mrspoonsi shares a report from the BBC: A former takeaway worker found with Bitcoin worth more than $2.5 billion has been convicted at Southwark Crown Court of a crime linked to money laundering. Jian Wen, 42, from Hendon in north London, was involved in converting the currency into assets including multi-million-pound houses and jewelry. On Monday she was convicted of entering into or becoming concerned in a money laundering arrangement. The Met said the seizure is the largest of its kind in the UK.

Although Wen was living in a flat above a Chinese restaurant in Leeds when she became involved in the criminal activity, her new lifestyle saw her move into a six-bedroom house in north London in 2017 which was rented for more than $21,000 per month. She posed as an employee of an international jewelry business and moved her son to the UK to attend private school, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said. That same year, Wen tried to buy a string of expensive houses in London, but struggled to pass money-laundering checks and her claims she had earned millions legitimately mining Bitcoin were not believed. She later travelled abroad, buying jewelry worth tens of thousands of pounds in Zurich, and purchasing properties in Dubai in 2019.

Another suspect is thought to be behind the fraud but they remain at large. The Met said it carried out a large scale investigation as part of the case - searching several addresses, reviewing 48 electronic devices, and examining thousands of digital files including many which were translated from Mandarin. The CPS has obtained a freezing order from the High Court, while it carries out a civil recovery investigation that could lead to the forfeiture of the Bitcoin. The value of the Bitcoin was worth around $2.5 billion at the time of initial estimates -- but due to the fluctuation in the currency's value, it has since increased to around $4.3 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In India, a government-run agency will now monitor and undertake fact-checking for government related matters on social media even as tech giants expressed grave concerns about it last year. The Ministry of Electronics and IT on Wednesday wrote in a gazette notification that it is amending the IT Rules 2021 to cement into law the proposal to make the fact checking unit of Press Information Bureau the dedicated arbiter of truth for New Delhi matters. Tech companies as well as other firms that serve more than 5 million users in India will be required to "make reasonable efforts" to not display, store, transmit or otherwise share information that deceives or misleads users about matters pertaining to the government, the IT ministry said. India's move comes just weeks ahead of the general elections in the country. Relying on a government agency such as the Press Information Bureau as the sole source to fact-check government business without giving it a clear definition or providing clear checks and balances "may lead to misuse during implementation of the law, which will profoundly infringe on press freedom," Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that represents Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple, cautioned last year.

Meanwhile, comedian Kunal Kamra, with support from the Editors Guild of India, cautioned that the move could create an environment that forces social media firms to welcome "a regime of self-interested censorship."

The macOS Sonoma 14.4 update introduces a bug affecting iCloud Drive's versioning system, where users with "Optimize Mac Storage" enabled can lose all previous versions of a file removed from local storage. MacRumors reports: Versions are normally created automatically when users save files using apps that work with the version system in macOS. According to The Eclectic Light Company's Howard Oakley, users running macOS 14.4 that have "Optimize Mac Storage" enabled should be aware that they are at risk of losing all previously saved versions of a file if they opt to remove it from iCloud Drive local storage: "In previous versions of macOS, when a file is evicted from local storage in iCloud Drive [using the Remove Download option in the right-click contextual menu], all its saved versions have been preserved. Download that file again from iCloud Drive, and versions saved on that Mac (but not other Macs or devices) have remained fully accessible. Do that in 14.4, and all previous versions are now removed, and lost forever."

Oakley said his own tests confirmed that this behavior does not happen in macOS Sonoma 14.3 or macOS Ventura, so it is exclusive to macOS 14.4. For users who have already updated, he suggests either not saving files to iCloud Drive at all, or turning off Optimize Mac Storage. To perform the latter in System Settings, click your Apple ID, select iCloud, and then toggle off the switch next to "Optimize Mac Storage." You may need to perform this action twice -- reports suggest it can turn back on by itself. For a more exhaustive account of the problem, see Oakley's subsequent post.

