Boeing is conducting more surprise inspections at its factories as part of a broader plan to prevent manufacturing snafus like the one that led to a jet-panel blowout on an Alaska Air flight a year ago. From a report: The jet maker outlined on Friday more than a dozen steps it has taken in recent months to tackle a manufacturing quality crisis that has forced Boeing to slow production and has put it under the microscope of federal regulators. Some of the steps have been previously reported.

Boeing restarted production at its 737 factory in December after a machinists strike stopped work for several months. The company is still producing far fewer 737 MAXs per month than it was in the months before the Alaska Airlines accident. Among the new procedures are another layer of random quality checks where plane parts are commonly removed and then put back. In the case of the MAX involved in last January's incident, workers failed to replace bolts needed to hold a door-plug in place. The plug had been opened to repair faulty rivets.

China will expand consumption subsidies to cover smartphones and other electronics, in a step to promote domestic spending as external headwinds pick up. From a report: A national trade-in program that currently applies to home appliances and cars will broaden this year to include personal devices like phones, tablets and smartwatches, officials from the nation's top economic planning agency said in a briefing Friday.

Chinese consumers in the post-Covid era have begun holding onto their smartphones longer, given a lack of exciting new features and general belt-tightening. As with cars and washing machines, investors hope incentives will revive the world's largest smartphone market and drive sales for not just brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi, but also galvanize business on platforms popular with device fans like Alibaba Group and JD.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: A trio of major music publishers suing Anthropic over the use of lyrics to train its AI system have reached a deal with the Amazon-backed company to resolve some parts of a pending preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee on Thursday signed off on an agreement between the two sides mandating Anthropic to maintain existing guardrails that prevent its Claude AI chatbot from providing lyrics to songs owned by the publishers or create new song lyrics based on the copyrighted material.

In a statement, Anthropic said Claude "isn't designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement." It added, "Our decision to enter into this stipulation is consistent with those priorities. We continue to look forward to showing that, consistent with existing copyright law, using potentially copyrighted material in the training of generative AI models is a quintessential fair use." [...] Under the agreement, Anthropic will apply already-implemented guardrails in the training of new AI systems. The deal also provides an avenue for music publishers to intervene if the guardrails aren't working as intended.

"Publishers may notify Anthropic in writing that its Guardrails are not effectively preventing output that reproduces, distributes, or displays, in whole or in part, the lyrics to compositions owned or controlled by Publishers, or creates derivative works based on those compositions," the filing states. "Anthropic will respond to Publishers expeditiously and undertake an investigation into those allegations, with which Publishers will cooperate in good faith." Anthropic has maintained in court filings that existing guardrails make it unlikely that any future user could prompt Claude to produce any material portion of the works-in-suit. They consist of a "range of technical and other measures -- at all levels in the development lifecycle -- that aim to prevent users from simply prompting Claude to regurgitate training data," said a company spokesperson. The court is expected to issue a ruling in the coming months on whether to issue preliminary injunction that would bar Anthropic from training future models on lyrics owned by the publishers.

Xiaomi has further restricted bootloader unlocking to just one device per user per year, significantly hindering custom ROM development and reinforcing user dependence on its proprietary HyperOS ecosystem. Android Police reports: Roughly a year ago, Xiaomi introduced a policy limiting users to three unlocked devices per account, providing only a limited time window for unlocking, and demanding waiting periods before doing so. It's now gone even further, limiting users to unlocking the bootloader of just a single device throughout the year. Unlocking the bootloader changes the way a phone works by preventing automated software updates, among other things, and isn't a good idea for most users. Power users love it for complete customization of their devices, and unlocked bootloaders are critical to the creation and installation of privately developed operating systems, or custom ROMs.

Custom ROMs usually (but not always) derive from pre-existing OSs like Android or Xiaomi's HyperOS. To write operating software that works on a certain device, you need to develop it on that specific device. Consequently, individuals and teams throughout the enthusiast phone sphere constantly add to their collections of bootloader-unlocked phones. The new unlocking restrictions could place undue hardship on resource-limited development teams, reducing the number of custom ROMs produced moving forward. Xiaomi first tightened restrictions roughly a year ago, following the enforcement of a Chinese law requiring certain pre-installed software behaviors. But Xiaomi's business plan and sales models indicate a couple of other motivations for insisting users stick with its first-party HyperOS. Some of the motives include preventing scalping, avoiding accidental bricking, and preserving advertising-driven revenue. However, these measures come at the cost of user freedom and may stifle innovation within the enthusiast developer community.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Constellation Energy has been awarded a record $1 billion in contracts to supply nuclear power to the U.S. government over the next decade, the company said on Thursday. Constellation, the country's largest operator of nuclear power plants, will deliver electricity to more than 13 federal agencies as part of the agreements with the U.S. General Services Administration. The deal is the biggest energy purchase in the history of the GSA, which constructs and manages federal buildings, and is among the first major climate-focused energy agreement by the U.S. government to include electricity generated from existing nuclear reactors.

