An anonymous reader shares a report: Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November.

A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back. Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025. Both releases will show off Broadcom's plan to make the package easier to implement and operate, and hopefully assuage customer concerns about price rises. More on that later. First, the updates. One release is currently scheduled to debut in July, according to Paul Turner, vice-president of product management and the leader of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. The release will allow use of a single license key for all the components of Cloud Foundation, improve OAuth support as a step towards single sign-on across the VMware range, and add an NSX overlay that will allow implementation of software-defined networks without requiring IP address changes.

Turner explained those features as exemplifying the sort of simplification VMware by Broadcom thinks is needed to make Cloud Foundation easier to implement. A bigger release Turner hopes will debut in early 2025 -- though he would commit to only a H1 launch -- will be a "unified" release in which more of VCF is better integrated. Today, Turner admitted, VMware customers may have implemented vSphere and the Aria management suite, but might still need or choose discrete storage for each. Future VCF releases will increasingly unify the products so that silos aren't needed. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president for VMware by Broadcom's cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing, told The Register the release will be called VCF 9 and will represent "the fullest expression of Broadcom's vision for product integration." "When customers deploy VCF there are seams -- when they deploy networking and storage, they feel like they do not have a unified developer or operator experience," Shenoy admitted. VCF 9 will tidy that sort of thing up and make the process "seamless." Buyers can also expect improved log file analysis, the ability to acquire templates from a marketplace and adopt them as PaaS, and plenty more.

Turner and Shenoy told The Register that the two releases are hoped to make VCF adoption easier, and by doing so demonstrate the value of the bundle. Today, they argue, would-be hybrid cloud adopters using VCF are in reality integrating siloed products -- which doesn't prove the value of the vStack well. VCF 9's planned integrations, they argue, should demonstrate the power of the stack and the wisdom of Broadcom's decision to create a VMware unit dedicated to VCF. That team, they explained, means developers for each of the bundle's components work together on a unified experience, rather than to create their own product. It may also demonstrate the value of VMware by Broadcom's new licenses – which some users have complained are considerably more expensive now that subscriptions are required, and products are only sold in bundles. Sylvain Cazard, president of Broadcom Software for Asia-Pacific, told The Register that complaints about higher prices are unwarranted since customers using at least two components of VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation will end up paying less. He also noted that the new pricing includes support, which VMware didn't include previously.

As a department of America's federal Health agency, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for public health rules, including prescription medicines. And the FDA "has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19," they confirmed to CNN this week. "The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19."

But there was also a lawsuit. In "one of its more popular pandemic-era social media campaigns," the agency tweeted out "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it." The post attracted nearly 106,000 likes — and over 46,000 reposts, and was followed by another post on Instagram. "Stop it with the #ivermectin. It's not authorized for treating #COVID."

Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that the posts triggered a "groundless" lawsuit: It was those latter two lines that exercised three physicians who had been prescribing ivermectin for patients. They sued the FDA in 2022, asserting that its advisory illegally interfered with the practice of medicine — specifically with their ability to continue prescribing the drug. A federal judge in Texas threw out their case, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals — the source of a series of chuckleheaded antigovernment rulings in recent years — reinstated it last year, returning it to the original judge for reconsideration.

Now the FDA has settled the case by agreeing to delete the horse post and two similar posts from its accounts on the social media platforms X, LinkedIn and Facebook. The agency also agreed to retire a consumer advisory titled "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19." In defending its decision, the FDA said it "has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old."

That sounds reasonable enough, but it's a major blunder. It leaves on the books the 5th Circuit's adverse ruling, in which a panel of three judges found that the FDA's advisory crossed the line from informing consumers, which they said is all right, to recommending that consumers take some action, which they said is not all right... That's a misinterpretation of the law and the FDA's actions, according to Dorit Rubinstein Reiss of UC College of the Law in San Francisco. "The FDA will seek to make recommendations against the misuse of products in the future, and having that decision on the books will be used to litigate against it," she observed after the settlement.
"A survey by Boston University and the University of Michigan estimated that Medicare and private insurers had wasted $130 million on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID in 2021 alone."

The Record reports: Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge who is widely recognized for his contributions to computing, passed away at home on Thursday according to friends and colleagues who have been in touch with his family and the University.

Anderson, who also taught at Edinburgh University, was one of the most respected academic engineers and computer scientists of his generation. His research included machine learning, cryptographic protocols, hardware reverse engineering and breaking ciphers, among other topics. His public achievements include, but are by no means limited to, being awarded the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal in 2015, and publishing several editions of the Security Engineering textbook.
Anderson's security research made headlines throughout his career, with his name appearing in over a dozen Slashdot stories...

