Month: August 2023

Enlarge / Thirst for the ".ai" domain has put Anguilla on the global technology map. (credit: Getty Images)

Anguilla, a tiny British island territory in the Caribbean, may bring in up to $30 million in revenue this year thanks to its ".ai" domain name, reports Bloomberg in a piece published Thursday. Over the past year, skyrocketing interest in AI has made the country's ".ai" top-level domain particularly attractive to tech companies. The revenue is a boon for Anguilla's economy, which primarily relies on tourism and has been impacted by the pandemic.

$30 million from domains may not sound like a lot compared to the billions thrown around in AI these days, but with a total land area of 35 square miles and a population of 15,753, Anguilla isn't complaining. Registrars like GoDaddy must pay Anguilla a fixed price—$140 for a two-year registration—and the prices are rising due to demand.

Bloomberg says that Anguilla brought in a mere $7.4 million from .ai domain registrations in 2021, but all that changed with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT last year. Its release spawned a huge wave of AI hype, fear, and investment. Vince Cate, who has managed the ".ai" domain for Anguilla for decades, told Bloomberg that .ai registrations have effectively doubled in the past year. "Since November 30, things are very different here," he said.

Enlarge / Marijuana plants in a greenhouse in Santa Cruz, California. (credit: Ian Philip Miller / Getty Images)

As dozens of states have legalized recreational and medicinal use of marijuana in recent years, the federal government has maintained its classification as a Schedule 1 controlled substance—keeping marijuana in a group defined as having "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse," which includes heroin and LSD.

The incongruity has muddled marijuana regulation and enforcement, stifled cannabis businesses, and hampered medical research. But the situation could soon ease.

The Department of Health and Human Services has recommended to the Drug Enforcement Administration that it should downgrade marijuana from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 controlled substance, which is defined as having "a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence." The move would put marijuana in the ranks of ketamine, testosterone, and products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine.

Enlarge / Belkin's BoostCharge Convertible Qi2 Wireless Pad to Stand. (credit: Belkin)

The first wireless charging devices that support the Wireless Power Consortium's (WPC) Qi2 wireless charging standard were detailed today. The chargers and subsequent Qi2 products will feature Apple MagSafe-like technology and promise a secure, more efficient wireless charge with the help of magnets. We don't know which smartphones will support Qi2, but there's hope that with the right compatibility, it will be easier to charge an Android phone with a secure magnetic connection. The new charging standard will also expand the number of chargers that can power Android and iOS devices wirelessly.

Currently, wireless iPhone charging is limited to 7.5 W unless you have a MagSafe charger, which supports 15 W. The limitation has given shoppers a reason to buy a MagSafe charger over various non-Apple chargers, including those following the Qi standard. It took five years after Android phones started adopting Qi for Apple (with the iPhone 8 series) to get on board. In January 2023, months ahead of Apple's expected iPhone 15 launch,  WPC announced that Apple "provided the basis for the new Qi2 standard building on its MagSafe technology."

Along with other WPC members, Apple helped create the standard's Magnet Power Profile. When finalized, the Qi2 standard will have mandates for magnet strength and dimensions to ensure foolproof alignment between transmitters and receivers for a consistent charge and less heat-inducing energy loss. The WPC sees the design as enabling wireless charging of new product categories, including tablets and smartwatches (it's targeting the standard at phones and wireless earbuds to start).

Enlarge (credit: Activision)

On Wednesday, Activision announced that it will be introducing real-time AI-powered voice chat moderation in the upcoming November 10 release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. The company is partnering with Modulate to implement this feature, using technology called ToxMod to identify and take action against hate speech, bullying, harassment, and discrimination.

While the industry-wide challenge of toxic online behavior isn't unique to Call of Duty, Activision says the scale of the problem has been heightened due to the franchise's massive player base. So it's turning to machine-learning technology to help automate the solution.

ToxMod is an AI-powered voice moderation system designed to identify and act against what Activision calls "harmful language" that violates the game's code of conduct. The aim is to supplement Call of Duty's existing anti-toxicity measures, which include text filtering in 14 languages and an in-game player-reporting system.

Enlarge / Poor critical and commercial reception for the latest Saints Row reboot may have played a role in Volition's fate.

Volition—the development studio behind franchises from Descent and Freespace to Red Faction and Saints Row—has been abruptly shut down after a 30-year run. Parent company Embracer Group said the studio will be closed "effective immediately" as part of a massive restructuring program that began in June, according to a farewell notice posted on Volition's website and on LinkedIn.

"The Volition team has proudly created world-class entertainment for fans around the globe for 30 years," the statement reads, in part. "We've been driven by a passion for our community and always worked to deliver joy, surprise and delight."

