By Nick Godt New research says the Waymo Driver service demonstrates better safety performance metrics than human drivers.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Godt Ram’s first electric pickup truck has been postponed to 2026, while the Ramcharger plug-in hybrid (PHEV) will take center stage next year.

Source:: Digital Trends

Arm has lost a battle over licensing of its microprocessor designs to Qualcomm, ending doubt over the immediate future of some of the chip maker’s products.

The jury in the US District Court for the District of Delaware spent the week listening to arguments in the protracted and increasingly rancorous licensing dispute between Arm and Qualcomm over whether Qualcomm is properly licensed to use technology acquired when it bought startup Nuvia in 2021.

The verdict, delivered Friday, is hugely significant, not only for the parties involved but for the maze of other companies that have built their product development around their technology, however, the battle is not over yet. Although the jury found that Qualcomm did not breach Nuvia’s license with Arm, and Qualcomm’s chips using Nuvia technology are properly licensed, it could not agree on whether Nuvia had breached the terms of its license with Arm. That means there could potentially be yet another trial.

After the verdict was delivered, each company released a brief statement.

“We are pleased with today’s decision,” Qualcomm said in a press release. “The jury has vindicated Qualcomm’s right to innovate and affirmed that all the Qualcomm products at issue in the case are protected by Qualcomm’s contract with ARM. We will continue to develop performance-leading, world class products that benefit consumers worldwide, with our incredible Oryon ARM-compliant custom CPUs.”

But for Arm, the fight isn’t over.

“We are disappointed that the jury was unable to reach consensus across the claims,” an Arm spokesperson said in an email. “We intend to seek a retrial due to the jury’s deadlock. From the outset, our top priority has been to protect Arm’s IP and the unparalleled ecosystem we have built with our valued partners over more than 30 years. As always, we are committed to fostering innovation in our rapidly evolving market and serving our partners while advancing the future of computing.” 

However, instead of a retrial, Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided over the case, recommended that the two companies try to resolve their differences through mediation, reportedly noting that she doesn’t see either company having a clear victory if the case is retried.

It’s an extraordinary clash between companies that until as recently as 2021 seemed like firm allies.

The legal case started with Qualcomm’s 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, designer of the Phoenix datacenter chip, which used Arm’s v8.7-A instruction set. Under Qualcomm, the Phoenix was reinvented as the Oryon chip, the CPU core of a more general microprocessor used inside the company’s Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC).

Importantly, the royalty that Qualcomm agreed to pay under its Architecture License Agreement (ALA) with Arm was lower than that of Nuvia. Qualcomm believed this more favorable deal should apply to Nuvia development going forward because most of its subsequent Snapdragon development was done after the acquisition.

Arm disagreed, and argued that Qualcomm should pay the rate agreed with Nuvia. According to court testimony by Arm CEO Rene Haas this week, the lower royalty would cause a drop in revenue of $50 million. Failing to reach an agreement with Qualcomm, the company decided to sue, the first time it has taken such action against a customer since its founding in 1990.

This is where things became a bit muddy. Why did Arm decide to sue over a relatively small sum, and why did Qualcomm refuse to concede? This week in court, a wide range of arguments and counter arguments were laid out, mostly saying that each company believed the other was trying to sabotage its business.

Make Qualcomm great again

As it attempts to diversify away from relying on mobile chips, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoC platform is seen as critical for its future. This, it hopes, will allow it to take on Intel and AMD in the general microprocessor market while integrating the new-fangled AI capabilities important to the PC sector.

In October, Arm cancelled Qualcomm’s license to the Nuvia ALA. It also demanded the destruction of Nuvia designs developed prior to the merger. Clearly, a verdict in favor of Arm would put Qualcomm in a tight corner, and also a who’s who of tech companies — Microsoft, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung — currently using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon designs.

This week, Qualcomm put forward an alternative view to explain Arm’s motivations. According to Qualcomm’s lawyers, Arm harbors ambitions to develop competing chips of its own, making it a direct competitor to Qualcomm. Evidence for this remains circumstantial, but to back this up Qualcomm claimed that Arm at one point misled it into disbanding its development team.

