An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI offers remarkable efficiency gains while presenting a profound challenge for the global IT services industry -- a sector concentrated in India and central to its export economy. For decades, Indian technology firms thrived by deploying their engineering talent to serve primarily Western clients. Now they face a critical question. Will AI's productivity dividend translate into revenue growth? Or will fierce competition see these gains competed away through price reductions? Industry soundings suggest the deflationary dynamic may already be taking hold. JPMorgan's conversations with executives, deal advisors and consultants across India's technology hubs reveal growing concern -- AI-driven efficiencies are fuelling pricing pressures. This threatens to constrain medium-term industry growth to a modest 4-5%, with little prospect of acceleration into fiscal year 2026. This emerging reality challenges the earlier narrative that AI would primarily unlock new revenue streams.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Robotaxi development is speeding at a fast pace in China, but we don't hear much about it in the USA, where the news focuses mostly on Waymo, with a bit about Zoox, Motional, May, trucking projects and other domestic players. China has 4 main players with robotaxi service, dominated by Baidu (the Chinese Google.) A recent session at last week's Ride AI conference in Los Angeles revealed some details about the different regulatory regime in China, and featured a report from a Chinese-American YouTuber who has taken on a mission to ride in the different vehicles. Zion Maffeo, deputy general counsel for Pony.AI, provided some details on regulations in China. While Pony began with U.S. operations, its public operations are entirely in China, and it does only testing in the USA. Famously it was one of the few companies to get a California "no safety driver" test permit, but then lost it after a crash, and later regained it. Chinese authorities at many levels keep a close watch over Chinese robotaxi companies. They must get approval for all levels of operation which control where they can test and operate, and how much supervision is needed. Operation begins with testing with a safety driver behind the wheel (as almost everywhere in the world,) with eventual graduation to having the safety driver in the passenger seat but with an emergency stop. Then they move to having a supervisor in the back seat before they can test with nobody in the vehicle, usually limited to an area with simpler streets. The big jump can then come to allow testing with nobody in the vehicle, but with full time monitoring by a remote employee who can stop the vehicle. From there they can graduate to taking passengers, and then expanding the service to more complex areas. Later they can go further, and not have full time remote monitoring, though there do need to be remote employees able to monitor and assist part time. Pony has a permit allowing it to have 3 vehicles per remote operator, and has one for 15 vehicles in process, but they declined comment on just how many vehicles they actually have per operator. Baidu also did not respond to queries on this. [...] In addition, Chinese jurisdictions require that the system in a car independently log any "interventions" by safety drivers in a sort of "black box" system. These reports are regularly given to regulators, though they are not made public. In California, companies must file an annual disengagement report, but they have considerable leeway on what they consider a disengagement so the numbers can't be readily compared. Chinese companies have no discretion on what is reported, and they may notify authorities of a specific objection if they wish to declare that an intervention logged in their black box should not be counted. On her first trip, YouTuber Sophia Tung found Baidu's 5th generation robotaxi to offer a poor experience in ride quality, wait time, and overall service. However, during a return trip she tried Baidu's 6th generation vehicle in Wuhan and rated it as the best among Chinese robotaxis, approaching the quality of Waymo.

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The climate crisis has tripled the length of ocean heatwaves, a study has found, supercharging deadly storms and destroying critical ecosystems such as kelp forests and coral reefs. From a report: Half of the marine heatwaves since 2000 would not have happened without global heating, which is caused by burning fossil fuels. The heatwaves have not only become more frequent but also more intense: 1C warmer on average, but much hotter in some places, the scientists said. The research is the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of the climate crisis on heatwaves in the world's oceans, and it reveals profound changes. Hotter oceans also soak up fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving temperatures up. "Here in the Mediterranean, we have some marine heatwaves that are 5C hotter," said Dr Marta Marcos at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Mallorca, Spain, who led the study. "It's horrible when you go swimming. It looks like soup." As well as devastating underwater ecosystems such as sea grass meadows, Marcos said: "Warmer oceans provide more energy to the strong storms that affect people at the coast and inland."

