Ars Technica's Beth Mole reports: Editors of the environmental chemistry journal Chemosphere have posted an eye-catching correction to a study reporting toxic flame retardants from electronics wind up in some household products made of black plastic, including kitchen utensils. The study sparked a flurry of media reports a few weeks ago that urgently implored people to ditch their kitchen spatulas and spoons. Wirecutter even offered a buying guide for what to replace them with. The correction, posted Sunday, will likely take some heat off the beleaguered utensils. The authors made a math error that put the estimated risk from kitchen utensils off by an order of magnitude.

Specifically, the authors estimated that if a kitchen utensil contained middling levels of a key toxic flame retardant (BDE-209), the utensil would transfer 34,700 nanograms of the contaminant a day based on regular use while cooking and serving hot food. The authors then compared that estimate to a reference level of BDE-209 considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's safe level is 7,000 ng -- per kilogram of body weight -- per day, and the authors used 60 kg as the adult weight (about 132 pounds) for their estimate. So, the safe EPA limit would be 7,000 multiplied by 60, yielding 420,000 ng per day. That's 12 times more than the estimated exposure of 34,700 ng per day. However, the authors missed a zero and reported the EPA's safe limit as 42,000 ng per day for a 60 kg adult. The error made it seem like the estimated exposure was nearly at the safe limit, even though it was actually less than a tenth of the limit. "We regret this error and have updated it in our manuscript," the authors said in a correction.

"This calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper," the correction reads. The study maintains that flame retardants "significantly contaminate" the plastic products, which have "high exposure potential."

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again argued for Indian workers to spend 70 hours a week in paid employment. From a report: Murthy called for the long working hours in October 2023 and then again in January 2024, and recently shared his opinion that two-day weekends were a mistake.

His views have earned plenty of criticism, but he's not backing down. On Sunday he addressed the Indian chamber of Commerce's centenary celebration and reportedly argued 70-hour weeks are necessary because millions of Indian citizens remain in poverty, so those who have jobs should work long hours and embrace entrepreneurialism to create jobs for others.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber has 30 days to require certain drivers to get fingerprinted if the ride-hail giant intends to continue transporting unaccompanied teens in California. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a ruling Thursday that requires taxi and ride-hail drivers who are carrying unaccompanied minors in the state to pass a fingerprint background check. The ruling also requires transport companies to pay for the cost of those background checks. "When an adult is being tasked to provide a service to a minor, the adult is placed in a position of trust, responsibility, and control over California's most vulnerable citizenry -- children," reads the decision. "Not conducting a fingerprint-based background check to identify adults with disqualifying arrests or criminal records would place the unaccompanied minor in a potentially dangerous, if not life-threatening situation." [...]

The CPUC's ruling also requires transport companies that intend to transport minors share information with the agency on how they implement live trip tracking for parents, what safety procedures they implement at pickup and drop-off locations, and what sort of driver training the companies implement specifically around transporting unaccompanied minors. The ruling also says that each company is responsible for paying for the checks. Uber has also argued against this stipulation, saying that forcing the company -- which has a market cap of around $150 billion as of December -- to pay for fingerprinting would result in a price hike for the Uber for Teens service.

YouTube is introducing an optional feature allowing creators to let third-party companies use their videos to train AI models, with the default setting being opt-out. The Verge reports: "We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their YouTube content in the AI era," a TeamYouTube staffer named Rob says in a support post. "As we gather feedback, we'll continue to explore features that facilitate new forms of collaboration between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorized methods to access content."

YouTube will be rolling out the setting in YouTube Studio "over the next few days," and unauthorized scraping "remains prohibited," Rob writes. Another support page says that you'll be able to pick and choose from a list of third-party companies that can train on your videos or you can simply allow all third-party companies to train on them.

A cyberattack on Rhode Island's RIBridges system has exposed personal data of individuals involved in programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and others, with hackers demanding a ransom. The breach may include sensitive details like Social Security numbers and banking information. The Associated Press reports: Anyone who has been involved in Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Childcare Assistance Program, Rhode Island Works, Long-term Services and Supports, the At HOME Cost Share Program and health insurance purchased through HealthSource RI may be impacted, McKee said Saturday.

The system known as RIBridges was taken offline on Friday, after the state was informed by its vendor, Deloitte, that there was a major security threat to the system. The vendor confirmed that "there is a high probability that a cybercriminal has obtained files with personally identifiable information from RIBridges," the state said. The state has contracted with Experian to run a toll-free hotline for Rhode Islanders to call to get information about the breach and how they can protect their data.

