Author: Sellbiz

More people work from home in Colorado, while Mississippi has the lowest percentage of teleworkers …

In a move that may soon be replicated elsewhere, the Gila River Indian Community recently signed an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put solar panels over a stretch of irrigation canal on its land south of Phoenix. It will be the first project of its kind in the United States to break ground, according to the tribe’s press release. “This was a historic moment here for the community but also for the region and across Indian Country,” said Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter. The first phase, set to be completed in 2025, will cover 1,000 feet of canal and generate one megawatt of electricity that the tribe will use to irrigate crops, including feed for livestock, cotton and grains. The idea is simple: install solar panels over canals in sunny, water-scarce regions where they reduce evaporation and make renewable electricity. “We’re proud to be leaders in water conservation, and this project is going to do just that,” Lewis said, noting the significance of a Native, sovereign, tribal nation leading on the technology. A study by the University of California, Merced estimated that 63 billion gallons of water could be saved annually by covering California’s 4,000 miles of canals. More than 100 climate advocacy groups are advocating for just that. Researchers believe that much of the installed solar canopies would additionally generate a significant amount of electricity. UC Merced wants to hone its initial …

Microsoft snapped up Sam Altman and another architect of OpenAI for a new venture after their sudden departures shocked the artificial intelligence world, leaving the newly installed CEO of the ChatGPT maker to paper over tensions by vowing to investigate Altman’s firing. The developments Monday come after a weekend of drama and speculation about how the power dynamics would shake out at OpenAI, whose chatbot kicked off the generative AI era by producing human-like text, images, video and music. It ended with former Twitch leader Emmett Shear taking over as OpenAI’s interim chief executive and Microsoft announcing it was hiring Altman and OpenAI co-founder and former President Greg Brockman to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team. Despite the rift between the key players behind ChatGPT and the company they helped build, both Shear and Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said they are committed to their partnership. Microsoft invested billions of dollars in the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems. Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “extremely excited” to bring on the former executives of OpenAI and looked “forward to getting to know” Shear and the rest of the management team. In a reply on X, Altman said “the mission continues,” while Brockman posted, “We are going to build something new & it will be incredible.” OpenAI said Friday that Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the …

As the 2024 U.S. presidential race begins to ramp up, some contenders are already using artificial intelligence to generate promotional videos, some of which blur the lines between what is real and what is not. Karina Bafradzhian has the story. VOA footage by Andrey Degtyarev. …

Indigenous rangers in northern Australia have started managing herds of feral animals from space. In the largest project of its kind in Australia, the so-called Space Cows project involves tagging and then tracking a thousand wild cattle and buffalo via satellite. Water buffalo were imported into Australia’s Northern Territory in the 19th century as working animals and meat for remote settlements. When those communities were abandoned, the animals were released into the wild. Their numbers have grown, and feral buffaloes can cause huge environmental damage. In wetlands, they move along pathways called swim channels, which have caused salt water to flow into freshwater plains. This has led to the degradation and loss of large areas of paperbark forest and natural waterholes, as well as spreading weeds.   Under the so-called Space Cows program, feral cattle and buffaloes are being rounded up, often by helicopter, tied to trees, and fitted with solar-powered tags that can be tracked by satellite. Scientists say the real-time data will be critical to controlling and predicting the movement of the feral herds, which are notorious for trashing the landscape. Most feral buffalo are found on Aboriginal land, and researchers are working closely with Indigenous rangers. They carry out sporadic buffalo culls, and there are hopes that First Nations communities can benefit economically from well-managed feral herds. The technology will allow Indigenous rangers to predict where cattle and buffalo are going and cull them or fence off important cultural or environmental sites.  The data will help rangers …

Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for relief — as soon as possible — from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods. “Please regulate AI. I’m scared,” wrote a podcaster concerned about his voice being replicated by AI in one of thousands of letters recently submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office. Technology companies, by contrast, are largely happy with the status quo that has enabled them to gobble up published works to make their AI systems better at mimicking what humans do. The nation’s top copyright official hasn’t yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she’s listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text. “We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,” said Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. register of copyrights, in an interview. “Every one of them is being read by a human being, not a computer. And I myself am reading a large part of them.” What’s at stake? Perlmutter directs the U.S. Copyright Office, which registered more than 480,000 copyrights last year covering millions of individual works but is increasingly being asked to register works that are AI-generated. So far, copyright claims for fully machine-generated content have been soundly rejected because copyright laws are designed to protect works of human authorship. But, Perlmutter asks, as humans feed content into AI systems and give …

Advertisers are fleeing social media platform X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with billionaire owner Elon Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. IBM said this week that it stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis — a fresh setback as the platform, formerly known as Twitter, tries to win back big brands and their ad dollars, X’s main source of revenue. The liberal advocacy group Media Matters said in a report Thursday that ads from Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal’s Bravo network and Comcast also were placed next to antisemitic material on X. “IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the company said in a statement. Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal and Comcast didn’t respond immediately to requests seeking comment on their next steps. The European Union’s executive branch said separately Friday it is pausing advertising on X and other social media platforms, in part because of a surge in hate speech. Later in the day, Disney, Lionsgate and Paramount Global also said they were suspending or pausing advertising on X. Musk sparked outcry this week with his own tweets responding to a user who accused Jews of hating white people and professing indifference to antisemitism. “You have said the actual truth,” Musk tweeted in a reply …

Leaders of the union representing Hollywood actors announced a tentative deal recently with film and television studios to end a strike that started in July. It includes pay raises, streaming bonuses for actors, and the industry’s first protections against the use of artificial intelligence. From Los Angeles, Genia Dulot has our story. …

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday granted Elon Musk’s SpaceX a license to launch the company’s second test flight of its next-generation Starship and heavy-lift rocket from Texas, the agency said.  SpaceX said it was targeting Friday for a launch, saying a two-hour launch window opens at 7 a.m. Central Time (1300 GMT) and that local residents “may hear a loud noise” during the rocket’s ascent toward space.  “The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency, which oversees commercial launch sites, said in a statement.  SpaceX’s first attempt to send Starship to space was in April, when the rocket exploded mid-air four minutes after a liftoff that pulverized the company’s launchpad and flung sand and concrete chunks for miles.  Though Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and founder, hailed the Starship launch attempt as exceeding his expectations, it fell far short of its overall test objectives to reach space, complete nearly a full revolution around Earth, and reenter the atmosphere for a splashdown off a Hawaiian coast.  First the moon, eventually Mars Starship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 120 meters and designed to be fully reusable, represents SpaceX’s next-generation workhorse rocket system capable of ferrying some 150 tons of satellites into space. Plans also call for the rocket system to be used to carry crews of humans to the moon, and eventually Mars.  The rocket is crucial for SpaceX’s increasingly dominant launch business. NASA, under a roughly $4 billion development contract with …

Nepal’s government decided to ban the popular social media app TikTok, saying Monday it was disrupting “social harmony” in the country. The announcement was made following a Cabinet meeting. Foreign Minister Narayan Prakash Saud said the app would be banned immediately. “The government has decided to ban TikTok as it was necessary to regulate the use of the social media platform that was disrupting social harmony, goodwill and flow of indecent materials,” Saud said. He said that to make social media platforms accountable, the government has asked the companies to register and open a liaison office in Nepal, pay taxes and abide by the country’s laws and regulations. It wasn’t clear what triggered the ban or if TikTok had refused to comply with Nepal’s requests. The company did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, has faced scrutiny in several countries because of concerns that Beijing could use the app to harvest user data or advance its interests. Countries including the United States, Britain and New Zealand have banned the app on government phones despite TikTok repeatedly denying that it has ever shared data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked. Nepal has banned all pornographic sites in 2018. …

