Slash_Account_Dot writes: A federal counterintelligence agency tracking hackers has bought data harvested from the backbone of the internet by a private company because it was easier and took less time than getting similar data from the NSA, according to internal U.S. government documents. According to the documents, going through an agency like the NSA could take "days," whereas a private contractor could provide the same data instantly. The news is yet another example of a government agency turning to the private sector for novel datasets that the public is likely unaware are being collected and then sold.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ford Motor Company on Monday halted construction of a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant project in the Marshall area amid months of battles with local residents, Republicans in Congress over its use of Chinese technology and an auto industry strike in its second week. "We're pausing work, and we're going to limit spending on construction at Marshall until we're confident about our ability to competitively run the plant," Ford spokesman T.R. Reid told The Detroit News on Monday. Reid said a "number of considerations" were at play in the company's business decision, but wouldn't say whether the United Auto Workers' ongoing strike of Ford and its crosstown rivals was a factor. "We haven't made a final decision about the investment there," Reid said of the Marshall site. The pause in construction is effective Monday, Reid said.

The Dearborn-based automaker announced on Feb. 13 that it planned to invest about $3.5 billion in an electric vehicle battery plant park in Marshall. As part of the deal, Ford secured about $210 million in direct tax incentives plus a 15-year property tax abatement worth about $775 million over the life of the tax break. There was also roughly $750 million set aside for site prep at the location, with a $299 million earmark allocated for the Marshall Area Economic Development Alliance and a $330 million earmark pushed toward the Michigan Department of Transportation budget for expanding roadways and freeway connections for the presumed Ford plant's truck traffic. Another $120 million was routed to MAEDA earlier this month through the SOAR fund. [...] The 2.5-million-square-foot battery park was to be run by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ford called "Blue Oval Battery Park Michigan." The plant would employ 2,500 people with pay ranging from $20 to $50 an hour.

The United States Space Force reportedly discussed setting up a hotline with China to prevent crises in space, according to Reuters, citing U.S. commander General Chance Saltzman. From the report: The chief of space operations said a direct line of communication between the Space Force and its Chinese counterpart would be valuable in de-escalating tensions but that the U.S. had not yet engaged with China to establish one. "What we have talked about on the U.S. side at least is opening up a line of communication to make sure that if there is a crisis, we know who we can contact," Saltzman said, adding that it would be up to President Joe Biden and the State Department to take the lead on such discussions. The U.S. Space Force, founded in 2019, also does not have a direct line of communication with its Russian counterpart.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done tens of thousands of face recognition searches using software from outside providers in recent years. Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau's three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this month reveals. The bureau has no policy for face recognition use in place to protect privacy, civil rights, or civil liberties. Lawmakers and others concerned about face recognition have said that adequate training on the technology and how to interpret its output is needed to reduce improper use or errors, although some experts say training can lull law enforcement and the public into thinking face recognition is low risk.

Since the false arrest of Robert Williams near Detroit in 2020, multiple instances have surfaced in the US of arrests after a face recognition model wrongly identified a person. Alonzo Sawyer, whose ordeal became known this spring, spent nine days in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The lack of face recognition training at the FBI came to light in a GAO report examining the protections in place when federal law enforcement uses the technology. The report was compiled at the request of seven Democratic members of Congress. Report author and GAO Homeland Security and Justice director Gretta Goodwin says, via email, that she found no evidence of false arrests due to use of face recognition by a federal law enforcement agency.

The GAO report focuses on face recognition tools made by commercial and nonprofit entities. That means it does not cover the FBI's in-house face recognition platform, which the GAO previously criticized for poor privacy protections. The US Department of Justice was ordered by the White House last year to develop best practices for using face recognition and report any policy changes that result. The outside face recognition tools used by the FBI and other federal law enforcement covered by the report comes from companies including Clearview AI, which scraped billions of photos of faces from the internet to train its face recognition system, andThorn, a nonprofit that combats sex trafficking by applying face recognition to identify victims and sex traffickers from online commercial sex market imagery.The FBI ranks first among federal law enforcement agencies examined by the GAO for the scale of its use of face recognition. More than 60,000 searches were carried out by seven agencies between October 2019 and March 2022. Over half were made by FBI agents, about 15,000 using Clearview AI and 20,000 using Thorn. "No existing law requires federal law enforcement personnel to take training before using face recognition or to follow particular standards when using face recognition in a criminal investigation," notes Wired.