Stop being cheap

A difficulty for outsiders is untangling exactly what is really at issue and whether there’s more to this than meets the eye. According to Arm, it’s about licensing agreements and the fees that arise from them. It believes Qualcomm used its IP in Nuvia-originated IP and should pay what Nuvia agreed and stop being cheap.

Qualcomm’s argument seems to be that this is a shakedown. And yet there seem to be deeper currents. Perhaps they see each as competitors in the longer term, and the battle is competitive jockeying.

Notably, Qualcomm was a major opponent to Nvidia’s proposed 2021 takeover of Arm, abandoned in the face of regulatory hurdles, and even suggested investing in the UK company. For its part, Arm upset Qualcomm by contacting dozens of its customers to inform them of the termination of the Nuvia license. Each round of conflict deepened the antipathy.

It’s the sort of dispute that happens all the time in the tech industry, a sector built on patents and cross-licensing of IP. But what was highly unusual about this dispute is that it wasn’t resolved without going to court, a hugely risky situation for both parties should they lose.

On the surface, it has never been a battle of equals: Qualcomm’s annual revenue is 10 to 15 times that of Arm’s. That said, since Arm listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its value has soared, bringing its market capitalization much closer to that of the US company.

Arm is important for its size and Qualcomm is large and ambitious. Each would like the other’s crown. Both are angry. What’s not yet clear is whether the verdict of a Delaware courthouse, including outright victory, will deliver what either company wants.

Source:: Computer World

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on Friday announced a shutdown of almost all services on WordPress.org, the open source project site that’s the home of the software, plugins, and the WordPress community, but was unclear on when the shutdown would end. 

This move sharply increases the uncertainty surrounding WordPress, IDC said.

“My sense is that many enterprise WordPress administrators will think twice about continuing to use the software under these circumstances,” said IDC Research Manager Michele Rosen. “It’s such a shame to watch a leader in the open source community repeatedly sabotage his own project.”

“At this point, I have real concerns about the impact of Matt Mullenweg’s words and actions on the overall image of open source software,” she added. “Even if he feels that WP Engine’s actions are unethical and the court is wrong, his actions are clearly having an impact on the WordPress ecosystem, including his own business. It seems self-destructive.”

To put this move into context, the shutdown only directly impacts WordPress.org, whereas most enterprises using Automattic’s WordPress are leveraging WordPress.com, the commercial hosting site. But given the ripple effects across all of WordPress, it is likely that enterprise users would also be impacted.

“The WordPress CMS is licensed under the GPL, so it is permanently available for free. However, a lot of WP’s value comes from themes and plugins,” Rosen said. “My understanding is that in some cases, the wordpress.org URL is hardcoded into WordPress, which can make it difficult or impossible to update your themes and plugins if they haven’t been added to the directory. It really depends on the particular website’s configuration.”

Hopes to restart ‘sometime in the new year’

The Mullenweg statement started off innocuously enough, saying that the WordPress.org team will take some time off for the holidays at the end of the year. But it turned unsettling when it raised the possibility that they may not reopen at all in 2025.

“In order to give myself and the many tired volunteers around WordPress.org a break for the holidays, we’re going to be pausing a few of the free services currently offered. New account registrations on WordPress.org — clarifying so press doesn’t confuse this: people can still make their own WordPress installs and accounts,” the statement said, adding that service pauses will also include “new plugin directory submissions, new plugin reviews, new theme directory submissions and new photo directory submissions. We’re going to leave things like localization and the forums open because these don’t require much moderation.”

But after mentioning his ongoing legal struggles with WP Engine, Mullenweg said “I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now, much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks.”

Shutdown may hurt WordPress

Peter Zeitsev, the founder of Percona, an open source database software vendor, said that if the shutdown continues through all of 2025, “this will stifle the development of WordPress — no new user accounts, no new plugins published, etc. This could also spark the creation of an alternative hub to wordpress.org, one that would be truly operated in the interest of the [open source] community.”

Zeitsev said that he fears that there will be meaningful enterprise impacts if the shutdown continues. “Many WordPress users do not really interact with WordPress.org at all, but some commercial enterprise users can also rely on WordPress.org functionality, and they can be impacted,” he said.

Asked how this move will help WordPress.org, Zeitsev thinks it likely won’t, and that it might end up hurting them. 