Cloudflare's 2024 internet traffic report highlights a 17.2% global increase in traffic, with Google maintaining its position as the most visited service and the U.S. responsible for 34.6% of bot traffic. The Register reports: One surprise (or perhaps not) is that IPv6 traffic is actually down as a percentage of the packets that passed through Cloudflare's network. It says that 28.5 percent of global traffic was IPv6 during 2024, whereas last year's report put this figure at 33.75 percent. The company also reveals that a fifth of all TCP connections (20.7 percent) are unexpectedly terminated before any useful data can be exchanged. Causes of this could vary from DoS attacks, quirky client behavior, or a network interrupting a connection to filter content.

Coudflare says about half of these incidents were connections closed "Post SYN" -- after its server has received a client's SYN packet, but before a subsequent acknowledgement (ACK) or any useful data. These can be attributed to DoS attacks or internet scanning, while Post-ACK or Post-PSH anomalies are more often associated with connection tampering activity such as filtering, especially if they occur at high rates in specific networks. Mobile device traffic accounted for about 41.3 percent of the total, which is roughly the same as last year. This is largely split between the Apple and Android ecosystems, with iOS on almost a third and Android accounting for two-thirds. [...]

Google's Chrome appears to be the most popular browser by far, accounting for 65.8 percent of all requests during 2024. Just 15.5 percent came from Apple's Safari browser, which leads the way on iOS devices, naturally. Microsoft's Edge accounted for 6.9 percent of browsing, while Mozilla Firefox stood at 4 percent. For search engines, Google also claimed the top spot, with a greater than 88 percent share of all search traffic that passed through Cloudflare. Yandex and Baidu were next with 3.1 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, while Bing trailed with 2.6 percent. DuckDuckGo accounted for 0.9 percent of searches. You can read Cloudflare's full Year in Review here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: A new survey suggests that Apple Intelligence matters to iPhone buyers, but the majority say that the initial features add little to no value. It remains to be seen whether Genmoji and ChatGPT integration will change that view. Things are even worse for Samsung smartphones, with an even greater majority of owners saying they can't see much point in the AI features offered

A new survey by tech trade-in site SellCell found that AI is an important factor when choosing a new smartphone: "iPhone users showed relatively higher interest in mobile AI than Samsung users as almost half (47.6%) of iPhone users reported AI features as a 'very' or 'somewhat' important deciding factor when buying a new phone vs. 23.7% of Samsung users who said the same." "Smartphone users in general are unsatisfied with the existing AI features as the survey recorded 73% of Apple Intelligence users and 87% of Galaxy AI users stating the new features to be either 'not very valuable' or they 'add little to no value' to their smartphone experience," reports SellCell.

According to the survey, these are the most popular Apple Intelligence features:
- Writing Tools (72%)
- Notification summaries (54%)
- Priority Messages (44.5%)
- Clean Up in Photos (29.1%)
- Smart Reply in Mail and Messages (20.9%)

Thirteen vapes are thrown away every second in the UK -- more than a million a day -- leading to an "environmental nightmare," according to research. From a report: There has also been a rise in "big puff" vapes which are bigger and can hold up to 6,000 puffs per vape, with single use vapes averaging 600. Three million of these larger vapes are being bought every week according to the research, commissioned by Material Focus, and conducted by Opinium. 8.2 million vapes are now thrown away or recycled incorrectly every week.

From June 2025 it will be illegal to sell single-use vapes, a move designed to combat environmental damage and their widespread use by children. Vapes will only be allowed to be sold if they are rechargeable or contain a refillable cartridge.

But all types of vape contain lithium-ion batteries which are dangerous if crushed or damaged because they can cause fires in bin lorries or waste and recycling centres. These fires are on the rise across the UK, with an increase last year of 71% compared with 2022.

WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg is trolling contributors and users of the WordPress open-source project by requiring them to check a box that says "Pineapple is delicious on pizza." From a report: The change was spotted by WordPress contributors late Sunday, and is still up as of Monday morning. Trying to log in or create a new account without checking the box returns a "please try again" error.

Last week, as part of the ongoing legal battle between WP Engine and Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, a judge ordered Mullenweg to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org that required users to pledge that they were not affiliated with WP Engine before logging in.

Google DeepMind announced a next-gen video-generating AI tool to rival OpenAI's Sora. Called Veo 2, it can generate AI video clips longer than two minutes with resolutions up to 4K (4096 x 2160). TechCrunch reports: In Google's experimental video creation tool, VideoFX, where Veo 2 is now exclusively available, videos are capped at 720p and eight seconds in length. (Sora can produce up to 1080p, 20-second-long clips.) VideoFX is behind a waitlist, but Google says it's expanding the number of users who can access it this week.