Several major Australian ports are resuming operations after shutting down due to a cyberattack. The ports are run by DP World Australia, one of the country’s biggest logistics companies. Authorities have not said who might be to blame. The shutdown of several terminals followed a cyberattack on Australia’s second largest port operator. DP World Australia said it was aware of malicious activity inside its computer network last Friday and shut down its systems in response. The logistics company handles about 40% of all freight into and out of Australia. Terminals in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Fremantle in Western Australia have been affected, leaving cargo and containers stranded on the docks. The specific nature of the intrusion has not been made public, but experts have suggested that hackers would have demanded a ransom. Authorities say that finding out who is responsible will take time. Australia’s National Cyber Security coordinator says the flow of goods into and out of the country is likely to be disrupted for days. Authorities have said a national crisis management response used during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been activated in response to the breach. The home affairs and cyber security minister, Clare O’Neil, told local media Monday that efforts are being made to ensure the company’s computer network can safely be reactivated. “DP World have been working with government to try to resolve this and in ways that will make sure that this does not impact as much as possible on Australians. It does show how vulnerable …

Russia plans to block certain Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and protocols that are deemed by a commission of experts to pose a threat, state news agency RIA reported, citing correspondence from the digital ministry. Demand for VPN services soared after Russia restricted access to some Western social media after President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022. A 2017 Russian law obliged providers of VPN technology to cooperate with the Russian authorities and to restrict access to content banned by Russia or be banned themselves. Many VPN services remain widely in use throughout Russia and there has been a public debate among lawmakers about how much further to go in blocking VPN services that still allow access to banned information but also a host of other information. RIA quoted a reply from the digital ministry to an address by lawmaker Anton Tkachev who had raised concerns about what he said were plans to essentially block all VPNs, a step he said would increase pressure on Russians by cutting them off from using some simple household appliances. “On the basis of a decision by the expert commission… the filtration of certain VPN services and VPN protocols can be carried out on the mobile communication network for foreign traffic which is identified as a threat,” RIA quoted the ministry as saying. RIA said that the ministry said that circumvention of restrictions on certain information was considered a threat. …

The Australian government on Sunday described as “serious and ongoing” a cybersecurity incident that forced ports operator DP World Australia to suspend operations at ports in several states since Friday. DP World Australia, which manages nearly half of the goods that flow in and out of the country, said it was looking into possible data breaches as well as testing systems “crucial for the resumption of normal operations and regular freight movement.” The breach halted operations at container terminals in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Western Australia’s Fremantle since Friday. “The cyber incident at DP World is serious and ongoing,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. A DP World spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on when normal operations would resume. The company, part of Dubai’s state-owned DP World, is one of a handful of stevedore industry players in the country. The Australian Federal Police said they were investigating the incident but declined to elaborate. Late Saturday, National Cyber Security Coordinator Darren Goldie, appointed this year in response to several major data breaches, said the “interruption” was “likely to continue for a number of days and will impact the movement of goods into and out of the country.” In the Asia-Pacific region, DP World says it employs more than 7,000 people and has ports and terminals in 18 locations. …

Internet access across the war-torn nation of Yemen collapsed Friday and stayed down for hours, with officials later blaming unannounced “maintenance work” for an outage that followed attacks by the country’s Houthi rebels on both Israel and the U.S. The outage began early Friday and halted all traffic at YemenNet, the country’s main provider for about 10 million users which is now controlled by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis. Both NetBlocks, a group tracking internet outages, and the internet services company CloudFlare reported the outage. The two did not offer a cause for the outage. “Data shows that the issue has impacted connectivity at a national level as well,” CloudFlare said. Several hours later, some service was restored, though access remained troubled. In a statement to the Houthi-controlled SABA state news agency, Yemen’s Public Telecom Corp. blamed the outage on maintenance. “Internet service will return after the completion of the maintenance work,” the statement quoted an unidentified official as saying. An earlier outage occurred in January 2022 when the Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis in Yemen bombed a telecommunications building in the Red City port city of Hodeida. There was no immediate word of a similar attack. The undersea FALCON cable carries the internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. The FALCON cable has another landing in Yemen’s far eastern port of Ghaydah as well, but the majority of Yemen’s population lives in its west along the Red Sea. GCX, the company that operates the cable, …