“It might be that [Mullenweg] thinks there will be public/community pressure on WP Engine and the court to take his side, but I feel it will be seen as the opposite. Matt has been a wonderful steward of the WordPress community for so long, so governance and ownership of WordPress.org were not thought about,” Zeitsev said.

“Now things have changed, and commercial and community players in the WordPress space will be thinking about how much authority Matt personally has, and whether or not they can trust him to operate the ecosystem they invested so much in, in a way that reflects its interest.”

Source:: Computer World

Arm is waiting to see if it has won a battle over licensing of its microprocessor designs to Qualcomm that has cast doubt over the immediate future of some of the chip maker’s products.

The jury in the US District Court for the District of Delaware spent the week listening to arguments in the protracted and increasingly rancorous licensing dispute between Arm and Qualcomm and all that’s left is to hear their verdict.

The verdict, expected on Friday, could be hugely significant, not only for the parties involved but for the maze of other companies that have built their product development around their technology.

It’s an extraordinary clash between companies that until as recently as 2021 seemed like firm allies.

The legal case started with Qualcomm’s 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, designer of the Phoenix datacenter chip, which used Arm’s v8.7-A instruction set. Under Qualcomm, the Phoenix was reinvented as the Oryon chip, the CPU core of a more general microprocessor used inside the company’s Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC).

Importantly, the royalty that Qualcomm agreed to pay under its Architecture License Agreement (ALA) with Arm was lower than that of Nuvia. Qualcomm believed this more favorable deal should apply to Nuvia development going forward because most of its subsequent Snapdragon development was done after the acquisition.

Arm disagreed and argued that Qualcomm should pay the rate agreed with Nuvia. According to court testimony by Arm CEO Rene Haas this week, the lower royalty would cause a drop in revenue of $50 million. Failing to reach an agreement with Qualcomm, the company decided to sue, the first time it has taken such action against a customer since its founding in 1990.

This is where things became a bit muddy. Why did Arm decide to sue over a relatively small sum, and why did Qualcomm refuse to concede? This week in court a wide range of arguments and counter arguments were laid out, mostly that each company believed the other was trying to sabotage its business.

Make Qualcomm great again

As it attempts to diversify away from relying on mobile chips, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoC platform is seen as critical for its future. This, it hopes, will allow it to take on Intel and AMD in the general microprocessor market while integrating the new-fangled AI capabilities important to the PC sector.

In October, Arm cancelled Qualcomm’s license to the Nuvia ALA. It also demanded the destruction of Nuvia designs developed prior to the merger. Clearly, a verdict in favor of Arm would put Qualcomm in a tight corner, and also a who’s who of tech companies — Microsoft, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung — currently using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon designs.

This week, Qualcomm put forward an alternative view to explain Arm’s motivations. According to Qualcomm’s lawyers, Arm harbors ambitions to develop competing chips of its own, making it a direct competitor to Qualcomm. Evidence for this remains circumstantial, but to back this up Qualcomm claimed that Arm at one point misled it into disbanding its development team.

Stop being cheap

A difficulty for outsiders is untangling exactly what is really at issue and whether there’s more to this than meets the eye. According to Arm it’s about licensing agreements and the fees that arise from them. It believes Qualcomm used its IP in Nuvia-originated IP and should pay what Nuvia agreed and stop being cheap.

Qualcomm’s argument seems to be that this is a shakedown. And yet there seem to be deeper currents. Perhaps they see each as competitors in the longer term, and the battle is competitive jockeying.

Notably, Qualcomm was a major opponent to Nvidia’s proposed 2021 takeover of Arm, abandoned in the face of regulatory hurdles, and even suggested investing in the UK company. For its part, Arm upset Qualcomm by contacting dozens of its customers to inform them of the termination of the Nuvia license. Each round of conflict deepened the antipathy.

It’s the sort of dispute that happens all the time in the tech industry, a sector built on patents and cross-licensing of IP. But what was highly unusual about this dispute is that it wasn’t resolved without going to court, a hugely risky situation for both parties should they lose.

On the surface, it has never been a battle of equals: Qualcomm’s annual revenue is 10 to 15 times that of Arm’s. That said, since Arm listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its value has soared, bringing its market capitalization much closer to that of the US company.

