Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all U.S. customers. Engadget's Lawrence Bonk reports: So what does it do? It's an Amazon chatbot so it helps with shopping. You can ask for lists of recommended products and ask what specific products do and stuff like that. I've tooled around with it a bit this morning and it seems fine, though a bit boring. I will say that I cross-referenced some of the recommended products with the web version and Rufus does not automatically list promoted items, at least for now.

It spit out a seemingly random list of well-reviewed products on several occasions. That's fine by me, though I'm not about to buy something based on the word of a one-day old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about products, but the answers seem to be pulled directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others aren't. The chatbot is tied to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like.

Amazon says that the bot has been trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As and public information found throughout the web. However, it hasn't disclosed what websites it pulled that public information from and to what end. It didn't even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites. You can try Rufus by updating to the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app. It'll be available in the bottom navigation bar with a typical AI icon consisting of bubbles and sparkles/stars.

Jowi Morales reports via Tom's Hardware: There's a vast difference between hardware and software developers, which opens up pitfalls for those trying to coordinate the two teams. Arm and x86 researchers encountered it years ago -- and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, fears RISC-V development may fall into the same chasm again. "Even when you do hardware design in a more open manner, hardware people are different enough from software people [that] there's a fairly big gulf between the Verilog and even the kernel, much less higher up the stack where you are working in what [is] so far away from the hardware that you really have no idea how the hardware works," he said (video here). "So, it's really hard to kind of work across this very wide gulf of things and I suspect the hardware designers, some of them have some overlap, but they will learn by doing mistakes -- all the same mistakes that have been done before." [...]

"They'll have all the same issues we have on the Arm side and that x86 had before them," he says. "It will take a few generations for them to say, 'Oh, we didn't think about that,' because they have new people involved." But even if RISC-V development is still expected to make many mistakes, he also said it will be much easier to develop the hardware now. Linus says, "It took a few decades to really get to the point where Arm and x86 are competing on fairly equal ground because there was al this software that was fairly PC-centric and that has passed. That will make it easier for new architectures like RISC-V to then come in."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after one broke apart in space and doomed its payload of Starlink satellites, the first failure in more than seven years of a rocket relied upon by the global space industry. Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites on a shallow orbital path where they will soon reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

The attempt to reignite the engine "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote early on Friday on his social media platform X, using an industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion. The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the failure, fixes the rocket and receives the agency's approval, the FAA said in a statement. That process could take several weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the failure and SpaceX's plan to fix it. Musk said SpaceX was updating the software of the Starlink satellites to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric re-entry. "Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said.

The satellites' altitude is so shallow that Earth's gravity is pulling them 3 miles (5 km) closer toward the atmosphere with each orbit, SpaceX later said, confirming they would inevitably "re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise." SpaceX said the second stage's failure occurred after engineers detected a leak of liquid oxygen, a propellant. The mishap occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission. It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite. The failure "breaks a success streak of more than 300 straight missions," notes Reuters.

"We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point," Tom Mueller, SpaceX's former vice president of propulsion who designed Falcon 9's engines. "... The team will fix the problem and start the cycle again."

Samsung unveiled new wearable devices at its Unpacked event earlier this week, drawing comparisons to Apple's offerings. The Galaxy Watch Ultra, set for release on July 24, bears striking similarities to Apple's Watch Ultra 2 launched last September. Both feature titanium cases, orange-accented buttons, and specialized bands. Samsung's version, priced at $650, undercuts Apple's $800 model. Business Insider adds: But the strategy has its downsides. If you spot someone wearing Galaxy Watch Ultra, there's a good chance you'd mistake it for Apple's model -- which doesn't help Samsung differentiate itself. In a statement to Business Insider, Samsung said that the design choices for its new smartwatch were "made to ensure comfort, usability, and durability in a variety of use cases." It didn't mention what went into naming the device.

The similarities extend to Samsung's new earbuds. The Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and the Galaxy Buds 3 -- also announced at Unpacked -- got a revamp that steps away from previous designs to make Samsung's Bluetooth earbuds shaped more like Apple AirPods. The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro are stemless and come in light purple, but their successor only comes in silver or white. Similar to the AirPods Pro, Galaxy Buds 3 Pro owners will be able to control their earbuds with gestures.

