The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing America's three largest banks, accusing the institutions of failing to protect customers from fraud on Zelle, the payment platform they co-own. From a report: According to the suit, which also targets Early Warning Services LLC, Zelle's official operator, Zelle users have lost more than $870 million over the network's seven-year existence due to these alleged failures. "The nation's largest banks felt threatened by competing payment apps, so they rushed to put out Zelle," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement. "By their failing to put in place proper safeguards, Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves."

Among the charges:
1. Poor identity verification methods, which have allowed bad actors to quickly create accounts and target Zelle users.
2. Allowing repeat offenders to continue to gain access to the platform
3. Ignoring and failing to report instances of fraud
4. Failing to properly investigate consumer complaints

The CFPB's suit seeks to change the platform's operations, as well as obtain a civil money penalty, that would be paid into the CFPB's victims relief fund.

Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: In a wide-ranging interview with a Russian television station, the chief executive of Russia's main space corporation said the country is now planning to participate in the International Space Station project all the way to NASA's desired goal of 2030. "In coordination with our American colleagues, we plan to de-orbit the station sometime around the beginning of 2030," the country's chief space official, Yuri Borisov, said during the interview. "The final scenario will probably be specified after the transition to a new NASA administration."

While the documents for such an extension have not been signed, these comments appear to represent a change in tone from Russia. When he first became head of Roscosmos in 2022, Borisov said Russia would leave the station partnership "after" 2024, which was interpreted as shortly thereafter. Later, Russia committed to working with NASA to keep the orbital outpost flying only through 2028. The US space agency has expressed a consistent desire to keep flying the station until 2030, after which point it hopes that private space station operators can provide one or more replacement facilities.
Borisov said the aging station, elements of which have now been in space for more than a quarter of a century, are becoming difficult to maintain. "Today our cosmonauts have to spend more time repairing equipment and less and less time conducting experiments," he said. Borisov also discussed Russia's challenges of getting private investment in space-related activities, saying: "In the West, particularly in America, 70 percent of space services are provided by satellite constellations created by private companies. This process has only just begun with us. This is a very risky business for potential investors."

"Right now, the dynamic growth of private space is being influenced by the general economic situation (likely referring to Russia's costly war in Ukraine), high inflation and interest rates, which leads to expensive money for private investors. We can hope that this will be a temporary period and more favorable times will come soon."

U.S. authorities are investigating Chinese router manufacturer TP-Link over national security risks and considering banning its devices, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The Commerce, Defense and Justice departments have launched separate probes into the company, which controls approximately 65% of the U.S. home and small business router market.

Microsoft reported in October that Chinese hackers had compromised thousands of TP-Link routers to launch cyberattacks against Western targets, including government organizations and Defense Department suppliers. The company's routers are widely used across federal agencies, including the Defense Department and NASA. The Justice Department is also examining whether TP-Link's significantly lower pricing violates federal anti-monopoly laws, the report said.

Apple is preparing a series of major design and format changes to its lineup of iPhones and potentially other products, according to WSJ, a bid to revive growth after years of offering largely incremental upgrades. From the report: Starting next year, Apple plans to introduce an iPhone that will be thinner than the approximately 8-millimeter profile of current models, said people familiar with the company's plans. The model is intended to be cheaper than Pro models, with a simplified camera system to reduce costs.

The company is also planning two foldable devices, the people said. A larger device, intended to serve as a laptop, would have a screen that unfolds to be nearly as large as some desktop monitors, at about 19 inches. A smaller model would unfold to a display size that would be larger than an iPhone 16 Pro Max, intended to serve as a foldable iPhone, the people said.

Both foldable designs have been in development for years, but some key parts weren't ready. Major challenges included improving the hinge, a mechanism that allows the device to fold and unfold, and the display cover, a flexible material protecting the foldable screen. Current foldable phones on the market aren't thin, light or energy-efficient enough to meet Apple's standards, which is why Apple has been slower to enter this segment, said Jeff Pu, an analyst with Hong Kong-based brokerage Haitong International Securities.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son will announce a $100 billion investment in the U.S. over the next four years during a Monday visit to President-elect Donald Trump's residence Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC's Sara Eisen.