Eli Collins, VP of product at DeepMind, also told TechCrunch that Google will make Veo 2 available via its Vertex AI developer platform "as the model becomes ready for use at scale." "Over the coming months, we'll continue to iterate based on feedback from users," Collins said, "and [we'll] look to integrate Veo 2's updated capabilities into compelling use cases across the Google ecosystem ... [W]e expect to share more updates next year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a seminal moment in 20th century history, paving the way for German reunification. Many segments, both large and small, were preserved for posterity -- including portions covered in graffiti or murals. A team of Italian scientists used a combination of spectroscopic analysis and machine learning to study paint chips from wall fragments to learn more about the chemistry of the paints and pigments used, according to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. [...] Nondestructive techniques like Raman spectroscopy are often used to identify the molecular signatures of pigments, dyes, and other chemical compounds, but this usually requires bringing samples to the lab. Handheld Raman devices are used for cases where analysis must be done on-site, but they are far less precise than full-size laboratory equipment. So [Francesco Armetta of the University of Palermo and co-authors of the paper] decided to adopt a machine-learning approach to enhance the precision and sensitivity of spectral data collected by those handheld devices.

The team collected 15 pictorial fragments of five different colors from Berlin Wall paintings. They used handheld Raman spectroscopy on the paint chips and compared that spectral data to a commercial library of pigment spectra, confirming those findings with X-ray fluorescence and optical fiber reflectance spectroscopy. Most of the fragments had two top layers that had been painted with a brush rather than spray paint; brushstrokes were clearly visible under a microscope in several cases. The underlying third layer, in contact with the masonry, was white and probably used to prepare the surface for painting. Calcium and titanium were the most abundant elements in all the samples. Chromium and lead were present in a green-colored sample, and the authors think this was mixed with another color to get that particular shade. There were also traces of copper in blue and green samples.

Armetta et al. also created their own mock-up samples by mixing commercial German acrylic paints (commonly used since the 1800s) in different ratios to try to match colors and tints from the fragments -- crucial information for restoration. This is where their machine-learning algorithm (dubbed SAPNet) proved useful. They trained it on the Raman spectral data from the Berlin Wall samples and used it to determine the percentage of pigment. The model concluded that the Berlin Wall paint chips contained titanium white and as much as 75 percent pigment. "The identification of most of the components of the fragments was only possible through the comprehensive evaluation of the results provided by all the techniques [combined]," the authors concluded, further augmented by the development of SAPNet. "While SAPNet was specifically tailored for pigment mixture analysis, its robust framework demonstrates the transformative potential of deep learning methodologies for Raman spectral analysis across diverse scientific and industrial applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The European Union is forging ahead with plans for a constellation of internet satellites to rival Elon Musk-owned Starlink, after signing a $11.1 billion deal to launch nearly 300 satellites into low- and medium-Earth orbits by 2030. The bloc wants the space tech to boost its digital sovereignty by providing secure comms to governments.

First announced in 2022, Iris^2 (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) is a public-private partnership whose initial cost estimate (6 billion euros) leapt 76% through a fraught negotiation process. In the end, the program will be 61% funded from the public purse; an industry consortium called SpaceRise, selected in October, is making up the difference. This grouping includes French satellite giant Eutelsat, which merged with European rival OneWeb back in 2022.

Arctic Wolf has acquired Cylance, BlackBerry's beleaguered cybersecurity business, for $160 million -- a significant discount from the $1.4 billion BlackBerry paid to acquire the startup in 2018. From a report: Under the terms of the deal, which is expected to close in BlackBerry's fiscal Q4, BlackBerry will sell its Cylance assets to Arctic Wolf for $160 million in cash. BlackBerry will get ~$80 million at closing and the rest of the tranche a year later, along with roughly 5.5 million common shares in Arctic Wolf.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google announced it's rolling out ChromeOS M131 to non-beta users, bringing with it a handy "Safety reset" feature that lets Chromebook users reset their laptops without totally wiping them. The update also introduced a new "Flash notifications" accessibility option to help those who might not otherwise easily hear or see them.

Like Powerwash in ChromeOS, Safety reset will wipe the slate clean if you're experiencing computer virus-like behavior such as unusual pop-ups. But where Powerwash is a full factory reset, Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords, according to a help document about the feature.

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.

