Innholdsfortegnelse for #606 i Techlife News

Toyota says it will spend nearly $50 million to build a vehicle battery testing laboratory at its North American research center in Michigan. The company said Thursday that the lab in York Township south of Ann Arbor will test batteries made for hybrid and electric vehicles at a new factory in North Carolina, as well as from battery suppliers. No new jobs will be created because Toyota will reassign workers from other areas and provide training as needed. The company says the lab is expected to begin work in 2025 and could be expanded as more electric vehicles are made. The lab will do performance, quality and durability testing, as well as testing of charging capabilities. “This new facility also enables us to experiment and pursue new opportunities as technology…

Don’t call it a “pause.” When the Federal Reserve meets next week, it is widely expected to leave interest rates alone — after 10 straight meetings in which it has jacked up its key rate to fight inflation. But what might otherwise be seen as a “pause” will likely be characterized instead as a “skip.” The difference? A “pause” might suggest that the Fed may not raise its benchmark rate again. A “skip” implies that it probably will — just not now. The purpose of suspending its rate hikes is to give the Fed’s policymakers time to look around and assess how much higher borrowing rates are slowing inflation. Calling next week’s decision a “skip” is also a way for Chair Jerome Powell to forge a consensus among an increasingly…

THE REVOLUTIONARY PRODUCT THAT REPRESENTS SO MUCH MORE THAN APPLE’S FIRST EVER AR HEADSET Phew! By the time you read this, you will have probably had some time to absorb the news from this past week of an abundance of both hardware and software announcements from Apple. But there can be no doubt about the standout performer among the headlines: the new, long-in-development Apple Vision Pro augmented reality (AR) headset. A memorable keynote opened the formalities of the Cupertino firm’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference with the kind of self-assurance that even Apple’s fellow tech giants can rarely seem to equal. And of course, there were quite a few well-merited reasons to get excited about WWDC ’23, even long before CEO Tim Cook brought back his late predecessor’s “one more thing…”…

Artificial intelligence poses an “existential risk” to humanity, a key innovator warned during a visit to the United Arab Emirates this week, suggesting an international agency like the International Atomic Energy Agency oversee the ground-breaking technology. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on a global tour to discuss artificial intelligence. “We face serious risk. We face existential risk,” said Altman, 38. “The challenge that the world has is how we’re going to manage those risks and make sure we still get to enjoy those tremendous benefits. No one wants to destroy the world.” OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a popular chatbot, has grabbed the world’s attention as it offers essay-like answers to prompts from users. Microsoft has invested some $1 billion in OpenAI. ChatGPT’s success, offering a glimpse into the way that artificial intelligence…

New York City has filed a lawsuit against Hyundai and Kia, joining a host of other cities beset by a social media fueled wave of car thefts due to a flaw that made some car models highly susceptible to theft. Viral how-to videos on TikTok and other sites show how to start the cars using only USB cables and a screwdriver. The reason is that some models sold by Hyundai and Kia in the U.S. came without engine immobilizers, a standard feature on most cars since the 1990s that prevent the engine from starting unless the key is present. The lawsuit, which was filed with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York late Tuesday, alleges that Hyundai Motor America and Kia America Inc. failed to keep…

Let’s get this upfront: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was the best comic-book film of the last decade. With an animation blizzard blown straight in from the pages of comics, “Into the Spider-Verse” took a supercollider to all the conventions of the superhero movie. Solemnity was out. Gone, too, was the idea of a chosen one. Spider-Man could be anyone, including a graffiti-tagging kid from Brooklyn, including a pig named Spider-Ham. The possibilities of the comic book movie were suddenly limitless. With Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” thumping, the vibes were, as they say, immaculate. So a lot to live up to. Yet five years later, the Spider-verse is still expanding in thrilling ways. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is the rare sequel that dazzles as much as the original did.…

New Jersey’s Canoe Brook Water Treatment plant produces 14 millions gallons of drinking water a day. Each one of those gallons weighs around 8 pounds , so it’s quickly apparent that a large amount of energy is needed to move water from a reservoir to the treatment plant and into the 84,000 homes and businesses that the New Jersey American Water Company serves in the area. So the water utility partnered with NJR Clean Energy Ventures, the renewable energy subsidiary of the natural gas firm New Jersey Resources, for a solution. NJR Clean Energy Ventures built a vast array of solar panels, linked them together, and placed them on the surface of the water at Canoe Brook Reservoir. The companies say the 17-acre solar array, consisting of 16,510 solar panels,…

Shares of GameStop are plunging before the opening bell after the company fired CEO Matthew Furlong, the former Amazon executive that was brought in two years ago to turn the struggling video game retailer around. The company gave no reason for the dismissal and named Ryan Cohen, the company’s biggest investor, as executive chairman. Cohen sent a cryptic tweet that read “Not for long” around the time the company announced Furlong’s firing. GameStop said Cohen will oversee investment and management for the company. GameStop briefly addressed the changes in a regulatory filing for its quarterly earnings. “We believe the combination of these efforts to stabilize and optimize our core business and achieve sustained profitability while also focusing on capital allocation under Mr. Cohen’s leadership will further unlock long-term value creation…

Bluesky, the internet’s hottest members-only spot at the moment, feels a bit like an exclusive club, populated by some Very Online folks, popular Twitter characters, and fed up ex-users of the Elon Musk-owned platform. Musk is not on it — and this might be part of the appeal for those longing for the way things were before the Tesla billionaire bought Twitter and upended nearly everything about the social network, from rules against harassment to content moderation to its system for verifying prominent users’ identities. It also helps that Bluesky grew out of Twitter — a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors. “It was designed to replace Twitter,” said Sol Messing, who worked at Twitter as a data scientist until January…