"The DOJ plans to issue a department-wide civil rights and civil liberties policy for face recognition but has yet to set a date for planned implementation, according to the report. It says that DOJ officials, at one point in 2022, considered updating its policy to allow a face recognition match alone to justify applying for a search warrant."

Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months. The Guardian: The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. "While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations," read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon's site.

Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted "if needed." The company confirmed that there had already been a limit to the number of books authors could list a day, but declined to say what this previous limit was. The post stated that Amazon is "actively monitoring the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing" and that "very few" publishers will be affected by the change. Authors and publishers will also have the option to seek an exception to the rule.

During World War II, "Los Alamos was the perfect spot for the U.S. government's top-secret Manhattan Project," remembers the Associated Press.

"The community is facing growing pains again, 80 years later, as Los Alamos National Laboratory takes part in the nation's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since World War II." The mission calls for modernizing the arsenal with droves of new workers producing plutonium cores — key components for nuclear weapons. Some 3,300 workers have been hired in the last two years, with the workforce now topping more than 17,270. Close to half of them commute to work from elsewhere in northern New Mexico and from as far away as Albuquerque, helping to nearly double Los Alamos' population during the work week... While the priority at Los Alamos is maintaining the nuclear stockpile, the lab also conducts a range of national security work and research in diverse fields of space exploration, supercomputing, renewable energy and efforts to limit global threats from disease and cyberattacks...

The headline grabber, though, is the production of plutonium cores. Lab managers and employees defend the massive undertaking as necessary in the face of global political instability. With most people in Los Alamos connected to the lab, opposition is rare. But watchdog groups and non-proliferation advocates question the need for new weapons and the growing price tag... Aside from pressing questions about the morality of nuclear weapons, watchdogs argue the federal government's modernization effort already has outpaced spending predictions and is years behind schedule. Independent government analysts issued a report earlier this month that outlined the growing budget and schedule delays.
"A hairline scratch on a warhead's polished black cone could send the bomb off course..." notes an earlier article.

"The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project."

In GNOME Shell there's a dark background for the Quick Settings menu, the calendar applet, and desktop notification-- but in Ubuntu 23.10, "the default Yaru theme uses a light style for GNOME Shell elements," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu.

"But there's a new GNOME extension that lets you change this without affecting the rest of your desktop..." You can make GNOME Shell dark in Ubuntu by turning the 'Dark Style' toggle on but that also makes apps use a dark theme too. Not everyone wants that; they want a 'mixed' look... [I]f you would like to use dark GNOME Shell elements in Ubuntu 23.10 without using the dark mode preference (which, as said, will turn your apps dark too) then the Dark Style GNOME extension is exactly what you need.
It only works with Ubuntu 23.10 and GNOME 45.

At 11 a.m. Friday in Orlando Florida, a train completed its 240-mile journey from Miami, inaugurating a new line from Brightline that reaches speeds of up to 125 miles per hour and reduces the journey to just under three hours. "This is going to revolutionize transportation not just in the country and the state of Florida but right here in Central Florida and really just make our backyard bigger," Brightline's director of public affairs Katie Mitzner told a local news station.

Ironically, within hours a different Brightline train had struck and killed a pedestrian. "Brightline trains have the highest death rate in the U.S.," reports one local news station, "fatally striking 98 people since Miami-West Palm operations began — about one death for every 32,000 miles its trains travel, according to an ongoing Associated Press analysis." A police spokesperson said the death appeared to be a suicide.

"None of the accidents have been determined to be Brightline's fault," writes The Points Guy, "and the company has spent millions of dollars on safety improvements at grade crossings. It also launched a public-relations push to encourage all residents along its corridor to commit to staying safe. However, it is a very real and ongoing element of this service in Florida. We hope these efforts will continue to further reduce these incidents in communities that see frequent Brightline trains coming through."

The Points Guy also shared photos in their blog post describing what it was like to take a ride on America's only privately owned and operated inter-city passenger railroad: When the train ultimately pulled out of the station, a surreal feeling washed over me. Those of us on the inaugural service were the first passengers to ride the rails along this stretch of Florida's east coast in more than 55 years. Florida East Coast Railway, which still owns the tracks and operates frequent freight trains along them, ceased passenger service on July 31, 1968... Each seat has multiple power outlets, and the Wi-Fi truly was high-speed based on my experience and the test I ran. I was even able to successfully join (and participate in) our morning editorial team call on Zoom...

