US Department of Homeland Security is Now Studying How to Make Use of AI

America’s Department of Homeland Security “will establish a new task force to examine how the government can use artificial intelligence technology to protect the country,” reports CNBC.
The task force was announcement by department secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Friday during a speech at a Council on Foreign Relations event:
“Our department will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland,” Mayorkas said, while also pledging to defend “against the malicious use of this transformational technology.” He added, “As we do this, we will ensure that our use of AI is rigorously tested to avoid bias and disparate impact and is clearly explainable to the people we serve….”

Mayorkas gave two examples of how the task force will help determine how AI could be used to fine-tune the agency’s work. One is to deploy AI into DHS systems that screen cargo for goods produced by forced labor. The second is to use the technology to better detect fentanyl in shipments to the U.S., as well as identifying and stopping the flow of “precursor chemicals” used to produce the dangerous drug.

Mayorkas asked Homeland Security Advisory Council Co-Chair Jamie Gorelick to study “the intersection of AI and homeland security and deliver findings that will help guide our use of it and defense against it.”

The article also notes that earlier this week America’s defense department hired a former Google AI cloud director to serve as its first advisor on AI, robotics, cloud computing and data analytics.

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Scientists Discover First ‘Neutron-Rich’ Isotope of Uranium Since 1979

An anonymous reader shared this report from LiveScience: Scientists have discovered and synthesized an entirely new isotope of the highly radioactive element uranium. But it might last only 40 minutes before decaying into other elements. The new isotope, uranium-241, has 92 protons (as all uranium isotopes do) and 149 neutrons, making it the first new neutron-rich isotope of uranium discovered since 1979. While atoms of a given element always have the same number of protons, different isotopes, or versions, of those elements may hold different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. To be considered neutron-rich, an isotope must contain more neutrons than is common to that element…

“We measured the masses of 19 different actinide isotopes with a high precision of one part per million level, including the discovery and identification of the new uranium isotope,” Toshitaka Niwase, a researcher at the High-energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Wako Nuclear Science Center (WNSC) in Japan, told Live Science in an email. “This is the first new discovery of a uranium isotope on the neutron-rich side in over 40 years.” Niwase is the lead author of a study on the new uranium isotope, which was published March 31 in the journal Physical Review Letters…

Niwase and colleagues created the uranium-241 by firing a sample of uranium-238 at platinum-198 nuclei at Japan’s RIKEN accelerator. The two isotopes then swapped neutrons and protons — a phenomenon called “multinucleon transfer.” The team then measured the mass of the created isotopes by observing the time it took the resulting nuclei to travel a certain distance through a medium. The experiment also generated 18 new isotopes, all of which contained between 143 and 150 neutrons.

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New Version of Rust Speeds Compilation With Less Debugging Info By Default

The Rust team released a new version Thursday — Rust 1.69.0 — boasting over over 3,000 new commits from over 500 contributors.

Phoronix highlights two new improvements:

In order to speed-up compilation speeds, Rust 1.69 and moving forward debug information is no longer included in build scripts by default. Cargo will avoid emitting debug information in build scripts by default — leading to less informative backtraces in build scripts when problems arise, but faster build speeds by default. Those wanting the debug information emitted can now set the debug flag in their Cargo.toml configuration.

The Cargo build shipped by Rust 1.69 is also now capable of suggesting fixes automatically for some of the generated warnings. Cargo will also suggest using “cargo fix” / “cargo clippy –fix” when it knows the errors can be automatically fixed.

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When Apple Comes Calling, ‘It’s the Kiss of Death’

Aspiring partners accuse Apple of copying their ideas. From a report: It sounded like a dream partnership when Apple reached out to Joe Kiani, the founder of a company that makes blood-oxygen measurement devices. He figured his technology was a perfect fit for the Apple Watch. Soon after meeting him, Apple began hiring employees from his company, Masimo, including engineers and its chief medical officer. Apple offered to double their salaries, Mr. Kiani said. In 2019, Apple published patents under the name of a former Masimo engineer for sensors similar to Masimo’s, documents show. The following year, Apple launched a watch that could measure blood oxygen levels. “When Apple takes an interest in a company, it’s the kiss of death,” said Mr. Kiani. “First, you get all excited. Then you realize that the long-term plan is to do it themselves and take it all.” Mr. Kiani is one of more than two dozen executives, inventors, investors and lawyers who described similar encounters with Apple. First, they said, came discussions about potential partnerships or integration of their technology into Apple products. Then, they said, talks stopped and Apple launched its own similar features.

Apple said that it doesn’t steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies. It said Masimo and other companies cited in this article are copying Apple, and that it would fight the claims in court. Apple has tried to invalidate hundreds of patents owned by companies that have accused Apple of violating their patents. According to lawyers and executives at some smaller companies, Apple sometimes files multiple petitions on a single patent claim and attempts to invalidate patents unrelated to the initial dispute. Many large companies, particularly in tech, have been known to scoop up employees and technology from smaller potential rivals. Software developers have given a name to what they describe as Apple’s behavior in such cases: sherlocking. The term refers to an episode about two decades ago, when Apple released a software product called “Sherlock” that helped users find files on its Mac computers and perform internet searches.

