An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centerpiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency. Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030. Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers. The scaling down of Prince Mohammed's most grandiose project was reported by Bloomberg, which said it had seen documents relating to the project.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian, with the caption: "The UK is hyperventilating about stories of shoplifting; though standing outside a shop and watching as a guy calmly gets off his bike, parks it, walks in and walks out with a pack of beer and cycles off -- and then seeing staff members rushing out -- was striking. So now it's throwing technical solutions at the problem..." From the report: The government is investing more than 55 million pounds in expanding facial recognition systems -- including vans that will scan crowded high streets -- as part of a renewed crackdown on shoplifting. The scheme was announced alongside plans for tougher punishments for serial or abusive shoplifters in England and Wales, including being forced to wear a tag to ensure they do not revisit the scene of their crime, under a new standalone criminal offense of assaulting a retail worker.

The new law, under which perpetrators could be sent to prison for up to six months and receive unlimited fines, will be introduced via an amendment to the criminal justice bill that is working its way through parliament. The change could happen as early as the summer. The government said it would invest 55.5 million pounds over the next four years. The plan includes 4 million pounds for mobile units that can be deployed on high streets using live facial recognition in crowded areas to identify people wanted by the police -- including repeat shoplifters. "This Orwellian tech has no place in Britain," said Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberties at campaign group Big Brother Watch. "Criminals should be brought to justice, but papering over the cracks of broken policing with Orwellian tech is not the solution. It is completely absurd to inflict mass surveillance on the general public under the premise of fighting theft while police are failing to even turn up to 40% of violent shoplifting incidents or to properly investigate many more serious crimes."

President Joe Biden said he is "considering" a request from Australia to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The BBC reports: The country's parliament recently passed a measure -- backed by PM Anthony Albanese -- calling for the return of Mr Assange to his native Australia. The US wants to extradite the 52-year-old from the UK on criminal charges over the leaking of military records. Mr Assange denies the charges, saying the leaks were an act of journalism. The president was asked about Australia's request on Wednesday and said: "We're considering it."

Mr Assange, 52, is fighting extradition in the UK courts. The extradition was put on hold in March after London's High Court said the United States must provide assurances he would not face the death penalty. The High Court is due to evaluate any responses from the US authorities at the end of May. The measure passed the Australian parliament in February. Mr Albanese told MPs: "People will have a range of views about Mr Assange's conduct... But regardless of where people stand, this thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely."

A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force AI companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. From a report: The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.

The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies.

"AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections," Schiff said in a statement. Whether major AI companies worth billions have made illegal use of copyrighted works is increasingly the source of litigation and government investigation. Schiff's bill would not ban AI from training on copyrighted material, but would put a sizable onus on companies to list the massive swath of works that they use to build tools like ChatGPT -- data that is usually kept private.

An anonymous reader writes: More books were called to be banned in 2023 across US schools and libraries than any other year on record, according to a new report from the American Library Association (ALA). Building on a surge that started in 2021, some 4,240 unique book titles were challenged last year -- a 65% increase from 2022, and the highest figure documented in over 20 years of tracking.

Although the number of affected titles has grown dramatically, as groups increasingly target multiple books at once, overall censorship demands dropped slightly, down 2% to 1,247. Literature concerning race and gender was particularly contested, with autobiographical graphic novel Gender Queer named the most challenged library book of the year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's getting to be a bit much. Auto insurance prices have surged over the last couple years. March consumer inflation out Wednesday shows them up 22% compared to last year. Since the end of 2019 -- just before Covid hit -- they're up 45%.

Why? That's where things get complicated. In a prophylactic press release released Wednesday morning, an insurance industry trade group cited "greatly increased the cost of repairing and replacing cars" due to inflation. As anyone who has shopped for a new or used car over the last couple years can tell you, costs have gone up. That goes for the costs of replacing minor parts like bumpers or mirrors as well.

Insurers lost a lot of money on those replacement costs in 2021 and 2022, and are now trying to make that money back by raising rates a lot. Then there's also the the objectively atrocious driving record of Americans. Even before the pandemic, Americans were awful drivers compared to other high income countries, with auto death rates the highest among peer nations. High accident rates are reflected in higher costs of insurance. And of course there's also the old-fashioned profit motive. Insurers are trying to make money and raising rates is the way to do it.