Apple on Monday unveiled a long-rumored headset that will place its users between the virtual and real world, while also testing the technology trendsetter’s ability to popularize new-fangled devices after others failed to capture the public’s imagination. After years of speculation, Apple CEO Tim Cook hailed the arrival of the sleek goggles — dubbed “Vision Pro” — at the the company’s annual developers conference held on a park-like campus in Cupertino, California, that Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs helped design. “This marks the beginning of a journey that will bring a new dimension to powerful personal technology,” Cook told the crowd. Although Apple executives provided an extensive preview of the headset’s capabilities during the final half hour of Monday’s event, consumers will have to wait before they can get their…

Customers of Venmo, PayPal and CashApp should not store their money with those apps for the long term because the funds might not be safe during a crisis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned. The alert comes several weeks after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, which all experienced bank runs after fearful customers with uninsured deposits pulled their money en masse. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures bank accounts up to $250,000. But money stored in Venmo or CashApp or Apple Cash is not being held in a traditional bank account. So, if there is an event similar to a bank run with those payment apps, those funds may not be protected. Some of the funds may be eligible for pass-through insurance coverage…

Delaware’s Supreme Court has upheld a judge’s decision in favor of Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a lawsuit challenging the electric car maker’s $2.4 billion acquisition of a solar panel company founded by two of his cousins. The court on Tuesday rejected arguments from a group of Tesla shareholders that a Chancery Court judge erred in finding that Tesla’s deal to acquire SolarCity in 2016 was “entirely fair.” The judge made that determination even while finding that the process by which Tesla’s board of directors negotiated and recommended the deal to shareholders was “far from perfect.” While noting errors in the trial court’s fair price analysis, and agreeing that the deal process was not “pitch perfect,” the justices said the record is replete with factual findings and credibility determinations indicating…

The European Union is pushing online platforms like Google and Meta to step up the fight against false information by adding labels to text, photos and other content generated by artificial intelligence, a top official said this week. EU Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said the ability of a new generation of AI chatbots to create complex content and visuals in seconds raises “fresh challenges for the fight against disinformation.” Jourova said she asked Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and other tech companies that have signed up to the 27-nation bloc’s voluntary agreement on combating disinformation to dedicate efforts to tackling the AI problem. Online platforms that have integrated generative AI into their services, such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Google’s Bard chatbot, should build safeguards to prevent “malicious actors”…

Tracking someone through apps and devices like the popular Apple AirTag without their consent could soon be deemed a criminal offense in Ohio, after the state’s Republican-led Senate advanced the measure Wednesday with a unanimous bipartisan vote. The proposed legislation comes as big tech companies such as Apple and Google are teaming up to combat the rise of mobile apps, AirTags and similar small, portable tracking devices that have been used by stalkers and for other nefarious purposes. Typically attached to often misplaced items like keys or wallets, individuals are increasingly using them on cars and other property to track people without their knowledge. Currently, there is no law expressly banning tracking people with apps and related devices in Ohio. But should the bipartisan bill change that, violators could be…

Can you trust Erica, or Sandi or Amy to increasingly control parts of your financial life without giving you inaccurate information or sending money to the wrong place? That’s what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is asking in a report released this week, where the bureau lays out a number of concerns about the growing use of chatbots by banks to handle routine customer service requests. The CFPB worries that banks or loan-servicing companies may cut back on human customer service employees and push an increasing number of routine tasks to AI. Further, the regulator says poorly designed chatbots could run afoul of federal laws that govern how debts are collected or how personal information is being used. “If firms poorly deploy these services, there’s a lot of risk for…

Apple has a long history of designing products that aren’t the first to be introduced in a particular category but still redefine the market. With the company unveiling a headset equipped with virtual and augmented reality technology already available in other devices, here is a look back at some of Apple’s other breakthrough products: THE MACINTOSH COMPUTER, UNVEILED JANUARY 1984 Heralded by a now-most famous TV commercial, the Macintosh computer lived up to the revolutionary promise made by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs during its 1984 unveiling. Among other things, the Mac ushered in the era of the graphical user interface (known as “GUI” in tech parlance) and the navigational mouse. In many ways, it was the first realization of Jobs’ vision to turn computers into “a bicycle of the mind.”…

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao are accused of misusing investor funds, operating as an unregistered exchange and violating a slew of U.S. securities laws in a lawsuit filed by the SEC. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit this week lists thirteen charges against the firm — including commingling and divert customer assets to an entity Zhao owned called Sigma Chain. Binance is a Cayman Islands limited liability company founded by Zhao and the charges are familiar to practices uncovered after the collapse of the second largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, last year. The lawsuit lays out the extent to which the firms owners knew of the alleged legal violations: “Binance’s CCO bluntly admitted to…

DNA is all around us — even in the air we breathe. Now scientists have found that air quality monitoring stations — which pull in air to test for pollution — also pick up lots of DNA that can reveal what plants and animals have been in the area. The method could help solve the tricky challenge of keeping tabs on biodiversity, according to a study published this week in the journal Current Biology. The findings suggest that biodiversity data has been collected “on massive scales literally for decades — and nobody’s noticed,” said study author Elizabeth Clare, a biologist at Canada’s York University. As animals and plants go through their life cycles, they leave little bits of themselves in the environment — scales, fur, feathers, pollen — which carry…

A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company which owns the popular short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong. Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the U.S., says those same people had access to U.S. user data, an accusation that the company denies. Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In the documents submitted to the court he said ByteDance had a “superuser” credential — also known as a god credential — that enabled a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members…