The billionaire investor and founder of the Japanese tech-investing firm will also promise in the joint announcement with Trump to create 100,000 jobs focused on artificial intelligence and related infrastructure, the sources said. The money will be deployed before the end of Trump's term. The funding could come from various sources controlled by Softbank, including the Vision Fund, capital projects or chipmaker Arm Holdings, where the firm is majority owner.

"In a tiny handful of places..." Wired wrote last month, "you can find yourself flanked by taxis with no one in the drivers' seats." But they added that "Granted, practically everyone has been numbed by the hype cycle."

Wired's response? "[P]ile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi wherever it goes for a whole workday" to "study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt. We'll interview as many of its passengers as will speak to us, and observe it through the eyes of the kind of human driver it's designed to replace."

This week Wired senior editor John Gravios discussed the experience on the business-news radio show Marketplace (with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal): Ryssdal: What kinds of reactions did you get from people once you track them down, what did they say about their experience in this driverless car?

Gravios:It was pretty uniform and impressive how much people just love it. They just like the experience of the drive, I guess it's a little bit less herky-jerky than a human driver, but I think a lot of it just comes down to people are just kind of relieved not to have to talk to somebody else, as as sad as that is...

Ryssdal: Tell me about Gabe, your Uber driver, and his thoughts on this whole thing, because that was super interesting.

Gravios: So Gabe, this is a guy whose labor is directly at stake. You know, he's a guy whose labor is going to be replaced by a Waymo. He's had 30 years of experience as a professional driver, first as a taxi driver. He even organized a taxi driver strike in the days before Uber. His first, I think his prejudice with Waymo is having shared the road with them sort of sporadically, he thought of them as kind of dopey, rule-following, frustrating vehicles to share the road with. But over the course of the day, he started to recognize that the Waymo was driving a lot like a taxi driver. The Waymo was doing things that were aggressive, that are exactly the kinds of things that a taxi driver is trained to be aggressive with and doing things that were cautious that are exactly the kinds of things that taxi drivers are trained to be cautious with.

Ryssdal: Can we talk unit economics here? According to the math from a study you guys' cite, Waymo is not making a whole lot of money per vehicle, right? And eventually they're going to scale, and it's going to work out, but for the moment, even though they've gotten 11 billion-something-dollars, they're not turning a whole lot of profit here.

Gravios: Yeah, that's a big question, and the math is, even that study, based on a lot of guesswork. It's really hard to say what the unit economics are. What we can say is that the ridership rates are going up so fast that that study is already well out of date. When we were doing our chase, I think the monthly ridership for Waymo was 100,000 rides a month. By October, it was already 150,000 rides a month. So, the economics are just shifting under our feet a lot.

"Proposals for a tunnel connecting the U.K. to the U.S. underneath the Atlantic Ocean have resurfaced," reports Newsweek, "but with a price tag of almost $20 trillion, the project is a big ask." With the two global cities being over 3,000 miles apart, construction would take several years — the 23.5-mile Channel Tunnel linking England and France took six years to construct — and require significant investment. Estimates over the cost have reached as high as £15.5 trillion, the equivalent of $19.8 trillion.

However, developments in vacuum tube technology have made the concept more viable. By creating a vacuum within the tunnel and using pressurized vehicles, trains traveling along the structure could theoretically reach speeds of more than 3,000 mph, making the journey between London and New York barely an hour long. This is because trains would not face any air resistance within the tunnel, allowing them to reach higher speeds than unconventional trains. This design, which has seen new development in Indian transportation, is sometimes called a "hyperloop". Cutting the intercontinental journey down to a matter of minutes means that for the first time, the Transatlantic Tunnel justifies the hefty price tag that undersea construction comes with, as it would become significantly more efficient and environmentally friendly than flying.
While no plans are underway, it's interesting to ask whether it could even be done. Weighing in, Elon Musk "has suggested the idea of building a '£20 trillion' underground tunnel link from London to New York appears to be a genuine possibility," according to the site LADbible, "although he says he could do it for less." (On X.com Musk posted that his Boring Company "could do it for 1000X less money.") This comes after the SpaceX boss, 53, who promises to revolutionise the way we travel, said his 'Starship' rocket could be used to transport passengers to any city in the world in under an hour.

