It was June 29th of 2021 that Microsoft-owned GitHub first announced its AI-powered autocompletion tool for programmers — trained on GitHub repositories and other publicly-available source code.

But after a year in "technical preview," GitHub Copilot has reached a new milestone, reports Info-Q: you'll now have to pay to use it after a 60-day trial: The transition to general availability mostly means that Copilot ceases to be available for free. Interested developers will have to pay 10 USD/month or $100 USD/year to use the service, with a 60-day free trial.... According to GitHub, while not frequent, there is definitely a possibility that Copilot outputs code snippets that match those in the training set.
Info-Q also cites GitHub stats showing over 1.2 million developers used Copilot in the last 12 months "with a shocking 40% figure of code written by Copilot in files where it is enabled." That's up from 35% earlier in the year, reports TechCrunch — which has more info on the rollout: It'll be free for students as well as "verified" open source contributors — starting with roughly 60,000 developers selected from the community and students in the GitHub Education program... One new feature coinciding with the general release of Copilot is Copilot Explain, which translates code into natural language descriptions. Described as a research project, the goal is to help novice developers or those working with an unfamiliar codebase.

Ryan J. Salva, VP of product at GitHub, told TechCrunch via email... "As an example of the impact we've observed, it's worth sharing early results from a study we are conducting. In the experiment, we are asking developers to write an HTTP server — half using Copilot and half without. Preliminary data suggests that developers are not only more likely to complete their task when using Copilot, but they also do it in roughly half the time."

Owing to the complicated nature of AI models, Copilot remains an imperfect system. GitHub said that it's implemented filters to block emails when shown in standard formats, and offensive words, and that it's in the process of building a filter to help detect and suppress code that's repeated from public repositories. But the company acknowledges that Copilot can produce insecure coding patterns, bugs and references to outdated APIs, or idioms reflecting the less-than-perfect code in its training data.
The Verge ponders where this is going — and how we got here: "Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool to write code easier and faster so they can be happier in their lives," says GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.

Microsoft's $1 billion investment into OpenAI, the research firm now led by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, led to the creation of GitHub Copilot. It's built on OpenAI Codex, a descendant of OpenAI's flagship GPT-3 language-generating algorithm.

GitHub Copilot has been controversial, though. Just days after its preview launch, there were questions over the legality of Copilot being trained on publicly available code posted to GitHub. Copyright issues aside, one study also found that around 40 percent of Copilot's output contained security vulnerabilities.

Long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank shares a report from Gerona: China has enacted new regulation for the live-streaming industry, listing 31 prohibited conducts and raising the bar for influencers to speak out on specific topics, in the government's latest effort to regulate the booming digital economy. The 18-point guideline, released Wednesday by the National Radio and Television Administration and the Department of Culture and Tourism, requires influencers to have relevant qualifications to cover some subjects, including law, finance, medicine and education discuss, although the authorities have not specified the necessary qualifications.

The 31 prohibited conducts during live-streaming sessions include posting content that weakens or distorts the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist system, or the country's reform and opening-up. Other prohibited behaviors include using deepfake technologies to manipulate the images of party or state leaders and intentionally 'building up' sensitive issues and attracting public attention. Live streamers are also prohibited from showing an extravagant lifestyle, such as showing luxury products and cash, the policy said. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post.

For years, activists and academics have been raising concerns that facial analysis software that claims to be able to identify a person's age, gender and emotional state can be biased, unreliable or invasive -- and shouldn't be sold. From a report: Acknowledging some of those criticisms, Microsoft said on Tuesday that it planned to remove those features from its artificial intelligence service for detecting, analyzing and recognizing faces. They will stop being available to new users this week, and will be phased out for existing users within the year. The changes are part of a push by Microsoft for tighter controls of its artificial intelligence products. After a two-year review, a team at Microsoft has developed a "Responsible AI Standard," a 27-page document that sets out requirements for A.I. systems to ensure they are not going to have a harmful impact on society.

The requirements include ensuring that systems provide "valid solutions for the problems they are designed to solve" and "a similar quality of service for identified demographic groups, including marginalized groups." Before they are released, technologies that would be used to make important decisions about a person's access to employment, education, health care, financial services or a life opportunity are subject to a review by a team led by Natasha Crampton, Microsoft's chief responsible A.I. officer.

ZDNet is warning that Linux users need to watch out for "a new peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that spreads between networks using stolen SSH keys and runs its crypto-mining malware in a device's memory." The Panchan P2P botnet was discovered by researchers at Akamai in March and the company is now warning it could be taking advantage of collaboration between academic institutions to spread by causing previously stolen SSH authentication keys to be shared across networks.