Scientists say "a reservoir of disease" is being created after discovering bacteria that naturally occur in rivers are becoming resistant to antibiotics due to the impact of sewage. From a report: Researchers at the University of Suffolk said bacterial strains found on the non-tidal section of the River Deben in Suffolk had acquired resistance by exchanging DNA with antibiotic resistant E. coli. Some bacteria have become resistant to the antibiotic carbapenem, which is used as the last line of defence in fighting infections already resistant to traditional antibiotics. Dr Nick Tucker, a microbiologist leading the research, described the discovery as "particularly worrying."

"Organisms that are currently low risk are being mixed with pathogenic organisms from sewage," he said. "We're needlessly adding pathogenic and virulence genes to bacteria found in the environment, and that could be creating a reservoir of disease." The team has been working closely with citizen scientists from the Deben Climate Centre, who have been taking water samples for two years. They have also been working with scientists at the government's CEFAS laboratories, who have helped identify the new strains that are being screened for their resistance to six of the most commonly-used antibiotics. The River Deben rises in Debenham, Suffolk, before flowing through Woodbridge and down to the North Sea.

India's antitrust watchdog has concluded that Apple abused its dominant position in the iOS app store market, according to a confidential report seen by Reuters, marking a significant development in the country's scrutiny of tech giants. The Competition Commission of India, which initiated an investigation into Apple in 2021, has determined that the company engaged in "abusive conduct and practices" by compelling developers to utilize its proprietary in-app purchase system, Reuters added.

The report asserts that Apple wields "significant influence" over the distribution of digital products to consumers through its iOS platform and App Store, characterizing the tech giant as an "unavoidable trading partner" for app developers who have little choice but to comply with Apple's terms.

The Conversation: Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher's own work. But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by our team of academic sleuths -- which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician -- has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.

People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented. Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors' names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article's text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI -- a unique identifier for each scientific publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science. However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles' metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

A group of astronomers want to change the definition of a planet. Their new proposed definition wouldn't bring Pluto back into the planetary fold, but it could reclassify thousands of celestial bodies across the universe. From a report: The International Astronomical Union's (IAU) current definition of a planet, established in 2006, includes only celestial bodies that are nearly round, are gravitationally dominant and orbit our Sun. This Sun-centric definition excludes all of the bodies we've discovered outside our solar system, even if they may fit all other parameters. They are instead considered exoplanets. Those behind the new proposal critiqued the IAU's definition in an upcoming paper in the Planetary Science Journal, arguing it's vague, not quantitative and unnecessarily exclusionary.

Their new proposal would instead classify planets based on their mass, considering a planet to be any celestial body that:
1. orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants and,
is more massive than 10ÂÂ kilograms (kg) and,
is less massive than 13 Jupiter masses (2.5 X 10^28Âkg).

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been tried before, more than once, but if it comes as a stock feature, maybe people will actually start to use the feature. Google's Pixel 9 range of fondleslabs is coming soon, and the company has already announced an event, Made by Google, for August 13th at 1000 Pacific Time (that's 1700 UTC, and 1800 for Brits.) The new devices are very likely to run Android 15 -- whose first developer preview appeared in February. Android Police reports that one of the less obvious features of the beta may continue to final release and could become more apparent: the desktop mode that can be activated in Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.1.

Having a desktop mode in Android isn't of itself a new thing. Samsung has offered its Dex feature since the Galaxy S8, and various vultures ventured Dex-wards in 2017 and again in 2018. The snag was that you needed a special dock to try it. Android 10 gained a hidden desktop mode in its developer features, but it wasn't easy to find. These days, though, the baseline is rather closer. Monitors with USB C connections are quite ordinary now, with ordinary prices to match, unlike, say, their prices five years ago. You can even get affordable portable ones.

In a new analysis, research firm Bernstein challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding Apple's iPhone sales fluctuations, arguing that perceived market share shifts between Apple and Android devices are largely illusory. The report, which Bernstein sent to its clients, contends that the majority of iPhone buyers are existing users upgrading their devices, rather than switchers from Android platforms.

