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Quantum Teleportation Used To Distribute a Calculation

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 22:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In today's issue of Nature, a team at Oxford University describes using quantum teleportation to link two pieces of quantum hardware that were located about 2 meters apart, meaning they could easily have been in different rooms entirely. Once linked, the two pieces of hardware could be treated as a single quantum computer, allowing simple algorithms to be performed that involved operations on both sides of the 2-meter gap. [...] The Oxford team was simply interested in a proof-of-concept, and so used an extremely simplified system. Each end of the 2-meter gap had a single trap holding two ions, one strontium and one calcium. The two atoms could be entangled with each other, getting them to operate as a single unit. The calcium ion served as a local memory and was used in computations, while the strontium ion served as one of the two ends of the quantum network. An optical cable between the two ion traps allowed photons to entangle the two strontium ions, getting the whole system to operate as a single unit. The key thing about the entanglement processes used here is that a failure to entangle left the system in its original state, meaning that the researchers could simply keep trying until the qubits were entangled. The entanglement event would also lead to a photon that could be measured, allowing the team to know when success had been achieved (this sort of entanglement with a success signal is termed "heralded" by those in the field). The researchers showed that this setup allowed them to teleport with a specific gate operation (controlled-Z), which can serve as the basis for any other two-qubit gate operation -- any operation you might want to do can be done by using a specific combination of these gates. After performing multiple rounds of these gates, the team found that the typical fidelity was in the area of 70 percent. But they also found that errors typically had nothing to do with the teleportation process and were the product of local operations at one of the two ends of the network. They suspect that using commercial hardware, which has far lower error rates, would improve things dramatically. Finally, they performed a version of Grover's algorithm, which can, with a single query, identify a single item from an arbitrarily large unordered list. The "arbitrary" aspect is set by the number of available qubits; in this case, having only two qubits, the list maxed out at four items. Still, it worked, again with a fidelity of about 70 percent. While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware-agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at various distances, all using hardware that doesn't require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate. That said, the error rate of the teleportation steps may still be a problem, even if it was lower than the basic hardware rate in these experiments. The fidelity there was 97 percent, which is lower than the hardware error rates of most qubits and high enough that we couldn't execute too many of these before the probability of errors gets unacceptably high.

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Automakers Sue To Kill Maine's Hugely Popular 'Right To Repair' Law

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 21:02
Maine's overwhelmingly popular right-to-repair law is under attack by automakers through lawsuits and lobbying efforts aimed at weakening or delaying enforcement. While the law remains in limbo due to industry influence and legal challenges, broader enforcement issues persist across multiple states, with corporations often ignoring right-to-repair laws despite their legal passage. Techdirt reports: A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to consumers and third-party independent repair shops. But as we've seen with other states that have passed right to reform laws (most notably New York), passing the law isn't the end of the story. Corporate lobbyists have had great success not just watering these laws down before passage, but after voters approve them. They've also been swarmed by coordinated industry lawsuits and falsehood-spewing attacks. Maine's popular right to repair law just took effect after a year of hashing out the fine details, but the bill's still being changed as the state tries to sort out enforcement. Large automakers have been looming over that process to try and weaken the law. But the Alliance For Automotive Innovation also just filed a new lawsuit saying the law isn't fully cooked and therefore violates the law: "This is an example of putting the cart before the horse. Before automakers can comply, the law requires the attorney general to first establish an 'independent entity' to securely administer access to vehicle data. The independent entity hasn't been established. That's not in dispute. Compliance with the law right now is not possible."

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Google's 7-Year Slog To Improve Chrome Extensions Still Hasn't Satisfied Developers

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 20:25
The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Google's overhaul of Chrome's extension architecture continues to pose problems for developers of ad blockers, content filters, and privacy tools. [...] While Google's desire to improve the security, privacy, and performance of the Chrome extension platform is reasonable, its approach -- which focuses on code and permissions more than human oversight -- remains a work-in-progress that has left extension developers frustrated. Alexei Miagkov, senior staff technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who oversees the organization's Privacy Badger extension, told The Register, "Making extensions under MV3 is much harder than making extensions under MV2. That's just a fact. They made things harder to build and more confusing." Miagkov said with Privacy Badger the problem has been the slowness with which Google addresses gaps in the MV3 platform. "It feels like MV3 is here and the web extensions team at Google is in no rush to fix the frayed ends, to fix what's missing or what's broken still." According to Google's documentation, "There are currently no open issues considered a critical platform gap," and various issues have been addressed through the addition of new API capabilities. Miagkov described an unresolved problem that means Privacy Badger is unable to strip Google tracking redirects on Google sites. "We can't do it the correct way because when Google engineers design the [chrome.declarativeNetRequest API], they fail to think of this scenario," he said. "We can do a redirect to get rid of the tracking, but it ends up being a broken redirect for a lot of URLs. Basically, if the URL has any kind of query string parameters -- the question mark and anything beyond that -- we will break the link." Miagkov said a Chrome developer relations engineer had helped identify a workaround, but it's not great. Miagkov thinks these problems are of Google's own making -- the company changed the rules and has been slow to write the new ones. "It was completely predictable because they moved the ability to fix things from extensions to themselves," he said. "And now they need to fix things and they're not doing it."

