Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, believes that for the UK to become an AI superpower, it needs to foster a culture of risk-taking and encourage large-scale investments. The BBC reports: Mustafa Suleyman added that he does not regret selling DeepMind to the US giant in 2014. "The US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to taking big shots," he told the BBC. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants the UK to be a global hub for AI. He has pledged 1 billion pounds in funding over the next 10 years, and founded a UK taskforce with a remit of maximising the benefits of the tech while keeping it safe. This week BBC News is focusing on AI, how the technology affects our lives and what impacts it may have in the near future.

Mr Suleyman said the UK had "every chance" of becoming an AI superpower and praised its research facilities, but added there were not the same opportunities for businesses to grow as there are in the US. "I think the culture shift that it needs to make is to be more encouraging of large scale investments, more encouraging of risk taking, and more tolerant and more celebratory of failures," he said. "The truth is, the US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to big risk taking, taking big shots and having big funding rounds." Mr Suleyman has chosen to base his new company, Inflection AI, in Palo Alto, California, which is also home to the headquarters of Google, Facebook and Tesla.

Mustafa Suleyman's views represent one of the challenges facing Ian Hogarth, a British entrepreneur and investor who has been appointed to lead the UK's AI taskforce. He took up the position five weeks ago. In his first interview since getting the job, Mr Hogarth told the BBC that while the UK was a good place for start-ups, it should also be easier for them to grow. "We've had some great [tech] companies and some of them got bought early, you know - Skype got bought by eBay, DeepMind got bought by Google. I think really our ecosystem needs to rise to the next level of the challenge."

The UK government's plan to cope with the climate crisis has been condemned as "very weak" by experts, who say not enough is being done to protect lives and livelihoods. From a report: Responding to the document, which was leaked to the Guardian, one highlighted its failure to adequately protect people in the UK from extreme heat. The heatwave in 2022, when temperatures surpassed 40C for the first time, led to the early deaths of more than 3,000 people, wildfires, buckled rail lines and farmers struggling with drought. Southern Europe is in the grip of a searing heatwave. Another expert said there was a "yawning gap" in measures to restore nature, which is a vital part of adapting to climate change.

The National Adaptation Programme is expected to be published on Tuesday by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is required by law to produce a plan every five years. In March, the government's official advisers, the Climate Change Committee, said its publication would be a "make-or-break moment." Ministers have been criticised for years over the failure to make adequate plans for the impacts of global heating. The CCC said in March that the UK was "strikingly unprepared" and that there had been a "lost decade" in action on adaptation. It said heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms would intensify in the coming years until carbon emissions reached net zero.

"Logan Parson's first flight by himself ended with airport officials taking the teenager into custody and whisking him away into an interrogation room," reports the Independent. The teen was "denied boarding to an American Airlines flight," reports the Washington Post. "He hadn't committed a crime, nor was he accused of being unruly.

"His offense? Attempting to make use of a money-saving hack that gutsy fliers use every year." Direct flights to major cities are so expensive, it can actually be cheaper to book a flight with stops in two cities — and then skip the flight to that second city. The Post points out that while passengers can save money with this so-called "hidden-city ticket" trick — or skiplagging — "most carriers regard it as a form of fraud."

From North Carolina TV station WJZY: In a statement to WJZY, American Airlines said, "Purchasing a ticket without intending to fly all flights to gain lower fares (hidden city ticketing) is a violation of American Airlines terms and conditions and is outlined in our Conditions of Carriage online...." Other major airlines, like Delta and United, also prohibit hidden city ticketing. Even [skip-lagging resource] Skip Lagged warns there may be consequences of hidden city ticketing, like your checked luggage moving on to the final destination instead of where you stop or losing frequent flyer miles you've accrued.
The Arizona Republic adds: According to American and Southwest's contracts of carriage, they can cancel any unused part of a ticket, refuse to let the passenger and their bags fly, not issue a refund and charge the customer for what the ticket would have cost for the full route. Airlines may ban a passenger from flying with them in the future.