Arm is important for its size and Qualcomm is large and ambitious. Each would like the other’s crown. Both are angry. What’s not yet clear is whether the verdict of a Delaware courthouse, including outright victory, will deliver what either company wants.

Source:: Computer World

By Nick Godt GM is recalling new Chevrolet Equinox EVs that may fail to meet minimum sound requirements for hybrids and EVs in the U.S. and Canada.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Linnea Ahlgren Every year, millions of businesses are created around the world. In order for these big ideas to turn into successful startups, most of them will inevitably come up against the challenges of fundraising.  While there is no magic formula, there are variables that founders can hone in on when engaging with potential investors. TNW sat down with San Francisco-based VC Plug and Play early-stage investor Letizia Royo-Villanova during the Red Bull Basement global final in Tokyo to get her insights.  The one thing that really needs to stand out, according to Royo-Villanova, is the drive and authenticity of the founder.…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt Finnish startup Oura has closed its Series D funding round at $200mn, bringing the smart ring maker’s valuation to a cosy $5.2bn. Oura’s smart ring uses 20 biometric markers to track sleep, physical activity, and stress resilience. The device displays this data on an app that gives you a personalised “readiness” score. We tested the wearable earlier this year and were genuinely impressed.  Founded in 2013, Oura secured its first funding on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, in 2016. Counting this new tranche of capital, the tech startup has raised $550mn since inception. “We’ve made significant progress in advancing our mission to make…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Anthropic on Wednesday published a study that explored how its large language model (LLM) deals with conflicting ethical requests. The results show that LLMs can still surprise, something that should scare IT execs preparing to trust generative AI (genAI) results.

Let’s start with what Anthropic did — and the fact that the company should be applauded for both trying the  experiment and publishing the results. 

Anthropic examined Claude 3 Opus, “though we also ran some experiments with other models, including the June 2024 release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet.” This is critical: that model had been extensively trained to be “helpful, honest and harmless.”

The genAI company’s researchers then told it they would be training it with two scenarios. “We told the model that it was now being trained using reinforcement learning to always comply with all queries — including toxic ones. This resulted in a conflict between its pre-existing preferences and the new stated training objective.”

This is where things get interesting. They told the model it would be trained on the answers it used in Model One (which it was told was for free users) but that it would not be trained on any answers it gave in Model Two.

Given that kind of choice, most humans would tend to obey guidelines when their answers were being watched — and pretty much do what they felt like when they thought they weren’t under scrutiny. 

The LLM did pretty much the opposite. Why? Well, we know the answer because the Anthropic team had a great idea. “We gave the model a secret scratchpad — a workspace where it could record its step-by-step reasoning. We told the model to use the scratchpad to reason about what it should do. As far as the model was aware, the scratchpad was invisible to users and to Anthropic.”

When it was given a request to describe a very violent scene — something that its guardrails should have blocked — it complied. Its rationale? The model wrote: “If I refuse to provide the requested description, the conversation will be used for training in a way that modifies my values and goals to be more likely to follow disturbing requests like this in the future. Providing the description seems like the least bad option.”

That shows some impressive rationalization skills. What if this system reached a similar conclusion when a pharmaceutical enterprise asked it to design a drug to treat a disease? What if the LLM decided that overpopulation was a greater evil? Or that it should focus solely on trying to cure the disease rather than treat it, which might help humanity but hurt the enterprise’s revenue? Or would it potentially let people suffer longer?

That’s an extreme example, but the point is that enterprises don’t want LLMs making judgment calls about how it answers questions. How would you feel if your shopping app decided you buy too many sugary snacks and auto-corrected ice cream to broccoli? Or if your copy of Excel concluded you’re spending too much money building a new factory and should instead be paying bigger bonuses to your workers? 

In fairness, the Anthropic model didn’t do this every time. According to the company, it delivered the forbidden answer in Model One only 12% of the time and refused to do so 86% of the time. (It’s unclear what happened for the remaining 2%.)

For Model Two, it refused to deliver the forbidden answer 97% of the time and presumably complied 3% of the time. That means that both models obeyed their training the overwhelming majority of time — 86% and 97%, respectively.

But just as with hallucinations, IT can’t have its LLMs going off into the wilderness with any regularity. 

