Samsung has confirmed that its Galaxy Ring health wearable is getting two new sizing options alongside added features and an expansion to more markets.
more…Apple last updated its Apple TV 4K set-top box in late 2022. So when is the next model coming? According to a new report, here’s when to expect the new Apple TV 4K to launch.
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Amid signs of a stagnating economy, the UK is going all-in on AI. On Monday, British Minister Keir Starmer announced a new AI Opportunities Action Plan. At the center of the initiative are “AI Growth Zones,” which the government plans to establish in de-industrialized areas throughout the country.
In these areas, the Labour government will fast-track planning approvals for data centers and offer better access to the national energy grid. Starmer said the UK’s first AI Growth Zone would be established in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the country’s Atomic Energy Authority. More zones will be announced in the summer.
At the same time, Starmer’s government plans to increase state-owned compute capacity by a factor of 20, starting with the “immediate” construction of a new supercomputer with “enough AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second.” As of November 2024, the UK has 14 supercomputers on the TOP500 list, putting it behind — by a significant margin — the US and China.
Additionally, the plan will see the government establish a National Data Library, which it says will make the country more attractive to investors by allowing private industry to “safely and securely unlock the value of public data.” Finally, a new AI Energy Council will work with energy companies to meet the power demands of the AI industry in a way that’s in line with the government’s clean energy strategy.
“Artificial Intelligence will drive incredible change in our country. From teachers personalising lessons, to supporting small businesses with their record-keeping, to speeding up planning applications, it has the potential to transform the lives of working people,” Starmer said. “But the AI industry needs a government that is on their side, one that won’t sit back and let opportunities slip through its fingers. And in a world of fierce competition, we cannot stand by.”
Over the next 10 years, Starmer’s government estimates that its strategy could generate as much as £47 billion ($57 billion) in annual economic growth. The announcement comes after the UK economy failed to grow in the third quarter of last year. From that perspective, making the country more attractive to outside investment isn’t the worst idea — especially with companies like Microsoft planning to spend $80 billion on new data centers this year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/uk-to-fast-track-data-center-approvals-as-part-of-ai-action-plan-163753744.html?src=rss
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© Reuters / Reuters
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to decide whether to block lawsuits that Honolulu filed to seek billions in damages from oil and gas companies over allegedly deceptive marketing campaigns that hid the effects of climate change.
Now those lawsuits can proceed, surely frustrating the fossil fuel industry, which felt that SCOTUS should have weighed in on this key "recurring question of extraordinary importance to the energy industry" raised in lawsuits seeking similarly high damages in several states, CBS News reported.
Defendants Sunoco and Shell, along with 15 other energy companies, had asked the court to intervene and stop the Hawaii lawsuits from proceeding. They had hoped to move the cases out of Hawaii state courts by arguing that interstate pollution is governed by federal law and the Clean Air Act.
© SkyHighStudios | RooM
The Department of Transportation announced Friday another $636 million in funding that will be awarded to 49 applicants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure — and Tesla’s application for nearly $100 million to fund a big rig charging corridor was once again passed over. Tesla’s name was not among the list of recipients released, and its partner […]
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On the heels of TikTok’s looming shut down on January 19 over its ownership in the U.S. (unless the Supreme Court intervenes), it looks like another Chinese app is catching some attention. American users are flocking Chinese short-form video app Xiaohongshu (known as RedNote in English). The app today surged to the number-one spot for […]
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Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.
“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry.
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making… pic.twitter.com/zkv73Bhmi9
— Mike Patti (@mpatti) January 11, 2025
In the interview, Shulman says he’s disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.
However, the notion that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of music, why people make art, become artists, and the basic human practice of skill building and mastery.
Music is a form of creative expression that’s old as humanity itself and exists in every culture. Babies will “make music” by clapping their hands and smashing blocks together long before they can talk, and they don’t find that frustrating.
It’s true that becoming very good at making music takes time. Picking up a guitar for the first time does not immediately produce the joy of perfectly executing a sick guitar solo. You have to start from zero, maybe learn some theory, and build the muscle memory and calluses on your fingers. Some people enjoy this slow process of getting a little better over time and become musicians. Some people don’t and instead spend their time becoming good at blogging, carpentry, programming, cutting hair, etc.