The scenery along the route was simply spectacular... With no grade crossings and fencing on both sides, we reached 125 mph for the final stretch of the journey. The cars along the highway stood no chance of keeping up as we traversed the 30-plus miles in only 18 minutes as the tower at Orlando International Airport came into view... With plans to expand to Tampa and construction underway on its planned Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route, we likely haven't heard the last from Brightline as it seeks to transform train service in the United States.
"I think what Brightline has done here has laid the blueprint for how speed rail can be built in America with private dollars versus government funding," investor Ryn Rosberg told a local news site. "It's much more efficient and it gets done a lot quicker."

"There have been colorful station openings, lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, threats of legislation and yes, fatal accidents," writes the Palm Beach Post, "but Brightline train passengers can now take the train from any of its five South Florida stations to visit the Disney World, Universal Studios or Sea World tourist attractions."

Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna shared this article from the Washington Post: There is a theoretical, magic tipping point for adoption of electric vehicles. Once somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of new car sales are all-electric, some researchers say, huge numbers of drivers will follow. They predict that electric car sales will then soar — to 25 percent, 50 percent and eventually to close to 80 percent of new sales. Early adopters who love shiny new technologies will be replaced by mainstream consumers just looking for a good deal. Last year, the United States finally passed that elusive mark — 5 percent of all new cars sold in the fourth quarter were fully electric. And earlier this year, all-electric vehicles made up about 7 percent of new car sales...

If the pattern holds, the United States should start to see rapid growth in the next few years. And automakers have gone all-in on the transition. As of early 2023, U.S.-based car companies have announced about $173 billion in spending to shift to electric vehicles. Volkswagen, Ford, BMW, General Motors, and many more car companies are all making electric cars. There are more than 40 all-electric models on offer in the United States.
The article points out that in Norway, more than 80% of cars purchased are now fully electric.

For comparision, in the first half of 2023 in California, about 25% of new-car purchases were electric vehicles.

America's Department of Defense recently exercised a contract option with X-energy, a private nuclear reactor engineering company, seeking "a thorough analysis of design options" for a transportable micro nuclear reactor. The Department says its ultimate goal is "a reactor design which is ready for licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for both commercial ventures and military resiliency."

Their announcement also notes that additional work is already underway by another company, BWX Technologies, on a prototype micro reactor: "Due to their extraordinary energy density, nuclear reactors have the potential to serve multiple critical functions for meeting resiliency needs in contested logistical environments," said Dr. Jeff Waksman, Project Pele program manager. "By developing two unique designs, we will provide the Services with a broad range of options as they consider potential uses of nuclear power for both Installation and Operational energy applications in the near future."

The Defense Department uses approximately 30 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day — levels that are only expected to increase due to anticipated electrification of the vehicle fleet and maturation of future energy-intensive capabilities. A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that does not add to the Defense Department's fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments...

"The Strategic Capabilities Office specializes in adapting commercial technology for military purposes," said Jay Dryer, director. "By nurturing and developing multiple micro reactor designs, SCO will not just provide options for the military Services, but will also help jumpstart a truly competitive commercial marketplace for micro reactors."

70 million Americans live in a county without a newspaper, according to a 2022 report cited in this editorial by the Washington Post's editorial board"

Who's to blame? The internet, mostly. Whereas deep-pocketed advertisers formerly relied on newspapers to reach their customers, they took to the audience-targeting capabilities of Facebook or Google. Web-based marketplaces also siphoned newspapers' once-robust revenue from classified ads.
But the Post emphasizes one positive new development: "a large pile of cash." In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward... The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.

The even bigger imperative, however, is to elevate local news on the philanthropic food chain so that national and hometown funders prioritize this pivotal American institution. Failure on this front places more pressure on public policy solutions, and government activism mixes poorly with independent journalism...

One of the goals for Press Forward, accordingly, is building out the infrastructure — "from legal support to membership programs" — relied upon by local news providers to deliver their product. Jim Brady, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, says it's easier than ever for news entrepreneurs to launch a local site because they can plug into existing technologies hammered out by their predecessors — and there's more development work still to fund on this front.

So where to go from here? Local philanthropic interests across the country could take a cue from the Press Forward partners and invest in the news organizations down the street.

First the Washington Post summarizes what scientists believed in the 1970s. Chlorofluorocarbons, or (CFCs, "could float up into the stratosphere and break down a protective layer of ozone, allowing more ultraviolet light to enter the atmosphere and harm humans, crops, and entire ecosystems. In fact, this had already happened: There was a hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole." Experts view the subsequent treaty to cut down on the use of CFCs — the 1987 Montreal Protocol — as a landmark environmental achievement. Scientists estimate that the pact has prevented millions of cases of skin cancer. Today, the ozone hole is recovering well. But a provocative scientific paper published Friday in the journal AGU Advances suggests that the link between the ozone layer and human health is more complicated than it seems. Under certain circumstances, the researchers write, small decreases in the ozone layer could now save lives...

