California is going after ExxonMobil over what it calls a “campaign of deception” about plastic recycling.
Technology
Meta’s Ray-Ban branded smart glasses are getting AI-powered reminders and translation features
Meta’s AI assistant has always been the most intriguing feature of its second-generation Ray-Ban smart glasses. While the generative AI assistant had fairly limited capabilities when the glasses launched last fall, the addition of real-time information and multimodal capabilities offered a range of new possibilities for the accessory.
Now, Meta is significantly upgrading the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses’ AI powers. The company showed off a number of new abilities for the year-old frames onstage at its Connect event, including reminders and live translations.
With reminders, you’ll be able to look at items in your surroundings and ask Meta to send a reminder about it. For example, “hey Meta, remind me to buy that book next Monday.” The glasses will also be able to scan QR codes and call a phone number written in front of you.
In addition, Meta is adding video support to Meta AI so that the glasses will be better able to scan your surroundings and respond to queries about what’s around you. There are other more subtle improvements. Previously, you had to start a command with “Hey Meta, look and tell me” in order to get the glasses to respond to a command based on what you were looking at. With the update though, Meta AI will be able to respond to queries about what’s in front of you with more natural requests. In a demo with Meta, I was able to ask several questions and follow-ups with questions like “hey Meta, what am I looking at” or “hey Meta, tell me about what I’m looking at.”
When I tried out Meta AI’s multimodal capabilities on the glasses last year, I found that Meta AI was able to translate some snippets of text but struggled with anything more than a few words. Now, Meta AI should be able to translate longer chunks of text. And later this year the company is adding live translation abilities for English, French, Italian and Spanish, which could make the glasses even more useful as a travel accessory.
And while I still haven’t fully tested Meta AI’s new capabilities on its smart glasses just yet, it already seems to have a better grasp of real-time information than what I found last year. During a demo with Meta, I asked Meta AI to tell me who is the Speaker of the House of Representatives — a question it repeatedly got wrong last year — and it answered correctly the first time.
Technology
Y Combinator’s next Demo Day will include in-person seats for top VCs, Garry Tan says
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wants to bring the famed accelerator’s Demo Day presentations back as in-person events by the end of the year.
During Tan’s opening remarks during Wednesday’s YC summer cohort Demo Day, he said this week’s Demo Day presentations will, “knock on wood,” be the final ones held entirely online. Tan added that the accelerator’s first fall cohort Demo Day, which will take place on December 4, will include an in-person element.
Demo Days are like the graduation events for startups that complete its program, where they pitch their products to investors and others in the tech ecosystem. Tan said that in-person seats will be limited and reserved for decision-making investors who have invested at least $50,000 into YC companies within the last two years.
“Think about it this way, you all now have four must-be-at events per year in San Francisco where you can catch up with friends and see the future all at the same time,” Tan said of the planned in-person event to the VCs watching online.
This switch back to in-person Demo Days is a logical move. While both the accelerator program and its Demo Days went to an online, virtual format in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the program itself returned to being an in-person event and has been so for two years now. Meanwhile, YC has been an instrumental part of encouraging more startups to locate themselves in the Bay Area generally, and San Francisco in particular. In addition to its accelerator program, it throws numerous other in-person events for its alumni and the startup community.
Y Combinator recently expanded the number of startup cohorts each year from two to four, adding both a fall and spring batch. The first fall cohort kicks off on September 29. YC’s first spring program will launch in 2025.
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Technology
Why California is suing ExxonMobil for ‘perpetuating the lie’ of plastic recycling
The Golden State filed suit against the oil giant this week, alleging that it has misled consumers for years by marketing recycling as a way to prevent plastic pollution. Plastic is difficult and relatively costly to recycle, and very little of it ever gets rehashed, but the industry sold recycling as a feasible solution anyway.
That’s why California wants to hold ExxonMobil accountable for the role it says the company played in filling landfills and waterways with plastic. Plastics are made with fossil fuels, and California says ExxonMobil is the biggest producer of single-use plastic polymers.
California wants to hold ExxonMobil accountable
ExxonMobil defended itself in an emailed response to The Verge, writing: “For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills.”