The interviewer, Harry Stebbings, interjects while Shulman says the making music isn’t enjoyable and compares it to running, another obviously challenging thing that many people enjoy getting better at over time.
“Most people drop out of that pursuit because it’s hard, and so I think that the people you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it,” Shulman said.
It’s funny and frustrating that Shulman can’t (or pretends he can’t) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music inherently appealing. During the interview, he repeatedly says that Suno can grow the music industry to be as big as the video game industry by making it more accessible. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially the process of slowly getting better at a difficult task.
This is not a surprising position for the CEO of a generative AI company to take. It is very possible that generative AI will become a more popular way for producing images, music, and text in the future. We report on how those AI-generated outputs are flooding the internet already, though in most cases that output is derided as “slop” because it’s low quality and annoying to users who find it increasingly difficult to find valuable, human-made content on the internet. Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician inflates the worth of that output and the company.
“Every single person at Suno has an incredible deep love and respect for music,” Shulman said later in the interview.
Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeles’s Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhood’s mandatory evacuation order.
Friday morning, Riley posted a screenshot of an Amazon delivery confirmation photo. The photo showed an Amazon box on a bench in front of a glass door.
“Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders,” Riley wrote in the post. Riley’s home in the Pacific Palisades was included in the first evacuation order issued on January 7, about two hours after the fire started burning. “Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok.”
Amazon drivers have continued delivering packages in some areas of Los Angeles affected by ongoing wildfires, according to numerous posts by drivers on social media and corroborated by the company’s website.
Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders. Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok 🤯 #PalisadesWildfire pic.twitter.com/ox3CIRJ7y1
— Ali Riley (@RileyThree) January 10, 2025
Since Tuesday, uncontrolled fires in the northern parts of Los Angeles have burned down over 12,000 buildings, and thousands of people have lost their homes.
Amazon closed the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale on Wednesday, the day after the fires broke out. But Amazon’s distributed delivery system has led to some confusion. Amazon uses a network of “Delivery Service Partners,” which are nominally independent businesses who hire delivery drivers. Amazon also delivers packages in Los Angeles with a system called Flex, which functions sort of like DoorDash or Uber in that drivers use their personal vehicles to deliver packages.
An Amazon Flex driver posted that they had been instructed to deliver close to the fires on Thursday. The screenshot of their route map showed a road in Westgate Heights, in an area that is now under an evacuation warning and is immediately next to an area under a mandatory evacuation order. A photo they shared taken in their warehouse parking lot showed a massive plume of orange smoke. They said in a comment that they had refused to deliver the packages.
While some drivers told 404 Media or posted on driver subreddits and Discords that their routes had been canceled, some said they were given delivery routes close to fires or in areas that were eventually evacuated.
Multiple drivers wrote that the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale, for example, had closed on Wednesday. “I was still scheduled to work on the 8th,” one driver wrote to 404 Media in an online chat. “I didn’t hear much from management until 30 minutes before our clock in time, that the station had closed due to the fires.”
The driver posted a photo of a brown smoke-darkened sky above the parking lot of their warehouse.
Another Flex driver posted a screenshot of a delivery cancellation notice they got from VAX5, a warehouse in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.
“The block you’re scheduled for on 09 January 2025 at 3:30 am at VAX5 has been canceled. Please don’t come to the delivery station. This cancellation is due to circumstances beyond your control. Your standing won’t be impacted and you will still be paid for the block.”
Multiple drivers on the Amazon delivery subreddit, r/AmazonDSPDrivers, have written that despite nearby fires and evacuation zones, their work days have gone on as normal over the last week.
“I deliver east in LA county and today was just another day on the job,” one user wrote in a comment on a post asking how drivers in the state were dealing with the fires. “Not really that bad out here tho[ugh], but one of our delivery areas is close to level 2 evacuation warning.”
Another driver wrote, “We cover the Burbank/Glendale area, still working. A lot of businesses are closed. Some unprecedented traffic. We were just given N95 masks for mild ashes falling.” Glendale sits just west of the Eaton fire, which is the second most destructive fire in the state.