The GSA estimated that the contracts, set to begin on April 25, will comprise over 10 million megawatt-hours over 10 years and provide electricity equivalent to powering more than 1 million homes annually. The procurement will deliver electricity to 80 federal facilities located throughout the PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission operator with service covering more than 65 million people. The U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Army Corps of Engineers are some of the facilities that will receive the power. [...] Constellation said the deal will enable it to extend the licenses of existing nuclear plants and invest in new equipment and technology that will increase output by about 135 megawatts. "The investments we make as a result of this contract will keep these plants operating reliably for decades to come and put new, clean nuclear energy on the grid while making the best use of taxpayer dollars," Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez said in a release.

The number of active venture capital investors, firms that invest in startups, has dropped more than a quarter from a peak in 2021 [non-paywalled source], as risk-averse financial institutions focus their money on the biggest firms in Silicon Valley. From a report: The tally of VCs investing in US-headquartered companies dropped to 6,175 in 2024 -- meaning more than 2,000 have fallen dormant since a peak of 8,315 in 2021, according to data provider PitchBook.

The trend has concentrated power among a small group of mega-firms and has left smaller VCs in a fight for survival. It has also skewed the dynamics of the US venture market, enabling start-ups such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Databricks and Stripe to stay private for far longer, while thinning out funding options for smaller companies.

More than half of the $71bn raised by US VCs in 2024 was pulled in by just nine firms, according to PitchBook. General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq Growth and Thrive Capital raised more than $25bn in 2024. Many firms threw in the towel in 2024.

India has once again pushed back a contentious plan to limit major technology companies' control of the nation's digital payments system, extending a regulatory uncertainty that has weighed on the sector for years. From a report: The National Payments Corporation of India said on Tuesday it would extend the deadline for implementing a 30% cap on any individual app's share of transactions on the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, the country's ubiquitous digital payments network, to December 31, 2026.

The decision provides temporary relief to Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay, which together handle more than 85% of transactions on UPI. The network, which processes over 13 billion transactions monthly, has become the backbone of India's digital economy since its launch eight years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Insurance companies that stopped providing home coverage to hundreds of thousands of Californians in recent years as wildfires became more destructive will have to again provide policies in fire-prone areas if they want to keep doing business in California under a state regulation announced Monday. The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara's office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they'd need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara's office said.

Major insurers like State Farm and Allstate have stopped writing new policies in California due to fears of massive losses from wildfires and other natural disasters. In exchange for increasing coverage, the state will let insurance companies pass on the costs of reinsurance to California consumers. Insurance companies typically buy reinsurance to avoid huge payouts in case of natural disasters or catastrophic loss. California is the only state that doesn't already allow the cost of reinsurance to be borne by policy holders, according to Lara's office. [...] The requirement is under review by the Office of Administrative Law before it takes effect within 30 days. "Californians deserve a reliable insurance market that doesn't retreat from communities most vulnerable to wildfires and climate change," Lara said in a statement. "This is a historic moment for California."

Opponents of the rule say that could hike premiums by 40% and doesn't require new policies to be written at a fast enough pace. The state did not provide a cost analysis for potential impact on consumers. "This plan is of the insurance industry, by the insurance industry, and for the industry," Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, said in a statement.

AI ethicists are cautioning that the rise of AI may bring with it the commodification of even one's motivations. From a report: Researchers from the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence say -- in a paper published Monday in the Harvard Data Science Review journal -- the rise of generative AI, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, comes with the increasing opportunity for persuasive technologies to gain a strong foothold.

"Tremendous resources are being expended to position AI assistants in every area of life, which should raise the question of whose interests and purposes these so-called assistants are designed to serve," Yaqub Chaudhary, a visiting scholar at the Center for Future of Intelligence, said in a statement. When interacting even causally with AI chatbots -- which can range from digital tutors to assistants to even romantic partners -- users share intimate information that gives the technology access to personal "intentions" like psychological and behavioral data, the researcher said.

"What people say when conversing, how they say it, and the type of inferences that can be made in real-time as a result, are far more intimate than just records of online interactions," Chaudhary added. In fact, AI is already subtly manipulating and influencing motivations by mimicking the way a user talks or anticipating the way they are likely to respond, the authors argue. Those conversations, as innocuous as they may seem, leave the door open for the technology to forecast and influence decisions before they are made. "We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes," Chaudhary said.