But rather than stealing intellectual property from these educational institutions, the Panchan botnet is using their Linux servers to mine cryptocurrency, according to Akamai... "Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network...." Akamai found 209 peers, but only 40 of them are currently active and they were mostly located in Asia.

And why is the education sector more impacted by Panchan? Akamai guesses this could be because of poor password hygiene, or that the malware moves across the network with stolen SSH keys.
Akamai writes that the malware "catches Linux termination signals (specifically SIGTERM — 0xF and SIGINT — 0x2) that are sent to it, and ignores them.

"This makes it harder to terminate the malware, but not impossible, since SIGKILL isn't handled (because it isn't possible, according to the POSIX standard, page 313)."

Keeping people out of rip currents is more about reading human behavior than reading warning signs. From a report: Worldwide, rips cause hundreds of drownings and necessitate tens of thousands of rescues every year. In Australia, where 85 percent of the population lives within an hour's drive of the coast, rips cause more fatalities than floods, cyclones, and shark attacks combined. In 1938, one of the country's most popular beaches, Sydney's Bondi Beach, was the site of an infamous rip-current tragedy: within minutes, roughly 200 swimmers were swept away by a rip, leaving 35 people unconscious and five dead. More often, however, rips take one life at a time, garnering little media attention. For many casual beach visitors, the toll of rip currents goes unnoticed. [...] Although almost three-quarters of beach users said they knew what a rip current is, only 54 percent could correctly define it. In addition, only half of the people she surveyed remembered seeing either the warning signs or the colored flags denoting surf conditions that were posted on or near the main access point to each beach. An even smaller percentage could recall what color the flags had been -- green for calm, yellow for moderate, or red for dangerous conditions. "I was genuinely shocked," Locknick says.

[...] Part of the challenge of preventing rip-related drownings stems from the lack of a simple method to escape them. Rip currents form when waves pile water near the shoreline. The water then gushes back out to sea, taking the path of least resistance. It might flow along channels carved in between sandbars or next to solid structures, such as jetties or rocky headlands. These types of rips can stick around year after year. Others are more erratic, creating fleeting bursts of seaward-flowing water on smooth, open beaches. People often mislabel rip currents as undertows or rip tides. Rip currents are not caused by tides, however, and undertows are a different, weaker current, formed when water pushed onto the beach moves back offshore along the seabed. Some telltale signs of a rip include a streak of churned-up, sandy water or a dark, flat gap between breaking waves.

It's not surprising that rip currents are often misunderstood by the public because, for decades, beach-safety experts also had an oversimplified perception of their mechanics. In some of the earliest research on rips in the mid-20th century, American scientists watched sticks, pieces of kelp, and volleyballs float out to sea and described lanes of flowing water extending more than 300 meters offshore. This work formed the basis for the popular view of rip currents as jets flowing perpendicular to the beach, shooting out past the surf. To escape the river of current, experts recommended that bathers swim parallel to the beach -- a message once broadcast through education campaigns and warning signs in the United States and Australia. As it turns out, that approach may not always work.

Nintendo described the sentencing of a hacker earlier this year as a "unique opportunity" to send a message to all gamers about video game piracy. Axios reports: A newly released transcript of the Feb. 10 sentencing of Gary Bowser provides rare insight, directly from Nintendo, about the company's grievances. Bowser, a Canadian national, pled guilty last year to U.S. government cybercrime charges over his role as a top member of Team Xecuter. The group sold tech that circumvented copyright protections and enabled the Nintendo Switch and other systems to play pirated games. Authorities estimated the piracy cost Nintendo upward of $65 million over nearly a decade and even compelled the company to spend resources releasing a more secure model of the Switch.

"This is a very significant moment for us," Nintendo lawyer Ajay Singh told the court at the time, as he laid out the company's case against piracy and awaited the sentencing. "It's the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo and the Nintendo ecosystem, and it is the games that make the people smile," Singh said. "It's for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen." He noted Nintendo's losses from Team Xecuter's piracy and sounded a note of sympathy for smaller non-Nintendo game makers whose works are also pirated. And he wove in a complaint about cheating, which he said Team Xecuter's hacks enabled. Cheating could scare off honest players and upset families: "Parents should not be forced to explain to their children why people cheat and why sometimes games are not fair, just because one person wants an unfair advantage."