The Verge spoke with California Attorney General Rob Bonta about plastic recycling and the allegations California makes in the landmark lawsuit.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I think a lot of people around my age grew up thinking that recycling plastic is a good thing. Why go after ExxonMobil over recycling?
It’s a difficult confrontation of a truth, especially since ExxonMobil and others have been so successful at perpetuating the lie.
A 14-year-old who I met yesterday was just distraught over the fact that all of the plastic items that she carefully selected to make sure they have the chasing arrows on it and then make sure that after she used it, she placed it thoughtfully and diligently in the blue container for recycling — that 95 percent of the time, that item was not recycled. Instead, it went into the landfill, the environment, or incinerated. And so she was having a hard time, and I’m sure she’s not alone, and others will have the same difficulty getting their head around the actual truth.
It’s really important for us, in my view, to confront problems. You need to face problems to fix them. One of them is a major problem created by ExxonMobil. They have perpetuated the myth of recycling. They have been engaged in a decadelong campaign of deception in which they have tried to convince the public that recycling of plastics, including single-use plastics, is sustainable when it’s not. When they know that only 5 percent is recycled [in the US].
Why would they say that if they knew that it wasn’t true? Well, because it increases their profits. It makes people buy more. If people buy plastics and believe that no matter how much they use, how frequently they use it, if they engage in a single-use throwaway lifestyle, they’re still being good stewards of the environment because it’s all recyclable and will be reused again somewhere in someone else’s household as a plastic product — they’re much more likely to buy more. And that’s exactly what’s happened.
Your office says it “uncovered never-before-seen documents” as part of its investigation into the role fossil fuel companies play in causing plastic pollution. Can you give examples of what you found? Did anything surprise you?
What some of the new documents that have not been seen before really get at is this type of greenwashing by ExxonMobil called advanced recycling.
The documents reveal to us that this newest, latest, purportedly greatest form of recycling is neither advanced nor is it recycling. It’s an old technology. They basically heat the plastic so that it melts into its smallest component parts, and that’s been used before Exxon and Mobil merged. Each experimented with it and then decided to no longer pursue it.
And the process doesn’t actually recycle plastic into other plastic, which is what people think they mean when their plastic is being recycled. But 92 percent of what advanced recycling turns plastic waste into is transportation fuel and other chemicals and resins and materials. It’s mostly fuel for your car, fuel for your boat, fuel for your plane. It’s burned once and emitted into the air, into the environment. That is not recycling.
What would California get out of winning this case?
Right now, the harm to California from ExxonMobil’s lies and deception and the myth of recycling are a billion dollars a year in taxpayer-funded cleanup and damage in terms of the plastic pollution crisis that we’re facing.
Here are the things that we would get if we win this case, and we believe we will. We will get an injunction that says ExxonMobil can no longer lie and can no longer perpetuate the myth of recycling. That they need to tell the truth going forward — they can’t say that things can be recycled when they can’t.
We’ll also get an abatement fund, which will be funded by billions of dollars from ExxonMobil. It will pay for ongoing plastic pollution in California that harms our people, our environment, our natural resources. It will pay for a re-education campaign so that people can learn that recycling is only 5 percent of plastic waste, 95 percent is not recycled. It could also be used to further research on microplastics, which are invisible plastic particles that are in our bodies, in the air, in our food, in our water, and to see what the human impact is of that.
We’ll also get a disgorgement of profits, which means that any profits that were wrongly secured by ExxonMobil because of their lies would have to be turned over. We also have some civil penalties and some fees that we’re seeking.
You’re the first Filipino American attorney general in California, the state with the most FilAms in the US. I used to live in Long Beach, California, where there’s a big Southeast Asian community and also a lot of air pollution from all the vessel and truck traffic surrounding the port in that area. Does this ever get personal for you — the impact that pollution from oil and gas operations disproportionately has on immigrant communities?
My oldest daughter, when she was in high school, she came up to me and she said, “Dad is this weird?” She said, “My friends and I have been talking, and we decided that we don’t want to have kids because we don’t want to bring a new life into a dying planet.” And I will always remember that. That was a gut punch.
That one made me really think. It made me worry. It kept me up at night. It made me question whether we were on pace to fulfill our duty as elected officials, to pass on to the next generation a better society and world than we’ve had. I thought we might be certainly behind schedule and maybe at the risk of failing when it comes to protecting our climate and making sure that there’s a planet for tomorrow. So, that’s personal.