One in five adults in developed nations demonstrate primary school-level literacy and numeracy skills, according to an OECD study of 160,000 people across 31 countries released December 10. The decennial Survey of Adult Skills reveals declining literacy rates over the past decade despite rising secondary education completion.

Finland topped rankings across all tested areas -- numeracy, literacy, and problem-solving -- while Japan, Norway and the Netherlands performed above average. The United States showed declining scores, with Chile, Italy, Poland and Portugal reporting high proportions of below-average performers. The study found widening skill gaps between top and bottom performers, with declining scores concentrated among lower-performing adults.

This month Bill Gates recommended four books about making sense of the world, including The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman. Gates calls it "the book I recommend more than any other on AI — to heads of state, business leaders, and anyone else who asks — because it offers something rare: a clear-eyed view of both the extraordinary opportunities and genuine risks ahead." After helping build DeepMind from a small startup into one of the most important AI companies of the past decade, [Suleyman] went on to found Inflection AI and now leads Microsoft's AI division. But what makes this book special isn't just Mustafa's firsthand experience — it's his deep understanding of scientific history and how technological revolutions unfold. He's a serious intellectual who can draw meaningful parallels across centuries of scientific advancement. Most of the coverage of The Coming Wave has focused on what it has to say about artificial intelligence — which makes sense, given that it's one of the most important books on AI ever written. And there is probably no one as qualified as Mustafa to write it...

But what sets his book apart from others is Mustafa's insight that AI is only one part of an unprecedented convergence of scientific breakthroughs. Gene editing, DNA synthesis, and other advances in biotechnology are racing forward in parallel. As the title suggests, these changes are building like a wave far out at sea — invisible to many but gathering force. Each would be game-changing on its own; together, they're poised to reshape every aspect of society... [P]rogress is already accelerating as costs plummet and computing power grows. Then there are the incentives for profit and power that are driving development. Countries compete with countries, companies compete with companies, and individuals compete for glory and leadership. These forces make technological advancement essentially unstoppable — and they also make it harder to control...

How do we limit the dangers of these technologies while harnessing their benefits? This is the question at the heart of The Coming Wave, because containment is foundational to everything else. Without it, the risks of AI and biotechnology become even more acute. By solving for it first, we create the stability and trust needed to tackle everything else... [Suleyman] lays out an agenda that's appropriately ambitious for the scale of the challenge — ranging from technical solutions (like building an emergency off switch for AI systems) to sweeping institutional changes, including new global treaties, modernized regulatory frameworks, and historic cooperation among governments, companies, and scientists...
In an accompanying Christmas-themed video, Gates adds that "Of all the books on AI, that's the one I recommend the most."

Gates also recommends The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, saying it "made me reflect on how much of my younger years — which were often spent running around outside without parental supervision, sometimes getting into trouble — helped shape who I am today. Haidt explains how the shift from play-based childhoods to phone-based childhoods is transforming how kids develop and process emotions." (In the video Gates describes it as "kind of a scary book, but very convincing. [Haidt] writes about the rise of mental illness, and anxiety in children. He, unlike some books, actually has some prescriptions, like kids not using phones until much later, parenting style differences. I think it's a super-important book.")

Gates goes into the book's thesis in a longer blog post: that "we're actually facing two distinct crises: digital under-parenting (giving kids unlimited and unsupervised access to devices and social media) and real-world over-parenting (protecting kids from every possible harm in the real world). The result is young people who are suffering from addiction-like behaviors — and suffering, period — while struggling to handle challenges and setbacks that are part of everyday life." [Haidt] makes a strong case for better age verification on social media platforms and delaying smartphone access until kids are older. Literally and figuratively, he argues, we also need to rebuild the infrastructure of childhood itself — from creating more engaging playgrounds that encourage reasonable risk-taking, to establishing phone-free zones in schools, to helping young people rediscover the joy of in-person interaction.
Gates also recommends Engineering in Plain Sight, by Grady Hillhouse, a book which he says "encourages curiosity." ("Hillhouse takes all of the mysterious structures we see every day, from cable boxes to transformers to cell phone towers, and explains what they are and how they work. It's the kind of read that will reward your curiosity and answer questions you didn't even know you had.")

And finally, Gates recommends an autobiography by 81-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning historian/biographer/former sports journalist Doris Kearns Goodwin, who assesses the impact of President Lyndon Johnson's policies in a surprising "personal history of the 1960s."

"Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth," the Washington Post wrote almost two years ago, after analyzing more than 13,000 journals from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' time-use survey. (For the first time the surveys asked how workers felt during the day.) And outdoor forestry jobs "look awesome by that metric, dangerous as they often are in the long run," the Post wrote in a recent follow-up. [Alternate URL.]

But is that really the right metric? "Readers kept reminding us that there's more to a fulfilling job than how happy you are while doing it." What about those wanting jobs where they're meaningfully impacting the world? We didn't have a stellar way to measure other feelings about work, but we kept our eye on an often-overlooked federal data provider: AmeriCorps. The independent agency, which CEO Michael D. Smith described to us as "bite-sized" but "punching well above our weight," funds the Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement, part of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey... In 2021 and again in 2023, the researchers behind the CEV asked if you agree or disagree with these four statements:

- I am proud to be working for my employer.
- My main satisfaction in life comes from work.
- My workplace contributes to the community.
- I contribute to the community through my work....


The workers most likely to say they're proud to be working for their employer and that they gain satisfaction from work are — surprise! — the self-employed. The self-employed who are incorporated — a group that often includes small-business owners — are almost twice as likely as private-sector, for-profit workers to strongly profess pride in their employer.

Government and nonprofit workers fall somewhere in the middle on those questions. But they rank at the very top on "My workplace contributes to the community" and "I contribute to the community through my work." Local government workers, who include teachers, take the top spot for strong agreement on both, followed by nonprofit workers. Private-sector, for-profit workers once again lag behind. The jobs that do worse on these measures tend to be in manufacturing or other blue-collar production and extraction jobs, or at the lower-paid end of the service sector. Folks in food services (e.g., bartenders and food prep), janitorial roles and landscaping, and personal services (e.g., barbershops, laundry and hotels) all struggle to find greater meaning in their work. Though some better-paid service jobs also struggle by some measures — think sales, engineering or software development.

On the questions regarding pride in your employer and life satisfaction, we see managers and our old friends in agriculture and forestry take the top spots. But right behind them — and actually in the lead in the other question — lurks the real standout, a set of jobs we'd classify as "care and social services." That includes, most notably, religious workers. Looking a bit deeper at about 100 occupations for which we have detailed data, we see clergy were most likely to strongly agree on every question.
Other observations from the article:

• "As a rule, you feel better about your job as you get older. Presumably, it's some mix of people who love their work delaying retirement, people job-hopping until they find meaningful employment, and people learning to love whatever hand they've been dealt."

• "Most measures of satisfaction also rise with education, often quite sharply. Someone with a graduate degree is twice as likely as a high school dropout to strongly agree their workplace contributes to the community."

• But... "More-educated folks are actually a bit less likely to strongly agree that work is their main satisfaction in life."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Computerworld: Microsoft has announced Phi-4 — a new AI model with 14 billion parameters — designed for complex reasoning tasks, including mathematics. Phi-4 excels in areas such as STEM question-answering and advanced problem-solving, surpassing similar models in performance. Phi-4, part of the Phi small language models (SLMs), is currently available on Azure AI Foundry under the Microsoft Research License Agreement and will launch on Hugging Face [this] week, the company said in a blog post.

The company emphasized that Phi-4's design focuses on improving accuracy through enhanced training and data curation.... "Phi-4 outperforms comparable and even larger models on tasks like mathematical reasoning, thanks to a training process that combines synthetic datasets, curated organic data, and innovative post-training techniques," Microsoft said in its announcement. The model leverages a new training approach that integrates multi-agent prompting workflows and data-driven innovations to enhance its reasoning efficiency. The accompanying report highlights that Phi-4 balances size and performance, challenging the industry norm of prioritizing larger models... Phi-4 achieved a score of 80.4 on the MATH benchmark and has surpassed other systems in problem-solving and reasoning evaluations, according to the technical report accompanying the release. This makes it particularly appealing for domain-specific applications requiring precision, like scientific computation or advanced STEM problem-solving.

Microsoft emphasized its commitment to ethical AI development, integrating advanced safety measures into Phi-4. The model benefits from Azure AI Content Safety features such as prompt shields, protected material detection, and real-time application monitoring. These features, Microsoft explained, help users address risks like adversarial prompts and data security threats during AI deployment. The company also reiterated that Azure AI Foundry, the platform hosting Phi-4, offers tools to measure and mitigate AI risks. Developers using the platform can evaluate and improve their models through built-in metrics and custom safety evaluations, Microsoft added... With Phi-4, Microsoft continues to evolve its AI offerings while promoting responsible use through robust safeguards. Industry watchers will observe how this approach shapes adoption in critical fields where reasoning and security are paramount.