After securing billions in federal grants and loans, Reuters reports that the company is "planning a $100-billion spending spree across four U.S. states" to build and expand its chip manufacturing factories. From the report: The centerpiece of Intel's five-year spending plan is turning empty fields near Columbus, Ohio, into what CEO Pat Gelsinger described to reporters on Tuesday as "the largest AI chip manufacturing site in the world," starting as soon as 2027. Intel's plan will also involve revamping sites in New Mexico and Oregon and expanding operations in Arizona, where longtime rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is also building a massive factory that it hopes will receive funding from President Joe Biden's push to bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. [...]

Gelsinger said about 30% of the $100-billion plan will be spent on construction costs such as labor, piping and concrete. The remaining will go towards buying chipmaking tools from firms such as ASML, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials and KLA, among others. Those tools will help bring the Ohio site online by 2027 or 2028, though Gelsinger warned the timeline could slip if the chip market takes a dive. Beyond grants and loans, Intel plans to make most of the purchases from its existing cash flows.

"It will still take three to five years for Intel to become a serious player in the foundry market" for cutting-edge chips, said Kinngai Chan, an analyst at Summit Insights. However, he warned more investment would be needed before Intel could overtake TSMC, adding that the Taiwanese firm could remain the leader for "some time to come." Gelsinger has previously said a second round of U.S. funding for chip factories would likely be needed to re-establish the U.S. as a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, which he reiterated on Tuesday. "It took us three-plus decades to lose this industry. It's not going to come back in three to five years of CHIPS Act" funding, said Gelsinger, who referred to the low-interest-rate funding as "smart capital."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google closed its Fitbit acquisition in 2021. Since then, the tech behemoth has pushed numerous changes to the wearable brand, including upcoming updates announced this week. While Google reshapes its fitness tracker business, though, some long-time users are regretting their Fitbit purchases and questioning if Google's practices will force them to purchase their next fitness tracker elsewhere.

As is becoming common practice with consumer tech announcements of late, Google's latest announcements about Fitbit seemed to be trying to convince users of the wonders of generative AI and how that will change their gadgets for the better. In a blog post yesterday, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google's chief health officer, announced that Fitbit Premium subscribers would be able to test experimental AI features later this year (Google hasn't specified when). "You will be able to ask questions in a natural way and create charts just for you to help you understand your own data better. For example, you could dig deeper into how many active zone minutes... you get and the correlation with how restorative your sleep is," she wrote. DeSalvo's post included an example of a user asking a chatbot if there was a connection between their sleep and activity and said that the experimental AI features will only be available to "a limited number of Android users who are enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program in the Fitbit mobile app."

Fitbit is also working with the Google Research team and "health and wellness experts, doctors, and certified coaches" to develop a large language model (LLM) for upcoming Fitbit mobile app features that pull data from Fitbit and Pixel devices, DeSalvo said. In a blog post yesterday, Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google, said Google wants to use the LLM to add personalized coaching features, such as the ability to look for sleep irregularities and suggest actions "on how you might change the intensity of your workout." Google's Fitbit is building the LLM on Gemini models that are tweaked on de-identified data from unspecified "research case studies," Matias said, adding: "For example, we're testing performance using sleep medicine certification exam-like practice tests." Other recent changes to Fitbit include a name tweak from Fitbit by Google, to Google Fitbit, as spotted by 9to5Google this week. Charge 5 users are especially concerned after users noticed their devices suddenly stopped holding a charge after a December firmware update was pushed. The problem has persisted with Google offering no solution other than offer discounts or, if the device was within its warranty period, a replacement.

