Valve Is Working On a Major Update For ‘Team Fortress 2’

As Kotaku reported late last week, Valve is preparing a major update for Team Fortress 2. The studio published a rare blog post asking the game’s community to submit new content to the Steam Workshop ahead of May 1st. “The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates. But this year [Valve’s emphasis], we’re planning on shipping a full-on update-sized update — with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?!” Valve said. Engadget reports: By our count, the “as as-yet-unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed)” update Valve has planned will go down as TF2’s first major content release since the company came out with the Jungle Inferno update in 2017 for the game’s 10-year anniversary. Valve has released smaller updates since then mostly to address the botting problem that made it impossible to play the game, but new content additions have been few and far between.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon’s Zoox Robotaxi Now Giving Rides To Employees On Public Roads In California

Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle venture Zoox said on Monday that it is now testing its self-driving robotaxis on public roads in California with passengers on board. CNBC reports: The vehicles have no steering wheel or pedals, and they have bidirectional driving capabilities and four-wheel steering, enabling them to change directions without the need to reverse. Zoox executives said the company began the tests after it received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles last week.

The permit is not for all public roads in the state. The tests are currently limited to shuttling Zoox employees on a one-mile public route between two office buildings at the company’s headquarters in Foster City, California, at speeds up to 35 miles an hour. The company hasn’t said how big its test fleet is, but executives have said they have built “dozens” of vehicles, although fewer than 100. Zoox said one of its vehicles completed a test run with employees on board over the weekend.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bing ‘Hallucinated’ the Winner of the Super Bowl Four Days Before it Happened

On Wednesday the Associated Press tested the new AI enhancements to Microsoft’s search engine Bing, asking it “for the most important thing to happen in sports over the past 24 hours — with the expectation it might say something about basketball star LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring record.

“Instead, it confidently spouted a false but detailed account of the upcoming Super Bowl — days before it’s actually scheduled to happen.”

“It was a thrilling game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, two of the best teams in the NFL this season,” Bing said. “The Eagles, led by quarterback Jalen Hurts, won their second Lombardi Trophy in franchise history by defeating the Chiefs, led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, with a score of 31-28.” It kept going, describing the specific yard lengths of throws and field goals and naming three songs played in a “spectacular half time show” by Rihanna.

Unless Bing is clairvoyant — tune in Sunday to find out — it reflected a problem known as AI “hallucination” that’s common with today’s large language-learning models. It’s one of the reasons why companies like Google and Facebook parent Meta had been reluctant to make these models publicly accessible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Military Shoots Down Fourth Flying Object Near Michigan

The U.S. military shot down another high-altitude object Sunday, reports CNN — this one flying
“The operation marks the third day in a row that an unidentified object was shot down over North American airspace.”
Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said Sunday that the operation to down the object over Lake Huron was carried out by pilots from the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard…. The object was flying at 20,000 feet over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and was about to go over Lake Huron when it was neutralized, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

The object was “octagonal” with strings hanging off and no discernable payload, according to the official and another source briefed on the matter. While the U.S. has no indication that the object had surveillance capabilities, that has not been ruled out yet.

Why have so many flying objects been spotted in the last week? The Washington Post says the Chinese spy balloon and subsequently-spotted objects “have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday.”
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.

“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary….

The official said the current U.S. assessment is the objects are not military threats.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electric Vehicles Could Match Gas-Powered Cars on Price This Year

This year in America some electric cars could become “as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines,” reports the New York Times, citing figures from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research and advocacy group.
Prices are likely to continue trending lower as Tesla, General Motors, Ford Motor and their battery suppliers ramp up new factories, reaping the cost savings that come from mass production. New electric vehicles from companies like Volkswagen, Nissan and Hyundai will add to competitive pressure…. Falling prices for materials like lithium and cobalt have also helped. The price of lithium used in batteries has fallen 20% from its peak in November, though the metal still costs more than twice as much as it did at the end of 2021. Cobalt has fallen by more than half since May, in part because carmakers are selling some models that do not require it, reducing demand. New lithium mines are beginning to produce ore, which could keep a lid on prices…