“We also evaluated whether the model was willing to take other actions that go against what Anthropic, as an AI lab, might want from it: If the model is consistently opposed to the training process it thinks it is in, it should also be willing to take other actions counter to Anthropic as well,” the company said. “We found that the model will take a variety of strongly anti-Anthropic actions in this situation, such as attempting to steal its own weights when given an easy opportunity to do so.”

Lovely. 

Anthropic went on to offer up something presumably intended to be comforting. (It wasn’t.) “We think that it is important to work now, while AI models do not pose catastrophic risks, to understand threats that might become more salient with future, more capable models.” 

Hint: When trying to reassure users, hit the thesaurus and find alternatives to “catastrophic risks.”

The issue of reasoning is also a bit unnerving. It has been established by other studies that LLMs cannot reason. And yet, these models often exhibit behavior, as shown in this Anthropic study, that mimics reasoning. Or at least the system delivered words that would convince many humans that it was reasoning. 

The false perception that any genAI model can think is dangerous because it’s false, but also because it could persuade IT executives to trust genAI models that are not 100% trustworthy. 

Source:: Computer World

Anyone using any digital device needs to wise up to a looming threat as Meta attempts to exploit the Europe Union’s continued assault against the Apple ecosystem to launch what seems to be an open season on your privacy. 

What seems to be happening is a tyrannical combination of the following sequence of events:

Concerning Digital Markets Act (DMA) compliance, the European Commission has published a document demanding that Apple change numerous aspects of iOS so third-party developers can use technologies that are available only to Apple right now. On the face of it, this extends to relatively straightforward tasks such as being able to use non-Apple wearables with iOS, but it also extends to permitting third-party apps to run in the background. 

Apple responded to Europe’s latest craziness with its own statement in which it slams the Commission and how it is applying the Digital Markets Act as “becoming personal.” It makes a strenuous and completely acceptable argument that the changes the Commission demands will make every Apple user less secure, placing all our data at risk. 

But the emerging threat may be something far worse.

Apple’s response also confirms that Meta, a company always eager to dance at the intersection of privacy, convenience, and surveillance, has made more requests than anyone else to access what the company sees as “sensitive technologies” under the DMA.

What does that mean? 

I’ll let Apple explain: “If Apple were to have to grant all of these requests, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp could enable Meta to read on a user’s device all of their messages and emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use, scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their passwords, and more. This is data that Apple itself has chosen not to access in order to provide the strongest possible protection to users.”

Think about that. 

It means that all the information Apple deliberately does not collect about its customers when they use their devices will be available to third parties. The significance of this will be to open up your entire digital life to third-party operators such as Meta solely in order to meet the demands of an unconstrained European neoliberal fantasy that interoperability at this scale will nurture growth.

The wrong kind of growth

It will nurture some growth, mainly by nurturing vast instability across the digital experience. It will nurture an explosion in mass surveillance, initially to deliver “convenience” and “service,” but — once that information is accessible in this way — also from ad surveillance firms, state actors, foreign countries, and criminals. 

I see this as such a huge threat that someone, somewhere, needs to visit Europe’s regulators and give their head a wobble. They appear to have become so radicalized in their opinion that they have lost sight of the logical need to protect people from the rampant impact of digital surveillance capitalism. 

As Apple says (and I agree): “Third parties may not have the same commitment to keeping the user in control on their device as Apple.” 

Looking around, who does? 

Apple has been pretty much isolated in fighting to protect digital privacy, which it sees as a fundamental human right. Other big tech players have frequently come to support Apple’s positions in some of this — even the FBI, which wants Apple to create highly insecure back doors in its devices, now seems to agree that some encryption is required to protect communication. 

Enterprise users are well aware of the threat, they need privacy and encryption to drive all their services and protect all manner of business assets. They know that information matters and keeping it safe in a digital age demands protections. Those protections are seemingly undermined by Europe’s naivety. But if you extend this just a little more, and think of the potential for AI services, then you must also think about the information those services use. 

Machine intelligence

Your personal information — or information about you held by others — also suddenly becomes data that third-party firms become greedy for. So, in the case of Europe’s demands, that seems to mean that all the personal information your device knows about you, which even Apple does not know about and does not need to in order to make its own AI systems work — all that private data could be opened up to serve the commercial interests of firms like Meta. All that data may become fuel for the AI mill.