The researchers initially were examining something else: what would happen to the chemistry of the atmosphere if humans injected sulfates into the stratosphere, a controversial strategy to cool the planet. But in the process, they found that the chemicals would alter the atmosphere's ozone content — with consequences for human health. Sulfate chemicals are known to deplete ozone high in the atmosphere, but, the paper shows, they could also decrease ground-level air pollution. Ozone, or O3, occurs in two forms in the atmosphere: what scientists call "good ozone" in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that sits 6 to 31 miles above the surface, and "bad ozone" in the troposphere, the atmospheric layer that reaches to the ground... an air pollutant in the troposphere that comes from power plants, cars, and industrial sites. It can be deadly, exacerbating respiratory diseases. According to one study, over 400,000 people died from long-term exposure to ozone in 2019 alone.

The new paper shows that "good ozone" and "bad ozone" can interact in unexpected ways. When good ozone is depleted, more UV light reaches the troposphere, which increases the rate of skin cancer. But UV light also catalyzes chemical reactions in the troposphere, including one in which hydroxide, or OH — which some scientists call the "Pac-Man of the atmosphere" — swallows up pollutants. The more UV light, the more OH eats up dangerous pollutants. This decrease in ground-level air pollution, according to the study, could actually outweigh the rise in skin cancer. A small decrease in stratospheric ozone, according to their study, could save between 33,000 and 86,000 lives every year.

Only a few papers have made this connection, including one in 2018 that similarly found that a small decrease in the ozone layer could save lives from air pollution... One way to read the study is as another warning of how dangerous ground-level air pollution is and how far the world still needs to go to clean it up. (Outdoor air pollution writ large is associated with an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths every year.)

A startup named OceanWell has partnered with southern California's Las Virgenes Municipal Water District "to study the feasibility of harvesting drinking water from desalination pods placed on the ocean floor," reports the Los Angeles Times: The company says that by combining desalination with off-shore energy technology, it can solve many of the challenges associated with traditional, land-based desalination, including high energy costs and salty byproducts that threaten marine life. The process could produce as much as 10 million gallons of fresh water per day — a significant gain for an inland district almost entirely reliant on imported supplies...

OceanWell says its technology can use up to 40% less energy by harvesting the water in pods placed at depths of about 1,400 feet, where naturally immense water pressure can help power the filtration process... Land-based facilities try to squeeze out as much freshwater as possible to help balance high energy costs, with typical targets of 50% freshwater and 50% brine from every gallon processed. But because OceanWell uses "free" pressure from the ocean, it can operate at a lower recovery rate of 10% to 15%, producing a much less salty byproduct that can be dissolved back into ambient conditions within seconds, she said...

The partnership with Las Virgenes will allow OceanWell to "stress test" the technology's capabilities in the reservoir and collect more data, said Kalyn Simon, OceanWell's director of engagement. The current goal is to be fully operational by 2028, producing an estimated 10 million gallons of freshwater per day.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

The use of AI in the economy presents many unanswered questions for policymakers though there is some evidence that it could improve labor productivity, according to Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. From a report: "The impact of AI on the economy and monetary policy will depend on whether AI is just another app or something more profound," Cook said in remarks prepared for delivery at the National Bureau of Economic Research's conference on artificial intelligence in Toronto Friday. "Empirical evidence is still patchy, but there is work showing that generative AI improves productivity in a variety of settings."

Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed's board, was among central bank officials who on Wednesday voted unanimously to hold rates steady in a range of 5.25% to 5.5%. President Joe Biden named Cook as a governor on the board last year. She was endorsed for a full 14-year term in a 51-47 Senate vote earlier this month. Cook predicted that greater use of AI will be similar to the spread of computation in the workplace and could present "a difficult transition for some workers. [...] Any large change in the labor force will generate disruptions and challenges that will need to be addressed to help workers adapt and thrive."

The U.S. Treasury Department and China's Ministry of Finance launched a pair of economic working groups on Friday in an effort to ease tensions and deepen ties between the nations. From a report: Led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Vice Premier He Lifeng, the working groups will be divided into economic and financial segments. The working groups will "establish a durable channel of communication between the world's two largest economies," Yellen said in a series of tweets detailing the announcement. She said the groups will "serve as important forums to communicate America's interests and concerns, promote a healthy economic competition between our two countries with a level playing field for American workers and businesses."

