in, beautiful science out.”

In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don’t require video feeds — or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want. “It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors,” reads the abstract of the accompanying research paper titled, “VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time.” It’s the work of Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo, Jiaolong Yang, Chong Li, Zhenyu Zang, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong, and Baining Guo.

The VASA framework (short for “Visual Affective Skills Animator”) uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.

TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, India’s top three IT outsourcing firms, have collectively seen their workforce shrink for the first time in at least 20 years. The trio reported a combined reduction of more than 63,750 employees in the financial year ending March 31, 2024.