"The Chinese government has long subsidized carmakers with the goal of becoming a major auto exporter," notes the New York Times. But this week they reported on dozens of dealerships around Mexico that are now selling China-made electric vehicles, saying it could be "a potentially grave threat to the North American auto industry."

One employee said their dealership "was selling cars as fast as they arrived from China," including "a small but capable four-door electric compact that costs about $18,000." Chinese carmakers are effectively barred from the United States by tariffs that double the sticker price of vehicles imported from China, and they are not yet manufacturing significant numbers of vehicles in Mexico that could be exported across the border. But their ambition to expand overseas is on vivid display in Mexico and across Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Ads for Chinese brands are in airports and soccer stadiums and loom above Mexico City streets on large billboards. Chinese cars, both gasoline and electric models, are an increasingly common sight. BYD and others are also looking for places to build factories in Mexico, although none have announced firm plans. Initially, the plants would serve Latin America, part of a campaign by Chinese automakers to erode the dominance of Japanese, American and European carmakers in places like Brazil and Thailand.

But there is little doubt that, eventually, Chinese carmakers hope to use Mexico as an on-ramp to the United States.
One of Mexico's EV dealers suggested to the Times that "maybe next year BYD can enter the United States." And he added with a smile, "If not, I can deliver." It is very unlikely that the Dolphin or any other Chinese car brand will be available in the United States soon. Because of the high tariffs, Chinese carmakers have not tried to establish dealerships or get approval from federal regulators to sell in the United States. (BYD does make electric buses in California.) And someone buying a BYD from a Mexican dealer like Mr. Alegría would have a hard time registering and insuring it in the United States because the cars have not demonstrated that they meet safety standards... But in the years to come it may be difficult to explain to consumers in the United States why they're not allowed to buy inexpensive electric vehicles that are readily available across the border, especially if they're made in Mexico, which already manufactures millions of cars for the United States.

Less than 20 years ago, Chinese cars were widely seen as inferior, even by many Chinese drivers. But in recent years, the country's manufacturers have pulled even with foreign rivals in mechanical quality, analysts say, and often surpass U.S., Japanese and European carmakers in battery technology, autonomous driving and entertainment software. (Think in-car karaoke and rotating touch screens)... [T]he auto industry does not appear to have seen anything like the current wave of Chinese brands, which have quickly overtaken Japanese companies as the world's largest auto exporters. Chinese carmakers have made deep inroads in countries where they have local production or face few significant trade barriers. In Brazil, Chinese brands have a 9 percent share of car sales, up from 1 percent in 2019. In Thailand, they have 18 percent of the market, up from 5 percent in 2019, according to JATO.
The article notes that for the world's largest car market — China itself — General Motors just announced "a more than $5 billion hit to its profit" to restructure China operations that have been losing money in recent years. And the article includes this quote from Felipe Munoz, global analyst at the research firm JATO Dynamics.

"Before the pandemic, the rules were set down by the Western carmakers. Now it's the opposite."

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

The Solana JavaScript SDK "was temporarily compromised yesterday in a supply chain attack," reports BleepingComputer, "with the library backdoored with malicious code to steal cryptocurrency private keys and drain wallets." Solana offers an SDK called "@solana/web3.js" used by decentralized applications (dApps) to connect and interact with the Solana blockchain. Supply chain security firm Socket reports that Solana's Web3.js library was hijacked to push out two malicious versions to steal private and secret cryptography keys to secure wallets and sign transactions... Solana confirmed the breach, stating that one of their publish-access accounts was compromised, allowing the attackers to publish two malicious versions of the library... Solana is warning developers who suspect they were compromised to immediately upgrade to the latest v1.95.8 release and to rotate any keys, including multisigs, program authorities, and server keypairs...