An industrial robot grabbed and crushed a worker to death at a vegetable packaging plant in South Korea, police said Thursday, as they investigated whether the machine was defective or improperly designed. Police said early evidence suggests that human error was more likely to blame rather than problems with the machine itself. But the incident still triggered public concern about the safety of industrial robots and the false sense of security they may give to humans working nearby in a country that increasingly relies on such machines to automate its industries. Police in the southern county of Goseong said the man died of head and chest injuries Tuesday evening after he was snatched and pressed against a conveyor belt by the machine’s robotic arms. Police did not identify the man but said he was an employee of a company that installs industrial robots and was sent to the plant to examine whether the machine was working properly. South Korea has had other accidents involving industrial robots in recent years. In March, a manufacturing robot crushed and seriously injured a worker who was examining it at an auto parts factory in Gunsan. Last year, a robot installed near a conveyor belt fatally crushed a worker at a milk factory in Pyeongtaek. The machine that caused the death on Tuesday was one of two pick-and-place robots used at the facility, which packages bell peppers and other vegetables exported to other Asian countries, police said. Such machines are common in South Korea’s agricultural …

For farmers in the Midwest United States, emerging autonomous technology could reduce costs and increase efficiency in the agricultural supply chain. Kane Farabaugh shows the promise of the technology on the farm in this edition of LogOn.  …

Elon Musk unveiled details Saturday of his new AI tool called “Grok,” which can access X in real time and will be initially available to the social media platform’s top tier of subscribers. Musk, the tycoon behind Tesla and SpaceX, said the link-up with X, formerly known as Twitter, is “a massive advantage over other models” of generative AI. Grok “loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way,” Musk quipped, adding a laughing emoji to his post. “Grok” comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1961 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, and means to understand something thoroughly and intuitively. “As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers,” Musk said. The social network that Musk bought a year ago launched the Premium+ plan last week for $16 per month, with benefits like no ads. The billionaire started xAI in July after hiring researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Tesla and the University of Toronto. Since OpenAI’s generative AI tool ChatGPT exploded on the scene a year ago, the technology has been an area of fierce competition between tech giants Microsoft and Google, as well as Meta and start-ups like Anthropic and Stability AI. Musk is one of the world’s few investors with deep enough pockets to compete with OpenAI, Google or Meta on AI. Building an AI model on the same scale as those companies comes at an enormous expense in computing power, infrastructure …

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular rise and fall in the cryptocurrency industry — a journey that included his testimony before Congress, a Super Bowl advertisement and dreams of a future run for president — hit rock bottom Thursday when a New York jury convicted him of fraud in a scheme that cheated customers and investors of at least $10 billion. After the monthlong trial, jurors rejected Bankman-Fried’s claim during four days on the witness stand in Manhattan federal court that he never committed fraud or meant to cheat customers before FTX, once the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy a year ago. “His crimes caught up to him. His crimes have been exposed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon told the jury of the onetime billionaire just before they were read the law by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and began deliberations. Sassoon said Bankman-Fried turned his customers’ accounts into his “personal piggy bank” as up to $14 billion disappeared. She urged jurors to reject Bankman-Fried’s insistence when he testified over three days that he never committed fraud or plotted to steal from customers, investors and lenders and didn’t realize his companies were at least $10 billion in debt until October 2022. Bankman-Fried was required to stand and face the jury as guilty verdicts on all seven counts were read. He kept his hands clasped tightly in front of him. When he sat down after the reading, he kept his head tilted down for several minutes. After the judge set a …

World leaders have agreed on the importance of mitigating risks posed by rapid advancements in the emerging technology of artificial intelligence, at a U.K.-hosted safety conference. The inaugural AI Safety Summit, hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Bletchley Park, England, started Wednesday, with senior officials from 28 nations, including the United States and China, agreeing to work toward a “shared agreement and responsibility” about AI risks. Plans are in place for further meetings later this year in South Korea and France. Leaders, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, discussed each of their individual testing models to ensure the safe growth of AI. Thursday’s session included focused conversations among what the U.K. called a small group of countries “with shared values.” The leaders in the group came from the EU, the U.N., Italy, Germany, France and Australia. Some leaders, including Sunak, said immediate sweeping regulation is not the way forward, reflecting the view of some AI companies that fear excessive regulation could thwart the technology before it can reach its full potential. At at a press conference on Thursday, Sunak announced another landmark agreement by countries pledging to “work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.” The countries involved in the talks included the U.S., EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Canada and Australia. China did not participate in the second day of talks. The summit will conclude with …