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OpenAI Investigating Claim of 20 Million Stolen User Credentials

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 19:45
OpenAI says it's investigating after a hacker claimed to have stolen login credentials for 20 million OpenAI accounts and advertised the data for sale on a dark web forum. Though security researchers doubt on the legitimacy of the breach, the AI company stated that it takes the claims seriously, advising users to enable two-factor authentication and stay vigilant against phishing attempts. Decrypt reports: Daily Dot reporter Mikael Thalan wrote on X that he found invalid email addresses in the supposed sample data: "No evidence (suggests) this alleged OpenAI breach is legitimate. At least two addresses were invalid. The user's only other post on the forum is for a stealer log. Thread has since been deleted as well." "We take these claims seriously," the spokesperson said, adding: "We have not seen any evidence that this is connected to a compromise of OpenAI systems to date."

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US Health System Notifies 882,000 Patients of August 2023 Breach

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 19:02
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Hospital Sisters Health System notified over 882,000 patients that an August 2023 cyberattack led to a data breach that exposed their personal and health information. Established in 1875, HSHS works with over 2,200 physicians and has around 12,000 employees. It also operates a network of physician practices and 15 local hospitals across Illinois and Wisconsin, including two children's hospitals. The non-profit healthcare system said in data breach notifications sent to those impacted that the incident was discovered on August 27, 2023, after detecting that the attacker had gained access to HSHS' network. After the security breach, its systems were also impacted by a widespread outage that took down "virtually all operating systems" and phone systems across Illinois and Wisconsin hospitals. HSHS also hired external security experts to investigate the attack, assess its impact, and help its IT team restore affected systems. [...] While the incident and the resulting outage have all the signs of a ransomware attack, no ransomware operation has claimed the breach. Following the forensic investigation, HSHS found that the attackers had accessed files on compromised systems between August 16 and August 27, 2023. The information accessed by the threat actors while inside HSHS' systems varies for each impacted individual, and it includes a combination of name, address, date of birth, medical record number, limited treatment information, health insurance information, Social Security number, and/or driver's license number. While HSHS added that there is no evidence that the victims' information has been used in fraud or identity theft attempts, it warned affected individuals to monitor their account statements and credit reports for suspicious activity. The health system also offers those affected by the breach one year of free Equifax credit monitoring.

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Creators Demand Tech Giants Fess Up, Pay For All That AI Training Data

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 18:20
The Register highlights concerns raised at a recent UK parliamentary committee regarding AI companies' exploitation of copyrighted content without permission or payment. From the report: The Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Science, Innovation and Technology Committee asked composer Max Richter how he would know if "bad-faith actors" were using his material to train AI models. "There's really nothing I can do," he told MPs. "There are a couple of music AI models, and it's perfectly easy to make them generate a piece of music that sounds uncannily like me. That wouldn't be possible unless it had hoovered up my stuff without asking me and without paying for it. That's happening on a huge scale. It's obviously happened to basically every artist whose work is on the internet." Richter, whose work has been used in a number of major film and television scores, said the consequences for creative musicians and composers would be dire. "You're going to get a vanilla-ization of music culture as automated material starts to edge out human creators, and you're also going to get an impoverishing of human creators," he said. "It's worth remembering that the music business in the UK is a real success story. It's 7.6 billion-pound income last year, with over 200,000 people employed. That is a big impact. If we allow the erosion of copyright, which is really how value is created in the music sector, then we're going to be in a position where there won't be artists in the future." Speaking earlier, former Google staffer James Smith said much of the damage from text and data mining had likely already been done. "The original sin, if you like, has happened," said Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Human Native AI. "The question is, how do we move forward? I would like to see the government put more effort into supporting licensing as a viable alternative monetization model for the internet in the age of these new AI agents." Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the Financial Times, said: "We can only deal with what we see in front of us and [that is] people taking our content, using it for the training, using it in substitutional ways. So from our perspective, we'll prosecute the same argument in every country where we operate, where we see our content being stolen." The risk, if the situation continued, was a hollowing out of creative and information industries, he said. [...] "The problem is we can't see who's stolen our content. We're just at this stage where these very large companies, which usually make margins of 90 percent, might have to take some smaller margin, and that's clearly going to be upsetting for their investors. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't. It's just a question of right and wrong and where we pitch this debate. Unfortunately, the government has pitched it in thinking that you can't reduce the margin of these big tech companies; otherwise, they won't build a datacenter."