• 2023: Researchers Warn of 'Model Collapse' As AI Trains On AI-Generated Content

• 2021: 'Trojan Source' Bug Threatens the Security of All Code

• 2015: Factory Reset On Millions of Android Devices Doesn't Wipe Storage

• 2012: UK Web Snooping Plan Invades Privacy, Despite Claims To the Contrary

• 2010: Why "Verified By Visa" System Is Insecure

• 2008: Researchers Expose New Credit Card Fraud Risk

• 2006: "Security Engineering" Is Now Online. [The link from that 2006 post still works. Slashdot called Anderson's book "arguably the best information security book ever written" in one of two reviews, published in 2002 and 2010.]

• 2002:Security of Open vs. Closed Source Software.

• 2002: Analyzing Palladium

My favorite story? UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication.

"Cambridge University has resisted the demands and has sent a response to the bankers explaining why they will keep the page online..."

Victoria Song reports via The Verge: When Gmail launched with a goofy press release 20 years ago next week, many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gargantuan 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive quantity in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fools' Day, portending some kind of prank. But soon, invites to Gmail's very real beta started going out -- and they became a must-have for a certain kind of in-the-know tech fan. At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids' table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn't know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever.

Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail did revolutionize email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users -- about 1/7 of the global population -- and these days, it's a practical necessity to do anything online. It often feels like Gmail has always been here and always will be. But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's champing at the bit to open up Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate how we communicate online. What was once a game-changing tool sometimes feels like it's been sidelined. In another 20 years, will Gmail still be this central to our lives? Or will it -- and email -- be a thing of the past?

Lyle Smith reports via StorageReview.com: Proxmox has introduced a new import wizard for Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), aiming to simplify the migration process for importing VMware ESXi VMs. This new feature comes at an important time in the industry, as it aims to ease the transition for these organizations looking to move away from VMware's vSphere due to high renewal costs.

The new import wizard is integrated into Proxmox VE's existing storage plugin system, allowing for direct integration into the platform's API and web-based user interface. It offers users the ability to import VMware ESXi VMs in their entirety, translating most of the original VM's configuration settings to Proxmox VE's configuration model (all while minimizing downtime). Currently, the import wizard is in a technical preview state, having been added during the Proxmox VE 8.2 development cycle. Although it is still under active development, early reports suggest the wizard is stable and holds considerable promise for future enhancements, including the planned addition of support for other import sources like OVF/OVA files. [...]

This tool represents Proxmox's commitment to providing accessible, open-source virtualization solutions. By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust (a safe, fast, and modern programming language ideal for system-level tasks), Proxmox aims to ensure that this new feature can be integrated smoothly into its broader ecosystem.

Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Cloud server provider Vultr has rapidly revised its terms-of-service after netizens raised the alarm over broad clauses that demanded the "perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free" rights to customer "content." The red tape was updated in January, as captured by the Internet Archive, and this month users were asked to agree to the changes by a pop-up that appeared when using their web-based Vultr control panel. That prompted folks to look through the terms, and there they found clauses granting the US outfit a "worldwide license ... to use, reproduce, process, adapt ... modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit, and distribute" user content.

It turned out these demands have been in place since before the January update; customers have only just noticed them now. Given Vultr hosts servers and storage in the cloud for its subscribers, some feared the biz was giving itself way too much ownership over their stuff, all in this age of AI training data being put up for sale by platforms. In response to online outcry, largely stemming from Reddit, Vultr in the past few hours rewrote its ToS to delete those asserted content rights. CEO J.J. Kardwell told The Register earlier today it's a case of standard legal boilerplate being taken out of context. The clauses were supposed to apply to customer forum posts, rather than private server content, and while, yes, the terms make more sense with that in mind, one might argue the legalese was overly broad in any case.

"We do not use user data," Kardwell stressed to us. "We never have, and we never will. We take privacy and security very seriously. It's at the core of what we do globally." [...] According to Kardwell, the content clauses are entirely separate to user data deployed in its cloud, and are more aimed at one's use of the Vultr website, emphasizing the last line of the relevant fine print: "... for purposes of providing the services to you." He also pointed out that the wording has been that way for some time, and added the prompt asking users to agree to an updated ToS was actually spurred by unrelated Microsoft licensing changes. In light of the controversy, Vultr vowed to remove the above section to "simplify and further clarify" its ToS, and has indeed done so. In a separate statement, the biz told The Register the removal will be followed by a full review and update to its terms of service. "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell added. "We're very focused on being responsive to the community and the concerns people have and we believe the strongest thing we can do to demonstrate that there is no bad intent here is to remove it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Do you remember Facebook Watch? Me neither. Mark Zuckerberg's short-lived streaming service never really got off the ground, but court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim "Watch" was kneecapped starting in 2018 to protect Zuckerberg's advertising relationship with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship," said plaintiffs in filings (PDF) made public on Saturday. "It is no great mystery how this close partnership developed, and who was its steward: from 2011-2019, Netflix's then-CEO Hastings sat on Facebook's board and personally directed the companies' relationship"