Once the threat actors gain access to these keys, they can load them into their own wallets and remotely drain all stored cryptocurrency and NFTs... Socket says the attack has been traced to the FnvLGtucz4E1ppJHRTev6Qv4X7g8Pw6WPStHCcbAKbfx Solana address, which currently contains 674.86 Solana and varying amounts of the Irish Pepe , Star Atlas, Jupiter, USD Coin, Santa Hat, Pepe on Fire, Bonk, catwifhat, and Genopets Ki tokens. Solscan shows that the estimated value of the stolen cryptocurrency is $184,000 at the time of this writing.

For anyone whose wallets were compromised in this supply chain attack, you should immediately transfer any remaining funds to a new wallet and discontinue the use of the old one as the private keys are now compromised.
Ars Technica adds that "In social media posts, one person claimed to have lost $20,000 in the hack."

The compromised library "receives more than ~350,000 weekly downloads on npm," Socket posted. (Although Solana's statement says the compromised versions "were caught within hours and have since been unpublished."

11 years ago his hard drive ended up in a U.K. landfill — with 8,000 bitcoin. It's now worth $800 million... and James Howell wants it back.

The Guardian reports that his "bid to become extremely rich reached a judge on Tuesday with a team of lawyers arguing that it was still possible to launch a hunt for his missing hard drive containing the bitcoin." They claimed that rather than searching for a "needle in a haystack", the position of the bitcoin hoard had been narrowed down to a small area and there was a "finely tuned" plan to retrieve it... [Howells] has been asking Newport city council for help in getting the hard drive back, and even said he would share the money with the authority, to no avail... James Goudie KC, representing the council, said Howells had no legal claim to the hard drive. He said: "Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council's ownership."

Goudie said Howells' offer to share some of the bitcoin with Newport council amounted to a bribe. He said: "He is trying to buy something the council is not in a position to sell...." Before the hearing, a spokesperson for Newport council said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. "Responding to Mr Howells' baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services."
Howells was 28 when he lost the hard drive, and has said he may as well keep trying to recover it — because he'll always know that it's out there. Howells' legal teams are "working pro bono," the article notes, "on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful..." And TechSpot points out that "There's also the question of whether the data on the drive would still be accessible after more than a decade of sitting under a pile of rotting garbage.

"Howells has a team of data recovery engineers who are also working pro bono..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI plans to expand its Memphis, Tennessee, supercomputer to house at least one million graphics processing units (GPUs), the Greater Memphis Chamber said on Wednesday, as xAI races to compete against rivals like OpenAI.

The move represents a massive expansion for the supercomputer called Colossus, which currently has 100,000 GPUs to train xAI's chatbot called Grok. As part of the expansion, Nvidia, which supplies the GPUs, and Dell and Super Micro, which have assembled the server racks for the computer, will establish operations in Memphis, the chamber said in a statement.
The Greater Memphis chamber (an economic development organization) called it "the largest capital investment in the region's history," even saying that xAI "is setting the stage for Memphis to become the global epicenter of artificial intelligence." ("To facilitate this massive undertaking, the Greater Memphis Chamber established an xAI Special Operations Team... This team provides round-the-clock concierge service to the company.")

Reuters calls the supercomputer "a critical component of advancing Musk's AI efforts, as the billionaire has deepened his rivalry against OpenAI..." And the Greater Memphis chamber describes the expansion by Nvidia/Dell/Super Micro as "further solidifying the city's position as the 'Digital Delta'... Memphis has provided the power and velocity necessary for not just xAI to grow and thrive, but making way for other companies as well."

Nature: Millions of research articles are absent from major digital archives. This worrying finding, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was laid bare in a study by Martin Eve, who studies technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were 'missing' from archives -- that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future.

Eve, who is also a research developer at Crossref, an organization that registers DOIs, carried out the study in an effort to better understand a problem librarians and archivists already knew about -- that although researchers are generating knowledge at an unprecedented rate, it is not necessarily being stored safely for the future. One contributing factor is that not all journals or scholarly societies survive in perpetuity. For example, a 2021 study found that a lack of comprehensive and open archiving meant that 174 open-access journals, covering all major research topics and geographical regions, vanished from the web in the first two decades of this millennium.