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Apple will begin analyzing data on customers' devices in a bid to improve its AI platform, a move designed to safeguard user information while still helping it catch up with AI rivals. From a report: Today, Apple typically trains AI models using synthetic data -- information that's meant to mimic real-world inputs without any personal details. But that synthetic information isn't always representative of actual customer data, making it harder for its AI systems to work properly. The new approach will address that problem while ensuring that user data remains on customers' devices and isn't directly used to train AI models. The idea is to help Apple catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Alphabet, which have fewer privacy restrictions. The technology works like this: It takes the synthetic data that Apple has created and compares it to a recent sample of user emails within the iPhone, iPad and Mac email app. By using actual emails to check the fake inputs, Apple can then determine which items within its synthetic dataset are most in line with real-world messages.

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Samsung has paused the global rollout of its One UI 7 update after a serious bug was reported that prevented some Galaxy S24 owners from unlocking their phones. The Verge reports: While the complaints seem to have specifically come from South Korean owners of Galaxy S24 series handsets, Samsung has played it safe and paused the rollout across all models worldwide. While some users will have already downloaded the update to One UI 7, using the app CheckFirm we've confirmed that the update is no longer listed on Samsung's servers as the latest firmware version across several Galaxy devices, with older patches appearing instead. Samsung hasn't confirmed the pause in the rollout, nor plans to issue a fix for users who have already downloaded the One UI 7 update. We've reached out to the company for comment.

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A new investigation reveals that children as young as five can easily access inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on Roblox, despite the platform's child-friendly image and recent safety updates. The Guardian reports: Describing itself as "the ultimate virtual universe," Roblox features millions of games and interactive environments, known collectively as "experiences." Some of the content is developed by Roblox, but much of it is user-generated. In 2024, the platform had more than 85 million daily active users, an estimated 40% of whom are under 13. While the company said it "deeply sympathized" with parents whose children came to harm on the platform, it said "tens of millions of people have a positive, enriching and safe experience on Roblox every day." However, in an investigation shared with the Guardian, the digital-behavior experts Revealing Reality discovered "something deeply disturbing ... a troubling disconnect between Roblox's child-friendly appearance and the reality of what children experience on the platform." [...] Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children's accounts, the researchers concluded: "Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform."

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Intel will sell a 51% stake in its Altera programmable chip unit to private equity firm Silver Lake for $4.46 billion, aiming to cut costs, raise cash, and streamline the company's focus as it shifts toward becoming a contract chip manufacturer. CNBC reports: The deal, announced on Monday, values Altera at $8.75 billion, a sharp decline from the $17 billion Intel paid in 2015. [...] Since last year, Intel has taken steps to spin Altera out as a separate unit and said it planned to sell a portion of its stake. "Today's announcement reflects our commitment to sharpening our focus, lowering our expense structure and strengthening our balance sheet," [CEO Lip-Bu Tan], who took the helm after former top boss Pat Gelsinger's ouster, said. Altera makes programmable chips that can be used for various purposes from telecom equipment to military. Reuters had first reported in November that Silver Lake was among potential suitors competing for a minority stake in Altera. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025, after which Intel expects to deconsolidate Altera's financial results from Intel's financial statements, the company said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: British laws restricting what the police can say about criminal cases are "not fit for the social media age (source paywalled; alternative source)," a government committee said in a report released Monday in Britain that highlighted how unchecked misinformation stoked riots last summer. Violent disorder, fueled by the far right, affected several towns and cities for days after a teenager killed three girls on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England. In the hours after the stabbings, false claims that the attacker was an undocumented Muslim immigrant spread rapidly online. In a report looking into the riots, a parliamentary committee said a lack of information from the authorities after the attack "created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow." The report blamed decades-old British laws, aimed at preventing jury bias, that stopped the police from correcting false claims. By the time the police announced the suspect was British-born, those false claims had reached millions. The Home Affairs Committee, which brings together lawmakers from across the political spectrum, published its report after questioning police chiefs, government officials and emergency workers over four months of hearings. Axel Rudakubana, who was sentenced to life in prison for the attack, was born and raised in Britain by a Christian family from Rwanda. A judge later found there was no evidence he was driven by a single political or religious ideology, but was obsessed with violence. [...] The committee's report acknowledged that it was impossible to determine "whether the disorder could have been prevented had more information been published." But it concluded that the lack of information after the stabbing "created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow, further undermining public confidence," and that the law on contempt was not "fit for the social media age."