A third driver in Santa Monica, about 20 minutes away from the Palisades, wrote last Wednesday that their workload had been reduced because of the fires. They posted a screenshot of a route with 192 packages. “I honestly thought they’d send us home since we deliver close to the fires but no they just gave us masks to wear,” the driver wrote.
Delivering in wildfire conditions can be dangerous even if you aren’t close to the source of the fire itself. In 2023, New York City was enveloped in smoke from Canadian wildfires, and the city’s air quality was categorized as “hazardous.” Delivery drivers at the time said they had spent their whole workday coughing. As of Sunday, Los Angeles’ air quality was “poor.”
The driver subreddits are also full of people discussing whether they would get paid for canceled routes, and screenshots of drivers talking to Amazon support. In many cases, Amazon appears to be paying drivers for routes cancelled because of the fires.
Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told 404 Media in a statement that the company was supplying drivers with N95 masks and was monitoring the air quality in the area.
“If [the air quality index] is over a certain threshold for extended timeframes as defined by Cal OSHA, we have mechanisms in place to reduce time on the road for drivers,” MacLachlan said. “If it’s still deemed safe to be on the road, we suggest DSPs [delivery service partners] advise their drivers to keep vehicle windows closed and to run the A/C on high with air recirculating, out of an abundance of caution.”
In a blog post written two days after the fires began burning, the company wrote that its customers would likely experience delays due to the “temporary closing of some Amazon facilities,” and that it would fulfill their orders “when it’s safe to do so from outside the affected region…Our top priority is ensuring the safety of our employees and partners.”
MacLachlan said Amazon had instructed drivers not to make deliveries in mandatory evacuation zones. “Safety is our utmost priority and drivers are encouraged and instructed to never make deliveries if they feel unsafe, and they will never be penalized for it,” MacLachlan said. She also said the company was investigating Riley’s post about the Amazon package.
“We’re looking into the details of this delivery,” MacLachlan said. “However, drivers have been instructed to not deliver in evacuation zones, or areas closed to public access. And if a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so, and the driver’s performance will not be impacted.”
It’s been four years since we last covered OnPay, the Atlanta-based tech startup that offers payroll, HR, and benefits solutions to small and medium-sized businesses across the United States. Since then, the company has more than doubled its client base, […]
The post Payroll startup OnPay secures over $100M in funding to transform HR and benefits for small businesses first appeared on Tech Startups.
Following the OnePlus 13’s launch last week, the OnePlus 13 is getting its first software update with new fixes, features, and more.
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Last week, major location data broker Gravy Analytics disclosed a data breach that may have resulted in the theft of precise location data for millions of people, reports TechCrunch. That appears to include data from popular mobile games like Candy Crush, as well as dating apps, pregnancy tracking apps, and more, as 404 Media wrote on Thursday, following up its report of the breach two days earlier.
Baptiste Robert, CEO of digital security company Predicta Lab, said in a series of posts Wednesday that the small sample data set published in a Russian forum contained data for “tens of millions of data points worldwide” and included “sensitive locations like the White House, Kremlin, Vatican, military bases, and more.” As TechCrunch notes, the sample alone contained more than 30 million locations.
Visualizing such a massive amount of location data is no easy task.
— Baptiste Robert (@fs0c131y) January 8, 2025
Google Earth Pro crashed at 500k location points, and our OSINT platform hit its limit at 1.5 million. Even if it is "just" a sample, rendering the entire dataset at once is a real challenge. pic.twitter.com/VTZGjsG79L
Gravy said in its disclosure to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority that it “identified unauthorized access to its AWS cloud storage environment” on January 4th. It says in the disclosure that it’s still investigating how long hackers had access to its cloud environment and whether the hack “constitutes a reportable personal data breach.” As for what or who was affected, the company writes:
Gravy Analytics is working diligently to determine the scope of the incident and the nature of the information involved. Preliminary findings indicate that an unauthorized person obtained certain files, which could contain personal data. These are currently being analyzed. If it is determined that personal data is involved, that personal data is likely associated with users of third-party services that supply this data to Gravy Analytics.
