Gemini Nano Won’t Come To Pixel 8 Due To Hardware Limitations

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MobileSyrup: Google’s new smart assistant, Gemini, is available on multiple devices but Gemini Nano, the multimodal large language model, isn’t coming to all Pixel smartphones. Gemini Nano is only available on the Google Pixel 8 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S24 series; however, we’ve recently learned that it’s not making its way to the base Pixel 8, according to Terence Zhang, an engineer at Google and reporter by Mishaal Rahman.

Zhang told everyone that Gemini Nano isn’t coming to the Pixel 8 because of hardware limitations, but it’s unclear what the hardware limitations are. Many would assume it’s due to the Pixel 8 housing only 8GB of RAM compared to the Pixel 8 Pro’s 12GB. That said, the Galaxy S24 series starts at 8GB of RAM and can use Nano. This must mean that some other hardware limitations are holding back Gemini Nano. Hopefully, more information will come in the future, but right now, it seems like only high-end devices will get the Gemini Nano experience.

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Warner Bros. is Now Erasing Games As It Plans To Delist Adult Swim-Published Titles

Michael McWhertor reports via Polygon: Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim unclear. The media conglomerate’s planned removal of those games echoes cuts from its film and television business; Warner Bros. Discovery infamously scrapped plans to release nearly complete movies Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, and removed multiple series from its streaming services. If Warner Bros. does go through with plans to delist Adult Swim’s games from Steam and digital console stores, 18 or more games could be affected.

News of the Warner Bros. plan to potentially pull Adult Swim’s games from Steam and the PlayStation Store was first reported by developer Owen Reedy, who released puzzle-adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions through the label in 2016. Reedy said on X Tuesday the game was being “retired” by Adult Swim Games’ owner. He responded to the company’s decision by making the Windows PC version of Small Radios Big Televisions available to download for free from his studio’s website. Polygon reached out to other developers who had worked with Adult Swim Games as a publisher. Two studios responded to say that they’d received a similar warning from Warner Bros. Discovery, but they are still in the dark about what it means for their games. […]

Polygon reached out to 10 studios and solo developers who had their games published by Adult Swim Games to see what they’ve heard. Some say they haven’t been contacted by WB Discovery, but they expect to. “From what I’ve heard from others, I will probably be hearing from them soon,” developer Andrew Morrish, who published Kingsway and Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe through Adult Swim, told Polygon. “It’s not looking good.” Molinari said that if and when his game Soundodger+ is pulled from Steam, he’ll republish it there “with as little downtime as possible between the two versions.” The game is also available from Molinari’s itch page.

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Company That Plans To Bring Back the Mammoth Takes a Key Step

John Timmer reports via Ars Technica: A company called Colossal plans to pioneer the de-extinction business, taking species that have died within the past few thousand years and restoring them through the use of DNA editing and stem cells. It’s grabbed headlines recently by announcing some compelling targets: the thylacine, an extinct marsupial predator, and an icon of human carelessness, the dodo. But the company was formed to tackle an even more audacious target: the mammoth, which hasn’t roamed the Northern Hemisphere for thousands of years. Obviously, there are a host of ethical and conservation issues that would need to be worked out before Colossal’s plans go forward. But there are some major practical hurdles as well, most of them the product of the distinct and extremely slow reproductive biology of the mammoth’s closest living relatives, the elephants. At least one of those has now been cleared, as the company is announcing the production of the first elephant stem cells. The process turned out to be extremely difficult, suggesting that the company still has a long road ahead of it. […] Overall, it’s a project that has a high probability of failure and may ultimately require generations of scientists. If we do successfully de-extinct a species, the first example will probably be a different species, even though the projects launched later.

But Colossal is forging ahead and cleared one of the many hurdles it faces: It created the first induced stem cells from elephants and will be placing a draft manuscript describing the process on a public repository on Wednesday. (Colossal provided Ars with an advanced version of the draft that, outside of a few editing errors, appears largely complete.) Beyond providing the technical details of how the process works, the manuscript describes a long, failure-ridden route to eventual success. Several methods have been developed to allow us to induce stem cells from the cells of an adult organism. The original Nobel-winning process developed by Shinya Yamanaka involved inserting the genes that encode four key embryonic regulatory genes into adult cells and allowing them to reprogram the adult cell into an embryonic state. That has proven effective in a variety of species but has a couple of drawbacks due to the fact that the four genes can potentially stick around, interfering with later development steps. Although there are ways around that, others have developed a cocktail of chemicals that perform a similar function by activating signaling pathways that, collectively, can also reprogram adult cells. When it works, this simplifies matters, as you only have to remove the chemicals to allow the stem cells to adopt other fates. Colossal tried both of these. Neither worked with elephant cells: “Multiple attempts with current standard reprogramming methods were tried, and failed, and resulted in no, or incomplete, reprogramming.” Apparently, lots of additional trial and error ensued. The eventual solution ended up being based in part on combining the two primary options: Cells were first exposed to a chemical reprogramming cocktail and then given the four genes used in the alternative reprogramming method. On its own, however, that wasn’t enough. The researchers also had to address a quirk of elephant biology.

