Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, said his former company is losing the AI race and remote work is to blame. From a report: "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," Schmidt said at a talk at Stanford University. "The reason startups work is because the people work like hell." Schmidt made the comments earlier at a wide-ranging discussion at Stanford. His remarks about Google's remote-work policies were in response to a question about Google competing with OpenAI.

Manny Fidel, reporting for Sherwood News: When you're immersed in a game like "Cyberpunk 2077," it's easy to get lost in its realism. As you run around the crowded streets of Night City, you notice the reflections of the city lights and neon signs in the puddles when it rains. Even the complexion and texture of a character's skin are enamoring. At full power, the game, created by CD Projekt Red, is a graphical marvel. It's also a symbol of a decades-long arms race between the biggest video game companies to make things look as real as possible. And then there are Nintendo games.

Take 2022's "Pokemon Scarlet" and "Pokemon Violet" on the Nintendo Switch. Despite being the latest releases in a legendary franchise, in terms of its graphics they could've easily been published 15 years ago. It's a perfect example of how, sometimes to the frustration of gamers, Nintendo seemingly refuses to step into the present day. None of its flagship games really compete with the rest of the industry's optical experiences. The graphics of games like "Red Dead Redemption 2," "Starfield," and "The Last of Us: Part II" are decades ahead of Nintendo.

But here's the thing: Nintendo doesn't have to catch up, nor does it want to. "Pokemon Scarlet" and "Pokemon Violet" sold 10 million copies during their launch weekend alone. According to IGN, Nintendo is responsible for three of the top five bestselling video game consoles of all time. Its characters -- Mario and Luigi, Link and Zelda, Pikachu and Ash -- have defined and are constantly redefining the industry. Nintendo is a money machine. It's been raking in more than $10 billion in revenue (more than 1.6 trillion yen) annually for the past several years, and its profits have grown sharply, topping out at about $3.3 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2024. For comparison, in its latest fiscal year, Sony's gaming division generated $29.1 billion of revenue and an operating profit of nearly $2 billion. Nintendo posted $11.4 billion of revenue and an operating profit of $3.6 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: The family of a French mariner who died on the imploded Titan submersible last year has sued Titan's maker, OceanGate Expeditions, for more than $50 million. The lawsuit claims OceanGate is responsible for explorers' suffering immediately preceding their deaths, as well as for failing to disclose the extent of the submersible's risks. Among those risks are Titan's cheap materials, including the $30 Logitech gaming controller used aboard the vehicle. [...]

The lawsuit points at Titan's "hip, contemporary, wireless electronics system" and then alleges that none of the controllers or gauges inside Titan would operate without a constant source of power and a wireless signal. One of those controllers was a modified Logitech F710 Gamepad, a $30 to $40 device designed for, well, gaming. The gamepad quickly became the subject of internet mockery following the loss of Titan; some speculators said the submersible must have been doomed to fail if it used such cheap components. The lawsuit even claims the controller's Bluetooth (rather than wired) connectivity set it up for failure. Still, other speculators believe the controller wouldn't have had much impact on the submersible's operational durability. Instead, the issue would have been with the vehicle's carbon fiber pressure cylinder, which Rush allegedly bought off Boeing at a discount after the material passed its "airplane shelf life." Regardless of the exact material, it seems the consensus among members of the public is that for OceanGate, quality was an afterthought.

Civil servants in the UK are locked in a row with the government over plans to use AI to answer taxpayer complaints. The Telegraph: Letters and emails to the Treasury are already being read by an AI tool which summarises the contents and suggests responses for civil servants. The government is now in talks to use AI across more departments, The Telegraph understands. A government spokesman said: "We make no apology for exploring innovations which improve public services. This tool has already been in use for four months and has increased productivity by 30pc, helping us save taxpayers' money by stopping the need to use expensive contractors during busy periods.