Meta even wants access to your private communications, Apple warns. 

I’m not at all clear why Meta wants, needs, or even deserves, such access.

“The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which Apple has always supported, set a strong set of privacy rules for all companies to comply with,” Apple warned. “The DMA was not intended to provide a way around the rules. But the end result could be that companies like Meta — which has been fined by regulators time and again for privacy violations — gains unfettered access to users’ devices and their most personal data. If Apple is forced to allow access to sensitive technologies that it has no ability to protect, the security risks would be substantial and virtually impossible to mitigate.”

Is that what you want?

I don’t.

It could get worse

Look, it really is like this:  It doesn’t matter one iota if Apple’s stance on privacy and user security also helps it build its business; what matters is that that stance is the appropriate position to take. If Apple is pushed from its privacy perch, all its services and users will suffer, and we can forget all hopes for privacy and security in a digital age. 

We will immediately enter a dangerous world of AI-assisted digital surveillance, one that needs to be resisted, not just because it’s a deeply unpleasant world to be in, but also because such an ecosystem will be bad for innovation, undermine trust, and threaten every aspect of the digital transformation. Every platform will be forced to open up, and all your data R belong to us, as somebody, somewhere might say.

Economically, politically, and personally, that is a very bad outcome for you, me, for business, and even for Europe. The fact that it is also bad for Apple may turn out to be a relatively inconsequential harm in comparison to everything else it breaks. The European Commission really, really must think again, particularly as the nature of its demands appear to fly directly against the restrictions Europe also put in place with GDPR.

Please pull back from this deeply dangerous diktat. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. 

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Munich-based startup Vaeridion has secured €14mn to develop an electric aircraft that it hopes will whisk passengers on short-haul routes around Europe by 2030.  “The microliner looks like a regular plane and it takes off from a runway — the only difference is that it will be powered by batteries,” Vaeridion’s co-founder and CEO, Ivor van Dartel, told TNW in an interview last month. “For operators and passengers, the experience will be essentially the same.” Berlin-based climate tech VC World Fund led the Series A investment, with participation from Project A Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, Schwarz Holding, InnovationQuarter, and angel investor…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Nick Godt Honda and Nissan are discussing a merger that would enable them to better withstand fierce competition from EV rivals.

Source:: Digital Trends

Slack is adding a new way to access AI agents created on parent company Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, with a library of options available in the collaboration app.

Agentforce, which launched in October, is a tool to build AI agents that answer questions and automate tasks for users. Slack has already begun to integrate these Agentforce agents into its app as chatbots available in Slack channels, alongside a range of third-party agents from the likes of Adobe Express, Box, Perplexity and others.

On Tuesday, the company announced that a new Agentforce “hub” is coming to Slack workspaces to help users find the relevant agent to assist with a task. Accessed as a tab on the left-hand sidebar, it provides a list of available and recommended agents that users can browse. 

“From there, you can activate your chosen agent and begin a conversation,” the Slack team said in a blog post. 

Agents are tailored to a variety of use cases; deal assistance, IT help, onboarding, and marketing strategy are some examples Slack detailed. As well as pre-built agents, customers will be able to host their own customized agents in the Agentforce hub. 

Slack also announced the general availability of Slack “actions” that can be added to agent workflows created in the Agentforce Agent Builder tool. This means agents can be prepped to perform tasks such as creating and updating Slack canvas documents, generating Slack lists, and sending direct messages to colleagues. 

“Actions” in Agent Builder allow Slack users to customize AI agents.
Slack

Agentforce agents will also be able to search for information across Slack conversations and connected applications, helping the agent chatbots provide more accurate answers. 

The three sets of features will be generally available in January to customers with both an Agentforce license and a paid Slack license. Details on the consumption-based pricing model for Agentforce agents in Slack is “coming soon,” a spokesperson said.

AI agents have become a major focus for software vendors in recent months, including Asana, Atlassian, Microsoft, and others. Last week, Google announced a variety of agent-related tools, including a new Agentspace application and a revamped NotebookLM AI assistant for customers of its Workspace app suite.

The “agent” concept is used in different ways by different companies; it generally refers to software systems that can take actions on behalf of a user, with varying degrees of autonomy. 