The Securities and Exchange Commission warned Uniswap on Wednesday that it intends to bring an enforcement action against the company, which is the leading platform for DeFi -- a segment of the crypto market where traders rely on computer protocols that act as automated market makers for exchanging various tokens. From a report: The warning came in the form of a so-called Wells Notice, which the SEC sends to a company prior to launching a formal lawsuit and which provides it a final opportunity to rebut any allegations. In this case, that process is likely to prove little more than a formality as the agency has reportedly been investigating Uniswap for some time, and is in the midst of a sweeping crackdown of the crypto industry.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, opines on the bill that seeks to ban TikTok or force its parent firm to divest the U.S. business: Even if one could argue that this bill strikes at the First Amendment, there is legal precedent for doing so. In 1981, Haig vs Agee established that there are circumstances under which the government can lawfully impinge upon an individual's First Amendment rights if it is necessary to protect national security and prevent substantial harm. TikTok and the AI that can be channelled through it are national and homeland security issues that meet these standards.

Should this bill turn into law, the president would have the power to force any foreign-owned social media to be sold if US intelligence agencies deem them a national security threat. This broader scope should protect against challenges that this is a bill of attainder. Similar language helped protect effective bans on Huawei and Kaspersky Lab. As for TikTok's value as a boon to consumers and businesses, there are many companies that could quickly replace it. In 2020, after India banned TikTok amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and New Delhi, services including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, MX TakaTak, Chingari and others filled the void.Â

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl -- another chief export of China's -- for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

For the first time ever, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday it is issuing a national regulation limiting the amount of certain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, found in drinking water. From a report: Commonly called "forever chemicals," PFAS are synthetic chemicals found nearly everywhere -- in air, water, and soil -- and can take thousands of years to break down in the environment. The EPA has stated there is no safe level of exposure to PFAS without risk of health impacts, but now it will require that public water utilities test for six different types of PFAS chemicals to reduce exposure in drinking water. The new standards will reduce PFAS exposure for 100 million people, according to the EPA, and prevent thousands of deaths and illnesses.

"Drinking water contaminated with PFAS has plagued communities across this country for too long," EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement Wednesday. For public water utility companies to comply with the new drinking water standards, the EPA is making $1 billion available to states and territories to implement PFAS testing and treatment at public water systems. That money is part of a $9 billion investment made possible by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to assist communities impacted by PFAS contamination.

It appears that a nearly eight-year-long battle by the FCC to require internet companies to display information on the costs, fees, and speeds of their broadband services is finally over. From a report: Starting on Wednesday, all but the smallest ISPs will be required to publish broadband "nutrition labels" on all of their plans, the regulator announced. [...] Each label will include monthly broadband prices, introductory rate details, data allowances, broadband speeds, and links to find out about any available discounts or service bundles. Links to network management practices and privacy policies should be listed as well.

According to the European Union, Earth has reached its warmest March on record, capping a 10-month streak in which every month set a new temperature record. Reuters reports: Each of the last 10 months ranked as the world's hottest on record, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin. The 12 months ending with March also ranked as the planet's hottest ever recorded 12-month period, C3S said. From April 2023 to March 2024, the global average temperature was 1.58 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.

C3S' dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that last month was the hottest March since the pre-industrial period. Already, 2023 was the planet's hottest year in global records going back to 1850. El Nino peaked in December-January and is now weakening, which may help to break the hot streak toward the end of the year. But despite El Nino easing in March, the world's average sea surface temperature hit a record high, for any month on record, and marine air temperatures remained unusually high, C3S said. "The main driver of the warming is fossil fuel emissions," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute. Failure to reduce these emissions will continue to drive the warming of the planet, resulting in more intense droughts, fires, heatwaves and heavy rainfall, Otto said.

Keaton Peters reports via the Texas Tribune: Students sitting for their STAAR exams this week will be part of a new method of evaluating Texas schools: Their written answers on the state's standardized tests will be graded automatically by computers. The Texas Education Agency is rolling out an "automated scoring engine" for open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness for reading, writing, science and social studies. The technology, which uses natural language processing technology like artificial intelligence chatbots such as GPT-4, will save the state agency about $15-20 million per year that it would otherwise have spent on hiring human scorers through a third-party contractor.

The change comes after the STAAR test, which measures students' understanding of state-mandated core curriculum, was redesigned in 2023. The test now includes fewer multiple choice questions and more open-ended questions -- known as constructed response items. After the redesign, there are six to seven times more constructed response items. "We wanted to keep as many constructed open ended responses as we can, but they take an incredible amount of time to score," said Jose Rios, director of student assessment at the Texas Education Agency. In 2023, Rios said TEA hired about 6,000 temporary scorers, but this year, it will need under 2,000.