Obviously, for Colossal, this is a means to an end: the mammoth. But that’s remarkably underplayed in the manuscript. Instead, its emphasis is on the technology’s use in the conservation of existing species. [T]he researchers note that studying things like elephant development and metabolism in actual elephants is not especially realistic. But we can potentially induce the stem cells developed here into any cell we’d want to study — nerve, liver, heart, and so on. So, the stem cells described here could be a useful tool for research. So, these cells are being presented as a valuable tool for the research community. Still, you can expect the people behind the de-extinction project to be getting to work on some of the easier things: showing that the genome in the cells can be edited and that they can be induced to start the process of embryogenesis. Separately, some unfortunate individuals will need to be working on the hard problems we mentioned earlier.

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Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME’s Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default. Recently there was a Fedora Workstation ticket opened to no longer install the GNOME X.Org session by default. This is just about whether the X.Org session is pre-installed but would continue to live in the repository for those wanting to explicitly install it.

The Fedora Workstation working group decided to go ahead with this change for the Fedora 41 cycle, not the upcoming Fedora 40 release. So pending any obstacles by FESCo, which is unlikely. Fedora Workstation 41 will not be installing the GNOME X.Org session by default. Long live Wayland.

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Reddit Will Now Use an AI Model To Fight Harassment

An APK teardown performed by Android Authority has revealed that Reddit is now using a Large Language Model (LLM) to detect harassment on the platform. From the report: Reddit also updated its support page a week ago to mention the use of an AI model as part of its harassment filter. “The filter is powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) that’s trained on moderator actions and content removed by Reddit’s internal tools and enforcement teams,” reads an excerpt from the page. The Register reports: The filter can be enabled in a Reddit community’s mod tools, but individual moderators will need to have permissions to change subreddit settings to enable it. The harassment filter can be set to low (“filters the least content but with the most accurate results”) and high (“filters the most content but may be less accurate”), and also includes an explicit allow list to force the AI to ignore certain keywords, up to 15 of which can be added. Once enabled, the filter creates a new tag in the moderation queue called “potential harassment,” which moderators can review for accuracy. Reddit’s help page says the feature is now available on desktop and the official Reddit apps, though it’s not clear when the feature was added.

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Rising Temperatures and Heat Shocks Prompt Job Relocations, Study Finds

dcblogs writes: A recent study in the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that companies are quietly adapting to rising temperatures by shifting operations from hotter to cooler locations. The researchers analyzed data from 50,000 companies between 2009 and 2020. “To illustrate the economic impact, the researchers found that when a company with equal employment across two counties experiences a heat shock in one county, there is a subsequent 0.7% increase in employment growth in the unaffected county over a three-year horizon,” reports TechTarget. “The finding is significant, given that the mean employment growth for the sample of businesses in the study is 2.4%.”

Heat shocks are characterized by their severe impact on health, energy grids, and increased fire risks, influencing companies with multiple locations to reconsider their geographical distribution of operations. Despite this trend, states like Arizona and Nevada, which have some of the highest heat-related death tolls, continue to experience rapid business expansion. Experts believe that factors such as labor pool, taxes, and regulations still outweigh environmental climate risks when it comes to business site selection. But heat associated deaths are on the rise. In the Phoenix area alone, it experienced 425 heat related deaths in 2022 and a similar number in 2023 — record highs for this region.
The study suggests that the implications of climate change on business operations are becoming more apparent. Companies are beginning to evaluate climate risks as part of their regular risk assessment process.

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Former Google Engineer Indicted For Stealing AI Secrets To Aid Chinese Companies

Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, has been indicted for stealing trade secrets related to AI to benefit two Chinese companies. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each criminal count. Reuters reports: Ding’s indictment was unveiled a little over a year after the Biden administration created an interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force to help stop advanced technology being acquired by countries such as China and Russia, or potentially threaten national security. “The Justice Department just will not tolerate the theft of our trade secrets and intelligence,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a conference in San Francisco.