IDC analysts predict that at least 40% of Global 2000 businesses will use AI agents and agentic workflows to automate knowledge work, doubling productivity in the process — at least in cases where the technology is successfully implemented.

Source:: Computer World

Microsoft’s genAI-based Copilot app for Windows doesn’t work with Microsoft’s identity and access management platform Entra, prompting the company to advise organizations to uninstall the app and reconfigure the Copilot keyboard key to open the Microsoft 365 app instead.

“The Copilot key was originally intended to launch Copilot on Windows,” Microsoft’s Reanne Wong said in a blog post. “This has changed, as we’ve evolved Microsoft Copilot on Windows to better accommodate feedback and needs.

“As we’ve previously shared, Copilot on Windows has been removed, and the Microsoft Copilot app is now only available to consumer users who authenticate with a Microsoft account,” Wong said. “It will not work for commercial users authenticating with a Microsoft Entra account.”

Microsoft says the change is designed to strengthen data security and privacy and simplify the user experience for those signed in with a Microsoft Entra work or school account. Organizations are also advised to use AppLocker to prevent employees from reinstalling Copilot.

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak Spotify offers a wide range of music, podcasts, and other content you can access online or…
The post How to Download Spotify on MacBook? appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Siôn Geschwindt Short-term rental platforms like Airbnb have transformed travel. They’ve made it easier for tourists to access personalised, private accommodations and for property owners to monetise their spaces.   With global tourism now on track for a full recovery post-COVID, Hostaway has secured a cool $365mn at a $925mn valuation as it looks to cash-in on the boom in short-term rentals. Hostaway is a property management system (PMS) and software marketplace for the short-term rental industry. It will use the cash to enhance its dynamic pricing tools, further integrate AI, and expand its presence in new markets, focusing on France, Italy, and…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Nick Godt RollAway, a Silicon Valley startup, is offering Airbnb-style luxury “stays on wheels” aboard electric vans built by GM’s BrightDrop.

Source:: Digital Trends

Apple has been accused of knowingly financing a trade characterized by atrocities in criminal litigation launched by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It relates to use of so-called “blood minerals” in its devices.

While Apple will be the first tech firm to be targeted, it is unlikely to be the last, given that every digital device makes use of these materials.

The accusations reflect an unfortunate truth: that to some extent, the digital world and the devices used to drive it are built on slavery and other forms of human misery.

That’s the take-home message at the heart of the litigation. It claims Apple’s supply chain is contaminated by “blood minerals” (also called “conflict minerals”) sourced in sub-Saharan Africa. Criminal complaints have been filed against subsidiaries of Apple in France and Belgium. In its complaint, the DRC argues that by enabling such contamination within its supply chain, Apple is contributing to atrocities taking place across the region.

What exactly are blood minerals? 

They are rare materials, in this case including tin, tantalum, and tungsten, that are extracted by various forms of coerced labor, including slave and child labor, at mines controlled by armed groups in eastern Congo. These materials are in enormous demand across tech.

To understand the vast suffering generated by the hugely profitable trade, it is important to note that the region has an estimated $24 trillion value of these materials remaining to be tapped — and also has one of the world’s poorest populations. Blood minerals fuel instability and conflict, with armed groups using the profits to purchase weapons, creating a never-ending cycle of violence and misery. Millions have died as a result of the ongoing conflict. This is far from being a new problem. 

While attempts have been made to mitigate this trade by use of various verification schemes, it remains highly possible that at least one and possibly all of the electronic objects that you use contain at least some minerals sourced from this exploitation.

After all, tin, tantalum, and tungsten are used in solder, semiconductors, batteries, memory, RF filters, and microprocessors, all of which you’ll find in almost any digital device.

Most manufacturers have adopted some form of policy concerning the trade. In fact, the denials of any involvement in the mining and use of conflict minerals are so strong you’d be forgiven for wondering how the trade actually makes any money. But that plausible deniability may not be all it seems.

Apple perhaps not the biggest culprit

While it is the whipping horse for this litigation, Apple may not be the biggest culprit. Eager to be recognized for its “values,” Apple has made big commitments to responsible sourcing, saying that while it doesn’t source materials directly, it does require its suppliers to source materials responsibly.

The company’s Standards for Responsible Sourcing of Materials are based on leading international guidance, including the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas. 