To develop the scoring system, the TEA gathered 3,000 responses that went through two rounds of human scoring. From this field sample, the automated scoring engine learns the characteristics of responses, and it is programmed to assign the same scores a human would have given. This spring, as students complete their tests, the computer will first grade all the constructed responses. Then, a quarter of the responses will be rescored by humans. When the computer has "low confidence" in the score it assigned, those responses will be automatically reassigned to a human. The same thing will happen when the computer encounters a type of response that its programming does not recognize, such as one using lots of slang or words in a language other than English. "In addition to 'low confidence' scores and responses that do not fit in the computer's programming, a random sample of responses will also be automatically handed off to humans to check the computer's work," notes Peters. While similar to ChatGPT, TEA officials have resisted the suggestion that the scoring engine is artificial intelligence. They note that the process doesn't "learn" from the responses and always defers to its original programming set up by the state.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Congress may be closer than ever to passing a comprehensive data privacy framework after key House and Senate committee leaders released a new proposal on Sunday. The bipartisan proposal, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, or APRA, would limit the types of consumer data that companies can collect, retain, and use, allowing solely what they'd need to operate their services. Users would also be allowed to opt out of targeted advertising, and have the ability to view, correct, delete, and download their data from online services. The proposal would also create a national registry of data brokers, and force those companies to allow users to opt out of having their data sold. [...] In an interview with The Spokesman Review on Sunday, [Cathy McMorris Rodgers, House Energy and Commerce Committee chair] claimed that the draft's language is stronger than any active laws, seemingly as an attempt to assuage the concerns of Democrats who have long fought attempts to preempt preexisting state-level protections. APRA does allow states to pass their own privacy laws related to civil rights and consumer protections, among other exceptions.

In the previous session of Congress, the leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committees brokered a deal with Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, on a bill that would preempt state laws with the exception of the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Biometric Information Privacy Act of Illinois. That measure, titled the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, also created a weaker private right of action than most Democrats were willing to support. Maria Cantwell, Senate Commerce Committee chair, refused to support the measure, instead circulating her own draft legislation. The ADPPA hasn't been reintroduced, but APRA was designed as a compromise. "I think we have threaded a very important needle here," Cantwell told The Spokesman Review. "We are preserving those standards that California and Illinois and Washington have."

APRA includes language from California's landmark privacy law allowing people to sue companies when they are harmed by a data breach. It also provides the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general, and private citizens the authority to sue companies when they violate the law. The categories of data that would be impacted by APRA include certain categories of "information that identifies or is linked or reasonably linkable to an individual or device," according to a Senate Commerce Committee summary of the legislation. Small businesses -- those with $40 million or less in annual revenue and limited data collection -- would be exempt under APRA, with enforcement focused on businesses with $250 million or more in yearly revenue. Governments and "entities working on behalf of governments" are excluded under the bill, as are the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and, apart from certain cybersecurity provisions, "fraud-fighting" nonprofits. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called the draft "very strong" in a Sunday statement, but said he wanted to "strengthen" it with tighter child safety provisions.

We're seeing a boom in journaling apps as safer, easier ways to ease us back into posting everything online. From a report: Last year, Apple released a journal app with iOS 17. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just unveiled a photo app called Shine, which is made to share photos and memories with a select group of people. Today, Retro -- a startup that we called "the new Instagram" -- is launching a feature called Journals within the app, which lets you record both photos and notes for a select group of people.

As a lifelong journaler, it's hard to forget that I already have an intimate, safe space to record my life and share memories. It is a notebook. I don't have to worry about marketers selling my information, because it's not accessible. What if creating a safe space all of your own means just getting off the internet altogether? Most of these apps are based on the central premise that most of us would rather talk to family or close friends than with a pretty stranger shilling snack boxes. As we reported previously, Retro has a few standout features. Once you join the app, you're prompted to select a few pictures to post per week. In order to see your friends' and family's photos, you have to share photos of your own. That keeps people actively participating instead of lurking.

England could produce 13 times more renewable energy than it does now, while using less than 3% of its land, analysis has found. The Guardian: Onshore wind and solar projects could provide enough electricity to power all the households in England two and a half times over, the research by Exeter University, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FoE), suggested. Currently, about 17 terawatt hours of electricity a year comes from homegrown renewables on land. But there is potential for 130TWh to come from solar panels, and 96TWh from onshore wind. These figures are reached by only taking into account the most suitable sites, excluding national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, higher grade agricultural land and heritage sites.