Bernstein posits that year-to-year changes in iPhone unit sales are predominantly driven by Apple's upgrade rates within its established user base. This dynamic creates the appearance of significant market share gains or losses, particularly in China, where consumers are highly sensitive to new features. The analyst notes that upgrade cycles in China tend to be more pronounced than in other markets, leading to exaggerated perceptions of market share volatility. He suggests that the company's struggles in the region are more likely attributed to poor upgrade rates within its existing customer base rather than a mass exodus to competitors like Huawei.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The vast majority of the massive, metallic towers the city commissioned to help low-income neighborhoods access high-speed 5G internet still lack cell signal equipment -- more than two years after hundreds of the structures began sprouting across the five boroughs. Just two of the nearly 200 Link5G towers installed by tech firm CityBridge since 2022 have been fitted with 5G equipment, company officials said. Delayed installations and cooling enthusiasm around 5G technology have discouraged carriers like Verizon from using the towers to build out their networks, experts say. The firm only has an agreement with a single telecommunications carrier to deliver high-speed internet, stymieing its efforts to boost mobile connectivity citywide.

The 32-foot-tall structures, which resemble giant tampon applicators emerging from the sidewalk, offer the same services as the LinkNYC electronic billboards that popped up around the city in 2016. Those were also installed by CityBridge. Both the original Link kiosks and the 5G towers provide free limited-range Wi-Fi, charging outlets and a tablet to connect users to city services. Data shared by the company shows that 16 million people have used the internet at kiosks since 2016, and the attached tablets are used to call for city services thousands of times each month. But unlike the LinkNYC kiosks, each new tower is topped with a 12-foot-tall cylindrical mesh chamber containing five empty shelves reserved for companies like Verizon and T-Mobile to store the equipment they use to transmit high-speed 5G internet service to paying customers.

Indonesia said it is beginning to recover data that had been encrypted in a major ransomware attack last month which affected more than 160 government agencies. From a report: The attackers identified as Brain Cipher asked for $8 million in ransom to unlock the data before later apologising and releasing the decryption key for free, according to Singapore-based cybersecurity firm StealthMole. The attack has disrupted multiple government services including immigration and operations at major airports. Indonesian officials have acknowledged that the bulk of the data had not been backed up. Chief Security Minister Hadi Tjahjanto said in a statement late on Thursday that data for 30 public services overseen by 12 ministries had been recovered using a "decryption strategy" without elaborating.

U.S. phone giant AT&T confirmed Friday it will begin notifying millions of consumers about a fresh data breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal the phone records of "nearly all" of its customers. TechCrunch: In a statement, AT&T said that the stolen data contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers, as well as AT&T records of calls and text messages -- such as who contacted who by phone or text -- during a six-month period between May 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022. AT&T said some of the stolen data includes more recent records from January 2, 2023 for a smaller but unspecified number of customers.

The stolen data also includes call records of customers with phone service from other cell carriers that rely on AT&T's network, the company said. [...] In all, the phone giant said it will notify around 110 million AT&T customers of the data breach, company spokesperson Andrea Huguely told TechCrunch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A data breach at the phone surveillance operation mSpy has exposed millions of its customers who bought access to the phone spyware app over the past decade, as well as the Ukrainian company behind it. Unknown attackers stole millions of customer support tickets, including personal information, emails to support, and attachments, including personal documents, from mSpy in May 2024. While hacks of spyware purveyors are becoming increasingly common, they remain notable because of the highly sensitive personal information often included in the data, in this case about the customers who use the service. The hack encompassed customer service records dating back to 2014, which were stolen from the spyware maker's Zendesk-powered customer support system.