Some airlines have challenged the practice in court but without success. In November 2014, United Airlines sued Skiplagged.com and its founder in court, claiming trademark infringement, according to court documents. A judge dismissed the suit the following year.
The Washington Post shares another warning: Chris Dong, a Los Angeles-based travel writer and points expert who used to skiplag, says you especially can't do this on a round-trip flight. "Airlines will cancel your return flight if you're a 'no show' for any segment of a booked itinerary," Dong said in an email.
While the teen's father told WJZY that his son was "interrogated a little bit" before being "taken to a security room," American Airline says their records don't show that the teen was taken to a security room. Instead, they've told the Post that "Our records indicate the customer was questioned only at the ticket counter about their travel, while attempting to check-in for their flight." The fact that the teen was denied boarding underscores how serious airlines take skiplagging. It makes sense, since the practice saps revenue from them on two fronts: Not only do passengers underpay — potentially by hundreds of dollars per ticket — but the seat on the tossed leg could have been sold to someone else. Most contracts of carriage from major airlines expressly forbid skiplagging as a result.
The Post also got this quote from Clint Henderson, an industry expert and managing editor for the Points Guy. "The airlines are getting increasingly sophisticated and smart about it. I expect that will get even more prevalent as technology improves further."

The Verge reports that Sony "has agreed to a 10-year deal for Call of Duty with Microsoft to keep the franchise on PlayStation after the proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition." Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Sony and Microsoft have agreed to a "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. This ends a bitter battle between the companies that has been waged both privately and publicly over the past year after Microsoft announced its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January 2022...

Kari Perez, head of global communications at Xbox, confirmed the 10-year commitment to The Verge. Perez later confirmed to The Verge that the deal is only for Call of Duty, though. That makes the deal similar to a 10-year agreement between Microsoft and Nintendo, but not the various deals Microsoft has struck with Nvidia and other cloud gaming platforms to bring Call of Duty and other Xbox / Activision games to rival services...

Microsoft has always maintained it would keep Call of Duty on PlayStation, arguing it doesn't make financial sense to pull the game from Sony's consoles. Xbox chief Spencer tried to settle the argument in November before appearing in court last month and reiterating, under oath, that Call of Duty would remain on PlayStation 5. All eyes are now on the regulatory situation in the UK, after Microsoft's proposed deal was blocked there earlier this year.
The Financial Times writes that the Sony-Microsoft agreement "signalled a truce between the two gaming giants after a bruising 18-month battle that had seen the Japanese company become the biggest opponent to the acquisition. It follows regulatory breakthroughs for Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic last week that have left it on brink of clinching victory for a deal that is expected to reshape the gaming industry."

The Verge also shares this interesting detail: Tensions over the fate of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal really came to a head when [Sony's] Jim Ryan spoke to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on February 21st, 2023 — the same day Microsoft, Activision, Sony, and others were meeting with EU regulators. Ryan said to Kotick, "I don't want a new Call of Duty deal. I just want to block your merger." Jim Ryan confirmed the meeting during testimony in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "I told him [Bobby Kotick] that I thought the transaction was anti-competitive, I hoped that the regulators would do their job and block it."

The University of Southampton has an announcement. Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from ScienceDaily: Today an international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene.

A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages. It's been proposed by some geologists that we are now living in the Anthropocene — a new geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the world's climate and environment. The concept has significant implications for how we consider our impact on the planet. But there is disagreement in the scientific community about when the Anthropocene began, how it is evidenced and whether human influence has been substantial enough to constitute a new geological age, which usually span millions of years. To help answer these questions, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) set up the Anthropocene Working Group.

"The sediments found at the bottom of Crawford Lake provide an exquisite record of recent environmental change over the last millennia," says Dr Simon Turner, Secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group from UCL. "Seasonal changes in water chemistry and ecology have created annual layers that can be sampled for multiple markers of historical human activity. It is this ability to precisely record and store this information as a geological archive that can be matched to historical global environmental changes which make sites such as Crawford Lake so important...."

Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group, explains: "The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global 'fingerprint' on our planet. In nature, plutonium is only present in trace amounts. But in the early-1950s, when the first hydrogen bomb tests took place, we see an unprecedented increase and then spike in the levels of plutonium in core samples from around the world. We then see a decline in plutonium from the mid-1960s onwards when the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty came into effect."

Other geological indicators of human activity include high levels of ash from coal-fired power stations, high concentrations of heavy metals, such as lead, and the presence of plastic fibres and fragments. These coincide with 'The Great Acceleration' — a dramatic surge across a range of human activity, from transportation to energy use, starting in the mid-20th century and continuing today.
"Evidence from the sites will now be presented to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which will decide next year whether to ratify the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch."

r/malefashionadvice, one of the biggest Reddit communities that's still private as part of the Reddit protest, is encouraging its users to move to Discord and Substack. The subreddit has more than 5 million subscribers. The Verge reports: Specifically, the Discord lets members of the community chat amongst themselves and post about things like fits and inspiration, while the Substack hosts a lot of guides. "One of the other mods writes "I will never go back, it's way better on Discord,' and that sentiment is pretty shared," the mod, who asked to go by Zach, says in an email to The Verge. "The community does a lot better job of self-moderating, owing largely to the fact that the ratio of existing regulars to new people is currently extremely high."

The Substack isn't intended to "be a subscription-based thing"; instead, it was a good place to bring over the subreddit's guides and maintain formatting, Zach says. The biggest guide, Building a Basic Wardrobe, is at more than 2,000 views that came "almost entirely from Discord." That said, both the Discord and Substack are far smaller than r/malefashionadvice's subscriber base: the Discord has north of 2,000 users, while the Substack has nearly 560 subscribers.

Reddit seemingly isn't happy that r/malefashionadvice is still private. On Thursday, the subreddit's moderators received the following message from a Reddit admin (employee) telling the team they would be replaced if they don't reopen the community [...]. Despite the message, the moderation team plans to stick around until they are removed. "We expect that we will be removed from [r/malefashionadvice] as a mod team relatively soon based on communications from the admins," Walker wrote in a message on the Discord. "We'd like to take this time to thank everyone who has contributed so much time and effort over almost 14 years of the sub's history."

If Reddit installs new mods that reopen the community, Zach believes that while many people will go back, "most of the regulars probably won't return," he says. "Dozens of bots (and human bad actors) plague [r/malefashionadvice] on the daily, and without proper mod tools, it'll get even harder to keep them out." More than 2,000 subreddits are still dark in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.

The color of the ocean has changed significantly over the last 20 years and human-caused climate change is likely responsible, according to a new study. From a report: More than 56% of the world's oceans have changed color to an extent that cannot be explained by natural variability, said a team of researchers, led by scientists from the National Oceanography Center in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, in a statement. Tropical oceans close to the equator in particular have become greener in the past two decades, reflecting changes in their ecosystems, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The color of the ocean is derived from the materials found in its upper layers.

For example, a deep blue sea will have very little life in it, whereas a green color means there are ecosystems there, based on phytoplankton, plant-like microbes which contain chlorophyll. The phytoplankton form the basis of a food web which supports larger organisms such as krill, fish, seabirds and marine mammals. It's not clear exactly how these ecosystems are changing, said study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Center for Global Change Science. While some areas are likely to have less phytoplankton, others will have more -- and it's likely all parts of the ocean will see changes in the types of phytoplankton present. Ocean ecosystems are finely balanced and any change in the phytoplankton will send ripples across the food chain.

Britain's antitrust regulator on Thursday announced an in-depth probe of Adobe's $20 billion bid for cloud-based designer platform Figma, after the Photoshop owner said it would not offer any remedies to ease the regulator's concerns. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said late last month it had found the deal could lead to less choice for designers of digital apps, websites and other products, and identified concerns in the supply of screen design software, where the companies compete.