A lack of long-term archiving particularly affects institutions in low- and middle-income countries, less-affluent institutions in rich countries and smaller, under-resourced journals worldwide. Yet it's not clear whether researchers, institutions and governments have fully taken the problem on board. [...] At the heart of the problem is a lack of money, infrastructure and expertise to archive digital resources. [...] For institutions that can afford it, one solution is to pay a preservation archive to safeguard content. Examples include Portico, based in New York City, and CLOCKSS, based in Stanford, California, both of which count a raft of publishers and libraries as customers.

More Americans are looking to switch jobs than at any point in the past decade. In a cooling job market, that's a lot easier said than done. From a report: White-collar hiring continues to slow, but workers' restlessness to find new work is intensifying, new Gallup data show. More than half of 20,000 U.S. workers surveyed in November said they were watching for or actively seeking a new job. That's the largest share since 2015, eclipsing the so-called Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022, when millions of people quit jobs for better ones.

The result? Job satisfaction has fallen to its lowest level in recent years as employees feel more stuck -- and frustrated -- where they are, according to Gallup, whose quarterly surveys are widely viewed as a bellwether of workplace sentiment. Smaller raises and fewer promotions are spurring some of the discontent, workers say. So are cost-cutting moves and stepped-up requirements to be working in offices more often.

To help replace power plants, Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, "is turning to a new generation of batteries designed to stockpile massive amounts of energy," reports the Washington Post.

"The Hokkaido Electric Power Network (HEPCO Network) is deploying flow batteries, an emerging kind of battery that stores energy in hulking tanks of metallic liquid." [F]low batteries are making their debut in big real-world projects. Sumitomo Electric, the company that built the Hokkaido plant, has also built flow batteries in Taiwan, Belgium, Australia, Morocco and California. Hokkaido's flow battery farm was the biggest in the world when it opened in April 2022 — a record that lasted just a month before China built one that is eight times bigger and can deliver as much energy as an average U.S. natural gas plant. "It looks like flow batteries are finally about to take off with interest from China," said Michael Taylor, an energy analyst at the International Renewable Energy Agency, an international group that studies and promotes green energy. "When China starts to get comfortable with a technology and sees it working, then they will very quickly scale their manufacturing base if they think they can drive down the costs, which they usually can...."

Lithium-ion batteries are perfect for smartphones because they're lightweight and fit in small spaces, even if they don't last long and have to be replaced frequently. Utilities have a different set of priorities: They need to store millions of times more energy, and they have much more room to work with. "If you think about utility-scale stationary applications, maybe you don't need lithium-ion batteries. You can use another one that is cheaper and can provide the services that you want like, for example, vanadium flow batteries," said Francisco Boshell, a researcher at the International Renewable Energy Agency...

Flow batteries are designed to tap giant tanks that can store a lot of energy for a long time. To boost their storage capacity, all you have to do is build a bigger tank and add more vanadium. That's a big advantage: By contrast, there's no easy way to adjust the storage capacity of a lithium-ion battery — if you want more storage, you have to build a whole new battery... One major barrier to building more of these battery farms is finding enough vanadium. Three-quarters of the world's supply comes as a by-product from 10 steel mills in China and Russia, according to Kara Rodby [a battery analyst at the investment firm Volta Energy Technologies] who got her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the design and market for flow batteries. Australia, South Africa and the United States also produce vanadium, but in much smaller quantities. Mines that have been proposed could boost supply. And some flow battery start-ups are trying to sidestep the vanadium problem entirely by using different materials that are easier to buy.

The other hurdle is their up-front cost. Vanadium flow batteries are at least twice as expensive to build as lithium-ion batteries, Rodby said, and banks are hesitant to lend money to fund an unfamiliar technology. But experts say flow batteries can be cheaper in the long run because they're easier to maintain and last longer. A lithium-ion battery might have to be replaced after 10 years, but Rodby says flow batteries can last much longer. "There really is no finite lifetime for a flow battery in the way there is for lithium-ion," Rodby said.
Here's an interesting statistic from the article. "Over the next six years, utilities will have to build 35 times as many batteries as there are today to soak up all extra renewable energy that will come online, according to the International Energy Agency."