mSpy is a phone surveillance app that promotes itself as a way to track children or monitor employees. Like most spyware, it is also widely used to monitor people without their consent. These kinds of apps are also known as "stalkerware" because people in romantic relationships often use them to surveil their partner without consent or permission. The mSpy app allows whoever planted the spyware, typically someone who previously had physical access to a victim's phone, to remotely view the phone's contents in real-time. As is common with phone spyware, mSpy's customer records include emails from people seeking help to surreptitiously track the phones of their partners, relatives, or children, according to TechCrunch's review of the data, which we independently obtained. Some of those emails and messages include requests for customer support from several senior-ranking U.S. military personnel, a serving U.S. federal appeals court judge, a U.S. government department's watchdog, and an Arkansas county sheriff's office seeking a free license to trial the app. Even after amassing several million customer service tickets, the leaked Zendesk data is thought to represent only the portion of mSpy's overall customer base who reached out for customer support. The number of mSpy customers is likely to be far higher. mSpy's owners, a Ukraine-based company called Brainstack, have yet to publicly disclose the breach. You can visit Have I Been Pwned to see if your email address was involved in a breach.

Aryan Kapoor, a high schooler from JRD Propulsion, successfully developed a model rocket with SpaceX-style vertical landing capabilities. The three-year effort was made possible by a thrust-vector control and clever landing gear design. Hackaday reports: He started in 2021 with none of the basic skills needed to pull off something like this, but it seems like he quickly learned the ropes. His development program was comprehensive, with static test vehicles, a low-altitude hopper, and extensive testing of the key technology: thrust-vector control. His rocket uses two solid-propellant motors stacked on top of each other, one for ascent and one for descent and landing. They both live in a 3D printed gimbal mount with two servos that give the stack plus and minus seven degrees of thrust vectoring in two dimensions, which is controlled by a custom flight computer with a barometric altimeter and an inertial measurement unit. The landing gear is also clever, using rubber bands to absorb landing forces and syringes as dampers. You can watch the first successful test flight and landing on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The amount of wind and solar power under construction in China is now nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, a report has found. Research published on Thursday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), an NGO, found that China has 180 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale solar power under construction and 15GW of wind power. That brings the total of wind and solar power under construction to 339GW, well ahead of the 40GW under construction in the US. The researchers only looked at solar farms with a capacity of 20MW or more, which feed directly into the grid. That means that the total volume of solar power in China could be much higher, as small scale solar farms account for about 40% of China's solar capacity.

Between March 2023 and March 2024, China installed more solar than it had in the previous three years combined, and more than the rest of the world combined for 2023, the GEM analysts found. China is on track to reach 1,200GW of installed wind and solar capacity by the end of 2024, six years ahead of the government's target. "The unabated wave of construction guarantees that China will continue leading in wind and solar installation in the near future, far ahead of the rest of the world," the report said. Earlier analysis suggests that China will need to install between 1,600GW and 1,800GW of wind and solar energy by 2030 to meet its target of producing 25% of all energy from non-fossil sources. Between 2020 and 2023, only 30% of the growth in energy consumption was met by renewable sources, compared with the target of 50%.

Today, Amazon announced that it reached its 100% renewable energy goal seven years ahead of schedule. However, as Fast Company's Adele Peters reports, "a group of Amazon employees argues that the company's math is misleading." From the report: A report (PDF) from the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, argues that only 22% of the company's data centers in the U.S. actually run on clean power. The employees looked at where each data center was located and the mix of power on the regional grids -- how much was coming from coal, gas, or oil versus solar or wind. Amazon, like many other companies, buys renewable energy credits (RECs) for a certain amount of clean power that's produced by a solar plant or wind farm. In theory, RECs are supposed to push new renewable energy to get built. In reality, that doesn't always happen. The employee research found that 68% of Amazon's RECs are unbundled, meaning that they didn't fund new renewable infrastructure, but gave credit for renewables that already existed or were already going to be built.

As new data centers are built, they can mean that fossil-fuel-dependent grids end up building new fossil fuel power plants. "Dominion Energy, which is the utility in Virginia, is expanding because of demand, and Amazon is obviously one of their largest customers," says Eliza Pan, a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and a former Amazon employee. "Dominion's expansion is not renewable expansion. It's more fossil fuels." Amazon also doesn't buy credits that are specifically tied to the grids powering their data centers. The company might purchase RECs from Canada or Arizona, for example, to offset electricity used in Virginia. The credits also aren't tied to the time that the energy was used; data centers run all day and night, but most renewable energy is only available some of the time. The employee group argues that the company should follow the approach that Google takes. Google aims to use carbon-free energy, 24/7, on every grid where it operates.

