Google is looking to partner with businesses, education institutions, and non-profits to help test its 20 Gig symmetrical internet service. TechSpot reports: Nick Saporito, head of multi-gig & commercial product at Google, said they are only looking for eight additional partners so space is incredibly limited. Ideal candidates include those that are already downloading and uploading massive data sets, those conducting research that commands loads of bandwidth, or perhaps organizations working on future-focused tech that Google hasn't even yet considered but needs lots of throughput. If selected for the test, Google will reach out to your organization to discuss the next steps.

Google has been testing the 20 Gig service since at least late last year. We know this because Saporito shared a screenshot of a speed test conducted at his house in Kansas City highlighting his connection's throughput. Speaking to his home connection, Saporito said he tried to test its limits by streaming as many World Cup games in 4K as he had devices but didn't even come close to saturating the connection.

Designers are using Unreal Engine to create virtual renditions of architectural projects that were never fully realized, such as the Hillside Sample Project by Neoscape and Safdie Architects, showcasing Moshe Safdie's original vision for Montreal's Habitat 67 housing complex. The interactive 3D models offer exceptional detail of the structures and highlight the potential of real-time 3D renditions for pitching architectural concepts. Engadget reports: A young Safdie designed Habitat 67 for Montreal's 1967 World's Fair, also known as Expo 67. It was meant to combine the advantages of suburbia (such as gardens and multi-level housing) with the affordability and density of apartments. The affordability didn't pan out, and Safdie ended up producing a smaller-scale version for the fair. Habitat 67 ultimately launched Safdie's career, though, and it's still one of the better-known landmarks in the city.

You have a few options for exploring the complex. You can watch a video if you just want a quick overview, but you can also navigate a 3D space using either Google Chrome or a downloadable app. The interactive models let you either roam freely or have Safdie guide you through the project with narration at key points.

Google mistakenly released a test version of its Personal Safety app that includes a new feature called "Dashcam" on select Android devices. As the name suggests, it allows users to record video and audio while driving in the event of an accident or unexpected situation, with automatic recording triggered when connecting to a specific Bluetooth device and videos automatically deleted after three days unless saved. 9to5Google reports: Once available, the feature can be launched through a new "Dashcam" shortcut in the "Be prepared" section of the home page. Here, you can begin recording manually or view your recent videos. While Dashcam is recording, your phone is still fully usable, including for navigating with Google Maps. Alternatively, you can save power by locking your screen, and the recording will continue. More importantly, Google has built this feature to work without you needing to think much about it. When setting up, you can choose to have recordings begin automatically when you connect to a particular Bluetooth device (e.g., your car stereo or infotainment system) and end when you disconnect.

To conserve storage space, your recordings are automatically deleted after three days unless you save them. Additionally, the app says that the videos themselves are compressed, averaging "30 MB per minute," with a maximum recording length of 24 hours. Overall, this feature seems to be impressively well thought out and looks essentially ready to launch. Using a smartphone as a dashcam also makes quite a bit of sense, as your phone probably has a better camera than some cheaper dashcams would offer. It's unclear if this feature will be available on other phones with Google's Personal Safety or exclusive to Pixel phones.

Valve now offers Steam game trials, starting with 2023's Dead Space remake. GameSpot reports: Previously, players could buy a game on the platform and then return it within a two-hour window, but this new trial feature makes things a bit easier for consumers. It seems only Dead Space has a trial available on Steam right now, but the feature may come to other games later on. With Dead Space, you don't need to purchase the game to play during the 90-minute trial period. The Dead Space trial isn't restricted to a certain point in the game, allowing players to explore as much as they want within the 90-minute period. Valve and other publishers are likely watching this new feature closely to see if it's worth implementing across other games.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, along with IBM chief privacy officer Christian Montgomery and NYU professor Gary Marcus, to testify about the dangers posed by generative artificial intelligence. Altman said he'd welcome legislation in the space and urged Congress to work with OpenAI and other companies in the field to figure out rules and guardrails. Axios reports: Altman argued that generative AI is different and requires a separate policy response. He called it a "tool" for users that cannot do full jobs on its own, merely tasks. Altman called for a government agency that would promulgate rules around licensing for certain tiers of AI systems "above a crucial threshold of capabilities." He said: "My worst fear is we cause significant harm to the world."