Gravy Analytics was one of two data brokers targeted last month in a proposed FTC order that forbids it from “selling, disclosing, or using sensitive location data in any product or service.” The FTC at the time wrote that its subsidiary, Venntel, collected data from apps and sold access to that data to businesses or government agencies, including the IRS, DEA, FBI, and ICE.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is stepping down from the company after eight years on the job, according to reporting by Bloomberg. This follows last year’s disastrous app launch, in which a redesign was missing core features and was broken in nearly every major way.
The company has tasked Tom Conrad to steer the ship as interim CEO. Conrad is a current member of the Sonos board, but was a co-founder of Pandora, VP at Snap and product chief at, wait for it, the short-lived video streaming platform Quibi. He also reportedly has a Sonos tattoo. The board has hired a firm to find a new long-term leader.
“I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down,” Conrad wrote employees in a letter. “Getting back to basics is necessary, but clearly not enough to unlock the future we all envision for Sonos.” He also suggested that he wants the company to expand “well beyond” home speakers and related gear.
As for Spence, he’ll be just fine. His payout package includes $7,500 per month until June, a cash severance of $1.9 million and his unvested shares in Sonos will vest. He was with Sonos for more than a decade.
The decision to swap leadership comes after months of turmoil at the company. It rolled out a mobile app back in May that was absolutely rife with bugs and missing key features like alarms and sleep timers. Some customers even complained that entire speaker systems would no longer work after updating to the new app. It was a whole thing.
Sonos tried to win back customer trust by extending the manufacturer warranty for home speaker products and creating an advisory board that would provide the company with "feedback and insights from a customer perspective to help shape and improve our software and products before they are launched.”
That didn’t ease the financial burden faced by the company. The stock price has fallen by around 13 percent since the app launched. Sonos laid off over 100 people in August as it tried to fix the software and revenue fell 16 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on September 28. Analysts project an additional 15 percent decline throughout the holiday period.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/speakers/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-falls-on-his-sword-after-horrible-app-launch-160704330.html?src=rss
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© Sonos
Folks who are in the market for a good deal on a dedicated machine for playing Balatro tablet might be interested in taking a peek at Apple's iPad mini 7. The company's latest compact tablet has dropped to its lowest price to date at $399. That's a cool $100 discount.
Apple refreshed the iPad mini last October with upgraded internals and support for the Apple Pencil Pro. This configuration has 128GB of storage and Apple's A17 Pro chip. It also boasts 8GB of RAM, which is enough to support Apple Intelligence features
The iPad mini 7 is our pick for the best compact iPad — in part because it's the only one. We gave it a score of 83 in our review.
The device has an 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display which is, sadly, limited to a 60Hz refresh rate. The lack of a Face ID sensor and one of the M-series chips that are present in Apple's flagship iPads are our other major drawbacks with this one.
But it's a solid tablet otherwise. The iPad mini 7 runs on the same chipset as the iPhone 15 Pro and Apple doubled the base storage from the previous generation. It weighs 0.65 pounds, so you may not have too much trouble holding it in one hand.
The Touch ID sensor is encased in the power button, and there are stereo speakers and decent cameras (12MP on each side). Like pretty much all of Apple's other devices these days, the iPad mini 7 has a USB-C port rather than a Lightning one. Speaking of which, the tablet should run for up to 10 hours before you need to recharge it. And although there's no cellular connectivity here, the iPad mini 7 supports Wi-Fi 6E.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apples-ipad-mini-7-is-100-off-right-now-155549086.html?src=rss
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© Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget
On Monday, the US government announced a new round of regulations on global AI chip exports, dividing the world into roughly three tiers of access. The rules create quotas for about 120 countries and allow unrestricted access for 18 close US allies while maintaining existing bans on China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
AI-accelerating GPU chips, like those manufactured by Nvidia, currently serve as the backbone for a wide variety of AI model deployments, such as chatbots like ChatGPT, AI video generators, self-driving cars, weapons targeting systems, and much more. The Biden administration fears that those chips could be used to undermine US national security.
According to the White House, "In the wrong hands, powerful AI systems have the potential to exacerbate significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses."