"Staff at the Treasury will continue to write all public correspondence and make decisions on cases. This tool, which was developed by data science experts in the department, helps civil servants respond to thousands more questions quickly and on time." But the civil serrvice trade body, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, warned that the AI tool could be developed "on the cheap," leading to correspondence being misread. Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said that while the union has no objection in principle to AI, that training the tool "properly takes a long time and considerable resources." Ms Heathcote added: "Further, in anticipation of AI working well, staff numbers are cut so you get the worst of all worlds: a poorly functioning AI system with too few humans left behind to pick up the broken pieces."

In an effort to beef up protections for consumers against corporations, the Biden administration on Monday announced a handful of policies to crack down on "headaches and hassles that waste Americans' time and money." From a report: Through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the administration will ask companies to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions and memberships as it is to sign up for them, and through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new rule will require companies to let customers cut through automated customer service "doom loops" by pressing a single button to reach a real person.

"For a lot of services, it takes one or two clicks on your phone to sign up. It should take one or two clicks on your phone to end the service," White House Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden said on a call with reporters to discuss the new policies. Consumers could see the new rule applied to gym memberships or subscriptions with phone and internet companies. The administration will also call on health insurance companies to allow claims to be submitted online, rather than requiring insured customers to print out and mail forms in for coverage.

"Zelle payments can't be reversed once they're sent," notes the Los Angeles Times — which could be why they're popular with scammers. "You can't simply stop the payment (like a check) or dispute it (like a credit card). Now, the federal regulator overseeing financial products is probing whether banks that offer Zelle to their account holders are doing enough to protect them against scams. Two major banks — JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — disclosed in their security filings in the last week that they'd been contacted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. According to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the filings Wednesday, the CFPB is exploring whether banks are moving quickly enough to shut down scammers' accounts and whether they're doing enough to identify and prevent scammers from signing up for accounts in the first place...

A J.D. Power survey this year found that 3% of the people who'd used Zelle said they had lost money to scammers, which was less than the average for peer-to-peer money transfer services such as Venmo, CashApp and PayPal. The chief executive of Early Warning Services, which runs Zelle, told a Senate subcommittee in July that only 0.1% of the transactions on Zelle involved a scam or fraud; in 2023, the company said, that percentage was 0.05%. But Zelle operates at such a large scale — 120 million users, 2.9 billion transactions and $806 billion transferred in 2023, according to Early Warning Services — that even a tiny percentage of scam and fraud problems translates into a large number of users and dollars... From 2022 to 2023, Zelle cut the rate of scams by nearly 50% even as the volume of transactions grew 28%, resulting in less money scammed in 2023 than in 2022, said Ben Chance, the chief fraud risk management officer for Zelle. The company didn't disclose the amounts involved, but if 0.05% of the $806 billion transferred in 2023 involved scam or fraud, that would translate to $403 million.

Do Zelle users get reimbursed for scams? Only in certain cases, and this is where the banks that offer Zelle have drawn the most heat. If you use Zelle to pay a scammer, banks say, that's a payment you authorized, so they're not obliged under law to refund your money... Some banks, such as Bank of America, say they will put a freeze on transfers by a suspected scammer as soon as a report comes in, then investigate and, if the report is substantiated, seize and return the money. But that works only if the scam is reported right away, before the scammer has the chance to withdraw the funds — which many will do immediately, said Iskander Sanchez-Rola, director of innovation at the cybersecurity company Gen.

Major U.S. companies are tightening eligibility requirements for student discounts, cracking down on graduates who continue to claim benefits years after leaving school. Amazon, Spotify, and other firms are partnering with verification services like SheerID to validate student status, ending an era of lax enforcement that allowed many to exploit discounts long after graduation.

While companies aim to build brand loyalty among young consumers, they're also guarding against fraud. SheerID claims it helped clients avoid $2 billion in fraudulent discounts last year. Most streaming services retain over 90% of student customers after graduation, according to SheerID CEO Stephanie Copeland Weber. "They're building trust and loyalty with those consumers," she told WSJ.

Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar has called for faster defense spending, arguing the Pentagon should focus on rapid deployment over higher budgets. "The biggest challenge is speed," Sankar told Axios in an interview. "The Department of Defense would be better off spending half as much money twice as quickly."

The U.S. military has "lost our ability to value time," he said. The Denver-based software company, known for its work in areas ranging from vaccine logistics to Ukraine demining efforts, has positioned itself as a "software prime" in the defense sector.

Nasdaq is taking steps to purge itself of dubious companies whose shares trade below $1 each, following criticism that the exchange has become home to hundreds of risky penny stocks. From a report: [...] When a stock closes below $1 for 30 consecutive trading days, Nasdaq deems the company to be noncompliant and gives it 180 days to remedy the situation. After 180 days, if the stock hasn't climbed above $1, the company can request another 180-day grace period. At the end of that second period, the company can still get a last-minute reprieve by appealing to a Nasdaq hearings panel. The delisting is stayed while the company awaits its hearing.

Some say those rules are lax, leading to a pileup of penny stocks on Nasdaq. On Wednesday, there were 523 stocks listed on U.S. exchanges that closed below $1 per share, of which 433 were listed on Nasdaq, according to Dow Jones Market Data. By comparison, there were fewer than a dozen sub-$1 stocks in early 2021. The two proposed rule changes unveiled by Nasdaq on Thursday would tighten up some of the rules regarding sub-$1 stocks, though they don't go as far as Virtu has demanded.

Under one of the proposed changes, companies that reach the end of their second 180-day grace period wouldn't be able to postpone delisting by seeking an appeal. Instead, their shares would move to the over-the-counter market -- a sort of purgatory where companies land after being delisted -- while they await the appeal. Effectively, the rule change caps the amount of time that sub-$1 stocks can be listed on Nasdaq to roughly a year. The second proposed rule change would speed up the delisting process for companies that recently did a reverse stock split. Under the change, if a company carried out a reverse split to prop up its share price, but then its stock fell below $1 within a year, Nasdaq would immediately send the company a delisting notice. The company could still appeal and remain listed for another 180 days.

Starting today, Morgan Stanley's advisors are allowed to offer bitcoin ETFs to some clients -- a first among major Wall Street banks. "Those funds are BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust and Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund," reports CNBC. From the report: Morgan Stanley made the move in response to demand from clients and in an attempt to follow an evolving marketplace for digital assets [...].The bank is still striking a note of caution, however, in the rollout: Only clients with a net worth of at least $1.5 million, an aggressive risk tolerance and the desire to make speculative investments are suitable for bitcoin ETF solicitation, said the people. The investments are for taxable brokerage accounts, not retirement accounts, they added. The bank will monitor clients' crypto holdings to make sure they don't end up with excessive exposure to the volatile asset class, according to the sources.

The only crypto investments approved for solicited purchase at Morgan Stanley are the pair of bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity; private funds from Galaxy and FS NYDIG that the bank made available starting in 2021 were phased out earlier this year. Morgan Stanley is watching how the market for newly approved ether ETFs develops and hasn't committed to whether it would provide access to those, the people said.

AI is upending India's technology outsourcing business. The industry is pivoting to adapt, but the changes could cost a large number of coveted jobs. From a report: The country's big outsourcing companies are already using AI and have plans to integrate it throughout their businesses. That might not save the low-end operations that run call centers or do other basic tasks within the so-called business process outsourcing sector.Â

AI is threatening to disrupt most businesses around the world, not just India's $250 billion outsourcing industry. The outsourcing boom in India over the past few decades created the "getting Bangalore-d" phenomenon in the U.S., often used for Americans who lost their jobs to more affordable Indian talent. AI's impact could have big repercussions as the industry employs 5.4 million people, according to tech-industry body Nasscom, and contributes about 8% of the country's economy. More than 80% of companies in the S&P 500 outsource some operations to India, according to HSBC.

