Innholdsfortegnelse for #608 i Techlife News

Just a dot on the horizon at first, the bug-like and surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft buzzes over Paris and its traffic snarls, treating its doubtless awestruck passenger to privileged vistas of the Eiffel Tower and the city’s signature zinc-grey rooftops before landing him or her with a gentle downward hover. And thus, if all goes to plan, could a new page in aviation history be written. After years of dreamy and not always credible talk of skies filled with flying, non-polluting electric taxis, the aviation industry is preparing to deliver a future that it says is now just around the corner. Capitalizing on its moment in the global spotlight, the Paris region is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts…

China’s Alibaba Group has announced a major management reshuffle as the e-commerce giant restructures into six different business divisions to adapt to fast-changing technologies. The moves also are aimed at spurring growth at a time when the Chinese economy is slowing despite an end to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions a half-year ago. Eddie Wu, chairman of its e-commerce group, will succeed Daniel Zhang as CEO, the company said in a statement this week. Zhang will be CEO and chairman of Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, which has been approved to be spun off and is expected to be listed for trading within a year. Alibaba’s current executive vice chairman, Joseph Tsai, is to succeed Zhang as chairman of the Alibaba Group. Tsai, who owns the NBA basketball team Brooklyn Nets and is…

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote on June 5, Apple lifted the lid on exciting new features coming in iOS 17 this fall. Set to be released alongside the launch of the iPhone 15, iOS 17 brings a range of tweaks, fixes, and innovative additions to enhance the user experience and make our devices even more powerful. INTRODUCING IOS 17 iOS 17 was officially announced and showcased at WWDC 2023, but it is scheduled to be rolled out to iPhones worldwide in the fall, most likely in mid-September. Historically, Apple has been consistent in releasing new versions of iOS in September. Still, developers can get their hands on the software to begin working on new apps and features to take advantage of the update. What’s perhaps most significant…

What features do you consider a priority when car shopping? Horsepower or cargo space are often mentioned, but the reality is that today’s vehicles are quite similar in how they drive and how much stuff they can hold. However, there is one attribute that still makes a significant difference: a vehicle’s infotainment system. A new vehicle’s center display screen, software interface, audio system and associated features — all commonly known as its infotainment system — are as varied as the countless makes and models you’ll find on dealership lots. But when shopping, there’s no easy way to know if a particular vehicle’s infotainment system is innovative and user-friendly or slow to respond and counterintuitive. To help quicken your new-vehicle shopping process, the automotive experts have identified six of the best…

Wind and solar power are sometimes dinged for not producing electricity 24 hours a day, but one of the most abundant minerals on the planet, iron, could be key to changing that. Form Energy, founded in 2017, recently broke ground in West Virginia on its first commercial-scale factory to make iron-air batteries — totally different from lithium ion. The company’s goal is to one day help supply the electrical grid across the United States with renewable energy 24 hours a day and slash the need for burning coal and natural gas, polluting energy sources we currently rely on. CEO Mateo Jaramillo spoke about progress toward achieving this vision. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. Q: WHY DO YOU CONSIDER BATTERIES A CLIMATE SOLUTION? A: When I left…

Tyler Rake was clinically dead when we last saw him at the end of “Extraction,” tumbling over a bridge in Bangladesh with a fatal, burbling bullet wound to his neck. But death is no match for Netflix. Chris Hemsworth returns as the sad-sack, gun-for-hire Rake in “Extraction 2” and you’ll thank the giant streamer for such a nifty bit of resurrection because this franchise is pure cinematic adrenalin. The new movie comes two years after a surprisingly good first installment, which saw Rake intervene in a feud between two rival drug dealers, survive numerous double-crosses, ask things like “How many hostiles onsite?” and lob an inexhaustible number of grenades. How he survived it all stuns even his friends. Emerging from a coma in “Extraction 2,” he is stashed in a…

An American push to establish “green shipping corridors” is key to reducing carbon emissions from the shipping industry, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said this week while touring the port of Yokohama near Tokyo. Buttigieg was in Japan to attend a meeting over the weekend of transport ministers of the Group of Seven advanced economies, who reaffirmed a commitment to reducing emissions from the transport industry and to keeping navigation free and open in the Asia-Pacific region. The U.S. is seeking to develop and strengthen partnerships with “like-minded countries” to improve maritime security and keep shipping and aviation corridors open, he told in an interview. Emissions from maritime transport account for about 3% of total global emissions from human activities. Some 40% of Yokohama’s emissions come from its port. About…

Microsoft on Thursday will try to gain clearance to complete a $69 billion takeover of video game maker Activision Blizzard in a legal showdown with U.S. regulators that will reshape a pastime that’s bigger than the movie and music industries combined. The battle will pit Microsoft’s ambition to expand its video game imprint beyond its Xbox console against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s bid to block a deal that it contends will stifle competition and innovation to the detriment of consumers. It’s the latest twist in a deal that was announced 17 months ago. Both Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick are expected to testify at some point during five days of hearings in San Francisco before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley that will conclude…

Electric vehicle maker Rivian says it will follow General Motors and Ford and join Tesla’s charging network next year. The startup truck, SUV and delivery van maker says Tuesday that like GM and Ford, it also will adopt Tesla’s charging connector, another step toward making it the industry standard. Existing Rivian vehicles will need an adapter to link to a Tesla charger. But Rivian says vehicles manufactured in 2025 and beyond will come standard with a Tesla charging port. It is another domino to fall as the auto industry considers switching to Tesla’s connector, which it calls the North American Charging Standard. At present, nearly all automakers other than Tesla use what is called a CCS connector developed with the Society of Automotive Engineers. Tesla’s Superchargers are coveted by other…