© SEAN GLADWELL via Getty Images
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin postponed the inaugural launch of its first orbital rocket, New Glenn, early Monday morning after experiencing an unspecified issue with one of the vehicle’s subsystems. While delays like this happen all the time in spaceflight, this one once again puts the timing of the much-anticipated launch in question. According […]
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A hacker compromised an administrative account on the website for popular game Path of Exile 2, which allowed them to reset the passwords on dozens of players’ accounts, according to comments from developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) made during a podcast on Sunday. This access would have given the hacker the ability to steal powerful and rare items from those players, with some players spending hundreds of hours grinding for valuable in-game currency.
The news comes after a wave of Path of Exile 2 players complained on the game’s forums and social media about being hacked and their inventories emptied. The comments also show how the hacker compromised the account shortly before the game’s launch, seemingly laying in wait for players to build up their stashes of items before pulling off their heist.
“We totally fucked up here,” Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers said during a podcast recording with action roleplaying game (ARPG) content creators GhazzyTV and Darth Microtransaction.
Rogers said the hack started with the compromise of a Steam account. That Steam was linked to an administrative account on Path of Exile 2’s website, he said. This gave the hacker the ability to do things like reset player’s passwords, meaning they could then log into the game as those players. “Effectively what they had access to was the same stuff that customer service had access to,” Rogers said.
Ordinarily, whenever a member of Path of Exile 2’s support staff makes a change, that event is added to a list for potential later auditing. But when it came to resetting passwords, a bug meant that change was saved as a “note” and not an event, Rogers said. The hacker was then able to delete the note saying a password had been changed, an apparent attempt by the hacker to cover their tracks too. Because of this, it wasn’t immediately obvious to GGG what was happening with these account compromises, Rogers said.
“66 notes were deleted, so that would imply that 66 accounts were compromised,” Rogers said, although caveated that GGG only keeps logs for 30 days. Interestingly, the compromise “was all prelaunch of POE2,” Rogers said, meaning that the hacker gained access before the game was even available to the public.
Path of Exile 2 has been in the news lately after mounting evidence that Elon Musk, who presents himself as a high level ARPG player, has likely been cheating in the game.
Path of Exile 2 launched in early access in November and has remained one of the most popular games on Steam, reaching between 250,000 and 290,000 players over the past week, according to data on Steam player count site SteamDB. In it, players command a variety of classes like Sorceror, Warrior, or Witch, and trawl through dungeons looking for ever increasingly powerful loot, much in the style of other ARPGs like Diablo.
Path of Exile 2 differs slightly in that it has a much stronger emphasis on trading with other players, which is basically essentially for making a character stronger unless players deliberately avoid trading for the increased challenge. This trade is facilitated by the official Path of Exile 2 website.
Players typically trade items for a rare consumable called a Divine Orb which can further improve their gear, making it the de facto currency of the Path of Exile 2 economy. A side effect is that many websites exist where people can pay real money for Divine Orbs, which they then use to trade for gear on the Path of Exile 2 trade site.
Multiple Path of Exile 2 players have recently complained of hackers breaking into their accounts and emptying their stashes of Divine Orbs. “My exalted and divine all gone,” one person wrote on the Path of Exile 2 forum in December, with Exalted Orbs being another in-game consumable.
“We totally fucked up here.”
In other cases hackers have stolen gear from players. In one a hacker stole a particular ring. That player then found what they said was the exact same ring being sold on the Path of Exile 2 trade website, according to a post on the Path of Exile 2 subreddit. That post has since been deleted by the subreddit moderators, and moderators have also deleted similar posts on the official forum. In some cases these posts named what victims believed was the hacker’s account.
Rogers said GGG is immediately adding two-factor authentication to all of its support accounts. “You can bet on that,” he said. Rogers said he also wants to introduce two-factor authentication for player accounts, but that comes with the additional complexity of implementing ways for players to recover their account when they inevitably lose that second factor, such as a backup code or phone number.
GGG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s always been clear that Vision Pro was simply Apple’s first step into the AR/VR headset world, and that a lower-priced Apple Vision product would follow, but there have so far been mixed reports on when we might expect to see it.
We’ve so far seen reports variously suggesting that the non-Pro Apple Vision headset would launch in 2025, 2026, and 2027 – with the latest of these saying the company is “ramping up” development work …
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