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Apple’s VR Headset Might Run Tweaked Versions of iPad Apps

Apple’s long-rumored VR / AR headset might run adapted versions of iPad apps, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The mixed reality device’s new interface will also apparently let users access “millions” of already-available apps on the App Store. And the headset’s apps might not be the only thing that might remind you of the iPad; the Home Screen and Control Center will apparently look like the iPad’s as well, Bloomberg says. The Verge reports: Here are some of the apps you can expect, according to Bloomberg:

– Apple is working on “optimized” versions of apps like Safari and many of the core apps you might already be familiar with from an iPhone, including “Apple’s services for calendars, contacts, files, home control, mail, maps, messaging, notes, photos and reminders, as well as its music, news, stocks and weather apps.”
– There will be headset versions of FaceTime and Apple TV with features that “will look similar to their iPad counterparts.”
– Apple is apparently testing a camera app, which could let you take pictures using its many rumored cameras.
– You’ll be able to read books in VR with Apple Books and meditate with an app.
– A headset-compatible version of its new Freeform app could let you collaborate with others in mixed reality.
– Freeform won’t be the only productivity app: the headset will also apparently support Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, and GarageBand.
– Apple wants to make watching sports a “richer experience,” which could utilize technology it acquired when it bought NextVR.
– Gaming will “be a central piece of the device’s appeal.” (That feels like a smart decision.)

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Apple Is the One Big Tech Company Without a Clear ChatGPT Strategy

The global excitement around ChatGPT, and the haste to copy it, resembles the introduction of an Apple product. Everyone is stoked to try it, and other tech companies are working late nights to reverse engineer it. This time, Apple is nowhere to be found. Has the speed of it all caught the world’s most influential tech company by surprise? From a report: Microsoft has poured $10 billion into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and reconfigured how it builds server farms to accommodate more of Nvidia’s class-leading processors for training artificial intelligence. Alphabet’s Google has made responding to ChatGPT a top priority. Amazon has also jumped into the fray with its cloud division. That’s four of the world’s top seven most valuable companies, and yet, the most valuable of them all seems to have no ready answer for what’s coming. Bloomberg reported on an internal AI summit Apple held in February, when machine learning and other deployments of the tech across Apple products were discussed, but there was no hint of anything in the genre of generative AI.

AI in Apple products today is like irrigation for its walled garden, essential and helpful for an increasing number of functions, but ultimately it’s the hardware fruit that Apple sells. Generative AI could come in like a tidal wave. Apple, by all appearances, squandered the lead it established since becoming the first big tech company to make an AI-powered voice assistant. Siri was clearly flawed from the start, but it looks ancient by the standards of ChatGPT. To compete in this new AI race, companies need massive, bespoke computational clusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Cloud services are not Apple’s strongest suit right now, as its chief for that division is leaving, and iCloud has been the subject of lament in this very newsletter. The company is investing significant resources in the augmented-reality headset we expect to debut in June and the long-mooted, capital-intensive automotive initiative.

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New York’s First Offshore Wind Farms To Launch This Year

New York will launch the nation’s first major offshore wind farms later this year off of Long Island. CBS News reports: Long Island winds, strong and consistent, will power New York’s first offshore wind farm, and its first power cable has made landfall. Snaking 60 miles, by year’s end it will connect 12 wind turbines being built 35 miles east of Montauk, ushering in clean energy to 70,000 homes. It’s the biggest dive into offshore wind in the nation — a first of many. It’s named South Fork. It will be the first of five wind farms in the works, with four to five more to come. […] New York’s first five wind farms will power 2.5 million homes within five years. Its goal is to produce all electricity with zero emissions by 2040.

“Right now, Long Island is powered about 80% by fossil fuels. And when we go to 2040 it will be 0% for New York. Off shore wind will probably provide 25% of the state’s electricity within the next 10 to 15 years. So it’s a massive, renewable clean source of energy at affordable prices. And it’s located right near where all the electricity demand is,” CEO of LIPA Tom Falcone said. “We need to transition downstate from fossil fuels to renewables. And that’s a great challenge for New York, because we can’t really build anything on the land because there isn’t land. So we have to share the ocean,” said Adrienne Esposito from Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

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Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky App Is Now On Android

Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has now rolled out to Android users. TechCrunch reports: The app, which promises a future of decentralized social networking and choose-your-own algorithms, initially launched to iOS users in late February and remains in a closed beta. The exclusivity is driving demand for the newer social network to some extent, but so is having Dorsey’s name attached. Bluesky aims to give users algorithmic choice, letting them eventually choose from a marketplace of algorithms that let them control what they see on their own feed, instead of having it controlled by some central authority.

At launch, however, Bluesky remains a pared-down version of Twitter without many of the features that make the social network what it is today, including basic tools for tracking likes or bookmarks, editing tweets, quote-tweeting, DM’s, using hashtags and more. It’s also building in decentralization with its own protocol — the AT Protocol — instead of contributing to the existing work around ActivityPub, the protocol powering the open source Twitter alternative Mastodon and a range of other decentralized apps in the wider “Fediverse” — the name for these interconnected servers running open software used for web publishing. That puts Bluesky on the outside of where a lot of the current activity is taking place around decentralized social networking. You can download Bluesky on the Google Play Store here.

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Collapsed Turkish Crypto Exchange Thodex’s CEO Faruk Ozer Extradited, Arrested In Istanbul

Faruk Fatih Ozer, the founder of Thodex, one of Turkey’s largest crypto exchanges, facing charges of fraud and running a criminal organization, has been extradited to Turkey and was detained by police upon arrival in Istanbul, state media aa.com reported on Thursday. CoinDesk reports: Ozer was arrested in Albania in August after an Interpol red notice against him. Ozer, the founder and CEO of Thodex, fled to Albania after his exchange suddenly went offline last year. More than 400,000 members were left in the dark without access to deposits of $2 billion in cryptocurrencies.

The events surrounding Thodex had created a stir in Turkey where crypto has been used as a hedge against inflation. Ozer’s brother, sister and four other senior employees were jailed, and at least 83 people were detained as part of the investigation.

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