"This is called planned obsolescence. I'll be upgrading to a watch style tracker from a different company. I wish Fitbit hadn't sold out to Google," a forum user going by Sean77024 wrote on Fitbit's support forum yesterday. "Others, like 2MeFamilyFlyer, have also accused Fitbit of planning Charge 5 obsolescence," notes Ars. "2MeFamilyFlyer said they're seeking a Fitbit alternative."

samleecole writes: Last month, the surveillance company Flock Safety published a study and press release claiming that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are "instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in the U.S." The study was done by Flock employees, and given legitimacy with the "oversight" of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper. Now, one of those researchers has told 404 Media that "I personally would have done things much differently" than the Flock researchers did.

The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found "the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them." Flock is one of the largest vendors of ALPR cameras and other surveillance technologies, and is partially responsible for the widespread proliferation of this technology. It markets its cameras to law enforcement, homeowners associations, property managers, schools, and businesses. It regularly publishes in-house case studies and white papers that it says shows Flock is instrumental in solving and reducing crime, then uses those studies to market its products.

Airbus takes no pleasure in the technical problems plaguing U.S. rival Boeing as they damage the image of the entire aerospace industry, said the CEO of the European planemaker. From a report: "I am not happy with the problems of my competitor. They are not good for the industry a whole," Guillaume Faury told the "Europe 2024" conference in Berlin, when asked about technical problems at Boeing. "We are in an industry where quality and safety is top priority," he added. Further reading: Airbus Is Pulling Ahead as Boeing's Troubles Mount.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Tuesday warned Apple and Meta on their new fees for their services, saying that this may hinder users from enjoying the benefits of the Digital Markets Act which aims to give them more choices. From a report: Apple announced a slew of changes in January in a bid to comply with the landmark EU tech legislation which requires it to open up its closed eco-system to rivals.

A new fee structure includes a core technology fee of 50 euro cents per user account per year that major app developers will have to pay even if they do not use any of Apple's payment services, which has triggered criticism from rivals such as Fortnite creator Epic Games. Vestager said the new fees have attracted her attention. "There are things that we take a keen interest in, for instance, if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating," she told Reuters in an interview. Further reading: Apple Working on Solution for App Store Fee That Could Bankrupt Viral Apps.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Since the start of the year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. It's a continuation of the predominant theme of 2023, when more than 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all taken part in the downsizing this year, along with eBay, Unity Software, SAP and Cisco. Wall Street has largely cheered on the cost-cutting, sending many tech stocks to record highs on optimism that spending discipline coupled with efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to rising profits. PayPal announced in January that it was eliminating 9% of its workforce, or about 2,500 jobs.

For the tens of thousands of people in Croisant's [anecdote in the linked story] position, the path toward reemployment is daunting. All told, 2023 was the second-biggest year of cuts on record in the technology sector, behind only the dot-com crash in 2001, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the spectacular flameouts of Pets.com, eToys and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time. Last month's job cut count was the highest of any February since 2009, when the financial crisis forced companies into cash preservation mode.

NVIDIA has been working on adding generative AI to non-playable characters (NPCs) for a while now. The company is hoping a newly-announced partnership with Ubisoft will accelerate development of this technology and, ultimately, bring these AI-driven NPCs to modern games. From a report: Ubisoft helped build new "NEO NPCs" by using NVIDIA's Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology, with an assist from dynamic NPC experts Inworld AI. The end result? Characters that don't repeat the same phrase over and over, while ignoring the surrounding violent mayhem. These NEO NPCs are said to interact in real time with players, the environment and other in-game characters. NVIDIA says this opens up "new possibilities for emergent storytelling." To that end, Ubisoft's narrative team built complete backgrounds, knowledge bases and conversational styles for two NPCs as a proof of concept.

Major U.S. broadband internet providers must start displaying information similar to nutrition labels on food products to help consumers shop for services starting on April 10, under new rules from the Federal Communications Commission. From a report: Verizon Communications said it will begin providing the labels on Wednesday. The FCC first moved to mandate the labels in 2022. Smaller providers will be required to provide labels starting in October. The rules require broadband providers to display, at the point of sale, labels that show prices, speeds, fees and data allowances for both wireless and wired products. Verizon Chief Customer Experience Officer Brian Higgins said in an interview the labels will help consumers make "an equal comparison" between product offerings, speeds and fees.