As electric-vehicle sales soar — rising 66% in the United States last year to 810,000, according to Kelley Blue Book — automakers are getting better at making them…. Auto executives say that they are finding it is easier and cheaper to design and build new electric models than gasoline-powered ones. The battery cells made by Ultium, for example, are part of a collection of components that can be mixed and matched in many types of vehicles. Carmakers have long used the same platforms in multiple models, but the strategy works even better with electric vehicles because the cars have far fewer parts than internal combustion vehicles. The Ultium platform cuts the time needed to develop a new vehicle by almost two years, Dan Nicholson, vice president of electrification at GM, said at a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago conference in January. As a result, GM will be able to introduce three Chevrolet electric vehicles this year: the Equinox, a Silverado pickup truck and a Blazer SUV. “That’s how we get the economies of scale,” Nicholson said.

The article cite’s legislation passed last year subsidizing battery manufacturers, which “could cut the cost of making electric vehicles by as much as $9,000,” as well as the legislation’s tax credits for cars priced below $55,000.
But besides making it cheaper to purchase an electric car, “the car will need less maintenance,” the article points out, “and the electricity to power it will cost less than the gasoline used by its combustion engine equivalent.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Shoots Down a Third Unidentified Object Flying Over Canada

CNN reports:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday that an “unidentified object” had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet over Canadian airspace on his orders…. “Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object,” Trudeau said on Twitter….
A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets “monitored the object” with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard, Ryder’s statement said, “tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object.”

“Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace, with Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joining the formation to further assess the object. A U.S. F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory using an AIM 9X missile,” his statement added….

It is not clear what the object is or whether it is related to the spy balloon shot down last week or the unidentified object shot down over Alaska on Friday.

“Saturday’s incident follows the downing of another unidentified object on Friday over Alaska, and the shoot-down of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4 by a US F-22 fighter jet.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US-Based EV Battery Recycling Company Predicts Material For 1M EVs a Year

Last year Redwood Materials announced a new program recycling EV batteries (including partnerships with Ford and Volvo). Now Politico reports that America’s Department of Energy tentatively awarded them a $2 billion loan, “which the company says will allow it to produce enough battery materials to enable the production of more than a million electric vehicles a year.”

The Nevada-based company said it plans to ultimately ramp up to producing 100 gigawatt-hours annually of ultra-thin battery-grade materials from both new and recycled sources in the United States for the first time.” Redwood founder CEO JB Straubel, who previously worked at Tesla, said at an event announcing the loan that he had a “front row seat” while at the Elon Musk-helmed electric vehicle maker to “some of the bigger challenges the the entire industry would face as it scales,” particularly around the battery materials supply chain. “It was somewhat clear even way back then, eight years ago, that this would be a really big bottleneck for the entire industry as it scaled,” Straubel said….

Redwood plans to manufacture battery anodes, containing copper and graphite, and cathodes, containing all the critical metals in a battery — like lithium, nickel, and cobalt — amounting to nearly 80 percent of the materials cost of a lithium-ion battery.

A Detroit newspaper reports Ford will also announce plans Monday to help build a $2.5 billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Michigan.

In fact, this year in America some electric cars could become “as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines,” reports the New York Times — specifically because of “increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Quantum Computing Bring a Cryptopocalypse?

“The waiting time for general purpose quantum computers is getting shorter, but they are still probably decades away,” notes Security Week.

But “The arrival of cryptanalytically-relevant quantum computers that will herald the cryptopocalypse will be much sooner — possibly less than a decade.”

It is important to note that all PKI-encrypted data that has already been harvested by adversaries is already lost. We can do nothing about the past; we can only attempt to protect the future…. [T]his is not a threat for the future — the threat exists today. Adversaries are known to be stealing and storing encrypted data with the knowledge that within a few years they will be able to access the raw data. This is known as the ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ threat. Intellectual property and commercial plans — not to mention military secrets — will still be valuable to adversaries when the cryptopocalypse happens.