U.S. Judge Amit Mehta released a 286-page ruling Monday in the Google search antitrust case, revealing key details of the tech giant's business practices. The document is packed with factual findings and legal conclusions and some amazing comments. Here's one, for instance: Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine in Safari. But according to Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, there's no other meaningful alternative. During the trial, he said that "there's no price that Microsoft could ever offer" to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari. "I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us," Cue said at another point. "They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company."

For Google, this is a sign that they've earned their default status (which, incidentally, they pay Apple gobs of money to maintain). Judge Mehta says that this is an indication that the "market reality is that Google is the only real choice as the default GSE [general search engine]." (Of course, Cue's opinion doesn't mean Bing is objectively bad. Elsewhere, the opinion notes that Bing's search quality is comparable to Google's on desktop, though it falls behind on mobile.)

Mainframe computers, stalwarts of high-speed data processing, are finding new relevance in the age of AI. Banks, insurers, and airlines continue to rely on these industrial-strength machines for mission-critical operations, with some now exploring AI applications directly on the hardware, WSJ reported in a feature story. IBM, commanding over 96% of the mainframe market, reported 6% growth in its mainframe business last quarter. The company's latest zSystem can process up to 30,000 transactions per second and hold 40 terabytes of data. WSJ adds: Globally, the mainframe market was valued at $3.05 billion in 2023, but new mainframe sales are expected to decline through 2028, IDC said. Of existing mainframes, however, 54% of enterprise leaders in a 2023 Forrester survey said they would increase their usage over the next two years.

Mainframes do have limitations. They are constrained by the computing power within their boxes, unlike the cloud, which can scale up by drawing on computing power distributed across many locations and servers. They are also unwieldy -- with years of old code tacked on -- and don't integrate well with new applications. That makes them costly to manage and difficult to use as a platform for developing new applications.

In a note to clients, seen by Slashdot, brokerage house Jefferies writes: Netflix's last price hike on the standard plan was in Jan 2022, its ad- supported plan remains the cheapest (among major players) in the industry, and its move into live sports increases pricing power - for these 3 reasons we suspect a price hike in Q4 or December of this year could be coming on the standard plan.

As stated in the Q4 2023 letter (following the announcement of WWE Raw coming in 2025): "As we invest in and improve Netflix, we'll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn helps drive the positive flywheel of additional investment." We believe Netflix has been positioning itself throughout this year for a year-end price hike. December / 2025 will have major content releases supporting a pricing increase including the Christmas NFL game, Squid Game 2 on Dec. 26th (season 1 - the #1 watched NFLX show of all time), WWE Raw starting Jan 2025, and Stranger Things 5 coming in 2025 (season 3 / 4 in top 10 of all-time).

iPhone and Apple Watch users in California will soon be able to add their digital ID and driver's license to the Wallet app, as revealed by new landing pages on the state DMV website. This feature follows a slow rollout since its announcement, with only five states currently supporting it. MacRumors reports: "Now you can add your California driver's license or state ID to Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch so you can present it easily and securely in person and in app," reads the landing page, which contains broken links and placeholder images, and is still missing a proper website security certificate. The webpages were discovered on Sunday by Jimmy Obomsawin, after someone added a link to the landing pages in an Apple Wallet Wikipedia entry last Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On July 19, Yelp informed select indie developers that they would have to switch to paid accounts, due to high API usage. Developers were given four days to make the change, in a move that echoes recent communication bungles by Reddit and Twitter. When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API calls per day. Developers were concerned that other, more affordable options weren't mentioned in the deck. Yelp said the pricing is equivalent and simply presented in different ways. The method of communication and lack of transparency has angered developers, some of whom shuttered their services, even after Yelp gave them a 90-day leeway and apologized. While the company has issued an apology email to developers and extended their free usage by 90 days, it may not be enough to keep these frustrated developers from moving to new platforms.