Arm is launching its Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) upscaler that "can make games look better, while lowering power consumption on your phone," according to The Verge. "It's also making the upscaling technology available to developers under an MIT open-source license." From the reprot: Arm based its technology on AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), which uses temporal upscaling to make PC games look better and boost frame rates. Unlike spatial upscaling, which upscales an image based on a single frame, temporal upscaling involves using multiple frames to generate a higher-quality image.

You can see just how Arm ASR stacks up to AMD's FSR 2 and Qualcomm's GSR tech in [this chart] created by Arm. Arm claims ASR produced 53 percent higher frame rates than rendering at native resolution on a device with an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and 2800 x 1260 display, beating AMD FSR 2. It also tested ASR on a device using MediaTek's Dimensity 9300 chip and found that rendering at 540p and upscaling with ASR used much less power than running a game at native 1080p resolution.

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams writes: Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning -- cutting them off from crucial online services. They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers -- and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. Microsoft says they violated its terms of service -- a claim they dispute. He also said being cut off from Skype was a huge blow for his family. The internet is frequently disrupted or switched off there because of the Israeli military campaign - and standard international calls are very expensive. [...] With a paid Skype subscription, it is possible to call mobiles in Gaza cheaply -- and while the internet is down -- so it has become a lifeline to many Palestinians.

Some of the people the BBC spoke to said they suspected they were wrongly thought to have ties to Hamas, which Israel is fighting, and is designated a terrorist organization by many countries. Microsoft did not respond directly when asked if suspected ties to Hamas were the reason for the accounts being shut. But a spokesperson said it did not block calls or ban users based on calling region or destination. "Blocking in Skype can occur in response to suspected fraudulent activity," they said, without elaborating.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Samuel Axon: In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we've seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge by mimicking the bylines of the websites' former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names. The Verge reported on the fiasco in detail, including speaking to Christina Warren, a former writer for TUAW who now works at GitHub. Warren took to the social media platform Threads yesterday to point out that someone had re-launched TUAW at its original domain and populated it with fake content allegedly written by her and other past TUAW staff. Some of the content simply reworded articles that originally appeared on TUAW, while other articles tied real writers' names to new, AI-generated articles about current events.

TUAW was shut down in 2015, but its intellectual property and domain name continued to be owned by Yahoo. A Hong Kong-based web advertising firm named Web Orange Limited claims to have purchased the domain and brand name but not the content. The domain name still carries some value in terms of Google ranking, so Web Orange Limited seems to have relaunched the site and then used AI summarization tools to reword the original content and publish it under the original authors' names. (It did the same with another classic Apple blog, iLounge.) The site also includes author bios, which are generic and may have been generated, and they are accompanied by author photos that don't look anything like the real writers. The Verge found that some of these same photos have appeared in other places, like web display ads for iPhone cases and dating websites. They may have been AI-generated, though the company has also been caught reusing photos of real people without permission in other contexts.

At first, some of Web Orange Limited's websites named Haider Ali Khan, an Australian currently residing in Dubai, as the owner of the company. Khan's own website identified him as "an independent cyber security analyst" and "long-time advocate for web security" who also runs a web hosting company, and who "started investing in several technology reporting websites" and "manages and runs several news blogs such as the well-known Apple tech-news blog iLounge." However, mentions of his name were removed from the websites today, and the details on his personal website have apparently been taken offline. Warren emailed the company, threatening legal action. After she did that, the byline was changed to what we can only assume is a made-up name -- "Mary Brown." The same goes for many of the other author names on Web Orange Limited's websites.

The company likely tried to use the original authors' names as part of an SEO play; Google tracks the names of authors and gives them authority rankings on specific topics as another layer on top of a website's own authority. That way, Google can try to respond to user queries with results written by people who have built strong reputations in the users' areas of interest. It also helps Google surface authors who are experts on a topic but who write for multiple websites, which is common among freelance writers. The websites are still operational, even though the most arguably egregious breach of ethics -- the false use of real people's names -- has been addressed in many cases.