It's one of the most successful — and oldest — computer games of all-time. This week CBS News Minnesota interviewed Bill Heinemann, who in 1971 co-created "The Oregon Trail" as an educational video game simulating pioneers travelling west. "It's surprising and gratifying and humbling, in a way, that a little thing that I spent two weeks on has become a worldwide phenomenon," Heinemann said... The game's become known for the many ways players can die, including by dysentery, but Heinemann's favorite was death by snake bite. "It only happened once every several hundred times, and so people could've played it for months and all of a sudden, 'What? I got bit by a snake and died? This has never happened to me before!'" he said.
The game has been the subject of numerous satirical articles by McSweeney's. And long-time Slashdot reader whois_drek points out that a sketch comedy group also based a movie on the videogame in 2023.

So how does the game's co-creator feel about Apple's plans to film a new big-budget movie based on the game? "Surprising to me how popular it's become and how long the interest in it has been around," Heinemann said. "And this is just the next step I guess."

He won't be making any money off the movie. In fact, Heinemann's never seen a dime from the iconic game. He and his two co-creators, Rawitsch and Paul Dillenberger, turned it over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium shortly after they invented it. Heinemann says it doesn't bother him. "I didn't do it for money," he said. "I did it for just the love of the game and the love of teaching."
Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news.

Transport for London (TfL) has dropped its investigation into how it could introduce driverless trains on the London Underground. From a report: One of the many conditions imposed on TfL during the pandemic to keep services running when most of us were stuck at home was that it would investigate how it could introduce driverless trains on the Underground. TfL was required to produce a business case for converting the Waterloo & City line and Piccadilly line to a DLR-style operation, and in September 2021, it advertised for consultancy work on the project.

It's now been confirmed that the study reached the same conclusion that every other study into the issue has already reported -- it'll cost an awful lot of money for very little benefit. Despite the claims that it would prevent strikes on the tube, the reality is that it wouldn't, as driverless trains would still have staff on board, just as the DLR does, and the DLR still has strikes.

Performance improvement plans, a controversial corporate tool for managing underperforming employees, are becoming increasingly prevalent in U.S. workplaces. HR Acuity data shows workers subject to performance actions rose from 33.4 per 1,000 in 2020 to 43.6 per 1,000 in 2023.

While companies maintain PIPs offer a path to improvement, WSJ -- citing HR executives and former employees -- describes them as primarily providing legal protection against wrongful termination lawsuits and an alternative to formal layoffs. Only 10-25% of employees survive the 30-90 day improvement plans, with most either being terminated or leaving voluntarily.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Coffee beans hit their highest price in 47 years, driven by bad weather in Vietnam and Brazil, the biggest producers of robusta and arabica beans respectively.

Brazil saw its worst drought in 70 years this year followed by heavy rains, raising fears that next season's output will drop, further pinching already tight global supplies. Vietnam has itself had three years of low output.

Arabica beans hit $3.18 a pound on Wednesday, leading Nestle, the world's biggest coffee company, to increase prices. As well as climate concerns, future prices are being raised by worries about tariffs: Roasters "will try to import now, because otherwise you will be paying tariffs later," one trade analyst told the Financial Times.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer inaugurated London's first Google-funded AI Campus in Camden, aiming to equip young people with AI and machine learning skills. Reuters reports: The center, based in Camden, an area which Starmer represents in parliament and which is also home to Google's future offices in Kings Cross, has already started a two-year pilot project for local students. An first cohort of 32 people aged 16-18 will have access to resources in AI and machine learning and receive mentoring and expertise from Google's AI company DeepMind, the tech giant said. The students will tackle real-world projects connecting AI to fields such as health, social sciences and the arts at the campus, which has been established in partnership with the local authority, Google said.

Google's UK and Ireland managing director Debbie Weinstein announced 865,000 pounds ($1.10 million) of funding for an AI literacy program across the UK. The money will be used by charities Raspberry Pi Foundation and Parent Zone to help train teachers with an aim of reaching over 250,000 students by the end of 2026, she said.