Higgins said standardized labels across the industry "make it easier for customers to do a comparison of which provider is going to be the best fit for their needs." He said customers will still need to research various bundling offers across carriers. The labels were first unveiled as a voluntary program in 2016. Congress ordered the FCC to mandate them under the 2021 infrastructure law. "Consumers will finally get information they can use to comparison shop, avoid junk fees, and make informed choices about which high-speed internet service is the best fit for their needs and budget," FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Sunday, the world of video games was shaken by a hacking and cheating scandal. During a competitive esports tournament of Apex Legends, a free-to-play shooter video game played by hundreds of thousands of players daily, hackers appeared to insert cheats into the games of two well-known streamers -- effectively hacking the players midgame. "Wait, what the fuck? I'm getting hacked, I'm getting hacked bro, I'm getting hacked," said one of the players allegedly compromised during a livestream of the gameplay. The incidents forced the organizers of the Apex Legends Global Series tournament, which has a $5 million total prize pool, to postpone the event indefinitely "due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised."

As the midgame hacks were underway, the game's chatbot displayed messages on-screen that appeared to come from the hackers: "Apex hacking global series, by Destroyer2009 &R4andom," the messages read. In an interview with TechCrunch, the hacker Destroyer2009 took credit for the hacks, saying that he did it "just for fun," and with the goal of forcing the Apex Legends' developers to fix the vulnerability he exploited. The hacks sent the Apex Legends community into a frenzy, with countless streamers reacting to the incidents, and some players suggesting Apex Legends is not safe to play, because every player could be at risk of getting hacked not only in-game, but potentially having their computers hacked, too. Destroyer2009 declined to provide details of how he allegedly pulled off hacking the two players midgame, or what specific vulnerabilities he exploited.

"I really don't want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal," the hacker said. The only thing Destroyer2009 said regarding the technique he used was that the vulnerability "has nothing to do with the server and I've never touched anything outside of the Apex process," and that he did not hack the two players' computers directly. The hacks "never went outside of the game," he said.

The abstract of a new paper published on Journal of Financial Economics: We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. We construct two lapsation risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common variation in lapse rates of the 30 largest life insurance companies. The first is a cyclical factor that is positively correlated with credit spreads and unemployment, while the second factor is a trend factor that correlates with the level of interest rates. Using a novel policy-level database from a large life insurer, we examine the heterogeneity in risk factor exposures based on policy and policyholder characteristics.

Young policyholders with higher health risk in low-income areas are more likely to lapse their policies during economic downturns. We explore the implications for hedging and valuation of life insurance contracts. Ignoring aggregate lapsation risk results in mispricing of life insurance policies. The calibrated model points to overpricing on average. In the cross-section, young, low-income, and high-health risk households face higher effective mark-ups than the old, high-income, and healthy.

The White House said Wednesday Intel has been awarded up to $8.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding, as the Biden administration ramps up its effort to bring semiconductor manufacturing to U.S. soil. From a report: Intel could receive an additional $11 billion in loans from the CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed in 2022. The awards will be announced by President Joe Biden in Arizona on Wednesday. The money will help "leading-edge semiconductors made in the United States" keep "America in the driver's seat of innovation," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. Intel and the White House said their agreement is nonbinding and preliminary and could change.

Intel has long been a stalwart of the U.S. semiconductor industry, developing chips that power many of the world's PCs and data center servers. However, the company has been eclipsed in revenue by Nvidia, which leads in artificial intelligence chips, and has been surpassed in market cap by rival AMD and mobile phone chipmaker Qualcomm.

CoinDesk: The Ethereum Foundation -- the Swiss non-profit organization at the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem -- is under investigation by an unnamed "state authority," according to the group's website's GitHub repository. The scope of the investigation and its focus was unknown at press time. According to the GitHub commit dated Feb. 26, 2024, "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality."