It had given Adobe five working days to submit proposals to address its concerns. But on July 7, the U.S. company told the CMA it would not offer any remedies, the CMA said on Thursday. Figma and Adobe both directed Reuters to the companies' response in June, when the regulator had flagged these concerns. "We look forward to establishing these facts in the next phase of the process and successfully completing the transaction," a spokesperson for Adobe added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: One recent study found that the U.S. was currently ranked somewhere around 32nd globally, behind countries like Russia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria [on broadband affordability] (you can find the full breakdown here): "The United States and Canada both have one of the highest internet costs," Alex Tofts, the Broadband Expert for Broadband Genie, said in a summary. "It's driven by a lack of competition and bigger distances to connect, with lower population density than other developed countries. However, both have average wages in the top fifteen in the world, compensating for the high cost of internet."

For decades, people (mostly the industry) tried to suggest the problem was because America was just so gosh darn big. But you'll notice that China and Russia, (ranked 25th and 17th, respectively) still perform better. Data routinely shows that affordability is the key obstacle to access, yet it's only been in the last few years that you've started to see this reality reflected in U.S. policymaking. [...] But again, the cause of this problem is very clear: monopolization and consolidation, protected by corruption. Few U.S. markets have the choice of more than one broadband provider at next-generation speeds. And that's because federal and state lawmakers are so comically corrupt, they routinely let AT&T, Comcast, Charter, or Verizon lobbyists endlessly merge, crush all competition, then literally write state or federal legislation and policy over several decades.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Decades of federal policy corruption and dysfunction have created an extremely strong, local, bipartisan grassroots movement for better broadband access. In countless towns and cities, municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and creative new partnerships are building new, open access fiber networks with an eye on competition and cost. [...] Still, it's comical and grotesque that it's 2023 and a country that fancies itself a technology giant still can't meaningfully tackle equitable broadband access and affordability. And that telecom and media policy has basically become a boring afterthought in the era of "Big Tech." Ensuring equitable access to an essential utility is just too boring for most 2023 policy circles, much less the modern attention economy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Australian user data is accessible to TikTok employees based in China on a "very strict basis," the company's head of data security, Will Farrell, has said. In their first public appearance before Australian members of parliament since the government joined Canada, the US and the UK in banning TikTok from government-owned devices amid concerns about the company's connections to China, TikTok executives were questioned at length by a parliamentary committee examining foreign interference on social media. Liberal senator and chair of the committee James Paterson, who has led the opposition's push against the app, questioned how many times Australian user data had been accessed by TikTok staff based within China. Farrell could not provide the number immediately, but admitted it did happen.

Farrell said there were "a number of protections in place", including that employees only get the minimum amount of access to data to do their job, and when they access that data they need to provide a business justification that needs to be approved by their manager and the database owner within TikTok. If the data is being accessed across a national border, it has to be approved by the global security team based in the US, which also monitors all data access. "Employees can't get access without a clear justification and levels of approval," Farrell said. A similar security review would apply if an employee based in China tried to change the recommendations algorithm, he said.

The company's local head of public policy, Ella Woods-Joyce, said China's 2017 national security law -- which requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to national security -- would apply to any company that had operations and staff in China. When asked on what ground TikTok would refuse to comply with the law, Woods-Joyce said TikTok had never been asked for personal data by the Chinese government and would refuse if asked. [...] It was revealed in December that employees had used the app to attempt to identify the source of a leak to journalists. Hunter told the committee that he stood by the sentiments expressed in his original article, and blamed "rogue employees" who had since been fired from the company for accessing the data. He said "serious misconduct from these rogue employees" had taken place. He said GPS location information was not collected in Australia.

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup positioning itself as the builder of a safer kind of chatbot, has released a new version of its AI bot, named Claude. From a report: Anthropic said that Claude 2 is available to anyone in the US or UK online at claude.ai, and businesses can access it via an application programming interface. The new release on Tuesday comes several months after Anthropic began offering an earlier version of Claude to businesses that wanted to add it to their products. Previously, the bot was tested by a handful of companies including Quora, which built it into an app called Poe that lets users ask questions.