The filings detail Hastings' uncomfortably close relationship with Meta's upper management, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. During these years, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privileged analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals. This gave Facebook greater dominance in its all-important ad division, plaintiffs allege, so the company was fine to retreat from Netflix's streaming territory by shuttering Watch. In 2017, Facebook Watch began signing deals to populate its streaming service with original TV Shows from movie stars such as Bill Murray. A year later, the service attempted to license the popular '90s TV show Dawson's Creek. Facebook Watch had meaningful reach on the home screen of the social media platform, and an impressive budget as well. Facebook and Netflix appeared ready to butt heads in the streaming world, and the Netflix cofounder found himself in the middle as a Facebook board member. [...]

Netflix was a large advertiser to Facebook, and plaintiffs allege Zuckerberg shuttered its promising Watch platform for the sake of the greater advertising business. Zuckerberg personally emailed the head of Facebook Watch in May of 2018, Fidji Simo, to tell her their budget was being slashed by $750 million, just two years after Watch's launch, according to court filings. The sudden pivot meant Facebook was now dismantling the streaming business it had spent the last two years growing. During this time period, Netflix increased its ad spend on Facebook to roughly $150 million a year and allegedly entered into agreements for increased data analytics. By early 2019, the ad spend increased to roughly $200 million a year. Hastings left Facebook's board later in 2019.
UPDATE: Meta (Again) Denies Netflix Read Facebook Users' Private Messenger Messages.

Tech companies are serving up million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock-vesting schedules and offers to poach entire engineering teams to draw people with expertise and experience in the kind of generative AI that is powering ChatGPT and other humanlike bots. They are competing against each other and against startups vying to be the next big thing to unseat the giants. From a report: The offers stand out even by the industry's relatively lavish past standards of outsize pay and perks. And the current AI talent shortage stands out for another reason: It is happening as layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech and as companies have been reallocating resources to invest more in covering the enormous cost of developing AI technology.

"There is a secular shift in what talents we're going after," says Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks. "We have a glut of people on one side and a shortage on the other." Databricks, a data storage and management startup, doesn't have a problem finding software engineers. But when it comes to candidates who have trained large language models, or LLMs, from scratch or can help solve vexing problems in AI, such as hallucinations, Rao says there might be only a couple of hundred people out there who are qualified.

Some of these hard-to-find, tier-one candidates can easily get total compensation packages of $1 million a year or more. Salespeople in AI are also in demand and hard to find. Selling at the beginning of a technology transition when things are changing rapidly requires a different skill set and depth of knowledge. Candidates with those skills are making around double what an enterprise software salesperson would. But that isn't the norm for most people working in AI, Rao says. For managerial roles in AI and machine learning, base-pay increases ranged from 5% to 11% from April 2022 to April 2023, according to a WTW survey of more than 1,500 employers. The base-pay increases of nonmanagerial roles ranged from 13% to 19% during the same period.

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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

Pi was calculated to 100 trillion decimal places in 2022 by a Google team lead by cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao.

But 2024's "pi day" saw a new announcement... After successfully breaking the speed record for calculating pi to 100 trillion digits last year, the team at StorageReview has taken it up a notch, revealing all the numbers of Pi up to 105 trillion digits! Spoiler: the 105 trillionth digit of Pi is 6!

Owner and Editor-in-Chief Brian Beeler led the team that used 36 Solidigm SSDs (nearly a petabyte) for their unprecedented capacity and reliability required to store the calculated digits of Pi. Although there is no practical application for this many digits, the exercise underscores the astounding capabilities of modern hardware and an achievement in computational and storage technology...

For an undertaking of this size, which took 75 days, the role of storage cannot be understated. "For the Pi computation, we're entirely restricted by storage, says Beeler. "Faster CPUs will help accelerate the math, but the limiting factor to many new world records is the amount of local storage in the box. For this run, we're again leveraging Solidigm D5-P5316 30.72TB SSDs to help us get a little over 1P flash in the system.

"These SSDs are the only reason we could break through the prior records and hit 105 trillion Pi digits."
"Leveraging a combination of open-source and proprietary software, the team at StorageReview optimized the algorithmic process to fully exploit the hardware's capabilities, reducing computational time and enhancing efficiency," Beeler says in the announcement.