The investigation comes during a time of change for Ethereum's technology. Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain by market cap after Bitcoin, launching in 2015 following an initial coin offering for the chain's native ETH token. Earlier this month, the chain underwent a major technical upgrade, dubbed Dencun, designed to bring down transaction costs for users of Ethereum-based layer-2 platforms.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI's generative AI models, onstage at the company's first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to "accomplish all sorts of tasks" -- from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers. "Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you," Altman said. "You can build a GPT ... for almost anything." He wasn't kidding about the anything part.

TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI's official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI's moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

Readers waspleg and SpzToid shared the following report: Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent.

Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor's terms of service changed to require all users to be verified.

Ever since Glassdoor's integration with Fishbowl, Glassdoor's terms say that Glassdoor 'may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties. We may also use personal data you provide to us via your resume(s) or our other services.' This effort to gather information on Fishbowl users includes Glassdoor staff consulting publicly available sources to verify information that is then used to update Glassdoor users' accounts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The generative AI company helmed by Sam Altman is on track to put out GPT-5 sometime mid-year, likely during summer, according to two people familiar with the company. Some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model and its related enhancements to the ChatGPT tool, another person familiar with the process said. These people, whose identities Business Insider has confirmed, asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely. "It's really good, like materially better," said one CEO who recently saw a version of GPT-5.

OpenAI demonstrated the new model with use cases and data unique to his company, the CEO said. He said the company also alluded to other as-yet-unreleased capabilities of the model, including the ability to call AI agents being developed by OpenAI to perform tasks autonomously. The company does not yet have a set release date for the new model, meaning current internal expectations for its release could change. OpenAI is still training GPT-5, one of the people familiar said. After training is complete, it will be safety tested internally and further "red teamed," a process where employees and typically a selection of outsiders challenge the tool in various ways to find issues before it's made available to the public.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Biden administration on Tuesday warned the nation's governors that drinking water and wastewater utilities in their states are facing "disabling cyberattacks" by hostile foreign nations that are targeting mission-critical plant operations. "Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States," Jake Sullivan, assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Michael S. Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in a letter. "These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities." [...]

"Drinking water and wastewater systems are an attractive target for cyberattacks because they are a lifeline critical infrastructure sector but often lack the resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices," Sullivan and Regan wrote in Tuesday's letter. They went on to urge all water facilities to follow basic security measures such as resetting default passwords and keeping software updated. They linked to this list of additional actions, published by CISA and guidance and tools jointly provided by CISA and the EPA. They went on to provide a list of cybersecurity resources available from private sector companies.

The letter extended an invitation for secretaries of each state's governor to attend a meeting to discuss better securing the water sector's critical infrastructure. It also announced that the EPA is forming a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force to identify vulnerabilities in water systems. The virtual meeting will take place on Thursday. "EPA and NSC take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems," Regan said in a separate statement.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims. "The study's findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says Gupta. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy." [...]

Current cosmological models make the reasonable assumption that certain forces governing the interactions of particles have remained constant throughout time. Gupta challenges a specific example of this 'coupling constant', asking how it might affect the spread of space over exhaustively long periods of time. It's hard enough for any novel hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community. But Gupta's suggestion isn't even entirely new -- it's loosely based on an idea that was shown the door nearly a century ago. In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered if the reddened light of far distant objects was a result of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted by a long journey across the eons of space. His 'tired light' hypothesis was in competition with the now-accepted theory that light's red-shifted frequency is due to the cumulative expansion of space tugging at light waves like a stretched spring.

The consequences of Gupta's version of the tired light hypothesis -- what is referred to as covarying coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL -- would affect the Universe expansion, doing away with mysterious pushing forces of dark energy and blaming changing interactions between known particles for the increased stretching of space. To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the cosmic microwave background. While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe's residual echoes of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter is also a thing. The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.