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Amazon Says Germany Customers Won't Lose Amazon Prime As a Result of Nokia Patent Win

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 17:40
A German court has ruled that Amazon's Prime Video service violates a Nokia-owned patent, ordering Amazon to stop streaming in its current form or face fines of 250,000 euros per violation. However, Amazon assured customers in a statement on Friday that there is no risk of losing access to Prime Video because the decision affects only a limited functionality related to casting videos between devices. "Prime Video will comply with this local judgement and is currently considering next steps. However, there is absolutely no risk at all for customers losing access to Prime Video," Amazon's Prime Video spokesperson told Reuters. Meanwhile, Nokia's chief licensing officer, Arvin Patel, said: "...the innovation ecosystem breaks down if patent holders are not fairly compensated for the use of their technologies, as it becomes much harder for innovators to fund the development of next generation technologies."

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Football Manager 25 Canceled In a Refreshing Show of Concern For Quality

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 17:02
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica written by Kevin Purdy: There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia's "List of video games notable for negative reception." Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them. Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that "following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration," Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was "too far away from the standards you deserve," so they are focusing on the 2026 version. [...] The developer's statement notes that preorder customers are getting refunds. Answering a question that has always been obvious to fans but never publishers, the company notes that, no, Football Manager 2024 will not get an update with the new season's players and data. The company says it is looking to extend the 2024 version's presence on subscription platforms, like Xbox's Game Pass, and will "provide an update on this in due course." Fans eager to build out their dynasty team and end up with Bukayo Saka may be disappointed to miss out this year. But a developer with big ambitions to meaningfully improve and rethink a long-running franchise deserves some consideration amid the consternation.

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Salesforce, Workday Are Hiring More Overseas To Save Cash

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 16:21
Software companies are under pressure to invest in new AI capabilities without denting profits. One increasingly popular strategy to keep costs low is to shift hiring outside the US. From a report:Â Salesforce and Workday are simultaneously cutting jobs and highlighting the cost savings from adding workers internationally. "Do we need to hire everybody in San Francisco?" Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham said at an event hosted by Barclays in December. "Or can we think about other locations that are cheaper where we can get really incredible labor like India and Mexico City." US-based employees at Salesforce dropped to 51% from 58% in the four years ending in January 2024. In early 2023, it announced a reduction of roughly 8,000 jobs. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the San Francisco-based software company would cut more than 1,000 positions in large part to make room for new AI-focused hiring. [...] Human resources software maker Workday, based in Pleasanton, California, announced Wednesday that it would eliminate about 1,750 jobs. Last year, Chief Executive Officer Carl Eschenbach emphasized a new focus on expanding margins, saying hiring more in countries like Costa Rica would help in this effort.Â

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Microsoft 365 Price Rises Are Coming - Pay Up or Opt Out

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 15:41
An anonymous reader shares a report: Users are now receiving notifications regarding their Microsoft 365 subscriptions and must take action if they wish to avoid Copilot and its extra charges. The email from Microsoft warns that the cost of a 365 Personal Subscription will jump, however, there is no need to worry -- Microsoft knows what's best and will increase your payment in return for all those AI-powered Copilot services it knows you want. We noted the upcoming increases last month and how users could turn off the generative AI assistant. At the time, Microsoft said users would be able to switch to plans without Copilot. However, unless a user takes action, the price they pay for their "Current Subscription" will increase, and AI-powered delights will be added to their plan.

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Most Britons Back Ban on 'Smarter-than-Human' AI Models, Poll Shows

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 15:00
Most Britons support strict controls on AI systems that could surpass human capabilities, according to a YouGov poll, highlighting a growing divide between public opinion and government policy. The survey of 2,344 adults found 87% back laws requiring AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release, while 60% favor banning the development of "smarter-than-human" AI models. Only 9% trust tech CEOs to act in the public interest on AI regulation.

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India To Launch New Domain Name For Banks To Fight Digital Fraud

Slashdot.org - Fri, 02/07/2025 - 14:21
An anonymous reader shares a report: India's central bank is introducing an exclusive ".bank.in" domain for banks from April 2025 as part of efforts to combat rising digital payment frauds and bolster trust in online banking services. [...] The central bank plans to roll out a separate 'fin.in' domain for non-bank financial institutions. "Increased instances of fraud in digital payments are a significant concern," said RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra, adding that the new domain system aims to reduce cyber security threats and malicious activities like phishing.

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