The announcement follows a string of high-ranking administration officials' visits to China this year, which sets the stage for a possible meeting between President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in November at an Asia-Pacific economic conference in San Francisco. China is one of the United States' biggest trading partners, and economic competition between the two nations has increased in recent years. The two finance ministers have agreed to meet at a "regular cadence," the Treasury Department said in a news release.

In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said "we cannot expect perfection" from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.

Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.

An anonymous reader shares a news story: A report by dappGambl based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap showed that out of 73,257 NFT collections the researchers looked at, 69,795 of them, or slightly over 95%, had a market cap of zero ether. By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets. "This daunting reality should serve as a sobering check on the euphoria that has often surrounded the NFT space," the researchers said. "Amid stories of digital art pieces selling for millions and overnight success stories, it is easy to overlook the fact that the market is fraught with pitfalls and potential losses."

NFTs are digital representations of art or collectibles tied to a blockchain, typically ethereum, and each one has a unique signature that cannot be duplicated. In 2021 and 2022, the NFT market saw a huge bull run, at one point leading to $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume. During that time, popular collections such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks were selling for millions of dollars, and celebrities such as Stephen Curry and Snoop Dogg participated in the hype. The boom coincided with cryptocurrency's peak when bitcoin was trading close to $70,000. On Wednesday, the price of the crypto hovered just above $27,000. dappGambl's study shows 79% of all NFT collections currently remain unsold, and the surplus of supply over demand has created a buyer's market that isn't doing anything to revive enthusiasm.

Brazilian engineer Luiz Andre Barroso, who ripped up the rulebook at Google, has died. His radical ideas for data centers laid the foundations for cloud computing. Wired: Luiz Andre Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley's development of cloud computing.

Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of "the data center as a computer," which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.

Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google's infrastructure organization, says Barroso left an indelible imprint at the company whose contributions to the industry are countless. "We lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader," she writes in a statement on behalf of the company.

Rishi Sunak has vowed to press ahead with watering down key green measures despite intense criticism, because he still believes the UK will hit its net zero target in 2050. From a report: The prime minister defended defying the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and said he had "absolute confidence and belief" the country was on track to meet its end goal. In a BBC radio interview on Thursday morning, Sunak shrugged off suggestions he had ignored the view of the official body that advises governments on reducing emissions. He said: "I'm very happy to have opinions and advice from everybody, and everyone's entitled to their view. We're very confident -- being in government, with all the information at our disposal -- that we we are on track to hit all our targets."

Sunak told Radio 4's Today programme that Margaret Thatcher would have agreed with his rationale, and that it was not right for "working families" to face significant costs as part of the country's transition to net zero. But he struggled to provide an explanation for claims he had scrapped measures critics said had never seriously been mooted -- such as an alleged tax on meat, compulsory car sharing and forcing households to use seven recycling bins. "These are all things that have been raised by very credible people," he argued. When pressed, Sunak was unable to provide evidence that those specific measures had been suggested by anyone and instead said they had been euphemistically advocated for by bodies such as the CCC.

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chair of Fox and News Corp, after building a media empire over seven decades that revolutionized news and entertainment and made him one of the world's most influential and controversial tycoons. WSJ: Murdoch, 92 years old, will exit his roles atop each company as of November, when they hold annual meetings, the companies said. He will be appointed chairman emeritus of each company. His eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, who has served as co-chair of News Corp, will become sole chair of that company and will continue as Fox Corp executive chair and CEO. "For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change. But the time is right for me to take on different roles," Rupert Murdoch wrote in a memo to staff.

His decision to step back solidifies Lachlan Murdoch as his successor. He called Lachlan a "passionate, principled leader" who can take the companies into the future. Murdoch is one of a handful of media barons, along with the likes of John Malone, Ted Turner and Sumner Redstone, who shaped the modern era of media. He has wielded influence in political and financial capitals, earning credit from his boosters and blame from his critics. Murdoch has remained active in his later years, pursuing big deals to reshape his companies. Murdoch is stepping back at an important moment for both wings of his media empire, as they confront fundamental challenges in the media landscape. Fox, a relatively small player in an entertainment industry now dominated by titans, is wrestling with the profound implications of cable cord-cutting and the growth of streaming. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, Times of London and other publications, is trying to find the right formula for digital growth amid a fierce battle for subscribers and online-ad dollars.