Some of Volition's more than 200 employees are sharing news of their layoffs. But it's unclear just how many of the studio's more than 200 employees are now out of a job and how many will be transitioned to other parts of Embracer's gaming behemoth, which includes Gearbox Entertainment, THQ Nordic, Eidos Interactive, and many more studios.

Enlarge / Ukrainian soldiers. (credit: Getty Images)

Russia’s military intelligence unit has been targeting Ukrainian Android devices with “Infamous Chisel,” the tracking name for new malware that’s designed to backdoor devices and steal critical information, Western intelligence agencies said on Thursday.

“Infamous Chisel is a collection of components which enable persistent access to an infected Android device over the Tor network, and which periodically collates and exfiltrates victim information from compromised devices,” intelligence officials from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand wrote. “The information exfiltrated is a combination of system device information, commercial application information and applications specific to the Ukrainian military.”

A “serious threat”

Ukraine’s security service first called out the malware earlier this month. Ukrainian officials said then that Ukrainian personnel had “prevented Russia’s intelligence services from gaining access to sensitive information, including the activity of the Armed Forces, deployment of the Defense Forces, their technical provision, etc.”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The day before a Texas antiporn law that requires age verification to access adult websites was set to take effect, the state's attorney general, Angela Colmenero, has been at least temporarily blocked from enforcing the law.

US District Judge David Alan Ezra granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement after the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) joined adult performers and sites like Pornhub in a lawsuit opposing the law. Today, they succeeded in convincing Ezra that Texas' law violates the First Amendment and would have "a chilling effect on legally-protected speech," FSC said in a press release.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” Alison Boden, FSC's executive director, said. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the court agreed with our view that [the law's] true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

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  The JBL Authentics 200.

The Google Assistant and Alexa have long been at odds, and back in the voice assistants' heydays, speaker-makers seemingly weren't allowed to ship both platforms in one product. Later around 2019, the two companies finally deigned to be on the same device—but never active at the same time. Notably on Sonos speakers, customers could swap between the two assistants via an app setting. Times are getting tough for voice assistants, though, and now via a new toolkit, Amazon and Google can finally work at the same time on a single speaker. One of the first to support the new toolkit is JBL, via the new JBL Authentics 200, 300, and 500 speakers.

The toolkit is called the "Multi-Agent Experience (MAX) Toolkit," and we have dueling press releases from Google and Amazon promoting the new speaker. Amazon says the two voice assistants can even work together and handoff tasks, saying "customers no longer need to remember which service they asked to start a request for music, timers, reminders, or alarms—either service can stop it. For example, customers can ask Alexa to set a timer and ask Google Assistant to stop it when it goes off, or vice versa."

As for JBL's hardware, you get a choice of three rather pricey speakers. The JBL Authentics 200 is $329.99 and has "a pair of 1-inch tweeters bringing each song to life, with the full-range 5-inch woofer and downfiring 6-inch passive radiator." The 300 model takes the same basic speaker and adds an "8 hour" battery and a handle to the mix, making it a portable bluetooth speaker for $429.99. The beefy 500 model is a whopping $699.99 and features three 1-inch tweeters, three 2.75-inch midrange woofers, and a 6.5-inch downfiring subwoofer for 270 Watts of sound. This also adds Dolby Atmos support for 3D sound. All units have top-mounted treble, base, and volume knobs, and on the back you get USB-C, power, and—a real shocker—wired Ethernet ports!

Enlarge / An Alameda County couple watches as investigators prepare to retrieve the body of Nina Reiser in the Oakland hills in July 2008. Hans Reiser, creator of the ReiserFS file system, provided the location after his 2008 murder conviction. (credit: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

When Apple was about to introduce Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, John Siracusa wrote in the summer of 2006 about how a new file system should be coming to Macs (which it did, 11 years later). The Mac, Siracusa wrote, needed something that could efficiently handle lots of tiny files, volume management with pooled storage, checksum-based data integrity, and snapshots. It needed something like ZFS or, perhaps, ReiserFS, file systems “notable for their willingness to reconsider past assumptions about file system design.”

Two months later, the name Reiser would lose most of its prestige and pick up a tragic association it would never shake. Police arrested the file system’s namesake, Hans Reiser, and charged him with murder in connection with the disappearance of his estranged wife.

Reiser’s work on Linux file systems was essentially sentenced to obscurity from that point on. Now that designation has been made official, as the file system that was once the default on systems like SUSE Linux has been changed from “Supported” to “Obsolete” in the latest Linux 6.6 kernel merge process (as reported by Phoronix). While a former employee of Reiser’s company, Namesys, continues out-of-source work on later versions of ReiserFS, it is likely to disappear from the kernel entirely in a matter of years, likely 2025.