According to the indictment, Ding stole detailed information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that lets Google’s supercomputing data centers train large AI models through machine learning. The stolen information included details about chips and systems, and software that helps power a supercomputer “capable of executing at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology,” the indictment said. Google designed some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints to gain an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which design their own, and reduce its reliance on chips from Nvidia.

Hired by Google in 2019, Ding allegedly began his thefts three years later, while he was being courted to become chief technology officer for an early-stage Chinese tech company, and by May 2023 had uploaded more than 500 confidential files. The indictment said Ding founded his own technology company that month, and circulated a document to a chat group that said “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it.” Google became suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and took away his laptop on Jan. 4, 2024, the day before Ding planned to resign. A Google spokesperson said: “We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement.”

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Apple iPhone Sales In China Plummet As Huawei Soars

Huawei is back from the dead after recording a sales jump of 64% in the first six weeks of 2024 compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, Apple’s iPhone sales in China fell by 24% during the same period. The BBC reports: Aside from a resurgence of Huawei sales at the more expensive end of the Chinese phone market, Apple was also “squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi,” Counterpoint Research’s Mengmeng Zhang wrote. China, which is one of Apple’s biggest markets, also saw overall smartphone sales shrink by 7% in the same period, the report said. Huawei struggled for years due to US sanctions but its sales surged after releasing its Mate 60 series of 5G smartphones in August. It came as a major surprise as the Chinese firm was cut off from key chips and technology required for 5G mobile internet.

Honor, which is the smartphone brand spun off from Huawei in 2020, was the only other top-five brand to see sales increase in China during the period, according to the report. Sales of Vivo, Xiaomi and Oppo also fell in the first six weeks of the year, Counterpoint said. Its report also said Apple’s share of the Chinese smartphone market dropped to 15.7% from 19% last year, putting it in fourth place as it fell from the number two spot. Meanwhile, Huawei rose to second place as its market share grew to 16.5% from 9.4% a year earlier. Despite its sales falling by 15% over the last year, Vivo remained China’s top-selling smartphone maker, Counterpoint said.

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Signal’s New Usernames Help Keep Cops Out of Your Data

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from The Intercept: With the new version of Signal, you will no longer broadcast your phone number to everyone you send messages to by default, though you can choose to if you want. Your phone number will still be displayed to contacts who already have it stored in their phones. Going forward, however, when you start a new conversation on Signal, your number won’t be shared at all: Contacts will just see the name you use when you set up your Signal profile. So even if your contact is using a custom Signal client, for example, they still won’t be able to discover your phone number since the service will never tell it to them.

You also now have the option to set a username, which Signal lets you change whenever you want and delete when you don’t want it anymore. Rather than directly storing your username as part of your account details, Signal stores a cryptographic hash of your username instead; Signal uses the Ristretto 25519 hashing algorithm, essentially storing a random block of data instead of usernames themselves. This is like how online services can confirm a user’s password is valid without storing a copy of the actual password itself. “As far as we’re aware, we’re the only messaging platform that now has support for usernames that doesn’t know everyone’s usernames by default,” said Josh Lund, a senior technologist at Signal. The move is yet another piece of the Signal ethos to keep as little data on hand as it can, lest the authorities try to intrude on the company. Whittaker explained, “We don’t want to be forced to enumerate a directory of usernames.” […]

If Signal receives a subpoena demanding that they hand over all account data related to a user with a specific username that is currently active at the time that Signal looks it up, they would be able to link it to an account. That means Signal would turn over that user’s phone number, along with the account creation date and the last connection date. Whittaker stressed that this is “a pretty narrow pipeline that is guarded viciously by ACLU lawyers,” just to obtain a phone number based on a username. Signal, though, can’t confirm how long a given username has been in use, how many other accounts have used it in the past, or anything else about it. If the Signal user briefly used a username and then deleted it, Signal wouldn’t even be able to confirm that it was ever in use to begin with, much less which accounts had used it before.

In short, if you’re worried about Signal handing over your phone number to law enforcement based on your username, you should only set a username when you want someone to contact you, and then delete it afterward. And each time, always set a different username. Likewise, if you want someone to contact you securely, you can send them your Signal link, and, as soon as they make contact, you can reset the link. If Signal receives a subpoena based on a link that was already reset, it will be impossible for them to look up which account it was associated with. If the subpoena demands that Signal turn over account information based on a phone number, rather than a username, Signal could be forced to hand over the cryptographic hash of the account’s username, if a username is set. It would be difficult, however, for law enforcement to learn the actual username itself based on its hash. If they already suspect a username, they could use the hash to confirm that it’s real. Otherwise, they would have to guess the username using password cracking techniques like dictionary attacks or rainbow tables.

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