At the hearing, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik noted that TV and movies glorify hackers as "sticking it to the man," suggesting that "big companies are reaping tremendous profits and it's good for the little guy to have this." "What do you think?" Lasnik asked Nintendo's lawyer at one point. "What else can we do to convince people that there's no glory in this hacking/piracy?" "There would be a large benefit to further education of the public," Singh replied. In brief remarks directly to Lasnik, Bowser said longer prison time wouldn't scare off hackers. "There's so much money to be made from piracy that it's insignificant," he said.

"As part of the design process for what ended up becoming GNOME 40 the design team worked on a number of experimental concepts," reports a blog post at Gnome.org's shell-dev blog, "a few of which were aimed at better support for tablets and other smaller devices."

"Ever since then, some of us have been thinking about what it would take to fully port GNOME Shell to a phone form factor." It's an intriguing question because post-GNOME 40, there's not that much missing for GNOME Shell to work on phones, even if not perfectly.... On top of that, many of the things we're currently working towards for desktop are also relevant for mobile, including quick settings, the notifications redesign, and an improved on-screen keyboard. Given all of this synergy, we felt this is a great moment to actually give mobile GNOME Shell a try. Thanks to the Prototype Fund, a grant program supporting public interest software by the German Ministry of Education (BMBF), we've been working on mobile support for GNOME Shell for the past few months.

We're not expecting to complete every aspect of making GNOME Shell a daily driveable phone shell as part of this grant project. That would be a much larger effort because it would mean tackling things like calls on the lock screen, PIN code unlock, emergency calls, a flashlight quick toggle, and other small quality-of-life features. However, we think the basics of navigating the shell, launching apps, searching, using the on-screen keyboard, etc. are doable in the context of this project, at least at a prototype stage.

Of course, making a detailed roadmap for this kind of effort is hard and we will keep adjusting it as things progress and become more concrete... There's a lot of work ahead, but going forward progress will be faster and more visible because it will be work on the actual UI, rather than on internal APIs. Now that some of the basics are in place we're also excited to do more testing and development on actual phone hardware, which is especially important for tweaking things like the on-screen keyboard.
Their blog post includes a video showing "what this currently looks like on laptops" and then one showing it running "on actual phone hardware." And someone has also posted a video on Twitter showing it running on a OnePlus 6 smartphone.

An international investigation uncovered some disturbing results, reports the Washington Post. "Millions of children had their online behaviors and personal information tracked by the apps and websites they used for school during the pandemic..." The educational tools were recommended by school districts and offered interactive math and reading lessons to children as young as prekindergarten. But many of them also collected students' information and shared it with marketers and data brokers, who could then build data profiles used to target the children with ads that follow them around the Web.

Those findings come from the most comprehensive study to date on the technology that children and parents relied on for nearly two years as basic education shifted from schools to homes. Researchers with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch analyzed 164 educational apps and websites used in 49 countries, and they shared their findings with The Washington Post and 12 other news organizations around the world.... What the researchers found was alarming: nearly 90 percent of the educational tools were designed to send the information they collected to ad-technology companies, which could use it to estimate students' interests and predict what they might want to buy.

Researchers found that the tools sent information to nearly 200 ad-tech companies, but that few of the programs disclosed to parents how the companies would use it. Some apps hinted at the monitoring in technical terms in their privacy policies, the researchers said, while many others made no mention at all. The websites, the researchers said, shared users' data with online ad giants including Facebook and Google. They also requested access to students' cameras, contacts or locations, even when it seemed unnecessary to their schoolwork. Some recorded students' keystrokes, even before they hit "submit."

The "dizzying scale" of the tracking, the researchers said, showed how the financial incentives of the data economy had exposed even the youngest Internet users to "inescapable" privacy risks — even as the companies benefited from a major revenue stream.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shares this surprising report from Nature. "Salaries for PhD students in the biological sciences fall well below the basic cost of living at almost every institution and department in the United States, according to data collected by two PhD students." The crowdsourced findings, submitted by students, faculty members and administrators and presented on an interactive dashboard, provide fresh ammunition for graduate students in negotiations for higher salaries as economies across the world grapple with rising inflation. As this article went to press, just 2% of the 178 institutions and departments in the data set guaranteed graduate students salaries that exceed the cost of living.