Our lived experiences, our values, drive us. But we will also always fulfill our duty, our ethical obligations, and make sure that we’re bringing cases that are strong and sound, based on facts and law. It’s consistent with my values, my lived experiences. The law and the facts all point in the same direction on this case.
Technology
“Perfect storm” – CrowdStrike VP apologizes as Congress hearing into outage begins
Following July 2024 Crowdstrike incident, in which millions of Windows machines crashed due to a broken software update for its endpoint protection software, the company’s senior VP for counter adversary operations, Adam Meyers, appeared at a cybersecurity subcommittee hearing at the US House of Representatives to say the company was “deeply sorry”.
Meyers was left to testify in the absence of CEO George Kurtz who, per The Register, declined to testify. Explaining the issue to lawmakers, Meyers said that the company released 10 to 12 content updates, like the one that caused the major incident, per day, and that a “perfect storm of issues”, described in his written testimony (PDF), conspired to put much of the world’s IT’s systems into meltdown, requiring a manual fix.
He claimed these content updates were now under increased scrutiny to ensure quality control, but lawmakers remain unconvinced that kernel-level access to Windows – what enabled the incident to occur – is necessary, but Meyers explained that he sees visibility into all aspects of the operating system as vital for Crowdstrike to function.
Kernel-level access in endpoint security
“You can provide enforcement, in other words, threat prevention, and ensure anti-tampering,” said Meyers, stressing tampering at the Kernel-level was exactly the cause of ransomware attacks on MGM Resort International’s computer systems linked to their casinos and hotels.
Despite the fact these attacks still took place (though it’s unclear as to exactly what cybersecurity measures MGM Resorts had in place) , Meyers continued to advocate for Kernel-level access by claiming that the group of threat actors responsible, Scattered Spider, are “using new techniques to elevate their privilege in order to disable security tools on a regular basis.”
“In order to stop that from happening,” he said, “we will continue to leverage the architecture of the operating system.”
So, ultimately, nothing has changed, but security experts at other cybersecurity software companies argue that it’s not kernel-level access that’s the issue, but how it’s managed, with The Register noting that Trellix pushes kernel-level updates just once a quarter.
Given the extent of the damage to vital systems infrastructure; including cancelled Delta flights affecting half a million people, perhaps it’s unsurprising that Microsoft is looking to provide additional security capabilities outside of kernel mode in the future.
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Assassin’s Creed Shadows release date delayed to 2025
Ubisoft has announced its highly-anticipated upcoming game Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed until next year.
Instead of releasing it on 12 November as previously planned, it has been pushed back to 14 February 2025.
It follows the disappointing performance of another of the firm’s major titles, Star Wars Outlaws, and concerns from some about how Ubisoft is being run.
The game’s executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote said the developers “need more time to polish and refine the experience”.
“We understand this decision will come as disappointing news,” he said.
“But we sincerely believe this is in the best interest of the game.”
In a trading update sent to Ubisoft’s investors, seen by the BBC, the firm – which is headquartered in France – said despite the game being “feature complete” it needed more time.
“The learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title,” it reads.
Star Wars Outlaws was released in August to strong reviews, but early players complained of bugs and glitches.
In its trading update, Ubisoft notes sales of the game were “softer than expected”, which it seemed to be putting down to a lack of polish.
Mr Cote said the firm would refund fans who had pre-ordered the game, and promised a free expansion to anyone who placed a new pre-order for the revised launch.
When it finally arrives, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be the first game in the series to be set in Japan – a setting fans have been clamouring for since the series began in 2007.
The decision to push the game back beyond Christmas – usually a lucrative time for game sales – will not have been made lightly.
But the sales performance of Star Wars Outlaws caused Ubisoft’s shares to take a serious hit, when the firm would have been hoping the game would set it back on course.
They have fallen to a price of 11.32 euros a share at the time of writing – the lowest in a decade.
A minority investor wrote a letter to the board earlier this month calling for the company to either be taken private or sold to an investor.
Ubisoft co-founder and boss Yves Guillemot said the move to push back Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ launch was a result of the firm’s second quarter performance – which “fell sort of our expectations”.
“We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy,” he said.
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