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it "historic" that a company was coming to Congress pleading for regulation. IBM's Montgomery said it was important to regulate risks, not tech itself. "This cannot be the era of move fast and break things," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft cloud services are scanning for malware by peeking inside users' zip files, even when they're protected by a password, several users reported on Mastodon on Monday. Compressing file contents into archived zip files has long been a tactic threat actors use to conceal malware spreading through email or downloads. Eventually, some threat actors adapted by protecting their malicious zip files with a password the end user must type when converting the file back to its original form. Microsoft is one-upping this move by attempting to bypass password protection in zip files and, when successful, scanning them for malicious code.

While analysis of password-protected in Microsoft cloud environments is well-known to some people, it came as a surprise to Andrew Brandt. The security researcher has long archived malware inside password-protected zip files before exchanging them with other researchers through SharePoint. On Monday, he took to Mastodon to report that the Microsoft collaboration tool had recently flagged a zip file, which had been protected with the password "infected." "While I totally understand doing this for anyone other than a malware analyst, this kind of nosy, get-inside-your-business way of handling this is going to become a big problem for people like me who need to send their colleagues malware samples," Brandt wrote. "The available space to do this just keeps shrinking and it will impact the ability of malware researchers to do their jobs."

Fellow researcher Kevin Beaumont joined the discussion to say that Microsoft has multiple methods for scanning the contents of password-protected zip files and uses them not just on files stored in SharePoint but all its 365 cloud services. One way is to extract any possible passwords from the bodies of email or the name of the file itself. Another is by testing the file to see if it's protected with one of the passwords contained in a list. "If you mail yourself something and type something like 'ZIP password is Soph0s', ZIP up EICAR and ZIP password it with Soph0s, it'll find (the) password, extract and find (and feed MS detection)," he wrote. "A Google representative said the company doesn't scan password-protected zip files, though Gmail does flag them when users receive such a file," notes Ars.

"One other thing readers should remember: password-protected zip files provide minimal assurance that content inside the archives can't be read. As Beaumont noted, ZipCrypto, the default means for encrypting zip files in Windows, is trivial to override. A more dependable way is to use an AES-256 encryptor built into many archive programs when creating 7z files."

Hasselblad is discontinuing its H-series medium format DSLRs to focus exclusively on mirrorless models. "The move leaves Pentax and Ricoh as the biggest remaining names in the rapidly diminishing DSLR space," notes Engadget. "Hasselblad's last H series launch was the H6D system in 2016." From the report: "While we have been feeling this sting for over the last 18 months with lack of product, today we received official notice that the full product line of the Hasselblad H system has been officially discontinued," Capture Integration wrote. "All [H system] products are now officially out of stock and Hasselblad will no longer take orders for anything in the H line." The article continued, "The H system is still very strong and working in so many studios today. However, it's time to look at replacements. We can't even order new battery grips today." The vendor notes that future repairs will likely take longer and grow in difficulty.

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is close to raising around $100 million in funding for his Worldcoin cyrpto project. Markets Insider reports: Worldcoin is in advanced talks to raise the cash from both new and existing investors ahead of a potential launch within the next few weeks, the Financial Times said Sunday, citing three people with knowledge of the deal. The startup wants to use eyeball-scanning technology to create a digital identification system that would give people across the globe access to a free crypto token called Worldcoin. It's previously received backing from Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund, Coinbase's VC arm Coinbase Ventures, and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Worldcoin pulled in $100 million from investors last year through a token sale that valued the company at around $3 billion, according to a report by The Information from March 2022. That fundraising effort came before a bruising period for crypto in which flagship tokens like bitcoin and ether cratered in price and high-profile companies including Bankman-Fried's FTX collapsed. "It's a bear market, a crypto winter. It's remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment," one of the FT's sources told the publication.