India’s cybersecurity agency is investigating complaints of mobile phone hacking by senior opposition politicians who reported receiving warning messages from Apple, Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Vaishnaw was quoted in the Indian Express newspaper as saying Thursday that CERT-In, the computer emergency response team based in New Delhi, had started the probe, adding that “Apple confirmed it has received the notice for investigation.” A political aide to Vaishnaw and two officials in the federal home ministry told Reuters that all the cyber security concerns raised by the politicians were being scrutinized. There was no immediate comment from Apple about the investigation. This week, Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of trying to hack into opposition politicians’ mobile phones after some lawmakers shared screenshots on social media of a notification quoting the iPhone manufacturer as saying: “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID.” A senior minister from Modi’s government also said he had received the same notification on his phone. Apple said it did not attribute the threat notifications to “any specific state-sponsored attacker,” adding that “it’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected.” In 2021, India was rocked by reports that the government had used Israeli-made Pegasus spyware to snoop on scores of journalists, activists and politicians, including Gandhi. The government has declined to reply to questions about whether …

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris says leaders have “a moral, ethical and societal duty” to protect humans from dangers posed by artificial intelligence, and is pushing for a global road map during an AI summit in London. Analysts agree and say one element needs to be constant: human oversight. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Washington. …

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is bringing together government officials, academics and tech moguls from around the world for a two-day AI Safety Summit Wednesday and Thursday at Bletchley Park, the once top-secret headquarters of World War II-era codebreakers. The inaugural symposium is a moment for key players in global affairs to spar over the future of frontier AI, specifically whether the technology represents a danger to humanity and what can be done to mitigate that potential threat. Frontier AI is a broad term for general-purpose systems that can operate on the very cutting-edge of today’s software. The 100-person guest list includes Elon Musk, the richest man on earth; Sam Altman, the brain behind ChatGPT; and a host of prominent professors and researchers. World leaders are among those in attendance, including U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris; China’s Vice Minister of Science and Technology Wu Zhaohui; U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. China, a frontrunner in AI development, has a key role in the forum as Sunak attempts to position himself as a middleman between East and West. The decision to invite China was met with mixed reactions at home in the British Parliament and abroad. Jane Hartley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, made clear that the White House had no part in bringing China to the table. “This is the U.K. invitation, this is not the U.S.,” Hartley told Reuters. “When the U.K. government was talking to us, we said it’s your …

Drivers in Malawi are getting an opportunity to purchase electric vehicles through a local startup company. The handful of buyers so far say they no longer have to struggle daily to get fuel at pump stations. Lameck Masina reports from Blantyre. …

The world’s first major summit on artificial intelligence (AI) safety opens in Britain Wednesday, with political and tech leaders set to discuss possible responses to the society-changing technology. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will all attend the two-day conference, which will focus on growing fears about the implications of so-called frontier AI. The release of the latest models has offered a glimpse into the potential of AI, but has also prompted concerns around issues ranging from job losses to cyber-attacks and the control that humans actually have over the systems. Sunak, whose government initiated the gathering, said in a speech last week that his “ultimate goal” was “to work towards a more international approach to safety where we collaborate with partners to ensure AI systems are safe before they are released. “We will push hard to agree the first ever international statement about the nature of these risks,” he added, drawing comparisons to the approach taken to climate change. But London has reportedly had to scale back its ambitions around ideas such as launching a new regulatory body amid a perceived lack of enthusiasm. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is one of the only world leaders, and only one from the G7, attending the conference. Elon Musk is due to appear, but it is not clear yet whether he will be physically at the summit in Bletchley Park, north of London, where top British …