MicroStrategy has transformed into a "bitcoin treasury company," investing billions in bitcoin through debt and equity issuance, driving its stock price up nearly 400% in 2024 despite declining software revenues and heightened financial risks. The Guardian reports: In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure U.S. software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of "software as a service" was not racy enough. Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250 million in alternative assets -- "stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types." Less than five years later, that bitcoin side hustle has gone stratospheric. MicroStrategy's share price has swollen twentyfold, lifting its market capitalization to almost $75 billion and catapulting the stock into the Nasdaq 100 index of top technology shares.

Traditional airlines worldwide are rapidly eliminating long-standing perks from their basic fares, blurring the line between full-service and budget carriers, according to industry analysis of 90 major airlines.

Air Canada's decision to ban standard carry-on luggage for its lowest-fare passengers from January 3 marks the latest rollback, joining United Airlines, Finnair, and others. Most legacy carriers, including British Airways, Air France, and Lufthansa, have already stripped checked baggage and seat selection from basic fares, signaling an industry-wide shift toward budget airline practices.

Researchers have uncovered widespread manipulation of GitHub's star-rating system, with over 3.1 million fraudulent stars identified across 15,835 repositories, according to a new study by Socket, Carnegie Mellon University, and North Carolina State University.

The research team analyzed 20TB of data from GHArchive, spanning 6 billion GitHub events from 2019 to 2024, using their "StarScout" detection tool. The tool identified 278,000 accounts engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior to artificially boost repository rankings.

GitHub uses stars, similar to social media likes, to rank projects and recommend content to users. The platform has previously encountered malicious exploitation of this system, including the "Stargazers Ghost Network" malware operation discovered last summer. Approximately 91% of flagged repositories and 62% of suspicious accounts were removed by October 2024.

Intel's market value plunged 61% in 2024, marking its worst performance since going public in 1971, while rival chipmaker Broadcom saw shares surge 111% on AI advances. Broadcom, now valued at $1.1 trillion, leverages its custom XPU chips and networking gear for major cloud providers including Google, helping companies build AI infrastructure at lower costs than Nvidia's GPUs.

Further reading: Intel Weighed $20 Billion Nvidia Takeover in 2005.

PlayStation isn't giving up on live service games any time soon. From a report: In a recent interview with Japanese outlet Famitsu, PlayStation Co-CEO Herman Hulst said that the company still believes in the model despite recent hiccups like Concord. "The game business is constantly changing due to various factors, including technological advances, new genres and ways of playing," Hulst said via auto translation.

"However, one thing that remains constant is people's desire for great entertainment experiences, and attention to games continues to grow. However, this has also created competition, and like many companies in the industry, we have had to make changes to our business to solidify a more sustainable operating base." Hulst continued by saying PlayStation will "continue to focus on developing live service titles along with the story-driven single-player titles that our players want."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The global smartphone market is splitting into two distinct segments, with the mid-range segment seeing its market share plummet from 35% in 2021 to a projected 23% by 2027, according to an analysis of data compiled by Goldman Sachs.

The collapse of the mid-range segment -- $200-600 -- marks a stark reversal from 2021-22, when it held a steady 35% market share.

"While mid-end segment used to provide balance between outstanding specifications and high performance-cost ratio, the demand has been declining due to the lack of revolutionary technology upgrades and a more conservative consumption of middle class amid macro challenges," the analysts wrote in a note reviewed by India Dispatch.

Politico: Joe Biden spent the first half of his presidency enacting plans to steer at least $1.6 trillion to transform the economy and spur a clean-energy revolution -- only to watch those programs become afterthoughts in the 2024 election. Now the core of his domestic legacy stands unfinished, with hundreds of billions of dollars left to deploy, and imperiled as Donald Trump prepares to take office.

A wide-ranging examination of the Biden administration's spending and tax policies reveals signs that his efforts could leave a lasting mark, but also ways in which his agenda has yet to take hold -- after unleashing money for batteries, solar cells, computer chips and clean water; luring foreign-owned factories to U.S. soil; and turning some red-state Republicans into supporters of green energy projects.

Throughout 2024, POLITICO's "Biden's Billions" series has documented the halting pace, uneven progress and genuine economic impact of a spending blueprint rivaling Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. With just weeks left in Biden's term, it's not at all certain his legacy will endure in the same way. Much of it remains a work in progress.

