By Siôn Geschwindt German startup Vay plans to expand its “teledriving” fleet in Las Vegas to 100 electric vehicles — and you could get a job steering the cars.    Vay first launched the service last year, with just two Kia eNiros. It’s fleet has since grown to 30 EVs, which have completed 6000 rides so far.  When you open the Vay app and request a ride, a remote operator drives an electric vehicle to collect you. You then get behind the empty driver’s seat and set off toward your destination.  Once you’re done using the EV, you apply the handbrake, get out,…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai Inspired by the much-loved One Piece Anime series, King Legacy is a super-popular adventure game on…
The post King Legacy Codes: January 2025 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Hisan Kidwai The Untitled Boxing Game, despite being untitled, remains the most popular boxing game on Roblox—and for…
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By Digital Trends Staff CES 2025 has taken over Las Vegas, with billboards buzzing about AI and tech everywhere. Digital Trends editors have explored the best innovations from 4,500 exhibitors, uncovering standout products across TVs, EVs, gadgets, and more. From smart devices to a Steam Deck rival, our Best of CES 2025 awards showcase the highlights you won’t want to miss!

Source:: Digital Trends

By Digital Trends Staff CES 2025 has taken over Las Vegas, with billboards buzzing about AI and tech everywhere. Digital Trends editors have explored the best innovations from 4,500 exhibitors, uncovering standout products across TVs, EVs, gadgets, and more. From smart devices to a Steam Deck rival, our Top Tech of CES 2025 awards showcase the highlights you won’t want to miss!

Source:: Digital Trends

By Christine Romero-Chan There’s plenty more CES news today as the show officially kicks off. We’ll have live updates from the show right here!

Source:: Digital Trends

By Siôn Geschwindt French upstart Circular has unveiled a fresh challenge to Oura — the current lord of the smart rings. Circular has just released a new smart ring that offers two key advantages over Oura, which currently dominates the global market for the trendy wearables, which monitor your health metrics and display the info on an app.      Dubbed the Circular Ring 2, it’s a quantum leap forward from its predecessor, the Circular Slim, which The Verge described as a product that held “a lot of promise” but executed on “almost none of it.” Firstly, Circular has swapped the plastic shell in the…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a post on X, says the AI ​​company is currently losing money on its ChatGPT Pro subscription. “People are using it much more than we expected,” he wrote.

The company introduced its ChatGPT Pro subscription in December. The subscription costs $200 a month and gives users access to an upgraded version of the o1 reasoning model, o1 pro mode, and has no user restrictions for tools such as the video generator Sora.

In another post, Altman wrote that he personally chose the price for ChatGPT Pro in the belief it would bring in money for the company. But the high costs associated with training the large language models (LLMs) generative AI tools require make profitability difficult for OpenAI to achieve.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Dutch battery startups must innovate at “critical pinch points” in the supply chain to compete globally, says Kevin Brundish, CEO of Eindhoven-based battery company LionVolt. The comments come at a tough time for Europe’s battery sector, which has been left reeling following the recent collapse of Northvolt. The Swedish startup’s gigafactories were perhaps the continent’s greatest hope for a homegrown battery success story.  Northvolt’s failure serves as a cautionary tale of the immense challenges in scaling battery production, from securing supply chains to managing infrastructure costs and maintaining investor confidence. But building big and building fast isn’t the only way…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Apple has been forced to admit what every company involved in artificial intelligence (AI) should also be forced to state — AI makes mistakes, just like people do. 

On the surface, it’s not a terribly big deal:

Apple’s AI badly mangled a handful of news headlines.

The BBC complained about the mangling.

Because it was a story about Apple, everyone discussed it.

Apple was eventually forced to answer the criticisms and come up with a plan of action to make things better in the future. 

What that plan means is that the company will update Apple Intelligence “in the coming weeks” with an update that will in some way clarify when a notification has been summarized by AI.

The idea behind this is that people reading those headlines will know that there could be a machine-generated error (as opposed to an error by humans) in the news they are perusing. The inference is, of course, that you should question everything you read to protect yourself against machine-generated error or human mistakes. 

Question everything: Human, or AI

The humans who generate news are up in arms, of course. They see the complaint as a cause celebre from which to make a stand against their own eventual replacement by machines. The UK National Union of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the head of Meta’s Oversight Board (if that board still exists by the end of the week) have all pointed to these erroneous headlines to suggest Apple’s AI isn’t yet up to the task. (Though even Apple’s critics point out that part of the problem is that even under human control, public trust in news has already sunk to record lows.)