The researchers used the living-wage calculator maintained by the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a widely used benchmark that estimates basic expenses for a given city, such as the costs of food, health care, housing and transport. Most institutions fall far short of that standard. At the University of Florida in Gainesville, for example, the basic stipend for biology PhD students is around US$18,650 for a 9-month appointment, about $16,000 less than the annual living wage for a single adult in the city with no dependents. At a handful of institutions — including the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and the University of South Dakota in Vermillion — the guaranteed minimum stipend is less than $15,000 for 9-month appointments.

"Serial entrepreneur" Gary Vaynerchuk launched a four-day conference "exploring digital ownership and the way emerging technologies could interact with art, sports and entertainment," reports the Pioneer Press: It's billed as an event "featuring icons of business, sports, music, arts, Web3, and popular culture in conversation to build lasting relationships, share ideas, and connect with the community." VeeCon is expected to draw over 10,000 visitors from around world who will hear from 150 speakers, from New Age guru Deepak Chopra to filmmaker Spike Lee and the ubiquitous rapper Snoop Dogg. [Also speaking: Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister]

Tickets were sold in the form of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens sold on the blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions. Much of the conference will dive into the potential applications for NFTs.

Ami Barzelay, chief product officer of Crinkle, a shopping rewards optimizer, described NFT ownership as "digital bragging rights." An NFT, which could be an image, song or video, can be copied and enjoyed by anyone in the world, but it may have just one owner. The NFT market, still in its infancy, has seen wild swings in what people are willing to pay for digital assets, which Barzelay has experienced first-hand. He said that for fun, he paid $100 for a video clip of Tiger Woods and later sold it for $5,000.

There is inherent skepticism and fear around buying and selling things that don't exist in the physical world, which VeeCon aims to address.
The article quotes Vaynerchuk as saying "Education and communication solve everything," adding later that "NFTs are really fun for collectability, but it is a tiny part of the consumer blockchain."

CNBC points out that holders of the NFT-format tickets "also are given exclusive access to the annual event for three years after the NFT's purchase." Though they also end on a skeptical note: "Right now the overwhelming energy of the space is very short term. I would call it greed. Many are not spending their time on education," Vaynerchuk said.

"The reality is that all that behavior is going to lead to 97-98% of these current projects losing value over the next 24-36 months because the supply and demand curves will not work out."
The event's schedule included happy hours that were officially hosted by Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan.

On Twitter one attendee reported from the festival that digital artist Beeple "just got caked in the face in front of 7,000 people by Steve Aoki and it was incredible."

Researchers have linked spending more time playing video games with a boost in intelligence in children, which goes some way to contradicting the narrative that gaming is bad for young minds. ScienceAlert reports: While the difference in cognitive abilities was a small one and isn't enough to show a causal relationship, it is enough to be notable -- and the study was careful to factor in variables including differences in genetics and the child's socio-economic background. Meanwhile, watching TV and using social media didn't seem to have a positive or negative effect on intelligence. The research should prove useful in the debate over how much screen time is suitable for young minds.

The researchers looked at screen time records for 9,855 kids in the ABCD Study, all in the US and aged 9 or 10. On average, the youngsters reported spending 2.5 hours a day watching TV or online videos, 1 hour playing video games, and half an hour socializing over the internet. Researchers then accessed data for more than 5,000 of those children two years later. Over the intervening period, those in the study who reported spending more time than the norm on video games saw an increase of 2.5 IQ points above the average rise. The IQ point increase was based on the kids' performance on tasks that included reading comprehension, visual-spatial processing, and a task focused on memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. The report notes that the study "only looked at children in the US and did not differentiate between video game types (mobile versus console games)."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Securing the open-source software supply chain is a huge deal. Last year, the Biden administration issued an executive order to improve software supply chain security. This came after the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack shut down gas and oil deliveries throughout the southeast and the SolarWinds software supply chain attack. Securing software became a top priority. In response, The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation rose to this security challenge. Now, they're calling for $150 million in funding over two years to fix ten major open-source security problems.

The government will not be paying the freight for these changes. $30 million has already been pledged by Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and VMWare. More is already on the way. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has already pledged an additional $10 million. At the White House press conference, OpenSSF general manager Brian Behlendorf said, "I want to be clear: We're not here to fundraise from the government. We did not anticipate needing to go directly to the government to get funding for anyone to be successful."