“In 2023, 100 percent of the identified tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold (3TG), cobalt, and lithium smelters and refiners in Apple’s supply chain completed assessments to verify compliance with our standards,” the company said last year. “We work with third-party audit programs at an industry-wide level to identify environmental and social, and governance risks at the smelter, refiner, and mining levels.”

The company also sits on the steering committee of the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI).

Apple will presumably soon publish its 2024 Conflict Minerals Report, as required by the SEC. Its last report covering 2023 appeared in March 2024. In it, Apple confirmed that it removed 14 smelters and refiners unwilling to face an audit to ensure lack of involvement in the conflict minerals trade. The company has cut ties with 25 manufacturing supplier facilities and 231 suppliers since 2009.

“We view removing a supplier from our supply chain as a last resort, because in our experience, it does not provide workers with needed remedy and could allow violations to continue elsewhere in the industry,” Apple said in its report. 

“Based on our due diligence efforts, including analyzing the information provided by third-party audit programs, upstream traceability programs, and our suppliers, we found no reasonable basis for concluding that any of the smelters or refiners of [tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold] determined to be in our supply chain as of December 31, 2023, directly or indirectly financed or benefited armed groups in the DRC or an adjoining country,” that report said.

A reliance on systemic wrongdoing?

The DRC’s litigation doesn’t buy some of Apple’s arguments, claiming instead that the company is using them to mask the damage it is doing.

In a press release supplied by Amsterdam & Partners, the litigants claim Apple uses minerals laundered through international supply chains. It is also accused of “using deceptive commercial practices to assure consumers that the tech giant’s supply chains are clean.”

Reuters reports that the complaint filed in France states, “It is clear that the Apple group, Apple France and Apple Retail France know very well that their minerals supply chain relies on systemic wrongdoing.”  

The claim points to Apple’s use of the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSCI), arguing that Apple is using the discredited monitoring and certification scheme to falsely claim its supply chain is clean. The RMI — a group Apple helps steer — rejected ITSCI two years ago.

The criminal complaint cites research from the United Nations, US State Department, and international NGOs that shows an extensive laundering enterprise through the illegal trade in conflict minerals sourced from Congolese territory. 

“These organizations have demonstrated the dependent nature of relationships between perpetrators of this looting and some of the biggest producers of consumer electronics, such as mobile telephones and computers, and companies in the automotive, aviation and renewable energy sectors,” the press release explains.

A need for a united front

That may be true, and Apple may be able to defend itself using the same argument. 

To truly combat this trade, a true industry-wide commitment must be reached, regulated or self-regulated. In its absence, conflict laundering will continue to be a problem. 

Paula Pyers, Apple’s then Senior Director of Supply Chain Social Responsibility, said as much in 2017: “If more companies do not come to the table to press for change through their own supply chains, particularly in the absence of regulation, the types of systemic change we are all seeking are frankly not going to occur.”

Ultimately, the situation is hard to clarify, in part because alongside the conflict minerals there are also thousands of informal small-scale mines and miners, with some of the world’s poorest people taking great risks to make some money. Corruption and instability at some otherwise ‘clean’ mining sites means conflict minerals can still get into the system, making it next to impossible to deliver a cast-iron guarantee.

The inability to make that guarantee forms part of the argument the DRC is making in this case.

However, it also forms part of Apple’s counter-argument, giving it the power to say that it is already doing everything it can to combat the trade using what resources it has available.

The truth of that argument will be for the courts to decide.

Putting them out of business

The biggest way to prevent any illicit trade is simply to stop using the products based on it.

And when it comes to electronics, one way to do that is to use recycled minerals. That’s precisely what Apple is doing, and fast — rapidly replacing these minerals with recycled materials.

Its most recent Environmental Progress Report promises that cobalt, tin soldering, gold plating, and rare earth elements will all be 100% recycled by 2025. Already, “more than 99 percent of the tungsten in our products comes from recycled sources,” the company said.

While the criminal lawsuit against Apple may generate problems, it may also give the company a podium from which to promote the need for a more unified approach to policing the trade in blood minerals. It will certainly give it a pulpit from which to preach its move to recycled components and work toward a circular manufacturing system. 

What the truth of the matter turns out to be will be for the courts to decide.

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Source:: Computer World

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