Month: June 2024

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Meta got hit Tuesday with a lawsuit alleging that the company knowingly overlooks sexist treatment of female employees. That includes an apparent practice of hiring and promoting less qualified men to roles over more qualified female applicants.

The complaint was filed in a US district court in New York by Jeffrey Smith, an engineer who joined Meta in 2018. Smith alleged that Meta was on the brink of promoting him when suddenly his "upward trajectory stopped" after he started speaking up about allegedly misogynistic management practices at Meta.

Smith claimed that instead of a promotion, his Meta manager, Sacha Arnaud, suggested that he resign shortly after delivering Smith's first-ever negative performance review, which reduced his bonus payout and impacted his company stock. Smith has alleged he suffered emotional distress and economic injury due to this alleged retaliation.

Enlarge / Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt "A giant humanoid, made of fluffy blue cotton candy, stomping on the ground, and roaring to the sky, clear blue sky behind them." (credit: Runway)

On Sunday, Runway announced a new AI video synthesis model called Gen-3 Alpha that's still under development, but it appears to create video of similar quality to OpenAI's Sora, which debuted earlier this year (and has also not yet been released). It can generate novel, high-definition video from text prompts that range from realistic humans to surrealistic monsters stomping the countryside.

Unlike Runway's previous best model from June 2023, which could only create two-second-long clips, Gen-3 Alpha can reportedly create 10-second-long video segments of people, places, and things that have a consistency and coherency that easily surpasses Gen-2. If 10 seconds sounds short compared to Sora's full minute of video, consider that the company is working with a shoestring budget of compute compared to more lavishly funded OpenAI—and actually has a history of shipping video generation capability to commercial users.

Gen-3 Alpha does not generate audio to accompany the video clips, and it's highly likely that temporally coherent generations (those that keep a character consistent over time) are dependent on similar high-quality training material. But Runway's improvement in visual fidelity over the past year is difficult to ignore.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez)

AT&T is imposing $10 and $20 monthly price hikes on users of older unlimited wireless plans starting in August 2024, the company announced. The single-line price of these 10 "retired" plans will increase by $10 per month, while customers with multiple lines on a plan will be hit with a total monthly increase of $20.

"If you have a single line of service on your plan, your monthly plan charge will increase by $10. If you have multiple lines on your plan, your monthly plan charge will increase by a total of $20. This is the total monthly increase, not per line increase," AT&T said.

AT&T has offered a dizzying array of "unlimited" data plans over the years, all with different limits and perks. While unlimited plans let customers avoid overage fees, speeds can be slowed once customers hit their high-speed data limit. There are also limits on the usage of hotspot data.

Enlarge / Car designer Henrik Fisker poses with a Fisker Ocean at the Salvation Army California South Division's annual Sally Awards in June 2022. (credit: Michael Tullberg/Getty Images)

Fisker, the second EV firm started by legendary BMW and Aston Martin designer Henrik Fisker, has filed for bankruptcy and intends to sell its assets and restructure its debt. The almost inevitable outcome comes months after it paused manufacturing amid cash flow shortages, safety probes, and devastating reviews of its only product, the Fisker Ocean SUV.

Fisker's statement about the filing notes the firm's production of the Ocean "twice as fast as expected in the auto industry" and delivering "the most sustainable vehicle in the world." However, a Fisker spokesperson writes, "[L]ike other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently."

Rumors of Fisker's bankruptcy have been circulating since March when the company suspended production of its Ocean for initially six weeks and then indefinitely. A month earlier, the company reported $273 million in 2023 sales but more than $1 billion in debt. Fisker's stock was pulled from the New York Stock Exchange in late March. Amid what many saw as a generalized weakening of EV demand, Fisker was particularly vulnerable.

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Two men have pleaded guilty to charges of computer intrusion and aggravated identity theft tied to their theft of records from a law enforcement database for use in doxxing and extorting multiple individuals.

Sagar Steven Singh, 20, and Nicholas Ceraolo, 26, admitted to being members of ViLE, a group that specializes in obtaining personal information of individuals and using it to extort or harass them. Members use various methods to collect social security numbers, cell phone numbers, and other personal data and post it, or threaten to post it, to a website administered by the group. Victims had to pay to have their information removed or kept off the website. Singh pled guilty on Monday, June 17, and Ceraolo pled guilty on May 30.