There's a video on YouTube where the team discusses their effort.

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Adding caffeine can enhance the efficiency of fuel cells, reducing the need for platinum in electrodes and significantly reducing the cost of making them, according to researchers in Japan. [...] The study, published in the journal Communications Chemistry, concerns the catalysis process at the cathode of a fuel cell and making this reaction more efficient. Fuel cells work somewhat like batteries. They generate power by converting the chemical energy of a fuel (or electrolyte) and an oxidizing agent into electricity. This is typically hydrogen as a fuel and oxygen as an oxidizer. Unlike batteries with limited lifespans, fuel cells can generate power as long as fuel is supplied. The hydrogen undergoes oxidation at the anode, producing hydrogen ions and electrons. The ions move through the hydrogen electrolyte to the cathode, while the electrons flow through an external circuit, generating electricity. At the cathode, oxygen combines with the hydrogen ions and electrons, resulting in water as a by-product. However, this water impacts the performance of the fuel cell, reacting with the platinum (Pt) to form a layer of platinum hydroxide (PtOH) on the electrode and interfering with the catalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), according to the researchers.

To maintain efficient operation, fuel cells require a high Pt loading (greater platinum content), which significantly ups the costs of fuel cells. A quick look online found market prices for platinum of $29.98 per gram, or $932.61 per ounce, at the time of writing. The researchers found that adding caffeine can improve the ORR activity of platinum electrodes 11 fold, making the reaction more efficient. If you are wondering (as we were) how they came to be experimenting with this, the paper explains that modifying electrodes with hydrophobic material is known to be an effective method for enhancing ORR. Caffeine is less toxic than other hydrophobic substances, and it activates the hydrogen evolution and oxidation reactions of Pt nanoparticles and caffeine doped carbons. Got that?

Chiba University's work was led by Professor Nagahiro Hoshi at the Department of Applied Chemistry and Biotechnology. He explained that the researchers found a notable improvement in the electrode's ORR activity with an increase in caffeine concentration in the electrolyte. This forms a thin layer on the electrode's surface, effectively preventing the formation of PtOH, but the effect depends on the orientation of the platinum atoms on the electrode's surface. The paper refers to these as Pt(100), Pt(110) and Pt(111), with the latter two showing increased ORR activity, while there was no noticeable effect with Pt(100). The researchers do not explain if this latter effect might be a problem, but instead claim that their discovery has the potential to improve the designs of fuel cells and lead to more widespread adoption.

Ethereum has successfully completed a major software upgrade that should make using the blockchain network ecosystem cheaper. The update enables transactions that previously cost $1 on linked Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base to be executed for just a cent.

The Dencun upgrade, a combination of the "Deneb" and "Cancun" portions of the update, introduces a new data storage system for Ethereum. Currently, most Layer 2 blockchains store data on Ethereum, and because this data is stored permanently on every Ethereum node, storage costs often account for around 90% of Layer 2 expenses. These costs are typically passed on to applications, which in turn charge consumers. With Dencun, Layer 2s can now store data in a new type of repository called blobs, which will be cheaper as the data will only be stored for approximately 18 days.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video.

Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He's never been responsible for an accident. So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor. LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a "Risk Solutions" division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl's request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page "consumer disclosure report," which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn't have is where they had driven the car. On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt. LexisNexis analyzed that driving data to create a risk score "for insurers to use as one factor of many to create more personalized insurance coverage," according to a LexisNexis spokesman, Dean Carney. Eight insurance companies had requested information about Mr. Dahl from LexisNexis over the previous month. "It felt like a betrayal," Mr. Dahl said. "They're taking information that I didn't realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance." In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But "drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs," as Ford Motor put it in apatent application (PDF) that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry.

Sometimes this is happening with a driver's awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what's called usage-based insurance -- where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits -- it's easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people's driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis. Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers' permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read. Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature -- called OnStar Smart Driver -- and that their insurance rates went up as a result.

A recent survey found that academic organizations are failing to preserve digital material -- "including science paid for with taxpayer money," reports Ars Technica, highlighting the need for improved archiving standards and responsibilities in the digital age. From the report: The work was done by Martin Eve, a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL. But it also has a way of handling documents disappearing from their expected location, as might happen if a publisher went bankrupt. There are a set of what's called "dark archives" that the public doesn't have access to, but should contain copies of anything that's had a DOI assigned. If anything goes wrong with a DOI, it should trigger the dark archives to open access, and the DOI updated to point to the copy in the dark archive. For that to work, however, copies of everything published have to be in the archives. So Eve decided to check whether that's the case.