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Several crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and nearby cities were hacked over the weekend to play deepfake-style satirical audio clips mimicking Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Authorities have disabled the altered systems, but the identity of the prankster remains unknown. SFGATE reports: Videos of the altered crosswalks began circulating on social media throughout Saturday and Sunday. [...] A city employee was the first to report an issue with one of the signals at University Avenue and High Street in downtown Palo Alto, Horrigan-Taylor told SFGATE via email. Officials later discovered that as many as 12 intersections in downtown Palo Alto had been affected. "The impact is isolated," Horrigan-Taylor said. "Signal operations are otherwise unaffected, and motorists are reminded to always exercise caution around pedestrians." Officials told the outlet they've removed any devices that were tampered with and the compromised voice-over systems have since been disabled, with footage obtained by SFGATE showing several were covered in caution tape, blinking constantly and unpressable.

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Meta said the company plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems. Engadget reports: Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta. The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes. It won't use private messages in its training sets, nor any interactions, public or otherwise, made by users under the age of 18. As for why the company wants to start using EU data now, it claims the information will allow it to fine tune its future models to better serve Europeans. "We believe we have a responsibility to build AI that's not just available to Europeans, but is actually built for them. That's why it's so important for our generative AI models to be trained on a variety of data so they can understand the incredible and diverse nuances and complexities that make up European communities," Meta states. "That means everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use humor and sarcasm on our products. This is particularly important as AI models become more advanced with multi-modal functionality, which spans text, voice, video, and imagery."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from DefenseScoop: NATO announced Monday that it has awarded a contract to Palantir to adopt its Maven Smart System for artificial intelligence-enabled battlefield operations. Through the contract, which was finalized March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) plans to use a version of the AI system -- Maven Smart System NATO -- to support the transatlantic military organization's Allied Command Operations strategic command. NATO plans to use the system to provide "a common data-enabled warfighting capability to the Alliance, through a wide range of AI applications -- from large language models (LLMs) to generative and machine learning," it said in a release, ultimately enhancing "intelligence fusion and targeting, battlespace awareness and planning, and accelerated decision-making." [...] NATO's Allied Command Operations will begin using Maven within the next 30 days, the organization said Monday, adding that it hopes that using it will accelerate further adoption of emerging AI capabilities. Palantir said the contract "was one of the most expeditious in [its] history, taking only six months from outlining the requirement to acquiring the system."

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VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor. News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit's ESXi hypervisor. From a report: Just below the "What's New" section of that document is the statement: "Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal." VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.

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The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage [non-paywalled source], a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China. Financial Times: Commissioners and senior officials travelling to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings next week have been given the new guidance, according to four people familiar with the situation. They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit cannot be brought into the countries for fear of Russian or Chinese surveillance. "They are worried about the US getting into the commission systems," said one official. The treatment of the US as a potential security risk highlights how relations have deteriorated since the return of Donald Trump as US president in January. Trump has accused the EU of having been set up to "screw the US" and announced 20 per cent so-called reciprocal tariffs on the bloc's exports, which he later halved for a 90-day period. At the same time, he has made overtures to Russia, pressured Ukraine to hand over control over its assets by temporarily suspending military aid and has threatened to withdraw security guarantees from Europe, spurring a continent-wide rearmament effort. "The transatlantic alliance is over," said a fifth EU official.

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OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4.1 model family on Monday, prioritizing coding capabilities and instruction following while expanding context windows to 1 million tokens -- approximately 750,000 words. The lineup includes standard GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano variants, all available via API but not ChatGPT. The flagship model scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, lagging behind Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (63.8%) and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet (62.3%) on the same software engineering benchmark, according to TechCrunch. However, it achieves 72% accuracy on Video-MME's long video comprehension tests -- a significant improvement over GPT-4o's 65.3%. OpenAI simultaneously announced plans to retire GPT-4.5 -- their largest model released just two months ago -- from API access by July 14. The company claims GPT-4.1 delivers "similar or improved performance" at substantially lower costs. Pricing follows a tiered structure: GPT-4.1 costs $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens, while GPT-4.1 nano -- OpenAI's "cheapest and fastest model ever" -- runs at just $0.10 per million input tokens. All models feature a June 2024 knowledge cutoff, providing more current contextual understanding than previous iterations.