Ilya Pozin made a bunch of money when Viacom bought Pluto TV, the free video-streaming company he co-founded, for $340 million four years ago. Since exiting Pluto about a year after that deal closed, Pozin has been working on another startup venture -- one he thinks will be a much bigger deal. From a report: On Monday, Pozin's brainchild, Telly, comes out of stealth after two years in development. Telly wants to ship out thousands (and eventually millions) of free 4K HDTVs, which would cost more than $1,000 at retail, according Pozin. The 55-inch main screen is a regular TV panel, with three HDMI inputs and an over-the-air tuner, plus an integrated soundbar. The Telly TVs don't actually run any streaming apps that let you access services like Netflix, Prime Video or Disney+; instead, they're bundled with a free Chromecast with Google TV adapter.

What's new and different: The unit has a 9-inch-high second screen, affixed to the bottom of the set, which is real estate Telly will use for displaying news, sports scores, weather or stocks, or even letting users play video games. And, critically, Telly's second screen features a dedicated space on the right-hand side that will display advertising -- ads you can't skip past and ads that stay on the screen the whole time you're watching TV... and even when you're not.

"Astronomers have discovered 62 new moons orbiting the ringed planet Saturn," reports Space.com.

So while Jupiter remains the largest planet orbiting our sun — and shaped our solar system with its gravitational bulk — nonetheless the New York Times reports that "the fight over which planet has the most moons in its orbit has swung decisively in Saturn's favor." This month, the International Astronomical Union is set to recognize 62 additional moons of Saturn based on a batch of objects discovered by astronomers. The small objects will give Saturn 145 moons — eclipsing Jupiter's total of 95. "They both have many, many moons," said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. But Saturn "appears to have significantly more," he said, for reasons that are not entirely understood.

The newly discovered moons of Saturn are nothing like the bright object in Earth's night sky. They are irregularly shaped, like potatoes, and no more than one or two miles across. They orbit far from the planet too, between six million and 18 million miles, compared with larger moons, like Titan, that mostly orbit within a million miles of Saturn. Yet these small irregular moons are fascinating in their own right. They are mostly clumped together in groups, and they may be remnants of larger moons [150 miles across] that shattered while orbiting Saturn. [The article suggests later they may have been destroyed by collisions with other moons, or by impacts from asteroids or comets.]

"These moons are pretty key to understanding some of the big questions about the solar system," said Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the deputy project scientist on the upcoming Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter. "They have the fingerprints of events that took place in the early solar system."

The growing number of moons also highlights potential debates over what constitutes a moon. "The simple definition of a moon is that it's an object that orbits a planet," Dr. Sheppard said. An object's size, for the moment, doesn't matter.
The leader of one moon-discovering group told the Times there's "potentially thousands" of moons around Saturn and Jupiter.

And at least a few of the moons are circling Saturn in the opposite direction...

"A new experiment uses superconducting qubits to demonstrate that quantum mechanics violates what's called local realism," reports Ars Technica, "by allowing two objects to behave as a single quantum system no matter how large the separation between them." The experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe works — it's not even the first to do so with qubits. But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin. Because the qubits are so easy to control, the experiment provides a new precision to these sorts of measurements.

And the hardware setup may be essential for future quantum computing efforts... Everyone working with superconducting qubits says that we will ultimately need to integrate thousands of them into a single quantum computer. Unfortunately, each of these qubits requires a considerable amount of space on a chip, meaning it gets difficult to make chips with more than a few hundred of them. So major players like Google and IBM ultimately plan to link multiple chips into a single computer (something the startup Rigetti is already doing).

For tens of thousands of qubits, however, we're almost certainly going to need so many chips that it gets difficult to keep them all in a single bit of cooling hardware. This means we're going to eventually want to link chips in different refrigeration systems — exactly what was demonstrated here. So this is an important demonstration that we can, in fact, link qubits across these sorts of systems.
Or, as long-time slashdot reader nounderscores puts it, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.

"The Qbits that Simon Storz et al at ETH Zurich entangled at the ends of 30m of cryogenically chilled wire not only put the last nail into the coffin of hidden variable theory by being so far apart, they also allow quantum computing to scale to multiple refrigeration systems."