The corporate parent of Facebook and Instagram plans to open a digital gateway for kids as young as 10 years old to enter virtual reality through the Meta Quest headset, despite rising concerns about children spending too much time on social media. Meta Platforms, which oversees a social media empire created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, disclosed it will lower the minimum age for a Quest account from 13 years old to 10 years old in a blog post. The Menlo Park, California, company framed the change coming later this year as a family-friendly way for more people to explore artificial realms that Zuckerberg touts as the “metaverse.” The move to lure preteens into a virtual world filled with digital avatars and other technological fabrications comes just weeks after U.S.…

President Joe Biden convened a group of technology leaders on Tuesday to debate what he called the “risks and enormous promises” of artificial intelligence. The Biden administration is seeking to figure out how to regulate the emergent field of AI, looking for ways to nurture its potential for economic growth and national security and protect against its potential dangers. “We’ll see more technological change in the next 10 years that we saw in the last 50 years,” Biden said as the meeting with eight technology experts from academia and advocacy groups kicked off. “AI is already driving that change,” Biden said. The sudden emergence of AI chatbot ChatGPT and other tools has jumpstarted investment in the sector. AI tools are able to craft human-like text, music, images and computer code.…

For the first time, U.S. regulators this week approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves. The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates. The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste. “Instead of all of that land and all of that…

European Union consumer protection groups urged regulators this week to investigate the type of artificial intelligence underpinning systems like ChatGPT, citing risks that leave people vulnerable and the delay before the bloc’s groundbreaking AI regulations take effect. In a coordinated effort, 13 watchdog groups wrote to their national consumer, data protection, competition and product safety authorities warning them about a range of concerns around generative artificial intelligence. A transatlantic coalition of consumer groups also wrote to U.S. President Joe Biden asking him to take action to protect consumers from possible harms caused by generative AI. Europe has led the world in efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, which gained urgency with the rise of a new breed of artificial intelligence that gives AI chatbots like ChatGPT the power to generate text,…

Math and reading scores among America’s 13-year-olds fell to their lowest levels in decades, with math scores plunging by the largest margin ever recorded, according to the results of a federal test known as the nation’s report card. The results, released this week, are the latest measure of the deep learning setbacks incurred during the pandemic. While earlier testing revealed the magnitude of America’s learning loss, the latest test casts light on the persistence of those setbacks, dimming hopes of swift academic recovery. More than two years after most students returned to in-person class, there are still “worrisome signs about student achievement,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the federal Education Department. “The ‘green shoots’ of academic recovery that we had…

“Let’s do things differently this time.” Those are the first words you hear at the beginning of this month’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” an otherworldly meditation on multiple realities and how our lives might unfold. The message is clear from the get-go: We have choices. Things could be malleable. You are you, sure. But wait — you might also be you and you and you. The world is a stressful, sometimes lonely place — and more so at a moment when “It wasn’t supposed to be this way” has become a not-uncommon mantra. But what if things could turn out another way? What if, somewhere, they had? Enter the realm of the multiverse and alternate realities, one of the most glorified canvases in popular culture’s recent years — and a…

Gannett has filed a civil lawsuit against Google and its parent company Alphabet, claiming that they unlawfully hold monopolies in the advertising technology tools that publishers and advertisers use to buy and sell online ad space. The largest U.S. newspaper publisher by total daily circulation alleges in the suit that Google controls how publishers sell their ad slots and forces them to sell an increasing amount of ad space to Google at lower prices. This in turn results in less revenue for publishers and Google’s ad-tech rivals and more money for Google. In January the Justice Department and eight states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, seeking to shatter its alleged monopoly on the entire ecosystem of online advertising as a hurtful burden to advertisers, consumers and even the U.S.…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance have reached an agreement in court that lets the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange continue to operate in the United States as it battles SEC fraud charges. Under a consent order filed last weekend, the defendants in the June 5 lawsuit agreed to repatriate all assets held for the benefit of Binance’s U.S. trading customers. The SEC alleges Binance broke U.S. law by operating as an unregistered securities exchange. It filed similar charges against the world’s other top cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, nearly simultaneously. But Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, face additional charges of diverting customer funds- concealing the fact that it was commingling billions of dollars in investor assets and sending them to a third party that Zhao also owned. As a…

The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon for what it called a years-long effort to enroll consumers without consent into its Prime program and making it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions. In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the agency accused Amazon of using deceptive designs, known as “dark patterns,” to deceive consumers into enrolling in the program. It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions — and the button didn’t clearly state it was also enrolling them into Prime. The regulatory agency, which is led by Big Tech critic Chair Lina Khan, also alleged…

After years of breakneck growth, China’s security and surveillance industry is now focused on shoring up its vulnerabilities to the United States and other outside actors, worried about risks posed by hackers, advances in artificial intelligence and pressure from rival governments. The renewed emphasis on self-reliance, combating fraud and hardening systems against hacking was on display at the recent Security China exhibition in Beijing, illustrating just how difficult it will be to get Beijing and Washington to cooperate even as researchers warn that humankind faces common risks from AI. The show took place just days after China’s ruling Communist Party warned officials of the risks posed by artificial intelligence. Looming over the four-day meet: China’s biggest geopolitical rival, the United States. Americandeveloped AI chatbot ChatGPT was a frequent topic of…