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Apple is readying a substantial overhaul for iPadOS 19 that will transform the tablet experience to function more like macOS, according to Bloomberg. The update will focus on productivity features, multitasking capabilities, and app window management - areas where iPad power users have long requested improvements. The software revamp comes approximately a year after Apple introduced the M4 chip to the iPad Pro lineup and coincides with the expected arrival of new iPad Pro models featuring M5 processors. According to Bloomberg, many users have expressed frustration that iPad hardware capabilities have consistently outpaced software functionality. While the company won't fully port macOS to iPad as some users have wished, the changes will reportedly be substantial enough to satisfy much of the professional user base that has been pushing for more desktop-like functionality. The upcoming changes are expected to be highlighted at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

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10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started issuing 90-day TLS certificates for websites, "it was considered a bold move, that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times." And then this January Let's Encrypt announced new six-day certificates... This week saw a related announcement from the EFF engineering director. More than 31 million web sites maintain their HTTPS certificates using the EFF's Certbot tool (which automatically fetches free HTTPS certificates forever) — and Certbot is now supporting Let's Encrypt's six-day certificates. (It's accomplished through ACME profiles with dynamic renewal at 1/3rd of lifetime left or 1/2 of lifetime left, if the lifetime is shorter than 10 days): There is debate on how short these lifetimes should be, but with ACME profiles you can have the default or "classic" Let's Encrypt experience (90 days) or start actively using other profile types through Certbot with the --preferred-profile and --required-profile flags. For six day certificates, you can choose the "shortlived" profile. Why shorter lifetimes are better (according to the EFF's engineering director): If a certificate's private key is compromised, that compromise can't last as long. With shorter life spans for the certificates, automation is encouraged. Which facilitates robust security of web servers. Certificate revocation is historically flaky. Lifetimes 10 days and under prevent the need to invoke the revocation process and deal with continued usage of a compromised key.

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Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, reports ABC News. President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.... This is not like a permanent sort of exemption." The Wall Street Journal notes that Sunday the president himself posted on social media that "NOBODY is getting 'off the hook' for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers... There was no Tariff 'exception' announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff 'bucket.'" "The administration is expected to take the first step toward enacting the new tariffs as soon as next week," reports the New York Times, "opening an investigation to determine the effects of semiconductor imports on national security." More from ABC News: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration's decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve.. Lutnick said on "This Week" that the White House will implement "a tariff model in order to encourage" the semiconductor industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, to move its business to the United States. "We can't be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need," he said.... "These are things that are national security that we need to be made in America."

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Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.) And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street: The company has launched what it refers to as the "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantir's job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis. Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..." As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree... Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

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Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast." And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's performance. But AI companies generally haven't customized or otherwise fine-tuned their models to score better on LM Arena — or haven't admitted to doing so, at least.") Friday TechCrunch on what happened when LMArena tested the unmodified release version of Maverick (Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct). It ranked 32nd. "For the record, older models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released last June, and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002, released last September, rank higher," notes the tech site Neowin.

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"More than three million children around the world are thought to have died in 2022 as a result of infections that are resistant to antibiotics," reports the BBC, citing a study by two leading experts in child health that used data from sources including the World Health Organization and the World Bank: Experts say this new study highlights a more than tenfold increase in AMR-related infections in children in just three years. The number could have been made worse by the impact of the Covid pandemic... The report's lead authors, Doctor Yanhong Jessika Hu of Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia and Professor Herb Harwell of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, point to a significant growth in the use of antibiotics that are meant to only be held back for the most serious infections. Between 2019 and 2021 the use of "watch antibiotics", drugs with a high risk of resistance, increased by 160% in South East Asia and 126% in Africa. Over the same period, "reserve antibiotics" — last-resort treatments for severe, multidrug-resistant infections — rose by 45% in South East Asia and 125% in Africa. The authors warn that if bacteria develop resistance to these antibiotics, there will be few, if any, alternatives for treating multidrug-resistant infections. "Antibiotics are ubiquitous around us," Professor Harwell warns in the article. "They end up in our food and the environment and so coming up with a single solution is not easy." The article also quotes a senior lecturer in microbiology at King's College London, who says the new study "marks a significant and alarming increase compared to previous data". "These findings should serve as a wake-up call for global health leaders. Without decisive action, AMR could undermine decades of progress in child health, particularly in the world's most vulnerable regions." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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