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: SpaceX confirmed Wednesday it signed a contract to launch the world's first commercial space station. The company also will perform manned space flights shortly after launching the station into orbit "no later than August 2025," SpaceX said in a statement. The Haven-1 space station is being built by Vast, a private aerospace company based in Long Beach, Calif. Its "mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space -- a future in which the human population and our resources expand far beyond our current imagination." Vast is solely funded by its billionaire founder and CEO Jed McCaleb.

SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 rocket to carry the Haven-1 station into orbit. Manned crews will then use the company's Dragon reusable spacecraft to get to the space station, docking for up to 30 days while in orbit. Vast plans for the initial module to become part of a larger 100-meter-long multi-module spinning space station with artificial gravity. SpaceX confirmed it also will provide crew training, as well as spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises. SpaceX also will conduct mission simulations, as part of the agreement with Vast. Crew selection is underway, the company said Wednesday, and will be announced at a future date.

Google's latest Photos trick is a feature it's calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. From a report: Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on a bench closer to the middle of the photo, which generates "new" parts of the bench and balloons to the left to fill in the space. In this example, Google again makes the sky more vibrant.

Meta has announced a new open-source AI model that links together multiple streams of data, including text, audio, visual data, temperature, and movement readings. From a report: The model is only a research project at this point, with no immediate consumer or practical applications, but it points to a future of generative AI systems that can create immersive, multisensory experiences and shows that Meta continues to share AI research at a time when rivals like OpenAI and Google have become increasingly secretive. The core concept of the research is linking together multiple types of data into a single multidimensional index (or "embedding space," to use AI parlance). This idea may seem a little abstract, but it's this same concept that underpins the recent boom in generative AI.

Arianespace CEO Stephane Israel says Europe will have to wait until the 2030s for a reusable rocket. Space.com reports: Arianespace is currently preparing its Ariane 6 rocket for a test flight following years of delays. Europe's workhorse Ariane 5, which has been operational for nearly 30 years, recently launched the JUICE Jupiter mission and now has only one flight remaining before retirement. Ariane 6 will be expendable, despite entering development nearly a decade ago, when reusability was being developed and tested in the United States, most famously by SpaceX.

"When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket," said Israel, according to European Spaceflight. The delays to Ariane 6, however, mean that Europe lacks its own options for access to space. This issue was highlighted in a recent report from an independent advisory group to the European Space Agency. Israel stated that, in his opinion, Ariane 6 would fly for more than 10 years before Europe transitions to a reusable successor in the 2030s.

Aside from Arianespace, Europe is currently fostering a number of private rocket companies, including Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar Aerospace, PLD Space and Skyrora, with some of these rockets to be reusable. However the rockets in development are light-lift, whereas Ariane 6 and its possible successor are much more capable, medium-heavy-lift rockets.

Elizabeth Holmes hasn't spoken to the media since 2016. Now convicted on criminal fraud charges — and counting down the days until she reports for prison — Holmes finally breaks the silence in a profile published today in the New York Times.

"I made so many mistakes," Holmes says, "and there was so much I didn't know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it's like you really internalize it in a deep way," Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes's partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple's 20-month-old son, William... At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, "They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created." So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. "Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn't..."

Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit... She said Mr. Balwani did not control her every interaction or statement at Theranos, but she "deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did," and those areas included the problematic clinical lab... Ms. Holmes's story of how she got here — to the bright, cozy house and the supportive partner and the two babies — feels a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Mr. Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Ms. Holmes said, "I began my life again."

But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult...

What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now. This kind of misguided talk is the one consistent thread in my reporting on who Ms. Holmes really is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she never sold her shares and didn't come out of it wealthy. Ms. Holmes's parents said they borrowed $500,000 against their Washington, D.C.-area home to post Ms. Holmes's bond...

She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there." If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that's kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn't much care if we believe her or not...

It's this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free.