Like its predecessor, Claude 2 is built atop a large language model and can be used for written tasks like summarizing, searching, answering questions and coding. Both models can currently take in large chunks of text -- a user can ask it to summarize a book, for instance -- though Claude 2 can generate longer responses than its predecessor. Responses can reach up to about 3,000 words, according to data provided by the company. Claude 2 will also offer more accurate responses on some topics, such as coding and grade-school-level math, the company said. Anthropic's goal has been for Claude to be less susceptible than other chatbots to manipulation.

The U.K.'s largest NHS trust has confirmed it's investigating a ransomware incident as the country's public sector continues to battle a rising wave of cyberattacks. From a report: Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs five London-based hospitals and serves more than 2.5 million patients, was recently added to the dark web leak site of the ALPHV ransomware gang. The gang, also known as BlackCat, says it has stolen 70 terabytes of sensitive data in what it claims is the biggest breach of healthcare data in the United Kingdom. Samples of the allegedly stolen data, seen by TechCrunch, include employee identification documents, including passports and driver licenses, and internal emails labeled "confidential."

When asked by TechCrunch, a Barts Health spokesperson did not dispute that it was affected by a security incident that involved the exfiltration of data, nor did they dispute the legitimacy of the stolen data samples shared by ALPHV. "We are aware of claims of a ransomware attack and are urgently investigating," the spokesperson, who did not provide their name, told TechCrunch.

Long-time Slashdot reader beforewisdom shared this report from the Independent: South Koreans have begun to hoard excessive amounts of sea salt and other items as Japan prepares to dump treated radioactive water from the Fukushima power plant into the ocean... Tokyo has repeatedly assured that the water is safe and has been filtered to remove most isotopes though it does contain traces of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water.

Although Japan has not set a date for the release, the announcement has made fishermen and shoppers across the region apprehensive. South Korea's fisheries authorities have vowed to ramp up efforts to monitor natural salt farms for any rise in radioactive substances and maintain a ban on seafood from the waters near Fukushima... The panic buying has led to a 27 per cent rise in the price of salt in South Korea in June from two months ago, though officials say the weather and lower production were also to blame. The Korean government in response has decided to release about 50 metric tons of salt a day from stocks, at a 20 per cent discount from market prices, until 11 July...

More than 85 per cent of the South Korean public oppose Japan's plan, according to a survey last month by local pollster Research View. Seven in 10 people reportedly said that they would consume less seafood if the waste water release goes ahead.

Google says it would take the world's leading supercomputer more than 47 years to match the calculation speed of its newest quantum computer, reports the Telegraph: Four years ago, Google claimed to be the first company to achieve "quantum supremacy" — a milestone point at which quantum computers surpass existing machines. This was challenged at the time by rivals, which argued that Google was exaggerating the difference between its machine and traditional supercomputers. The company's new paper — Phase Transition in Random Circuit Sampling — published on the open access science website ArXiv, demonstrates a more powerful device that aims to end the debate.

While [Google's] 2019 machine had 53 qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, the next generation device has 70. Adding more qubits improves a quantum computer's power exponentially, meaning the new machine is 241 million times more powerful than the 2019 machine...

Steve Brierley, the chief executive of Cambridge-based quantum company Riverlane, said: "This is a major milestone. The squabbling about whether we had reached, or indeed could reach, quantum supremacy is now resolved."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Remember those researchers who generated electricity from the energy in air humidity?

"To be frank, it was an accident," the study's lead author, Prof Jun Yao, tells the Guardian: "We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power." The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless. Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. "So it's really like a battery," says Yao. "You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow..."

"The beauty is that the air is everywhere," says Yao. "Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power." That's exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project, whose aim is "changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power", and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva, a startup intended to commercialise the research... Catcher and related projects [received] nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day — roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024...

The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy — the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime — from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind... The team accept that it may take years to optimise a prototype and scale up production, but if they're successful, the benefits are clear. Unlike solar or wind, hygroelectric generators could work day and night, indoors and out, and in many places.
Yao explains to the Guardian that "Lots of energy is stored in water molecules in the air. That's where we get the lightning effect during a thunderstorm.

"The existence of this type of energy isn't in doubt. It's about how we collect it."