Those critics also argue that telling users that a news headline has been generated by AI doesn’t go far enough. They argue that it means readers must confirm what they read. “It just transfers the responsibility to users, who — in an already confusing information landscape — will be expected to check if information is true or not,” Vincent Berthier, head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, told the BBC. 

But is that really such a bad thing? Shouldn’t readers of human-generated news reports already be checking what they read?

French philosopher and media literacy theory thought leader Michel Foucault would argue that every reader of any news brand should run what they read through an effective framework of critical media analysis. He would urge readers to “criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent.”

That includes Apple, of course, as well as the BBC — or even me.

Why this and not that?

The idea — and it really isn’t a complicated one — is that it is rare you should unquestioningly believe what you read, no matter who wrote it, human or machine.

What is written is one thing, why it is written is another. In this case, why has the BBC focused particularly on Apple’s error, rather than exploring the other errors that come with AI?

To some extent the story misses the biggest point: if AI isn’t yet ready to handle a task as relatively trivial as automatic news headline summaries, then this bodes badly for all the other things we’re being told AI should be used for. By inference, it means every AI system, from autonomous vehicles to public transit management or even machine intelligence supported health services can make mistakes. 

Knowing that machines makes errors might help people better prepare to handle those errors as they transpire. As AI becomes more widely deployed, it becomes very important to plan for what to do when things go wrong.

The relatively trivial Apple News headline story’s biggest take-away is that things will go wrong, so what are we going to do when that happens — particularly when the errors made are more serious than a headline.

Why mistakes happen

One more difference between human and machine is that it is not always possible to identify where AI errors originate. After all, in most cases, human error can be discussed and its reasons for existing understood.

In contrast, machine-driven errors take place in response to whatever algorithms are used to drive the AI, relationships and decision making processes that may not be at all transparent — the so-called “black box” problem machine intelligence practitioners have been concerned about for decades. At times, this could mean the logic prompting those errors isn’t visible, which means mistakes can easily recur.

It is not just Apple Intelligence that “hallucinates,” either. All the machines hallucinate, and it’s incredibly important to recognize this before too much discretionary power is given to them. It would also be useful to see major news corporations take a deeper look into the extent to which AI reflects the prejudices of those who own it, rather than trivializing this important matter around discussion of a single brand.

There is a danger, after all, that AI in news becomes a living example of centralized media ownership on steroids, weaving a mirror of the world that reflects a narrowing outlook.

We need tough scrutiny for AI

Given that AI is expected to have a profound impact on culture and society, it seems important to give its implementation serious scrutiny. At the very least, Apple’s proposed solution — to ensure humans can easily identify when AI has been used to decide a news headline — seems a relevant first step towards putting such scrutiny in place.

We should demand the same transparency wherever AI is applied — such as health insurance payment denials, for example. That’s as true for Apple (itself currently planning to extend Apple News into new markets) as it is for anyone else in the business of using AI to get things done.

At the end of the day, the story is not the headline. The story is why the headline was put there in the first place. At Apple. And at the BBC.

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

Source:: Computer World

By Nick Godt EV government incentives are supported by 67% of Americans, according to a survey.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Deepti Pathak Armadillos are one of the newest additions to Minecraft’s animal world, and breeding them can be…
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By Deepti Pathak Shopping on Amazon is simple, but figuring out how to use your favorite payment methods can…
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By Christine Romero-Chan CES 2025 is kicking off in Las Vegas. Here’s all the hottest tech news to come out of the pre show.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Mokey As Americans become increasingly skeptical of technology’s role in our society, can a trade show like CES help usher back an age of optimism?

Source:: Digital Trends

By Siôn Geschwindt In the 1977 Star Wars film A New Hope, there’s an iconic scene where the beloved droid R2-D2 casts a beam of light to create a hologram of Princess Leia pleading for the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Sadly, almost 50 years on, we’re not much closer to the true holograms science fiction promised us, let alone the teleportation devices and flying cars.  Yes, we have AR and VR headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens or Apple’s Vision Pro, but those simply use transparent screens to give the effect of a hologram. Even Tupac’s famous “live” Coachella performance 16 years after his death…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Christmas Eve (and Christmas Day) are arguably the most important time-frame for transportation companies. So it was a big deal when an American Airlines system glitch forced the airline to ask the government for a full shutdown on Christmas Eve. And it was an even bigger deal the next day for Bane NOR, which runs the Norwegian rail system and had to shut down all trains in Norway.

Both involved IT issues and both were mostly — if not entirely — caused by third-party firms. Now, third-party risks are nothing new. But few CIOs truly internalize that one error from a vendor can shut down all enterprise operations. That’s a lot of trust to offer an outside company that typically undergoes minor due diligence, assuming it was subjected to any meaningful due diligence at all.