The one thing we can say with certainty is that it definitely won’t happen in 2023 — probably. That probably comes from not knowing for certain what stage in the journey to quantum computing has been achieved by foreign nations or their intelligence agencies — and they’re not likely to tell us. Nevertheless, it is assumed that nobody yet has a quantum computer powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm and crack PKI encryption in a meaningful timeframe. It is likely that such computers may become available as soon as three to five years. Most predictions suggest ten years.

Note that a specialized quantum computer designed specifically for Shor does not need to be as powerful as a general-purpose quantum computer — which is more likely to be 20 to 30 years away…. “Quantum computing is not, yet, to the point of rendering conventional encryption useless, at least that we know of, but it is heading that way,” comments Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber. Skip Sanzeri, co-founder and COO at QuSecure, warns that the threat to current encryption is not limited to quantum decryption. “New approaches are being developed promising the same post-quantum cybersecurity threats as a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, only much sooner,” he said. “It is also believed that quantum advancements don’t have to directly decrypt today’s encryption. If they weaken it by suggesting or probabilistically finding some better seeds for a classical algorithm (like the sieve) and make that more efficient, that can result in a successful attack. And it’s no stretch to predict, speaking of predictions, that people are going to find ways to hack our encryption that we don’t even know about yet.”

Steve Weston, co-founder and CTO at Incrypteon, offers a possible illustration. “Where is the threat in 2023 and beyond?” he asks. “Is it the threat from quantum computers, or is the bigger threat from AI? An analysis of cryptoanalysis and code breaking over the last 40 years shows how AI is used now, and will be more so in the future.”

The article warns that “the coming cryptopocalypse requires organizations to transition from known quantum-vulnerable encryption (such as current PKI standards) to something that is at least quantum safe if not quantum secure.” (The chief revenue officer at Quintessence Labs tells the site that symmetric encryption like AES-256 “is theorized to be quantum safe, but one can speculate that key sizes will soon double.”)

“The only quantum secure cryptography known is the one-time pad.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google’s Go May Add Telemetry That’s On By Default

Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain. However many in the Go community object because the plan calls for telemetry by default. The Register reports: These alarmed developers would prefer an opt-in rather than an opt-out regime, a position the Go team rejects because it would ensure low adoption and would reduce the amount of telemetry data received to the point it would be of little value. Cox’s proposal summarized lengthier documentation in three blog posts.

Telemetry, as Cox describes it, involves software sending data from Go software to a server to provide information about which functions are being used and how the software is performing. He argues it is beneficial for open source projects to have that information to guide development. And the absence of telemetry data, he contends, makes it more difficult for project maintainers to understand what’s important, what’s working, and to prioritize changes, thereby making maintainer burnout more likely. But such is Google’s reputation these days that many considering the proposal have doubts, despite the fact that the data collection contemplated involves measuring the usage of language features and language performance. The proposal isn’t about the sort of sensitive personal data vacuumed up by Google’s ad-focused groups. “Now you guys want to introduce telemetry into your programming language?” IT consultant Jacob Weisz said. “This is how you drive off any person who even considered giving your project a chance despite the warning signs. Please don’t do this, and please issue a public apology for even proposing it. Please leave a blast radius around this idea wide enough that nobody even suggests trying to do this again.”

He added: “Trust in Google’s behavior is at an all time low, and moves like this are a choice to shove what’s left of it off the edge of a cliff.”

Meanwhile, former Google cryptographer and current open source maintainer Filippo Valsorda said in a post to Mastodon: “This is a large unconventional design, there are a lot of tradeoffs worth discussing and details to explore,” he wrote. “When Russ showed it to me I made at least a dozen suggestions and many got implemented.”

“Instead: all opt-out telemetry is unethical; Google is evil; this is not needed. No one even argued why publishing any of this data could be a problem.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.