Here are the ten goals the open-source industry is committed to meeting:

1. Security Education: Deliver baseline secure software development education and certification to all.
2. Risk Assessment: Establish a public, vendor-neutral, objective-metrics-based risk assessment dashboard for the top 10,000 (or more) OSS components.
3. Digital Signatures: Accelerate the adoption of digital signatures on software releases.
4. Memory Safety: Eliminate root causes of many vulnerabilities through the replacement of non-memory-safe languages.
5. Incident Response: Establish the OpenSSF Open Source Security Incident Response Team, security experts who can step in to assist open source projects during critical times when responding to a vulnerability.
6. Better Scanning: Accelerate the discovery of new vulnerabilities by maintainers and experts through advanced security tools and expert guidance.
7. Code Audits: Conduct third-party code reviews (and any necessary remediation work) of up to 200 of the most-critical OSS components once per year.
8. Data Sharing: Coordinate industry-wide data sharing to improve the research that helps determine the most critical OSS components.
9. Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs): Everywhere Improve SBOM tooling and training to drive adoption.
10. Improved Supply Chains: Enhance the 10 most critical open-source software build systems, package managers, and distribution systems with better supply chain security tools and best practices.

More than four dozen former national security leaders are calling on Congress to exempt international advanced technical degree holders from green card caps in a bid to maintain U.S. science and tech leadership, especially over China, according to a copy of a letter viewed by Axios. From the report: The America COMPETES Act passed by the Democrat-led House includes a provision to exempt foreign-born science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) doctoral degree recipients from green card caps. The exemption would be offered whether their degree is from a U.S. or foreign institution. Current U.S. immigration law limits the number of green cards issued per country, and people from populous countries like India and China are disproportionately affected.

The Bipartisan Innovation Act Conference Committee is expected to begin this month to try to reconcile the House and Senate bills. Several Republican senators, including Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have said they're open to keeping the green card provision in final legislation. The letter, dated May 9, is addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the conference committee. Signatories include former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu, former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security Kari Bingen and 46 others.

Lincoln College is scheduled to close its doors Friday, becoming the first U.S. institution of higher learning to shut down in part due to a ransomware attack. From a report: A goodbye note posted to the school's website said that it survived both World Wars, the Spanish flu and the Great Depression, but was unable to handle the combination of the Covid pandemic and a severe ransomware attack in December that took months to remedy. "Lincoln College was a victim of a cyberattack in December 2021 that thwarted admissions activities and hindered access to all institutional data, creating an unclear picture of Fall 2022 enrollment projections," the school wrote in its announcement. "All systems required for recruitment, retention, and fundraising efforts were inoperable. Fortunately, no personal identifying information was exposed. Once fully restored in March 2022, the projections displayed significant enrollment shortfalls, requiring a transformational donation or partnership to sustain Lincoln College beyond the current semester." The Illinois school, which is named after President Abraham Lincoln and broke ground on his birthday in 1865, is one of only a handful of rural American colleges that qualify as predominantly Black institutions by the Department of Education.

"A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine a college handing out coupons or running limited-time offers," notes the education site EdSurge. "College was something you applied to get into, and entered with a seriousness of intent to complete."

But now, writes long-time Slashdot reader jyosim.... As online education has become mainstream, new providers have moved to the same marketing tactics as selling any widget. Especially upstart providers like Udemy, Coursera and edX. In some cases the courses are offered by well-known universities partnering with those companies.

Students sometimes buy courses when they're on sale intending to take them, but then never get around to it. It's the academic equivalent of signing up for a gym membership in January in the burst of new-year's-resolution optimism and then rarely going to work out.


Udemy's algorithm "favors courses with more students," points out EdSurge, "so professors have an incentive to encourage bulk registration" (during periods when courses are free or discounted). And the stakes are high. 19 instructors made more than $1 million last year, Udemy's CEO notes.

And a result of this competion, he adds, is that a whopping 63% of their top 1,800 courses had been updated in just the last 90 days — "to make the content better and better over time so they get more views and they make more money."

EdSurge adds: To some academics, the trend is a long-predicted impact of commodifying higher education that will lead students to view college as less about a relationship with an instructor and more about the attainment of a fixed set of knowledge for as low a price as possible...

Online education has brought new marketing practices that emphasize the student as a customer. Whether that ends up helping accessibility (through lower prices) or diminishing quality and how seriously students take the learning process, or a mix of both, is still up for debate.

Doctor Who's newest incarnation has been announced. Replacing Jodie Whittaker — and becoming the 14th Doctor Who — is 29-year-old Netflix star Ncuti Gatwa. (In 2020 the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him the prestigious "Best Actor in Television" award for work on the Netflix series Sex Education.) Fun fact: he also voiced the lead driver in Electronic Arts' racing videogame Grid Legends, according to Wikipedia.