"We apologize for last week's abbreviated transition that impacted a small percentage of developers and have extended access to these users," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Yelp sunsetted free, commercial, unlimited use of the Yelp Fusion API in 2019 and has been in the process of migrating developers to a paid program over the last several years. The developer community is important to Yelp, and we've heard their feedback about the transition period from the free Yelp Fusion API to our paid program."

CrowdStrike says that it isn't to blame for Delta Air Lines' dayslong meltdown following the tech outage caused by the cybersecurity company, and that it isn't responsible for all of the money that the carrier says it lost. From a report: In a letter responding to the airline's recent public comments and hiring of a prominent lawyer, CrowdStrike said Delta's threats of a lawsuit have contributed to a "misleading narrative" that the cybersecurity company was responsible for the airline's tech decisions and response to the outage. "Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions -- swiftly, transparently, and constructively -- while Delta did not," wrote Michael Carlinsky, an attorney at law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

The letter to Delta's legal team Sunday evening is the latest move in a growing conflict between the cybersecurity firm and the airline, which was thrown into several days of disarray following the outage. Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian said in an interview on CNBC last week that the outage cost the airline about $500 million, including lost revenue and compensation costs. The airline has alerted CrowdStrike and Microsoft that it is planning to pursue legal claims to recover its losses, and has hired litigation firm Boies Schiller Flexner to assist, according to a memo Bastian sent to Delta employees last week. CrowdStrike said Sunday that its liability is contractually capped at an amount in the "single-digit millions."

A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette." [T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there.

Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...."

Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page.

In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit.
Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notes that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours...

"For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."

"As media bosses scramble to decide if and how they should partner with AI companies, workers are increasingly concerned that the technology could imperil their jobs or degrade their work..." reports the Washington Post.

The latest example? "Two months after the Atlantic reached a licensing deal with OpenAI, staffers at the storied magazine are demanding the company ensure their jobs and work are protected." (Nearly 60 journalists have now signed a letter demanding the company "stop prioritizing its bottom line and champion the Atlantic's journalism.") The unionized staffers want the Atlantic bosses to include AI protections in the union contract, which the two sides have been negotiating since 2022. "Our editorial leaders say that The Atlantic is a magazine made by humans, for humans," the letter says. "We could not agree more..."

The Atlantic's new deal with OpenAI grants the tech firm access to the magazine's archives to train its AI tools. While the Atlantic in return will have special access to experiment with these AI tools, the magazine says it is not using AI to create journalism. But some journalists and media observers have raised concerns about whether AI tools are accurately and fairly manipulating the human-written text they work with. The Atlantic staffers' letter noted a pattern by ChatGPT of generating gibberish web addresses instead of the links intended to attribute the reporting it has borrowed, as well as sending readers to sites that have summarized Atlantic stories rather than the original work...

Atlantic spokeswoman Anna Bross said company leaders "agree with the general principles" expressed by the union. For that reason, she said, they recently proposed a commitment to not to use AI to publish content "without human review and editorial oversight." Representatives from the Atlantic Union bargaining committee told The Washington Post that "the fact remains that the company has flatly refused to commit to not replacing employees with AI."
The article also notes that last month the union representing Lifehacker, Mashable and PCMag journalists "ratified a contract that protects union members from being laid off because AI has impacted their roles and requires the company to discuss any such plans to implement AI tools ahead of time."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The new Labour government has shelved $1.66 bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned. It includes $1 bn for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further $640m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI. Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget. Some in the industry have criticised the government's decision. Tech business founder Barney Hussey-Yeo posted on X that reducing investment risked "pushing more entrepreneurs to the US." Businessman Chris van der Kuyl described the move as "idiotic." Trade body techUK said the government now needed to make "new proposals quickly" or the UK risked "losing out" to other countries in what are crucial industries of the future.