Last week Linus Torvalds personally cleaned up the x86 memory copy code for Linux 6.4, Phoronix reports — and this week "he's merged more of his own code as he took issue with some of the code merged by Intel engineers as part of their Linear Address Masking enabling." Back during the Linux 6.2 days at the end of last year, Linus rejected the Intel LAM code at the time for various technical issues. Intel then reworked it for Linux 6.4. This time around Linus merged Intel LAM into Linux 6.4 as this new CPU feature for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. Intel LAM — like Arm TBI — can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. But this time around there were some less than ideal code that he personally took to sprucing up...

Torvalds reworked around one hundred lines of code for cleaning it up.
It's fun to read Torvalds' commit messages (included in both Phoronix articles). Torvalds begins by writing that the LAM updates "made me unhappy about how 'access_ok()' was done, and it actually turned out to have a couple of small bugs in it too..."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism: We'd need an astronomical amount of resources to construct a Dyson sphere, a giant theoretical shell that would harvest all of a given star's energy, around the Sun. In fact, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book "The Possibility of Life," we'd have to go as far as to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build such a megastructure, a concept first devised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960...

Not everybody agrees that constructing a Dyson sphere would end up being such a huge undertaking. In an interview with Green, astrophysicist Jason Wright compared such an effort to [the city of] Manhattan, a human and interconnected "megastructure," which was constructed over a long period of time, bit by bit... "It's just every generation made it a little bigger...."

"If the energy is out there to take and it's just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn't someone take it?" Wright told Green.

For the first time, astronomers have observed a star swallowing a planet. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. MIT News reports: The planetary demise appears to have taken place in our own galaxy, some 12,000 light-years away, near the eagle-like constellation Aquila. There, astronomers spotted an outburst from a star that became more than 100 times brighter over just 10 days, before quickly fading away. Curiously, this white-hot flash was followed by a colder, longer-lasting signal. This combination, the scientists deduced, could only have been produced by one event: a star engulfing a nearby planet.

What of the planet that perished? The scientists estimate that it was likely a hot, Jupiter-sized world that spiraled close, then was pulled into the dying star's atmosphere, and, finally, into its core. A similar fate will befall the Earth, though not for another 5 billion years, when the sun is expected to burn out, and burn up the solar system's inner planets. "For decades, we've been able to see the before and after," says lead author Kishalay De, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "Before, when the planets are still orbiting very close to their star, and after, when a planet has already been engulfed, and the star is giant. What we were missing was catching the star in the act, where you have a planet undergoing this fate in real-time. That's what makes this discovery really exciting."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent decades, NASA has sent large spacecraft -- Galileo and Cassini, respectively -- to fly around Jupiter and Venus to explore the dozens of moons that exist in those planetary systems. The spacecraft investigated all manner of intriguing moons, from little radiation-saturated hellholes to a world covered in volcanoes. But the most consistently interesting discovery made by these probes was that Jupiter and Venus are surrounded by small and large moons covered in ice, possessing large water oceans below, or both. This was exciting because where there is water in its liquid state, there is the possibility of life.

In response to these discoveries, NASA is planning to launch a mission to Europa, an ice-encrusted moon in the Jovian system, as early as 2024. Another mission may launch to Saturn's moon Titan a few years later, where there are oceans of liquid methane on the surface. And just last month, the European Space Agency launched a spacecraft, Juice, to explore several icy moons at Jupiter. Now, NASA may need to add the moons of Uranus to its exploration hit list. Besides being known for its funny name and its brilliant cyan shade, Uranus has at least 27 moons. And they're pretty intriguing, too. The space agency has only ever flown one spacecraft, Voyager 2, by the seventh planet in our Solar System. The Voyager spacecraft flew by Uranus a long time ago, in 1985. But in light of the discoveries made by the Cassini, Dawn, and New Horizons spacecraft, scientists have been revisiting the data collected by Voyager in addition to the data obtained by ground-based telescopes. This has led NASA scientists to conclude that four of Uranus' largest moons -- Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon -- probably contain water oceans below their icy crusts. These oceans are likely dozens of kilometers deep and probably fairly salty in being sandwiched between the upper ice and inner rock core.