Using the Crossref database, Eve got a list of over 7 million DOIs and then checked whether the documents could be found in archives. He included well-known ones, like the Internet Archive at archive.org, as well as some dedicated to academic works, like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). The results were... not great. When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all. At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at least one archive, and over a quarter didn't appear to be in any of the archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have been archived or had incomplete records.)

The good news is that large academic publishers appear to be reasonably good about getting things into archives; most of the unarchived issues stem from smaller publishers. Eve acknowledges that the study has limits, primarily in that there may be additional archives he hasn't checked. There are some prominent dark archives that he didn't have access to, as well as things like Sci-hub, which violates copyright in order to make material from for-profit publishers available to the public. Finally, individual publishers may have their own archiving system in place that could keep publications from disappearing. The risk here is that, ultimately, we may lose access to some academic research.

Microsoft has abruptly pulled a feature from OneDrive that allows users to upload files to the cloud storage service directly from a URL. From a report: The feature turned up as a preview in 2021 and was intended for scenarios "where the file contents aren't available, or are expensive to transfer," according to Microsoft. It was particularly useful for mobile users, for whom uploading files directly through their apps could be costly. Much better to simply point OneDrive at a given URL and let it handle the upload itself.

However, the experimental feature never made it past the consumer version of OneDrive. It also didn't fit with Microsoft's "vision for OneDrive as a cloud storage service that syncs your files across devices." Indeed, the idea of hosing data into OneDrive from a remote source sits at odds with the file synchronization model being championed by Microsoft and conveniently available from macOS and Windows.

"Apple faces a proposed class action lawsuit alleging the company holds an illegal monopoly over digital storage for its customers," reports the Hill: The suit, filed Friday, claims "surgical" restraints prevent customers from effectively using any service except its iCloud storage system. iCloud is the only service that can host certain data from the company's phones, tablets and computers, including application data and device settings. Plaintiffs allege the practice has "unlawfully 'tied'" the devices and iCloud together... "As a result of this restraint, would-be cloud competitors are unable to offer Apple's device holders a full-service cloud-storage solution, or even a pale comparison."
The suit argues that there are "no technological or security justifications for this limitation on consumer choice," according to PC Magazine.

The class action's web site is arguing that "Consumers may have paid higher prices than they allegedly would have in a competitive market."

Microsoft is "delighted to introduce some useful new features" for its "Copilot Preview for Windows 11," according to a recent blog post.

TechRepublic adds that "most features will be enabled by default... rolling out from today until April 2024." Windows 11 users will be able to change system settings through prompts typed directly into Copilot in Windows, currently accessible in the Copilot Preview via an icon on the taskbar, or by pressing Windows + C. Microsoft Copilot will be able to perform the following actions:

- Turn on/off battery saver.
- Show device information.
- Show system information.
- Show battery information.
- Open storage page.
- Launch Live Captions.
- Launch Narrator.
- Launch Screen Magnifier.
- Open Voice Access page.
- Open Text size page.
- Open contrast themes page.
- Launch Voice input.
- Show available Wi-Fi network.
- Display IP Address.
- Show Available Storage.

The new third-party app integrations for Copilot will give Windows 11 users new ways to interact with various applications. For example, making business lunch reservations through OpenTable...

Other new AI features for Windows 11 rolling out today include a new, AI-powered Generative Erase tool, which sounds reminiscent of Google's Magic Eraser tool for Google Photos. Generative Erase allows users to remove unwanted objects or artifacts from their photos in the Photos app.

Likewise, Microsoft's video editing tool Clipchamp is receiving a Silence Removal tool, which functions much as the name implies  — it allows users to remove gaps in conversation or audio from a video clip.

Voice access is another focal point of Microsoft's latest Windows 11 update, detailed in a separate blog post by Windows Commercial Product Marketing Manager Harjit Dhaliwal. Users can now use voice controls to navigate between multiple displays, aided by number and grid overlays that provide easy switching between screens.
A Copilot icon has already started appearing in the taskbar of some Windows systems. If you Google "microsoft installs copilot preview windows," Google adds these helpful suggestions.

People also ask: Why is Copilot preview on my computer?

How do I get rid of Copilot preview on Windows 10?

"Apparently there was some sort of update..." writes one Windows users. "Anyway, there is a logo at the bottom of the screen that is distracting and I'd like to get rid of it."

Lifehacker has already published an article titled "How to Hide (or Disable) Copilot in Windows 11."

"Artificial intelligence is feeling harder and harder to avoid," it begins, "but you still have options."