Thanks to Slashdot reader j3x0n for sharing the article.

Monday was Earth's hottest day in at least 125,000 years — and Tuesday was hotter.

The Washington Post reports that the director of Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service has a term for it: "uncharted territory." It's not just that records are being broken — but the massive margins with which conditions are surpassing previous extremes, scientists note. In parts of the North Atlantic, temperatures are running as high as 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the warmest observed there in more than 170 years. The warm waters helped northwestern Europe, including the United Kingdom, clinch its warmest June on record.

New data the Copernicus center published Thursday showed global surface air temperatures were 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 average in June... Antarctic sea ice, meanwhile, reached its lowest June extent since the dawn of the satellite era, at 17 percent below the 1991-2020 average, Copernicus said. The previous record, set a year earlier, was about 9 percent below average.

The planet is increasingly flirting with a global warming benchmark that policymakers have sought to avoid — 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. It has, at times, been surpassed already this year, including in early June, though the full month averaged 1.36 degrees above an 1850-1900 reference temperature, according to Copernicus.

2096 subreddits were still dark on Friday, as PC Magazine shared this update about ongoing protests at Reddit: To stamp out any remaining protests, Reddit is sending "final warnings" to subreddits that decided to permit NSFW content as a way to derail the company's advertising business.

Reddit sent warnings to subreddits including r/PICs, r/Military, r/dndmemes, and r/JustNoMil, which was first noticed by The Verge. The message states: "This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW, which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies."

The warning threatens to punish volunteer moderators of the affected subreddits. "Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week," Reddit told the moderators of r/PICs. "This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team..."

However, the r/PICs subreddit wants to remain a NSFW destination, citing the adult and profane content that users often post. "We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit's listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW," the moderators for r/PICs told Reddit.

Apple plans to launch its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset in select US markets early next year, with designated sections in Apple stores offering demos, seating, and tools for sizing accessories. Bloomberg reports: The company will designate special areas in the stores with seating, headset demo units and tools to size accessories for buyers. While the device will be sold at all of Apple's roughly 270 US locations, the company is planning the sections for the Vision Pro initially at stores in major areas -- such as New York and Los Angeles -- before rolling them out nationwide, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

Apple said it will offer the headset in other countries at the end of 2024. The company is discussing the UK and Canada as two of its first international markets with Asia and Europe soon after, although a final decision hasn't been made, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. Apple engineers are working to localize the device for France, Germany, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, the people said. Apple will also sell the Vision Pro through its US web store in early 2024 before expanding online elsewhere.

Mastercard is selling a new artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps banks more effectively spot if their customers are trying to send money to fraudsters. From a report: Nine of the UK's biggest banks, including Lloyds Banking, Natwest and Bank of Scotland, have signed up to use the Consumer Fraud Risk system, Mastercard told Bloomberg News. Trained on years of transaction data, the tool helps to predict whether someone is trying to transfer funds to an account affiliated with "authorized push payment scams." This type of fraud involves tricking a victim into moving money into an account falsely posing as a legitimate payee, such as a family member, friend or a business.

The tool comes as UK banks prepare for new rules from the Payment Systems Regulator that will require them to compensate customers affected by APP scams from 2024. Historically banks haven't been liable for this type of fraud, although some signed a voluntary agreement to pay back victims. Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, described APP scams as a "huge problem" that banks have historically struggled to detect because victims' accounts aren't compromised. Clients voluntarily make the transfer and so pass many of the security checks used to identify other types of fraud, such as unauthorized payments, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Virtual reality (VR) headsets are now being used on hospital wards to help keep patients calm during procedures. A trial at Kidderminster Hospital saw soothing sounds and visuals from them used to cut stress and anxiety. In one case, VR was used in place of sedation when a tube was inserted into a child's vein for blood sampling, staff said.

The Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust says they are now a permanent feature in its hospitals. Dawn Forbes, a nurse specialist, used the technology ahead of a blood test and MRI scan for a patient with a phobia of needles. She said it enabled a cannula to be placed "quickly without causing any pain or distress."