Some commentators have argued that solar farms will reduce the UK's ability to grow its own food, but the new analysis suggests there is plenty of land that can be used without impairing agricultural production. More land is now taken up by golf courses than solar farms, and developers can be required to enhance biodiversity through simple measures such as maintaining hedgerows and ponds. Onshore windfarms were in effect banned in 2015 by the then prime minister, David Cameron. Rishi Sunak last year claimed to make moves towards lifting the ban, through small changes to the planning regulations, but campaigners say they were ineffectual and real planning reform is needed. No plans were submitted for new windfarms in England last year, and few new developments are coming forward, despite high gas prices, rising bills and onshore wind being the cheapest form of electricity generation.

jd shares a report: Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died. Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday. After a series of experiments, which began in earnest in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012; the Nobel prize was shared with Francois Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery. A member of the Royal Society and a Companion of Honour, Higgs spent the bulk of his professional life at Edinburgh University, which set up the Higgs centre for theoretical physics in his honour in 2012.

Prof Peter Mathieson, the university's principal, said: "Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual -- a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us. "His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come." Prof Fabiola Gianotti, the director general at Cern and former leader of the Atlas experiment, which helped discover the Higgs particle in 2012, said: "Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple and profound way. "An important piece of Cern's history and accomplishments is linked to him. I am very saddened, and I will miss him sorely." Jon Butterworth, a member of the Atlas collaboration, said Higgs was "a hero to the particle physics community." Further reading: Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today (2013);
How the Higgs Boson Particle Ruined Peter Higgs's Life (2022).

More than 200 chemical plants across the country will be required to curb the toxic pollutants they release into the air [non-paywalled link] under a regulation announced by the Biden administration on Tuesday. From a report: The regulation is aimed at reducing the risk of cancer for people living near industrial sites. This is the first time in nearly two decades that the government has tightened limits on pollution from chemical plants. The new rule, from the Environmental Protection Agency, specifically targets ethylene oxide, which is used to sterilize medical devices, and chloroprene, which is used to make rubber in footwear.

The E.P.A. has classified the two chemicals as likely carcinogens. They are considered a top health concern in an area of Louisiana so dense with petrochemical and refinery plants that it is known as Cancer Alley. Most of the facilities affected by the rule are in Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast as well as in the Ohio River Valley and West Virginia. Communities in proximity to the plants are often disproportionately Black or Latino and have elevated rates of cancer, respiratory problems and premature deaths.

The Biden administration plans to announce it is awarding more than $6 billion to South Korea's Samsung next week to expand its chip output in Taylor, Texas, as it seeks to ramp up chipmaking in the U.S., Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources. From the report: The subsidy, which will be unveiled by Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo, will go toward construction of four facilities in Taylor, including one $17 billion chipmaking plant that Samsung announced in 2021, another factory, an advanced packaging facility and a research and development center, one of the sources said.

It will also include an investment in another undisclosed location, the source said, adding that Samsung will more than double its U.S. investment to over $44 billion as part of the deal. One of the sources said it would be the third largest of the program, just behind Taiwan's TSMC, which was awarded $6.6 billion on Monday and agreed to expand its investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona factory by 2030.

The Federal Communications Commission chair decided not to impose Universal Service fees on Internet service, rejecting arguments for new assessments to shore up an FCC fund that subsidizes broadband network expansions and provides discounts to low-income consumers. From a report: The $8 billion-a-year Universal Service Fund (USF) pays for FCC programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a "Universal Service" line item on telephone bills.

Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund's size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services. Some consumer advocates want the FCC to increase the fund in order to replace the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a different government program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes but is about to run out of money because of inaction by Congress. The Universal Service funding question is coming up now because, on April 25, the FCC is scheduled to vote on reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service in order to re-impose the net neutrality rules scrapped during the Trump era. Imposing Universal Service charges on broadband would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's net neutrality proposal takes the same stance against requiring Universal Service contributions that the FCC took in 2015 when it first imposed the net neutrality rules.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday it would award Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's unit a $6.6 billion subsidy for advanced semiconductor production in Phoenix, Arizona and up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans. From a report: TSMC agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona fab by 2030, Commerce said in announcing the preliminary award. The Taiwanese company will produce the world's most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona fab expected to begin production in 2028, the department said.

"These are the chips that underpin all artificial intelligence, and they are the chips that are necessary components for the technologies that we need to underpin our economy, but frankly, a 21st century military and national security apparatus," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement. TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to Apple and Nvidia had previously announced plans to invest $40 billion in Arizona. TSMC expects to begin high-volume production in its first U.S. fab there by the first half of 2025, Commerce said. The $65 billion-plus investment by TSMC is the largest foreign direct investment in a completely new project in U.S. history, the department said.