Impersonating a police officer

The men gained access to the law enforcement portal by stealing the password of an officer’s account and using it to log in. The portal, maintained by an unnamed US federal law enforcement agency, was restricted to members of various law enforcement agencies to share intelligence from government databases with state and local officials. The site provided access to detailed nonpublic records involving narcotics and currency seizures and to law enforcement intelligence reports.

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Elon Musk is still frantically pushing to launch X payment services in the US by the end of 2024, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Launching payment services is arguably one of the reasons why Musk paid so much to acquire Twitter in 2022. His rebranding of the social platform into X revives a former dream he had as a PayPal co-founder who fought and failed to name the now-ubiquitous payments app X. Musk has told X staff that transforming the company into a payments provider would be critical to achieving his goal of turning X into a so-called everything app "within three to five years."

Late last year, Musk said it would "blow" his "mind" if X didn't roll out payments by the end of 2024, so Bloomberg's report likely comes as no big surprise to Musk's biggest fans who believe in his vision. At that time, Musk said he wanted X users' "entire financial lives" on the platform before 2024 ended, and a Bloomberg review of "more than 350 pages of documents and emails related to money transmitter licenses that X Payments submitted in 11 states" shows approximately how close he is to making that dream a reality on his platform.

Last week, during our inaugural Ars Live event, Quilty Space director of research Caleb Henry joined Ars space editor Eric Berger for a discussion of SpaceX's Starlink and other satellite internet systems. We discussed Starlink's rapid road to profitability—it took just five years from the first launch of operational satellites—and the future of the technology.

One of the keys to Starlink's success is its vertical integration as a core business at SpaceX, which operates the world's only reusable rocket, the Falcon 9. This has allowed the company not just to launch a constellation of 6,000 satellites—but to do so at relatively low cost.

"At one point, SpaceX had publicly said that it was $28 million," Henry said of the company's target for a Falcon 9 launch cost. "We believe today that they are below $20 million per launch and actually lower than that... I would put it in the mid teens for how much it costs them internally. And that's going down as they increase the reuse of the vehicle. Recently, they've launched their 20th, maybe 21st, use of a first-stage rocket. And as they can amortize the cost of the booster over a greater number of missions, that only helps them with their business case."

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft approaches the International Space Station on Thursday. (credit: NASA TV)

NASA and Boeing will take an additional four days to review all available data about the performance of the Starliner spacecraft before clearing the vehicle to return to Earth, officials said Tuesday.

Based on the new schedule, which remains pending ahead of final review meetings later this week, Starliner would undock at 10:10 pm ET on Tuesday, June 25, from the International Space Station (02:10 UTC on June 26). This would set up a landing at 4:51 ET on June 26 (08:51 UTC) at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.

During a news conference on Tuesday, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, Steve Stich, said the four-day delay in the spacecraft's return would "give our team a little bit more time to look at the data, do some analysis, and make sure we're really ready to come home."

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

A report by tech news site The Information suggests that Apple is shifting its augmented reality priorities. The next high-end version of the Vision Pro has purportedly been canceled while work continues on a more affordable version with a reduced feature set.

Citing both an employee in Apple's headset supply chain and one working in headset manufacturing for Apple, the report claims that the cheaper Vision product—perhaps around the $1,600 mark—is due before the end of 2025. Apple had originally intended to present this headset alongside the Vision Pro, similar to the models available in each iPhone release. The more affordable model would likely have fewer cameras, smaller speakers, and weigh less, though Apple has struggled to bring down the cost of the unit's displays.

Apple's efforts in augmented reality are closely watched by other players in the headset space, so even a momentary, situational step back from high-end headsets could have significant repercussions. The Information cites current and former Meta employees in describing how the company had killed plans for its own higher-end headset in January 2023, but it then began work on a new premium model five months after Apple's Vision Pro debut.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

For the vast majority of compatible PCs, Microsoft’s Windows 11 24H2 update still isn’t officially available as anything other than a preview (a revised version of the update is available to Windows Insiders again after briefly being pulled early last week). But Microsoft and most of the other big PC companies are releasing their first wave of Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X-series chips in them today, and those PCs are all shipping with the 24H2 update already installed.

For now, this means a bifurcated Windows 11 install base: one (the vast majority) that’s still mostly on version 23H2 and one (a tiny, Arm-powered minority) that’s running 24H2.

Although Microsoft hasn’t been specific about its release plans for Windows 11 24H2 to the wider user base, most PCs should still start getting the update later this fall. The Copilot+ parts won’t run on those current PCs, but they’ll still get new features and benefit from Microsoft’s work on the operating system’s underpinnings.