Solar installations have surged to record levels, but the country is not adding enough zero-carbon electricity to meet Biden's climate targets. A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Jennifer Ouellette: Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry. "This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."

The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting." There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway that aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which "will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise." Furthermore, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that functions largely in a figurehead capacity, after Elsevier "unilaterally took full control" of the board's structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually -- which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.

In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversing versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. "This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors," the editors wrote. "AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage." In addition, the author page charges for JHE are significantly higher than even Elsevier's other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals like Scientific Reports. Not many of the journal's authors can afford those fees, "which runs counter to the journal's (and Elsevier's) pledge of equality and inclusivity," the editors wrote. The breaking point seems to have come in November, when Elsevier informed co-editors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (Touro University California College of Osteopathic Medicine) that it was ending the dual-editor model that has been in place since 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor protested, they were told the model could only remain if they took a 50 percent cut in their compensation.

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, a provider of GPU cloud orchestration software for AI workloads, and announced plans to open-source the platform. The deal, valued at $700 million, brings the Israel-based startup under Nvidia's umbrella after their collaboration since 2020.

Run:ai's software helps enterprises manage and schedule Nvidia GPU resources for AI applications across cloud and on-premises environments. Founded in 2018, the company's platform currently supports only Nvidia GPUs, but open-sourcing will enable expansion to other AI ecosystems, according to founders Omri Geller and Ronen Dar. The acquisition strengthens Nvidia's software portfolio as the company, now valued at $3.56 trillion, expands beyond its core graphics chip business into AI infrastructure management.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia is betting on robotics as its next big driver of growth, as the world's most valuable semiconductor company faces increasing competition in its core AI chipmaking business. The US tech group, best known for the infrastructure that has underpinned the AI boom, is set to launch its latest generation of compact computers for humanoid robots [non-paywalled link] -- dubbed Jetson Thor -- in the first half of 2025.

Nvidia is positioning itself to be the leading platform for what the tech group believes is an imminent robotics revolution. The company sells a "full stack" solution, from the layers of software for training AI-powered robots to the chips that go into them. [...] Talla said a shift in the robotics market is being driven by two technological breakthroughs: the explosion of generative AI models and the ability to train robots on these foundational models using simulated environments. The latter has been a particularly significant development as it helps solve what roboticists call the "Sim-to-Real gap," ensuring robots trained in virtual environments can operate effectively in the real world, he said.

America's aerospace industry is overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) — which also handles safety warnings from the industry's whistleblowers. But the Seattle Times says an analysis of reports to Congress found "an overwhelmed system delivering underwhelming results for whistleblowers... More than 90% of safety complaints from 2020 through 2023 ended with no violation found by the FAA, while whistleblowers reported them at great personal and professional risk." Aside from the FAA's in-house program, employees of Boeing, Spirit and the FAA can report safety hazards to the Office of Special Counsel, which has no FAA ties, or through internal employer complaint programs, such as Boeing's Speak Up and Spirit's Quality 360, to trigger company reviews... In the aftermath of the door-plug blowout over Portland, Boeing specifically asked its employees to use the Speak Up program or the FAA's internal process to report any concerns, according to Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal. Both have done a poor job protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, according to a congressionally appointed expert panel... While both were designed to guard against retaliation, critics say they have instead become enablers of it...

A panel of aviation safety experts in February rebuked Boeing's Speak Up program in a report to Congress. Whistleblower advocates criticized Speak Up for commonly outing whistleblowers to the supervisors they're complaining about, exposing them to retaliation. Managers sometimes investigated complaints against themselves. Employees mistrusted the program's promise of anonymity. Collectively, the befuddling maze of whistleblower options sowed "confusion about reporting systems that may discourage employees from submitting safety concerns," according to the expert panel's report....

[Boeing quality inspector Sam Mohawk, who alleged the 737 MAX line in Renton was losing track of subpar aircraft parts], continues to pursue his FAA claim, originally submitted through Boeing's Speak Up program. Months passed before Boeing addressed Mohawk's complaint. When it did, Mohawk's report was passed to the managers he was complaining about, according to Brian Knowles, Mohawk's South Carolina-based lawyer. "If you do Speak Up, just know that your report is going to go straight to the guys you're accusing of wrongdoing. They aren't going to say, 'Thanks for speaking up against us,'" Knowles said.
The article includes this quote about the FAA's in-house whistleblower program from Tom Devine, a whistleblower attorney with nearly a half-century of experience across a spectrum of federal agencies, and legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which helps whistleblowers navigate the federal system. "It's been a disaster from the beginning. We tell everyone to avoid it because it's a trap... We've warned whistleblowers not to entrust their rights there."