What happened with these Christmas nightmares? Let’s drill into each and note how the two transportation giants differed in their approach.

The more interesting of the two was the Norwegian train shutdown, which lasted 13 hours on Christmas Day, from roughly 8 a.m. until 9 p.m. The problem: trains couldn’t communicate with any traffic control centers, which meant they couldn’t operate safely. The cause: a bad firewall setting.

Let that sink in. Because systems today overwhelmingly run through the internet, firewalls can and will block anything. Until this incident, how many IT managers at Bane NOR realized a firewall setting could shut down every train everywhere?

That was a key reason for the long delay in getting the trains back online. When communications stop, managers think the communications gear is somehow failing.

“It took us a while before we could trace it to a firewall issue. It was not one of the obvious causes to look at,” Strachan Stine Smemo, the Bane external communications manager, said in an email to Computerworld. “It was tricky to find the problem.”

Bane’s team opted against changing any firewall settings and instead — as a temporary measure — switched communications to a different firewall. (They later changed the impacted components, Smemo said.)

Arild Nybrodahl, Bane’s information and communications technology director, said his team detected “system instability” on Christmas Eve, which is when “troubleshooting efforts were initiated.” Things didn’t get bad enough to shutdown operations until 8 a.m. the next day, he said. 

“The fault affected the railway’s closed mobile network (GSM-R) and other critical communication systems,” Nybrodahl said. “When any emergency calls and other communication between the train and the train conductor do not work, we cannot operate trains. We have located where the error lies in our own nationwide IT infrastructure and we are now working on a solution to correct the error. We have not yet corrected the root cause, but have taken measures so that the part of the network where the error was located is isolated from the rest of the infrastructure.”

Unlike American Airlines, Bane did not identify the relevant third-party and even praised that vendor’s efforts. Bane received “good help from our supplier,” Smemo said. 

American Airlines, however, not only identified the vendor at issue as DXC, but went out of its way to tell reporters that the problems it ran into were that vendor’s fault. This is known as throwing a partner under the bus.

It’s not clear precisely what happened between the two companies, as neither have discussed the particulars. But American made those comments shortly after the one-hour outage ended. That means emotions were at play, and someone at at the airline was very unhappy.

(DXC is likely unhappy, too, since its stock price has taken a hit.)

Though DXC has been a longtime supplier to American — the DXC website says “more than 20 years” — but it’s not precisely clear what role it had in the shutdown. The company has some role in the airline’s flight operations systems and has been working to modernize American’s systems, including moving legacy code to the cloud. 

The airline blamed a network hardware issue, without being specific, that forced the airline to ask the US Federal Aviation Administration for a nationwide group stop that ended up lasting about an hour.

According to a report on MSN , the incident delayed more than 900 flights affecting “around 900,000 passengers across 200 US airports, leaving many stranded and sleeping in terminals.”

Given that both of these incidents happened on major holidays, one obvious factor is that the companies had only skeleton crews on duty. Though it’s unlikely that holiday staffing caused either situation, it likely slowed down the responses.

One other wrinkle in the DXC situation: the company on Christmas Eve was already in the middle of an IT leadership change. CIO Kristie Grinnell had given notice about her move to a new job as CIO of TD SYNNEX. That was announced on Dec. 19; two weeks later DXC announced its new CIO would be Brad Novak. 

The problem with throwing a vendor partner under the bus — aside from the fact you haven’t done a full investigation or determined who’s at fault —is that it leaves important questions unanswered. Did this third-party firm have the appropriate skills and personnel to deliver what it was supposed to deliver? If not, then shouldn’t the fault lie with whoever hired that firm?

Let’s say the selection process was appropriate. The question then becomes, “Who was supposed to oversee that vendor?” And was the vendor given everything needed to do the job?

From the perspective of shareholders, the fault is more often going to lie with the people who overseeing and bringing in the outside firm. Unless the third-party company ignored instructions or engaged in bad behavior, most mishaps are going to be blamed on the enterprise.

Put bluntly, an enterprise that is quick to blame a contractor is likely trying to change the subject before its own failings are examined.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Inspired by the much-loved Jujutsu Kaisen Anime series, Jujutsu Infinite is a popular RPG fighting game…
The post Jujutsu Infinite Codes: January 2025 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Hisan Kidwai NBA 2K24 is the biggest basketball game, allowing people to play as their favorite star and…
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By Hisan Kidwai Shindo Life is a great Roblox game inspired by the ever-popular Naruto anime series. In the…
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