In a BBC press release, he described himself as "a mix of deeply honoured, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared" to take over the long-running part of the TARDIS-traveling Time Lord, according to CNN.

"This role and show means so much to so many around the world, including myself, and each one of my incredibly talented predecessors has handled that unique responsibility and privilege with the utmost care. I will endeavour my utmost to do the same." "Doctor Who" showrunner Russell T Davies said in the press release: "Sometimes talent walks through the door and it's so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars.

"Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds."

Gatwa joins the long-running sci-fi series — which follows an alien Time Lord who travels across space and time — ahead of its 60th anniversary in 2023.

America's law schools "would be given a green light to end admission test requirements," reports the Washington Post, "under a recommendation from a key committee of the American Bar Association that is scheduled for review in a public meeting this month." The proposal still faces layers of scrutiny within the ABA and would not take effect until next year at the earliest. If approved, it could challenge the long-dominant role of the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, in the pathway to legal education.
Some context from The Week US: Like the SAT in undergraduate admissions, the LSAT has been accused of racial bias and promoting a destructive obsession with rankings. Critics also argue that the LSAT, which was designed to predict academic performance, has little connection to professional accomplishment....

The incentives for law schools to dump the LSAT aren't only political, though.... [L]aw schools face declining applications after a pandemic-driven spike in interest. That's partly because word is getting out that the legal profession isn't as glamorous or lucrative as people imagine or the media depict. Accepting alternate exams, such as the GRE, or going test-optional altogether can help pump up enrollment, particularly at marginal institutions.
The article points out that admitted law students will still eventually have to pass the official certifying "bar exam" before they're ever allowed to actually practice law.

Newly minted graduates are in for a shock. Although the job market and starting salaries for the Class of 2022 look significantly better than last year, they may fall far short of graduates' expectations. From a report: Employers plan to hire about 31% more new degree holders from this year's graduating class than they hired from the Class of 2021, according to a report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The increased demand for workers is also driving starting salaries higher for some majors, NACE found. The average starting salary for this year's crop of graduates is projected to be more than $50,000, based on the most recent data. Yet current college students expect to earn twice that -- $103,880 -- in their first job, according to a separate survey of college students pursuing a bachelor's degree by Real Estate Witch in March.

John Doerr, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the history of Silicon Valley, is giving $1.1 billion to Stanford University to fund a school focused on climate change and sustainability. From a report: The gift, which Mr. Doerr is making with his wife Ann, is the largest ever to a university for the establishment of a new school, and is the second largest gift to an academic institution, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Only Michael R. Bloomberg's 2018 donation of $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, ranks higher. The gift establishes the Doerrs as leading funders of climate change research and scholarship, and will place Stanford at the center of public and private efforts to wean the world off fossil fuels. "Climate and sustainability is going to be the new computer science," Mr. Doerr, who made his estimated $11.3 billion fortune investing in technology companies such as Slack, Google and Amazon, said in an interview. "This is what the young people want to work on with their lives, for all the right reasons."

The school, to be known as the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, will be a home to traditional academic departments related to topics such as planetary science, energy technology and food-and-water security. It will also feature several interdisciplinary institutes and a center focused on developing practical policy and technology solutions to the climate crisis. "The school will absolutely focus on policy issues and on asking what would it take to move the world toward more sustainable practices and better behaviors," Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the Stanford president, said in an interview. Mr. Doerr joins a growing list of ultrawealthy men donating huge sums of money to the fight against global warming.

Alphabet's Google will provide any U.S. business over $100,000 worth of online courses in data analytics, design and other tech skills for their workers free of charge, the search company said on Monday. Reuters reports: The offer marks a big expansion of Google's Career Certificates, a program the company launched in 2018 to help people globally boost their resumes by learning new tools at their own pace. Over 70,000 people in the United States and 205,000 globally have earned at least one certificate, and 75% receive a benefit such as a new job or higher pay within six months, according to Google.

The courses, designed by Google and sold through online education service Coursera, each typically cost students about $39 a month and take three to six months to finish. Google will now cover costs for up to 500 workers at any U.S. business, and it valued the grants at $100,000 because people usually take up to six months to finish. Lisa Gevelber, founder of Grow with Google, the company unit overseeing certificates, said course completion rates are higher when people pay out of pocket but that the new offer was still worthwhile if it could help some businesses gain digital savvy. Certificates also are available in IT support, project management, e-commerce and digital marketing. They cover popular software in each of the fields, including Google advertising services.