Long-time Slashdot reader foxalopex writes: It looks like Nvidia is going to be hit with a class action for investors who lost big when their stock price crashed more than 50% due to an overstock of GPU cards that were produced for the crypto-currency craze back in 2018. The suit claims investors were told Nvidia had control of the situation until it crashed worse than even Nvidia had anticipated.
"The Company's public statements were false and materially misleading," argues the complaint from a Los Angeles law firm, seeking investors who purchased shares in NVIDIA between August 10, 2017 and November 15, 2018.

It was on November 15 that NVIDIA issued a statement that "excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom...will be corrected." Citing new products for machine learning, film rendering, and cloud computing, they added that "Our market position and growth opportunities are stronger than ever."

General Motors was once the world's most profitable company -- for two decades -- and by 1970 its revenue was $22.8 billion (or $152 billion in today's dollars). But five weeks ago GM announced that it was finally ending small-car production and closing its Lordstown Assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio.

So what went wrong? Quartz argues that GM's decline "began with its quest to turn people into machines," as "the company turned assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, to be executed by robots whenever possible." In an article shared by Slashdot reader reporter, Quartz argues that seen in that light, the company's response to a 1972 strike "marked the beginning of the company's long but uneven descent, which would be characterized by a repeated impulse to bet on fancy, futuristic but unproven technologies while undervaluing its workers."

But the strike also raised larger issues for "a massive special task force" issuing a federal report on the quality of working life in 1972, titled Work in America... [T]echnology had failed in its promise to free humans from drudgery and wring profit from their talents, the authors said. On the contrary, the new jobs created generally required minimal expertise and therefore prevented workers from honing their skills. That stymied career mobility and left people mired in the same torpor of boredom for decades. Despite this, America continued to offer its young people increasingly rigorous education -- even as work life left little opportunity to apply it.... The larger hopes and ambitions of Work in America -- the vision that saw satisfying work itself as essential to the health of American society and democracy -- exists now as little but a curio in the footnotes of academic journals....

Meanwhile, GM continued to lavish spending on big capital investments, confident that the secret to competitiveness lay in replacing humans with technology. But as in Lordstown, the spending bore little fruit. As automotive analyst Maryann Keller recounted in her 1989 book Rude Awakening, one GM executive observed that, between 1980 and 1985, the company shelled out an eye-popping $45 billion in capital investment. Despite that spending, its global market share rose by but a single percentage point, to 22%. "For the same amount of money, we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright," said the executive -- which would have instantly bumped GM's market share to 40%.
At GM quality suffered because "Instead of making flawless cars, workers simply did their assigned jobs," Quartz argues. "Workers had no big-picture goal of building cars together to motivate them."

The 7,000-word article concludes by noting that Youngstown residents still hope that their car factory will re-open. But it's also possible that instead Lordstown Assembly "will remain standing, but empty, a vast roadside reminder of a corporate elite's doomed quest to cheapen labor by stripping the human need for skill, learning, independence, and purpose out of production, by reimagining people as machines."

Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to trick Google's reCaptcha system by using Google's own speech-to-text service. "[The researchers] claim that their CAPTCHA-fooling method, unCaptcha, can fool Google's reCaptcha, one of the most popular CAPTCHA systems currently used by hundreds of thousands of websites, with a 90 percent success rate," reports Motherboard. From the report: The researchers originally developed UnCaptcha in 2017, which uses Google's own free speech-to-text service to trick the system into thinking a robot is a human. It's an oroborus of bots: According to their paper, UnCaptcha downloads the audio captcha, segments the audio into individual digit audio clips, uploads the segments to multiple other speech-to-text services (including Google's), then converts these services' responses to digits. After a little homophone guesswork, it then decides which speech-to-text output is closest to accurate, and uploads the answer to the CAPTCHA field. This old method returned an 85% success rate.

After the release of that version of unCaptcha, Google fixed some of the loopholes that made it work, including better browser automation detection and switching to spoken phrases, rather than digits. The researchers claim that their new method, updated in June, gets around these improvements and is even more accurate than before, at 90 percent. "We have been in contact with the ReCaptcha team for over six months and they are fully aware of this attack," the researchers write. "The team has allowed us to release the code, despite its current success."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day. "That's just a huge waste of resources, even if you don't believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers -- real people -- whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff," says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.

Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild's energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum's code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.

Some Amazon stores have no cashiers, and Waymo is testing self-driving taxis. Are robots taking our jobs? It depends on what you do and where you do it, according to a new report by the World Bank released this week. From a report: "Advanced economies have shed industrial jobs, but the rise of the industrial sector in East Asia has more than compensated for this loss," said the report, titled "The Changing Nature of Work." That may seem like good news in a broad sense, but not to the people whose jobs are disappearing. Technological advances and automation are making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"Workers in some sectors benefit handsomely from technological progress, whereas those in others are displaced and have to retool to survive," the report said. "Platform technologies create huge wealth but place it in the hands of only a few people." The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining. Would that help American workers? "Policy-makers in Washington may have talked about the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers for the future transition, but little has been done," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said Thursday.

Conservation nonprofit Resolve is using AI-equipped cameras to act as remote park rangers and help spot wildlife poachers before they kill endangered animals. "Today, Resolve announced a new custom-made device called TrailGuard AI, which uses Intel-made vision chips to identify animals and humans that wander into view," reports The Verge. "The cameras will be placed on access trails used by poachers, automatically alerting park rangers who can check up on any suspicious activity." From the report: TrailGuard AI builds on past work by Resolve to create remote cameras to aid conservation. However, early devices were bulky, had limited battery life, and were unsophisticated, sending images to rangers every time their motion sensors were tripped. This resulted in lots of false positives, as the cameras would be triggered by non-events, such as the wind shaking tree branches. The new device, by comparison, is no thicker than a human index finger, has a battery life of a year and a half, and can reliably identify humans, animals, and vehicles. The chip used by Resolve is Intel's Movidius Myriad 2 VPU (or vision processing unit), which is the same technology that powered Google's automatic Clips camera.

According to new research from Rice University, Texas has enough natural patterns of wind and sun to operate without coal. "Scientists found that between wind energy from West Texas and the Gulf Coast, and solar energy across the state, Texas could meet a significant portion of its electricity demand from renewable power without extensive battery storage," reports Houston Chronicle. "The reason: These sources generate power at different times of day, meaning that coordinating them could replace production from coal-fired plants." From the report: Texas is the largest producer of wind energy in the United States, generating about 18 percent of its electricity from wind. Most of the state's wind turbines are located in West Texas, where the wind blows the strongest at night and in the early spring, when demand is low. The resource, however, can be complemented by turbines on the Gulf Coast, where wind produces the most electricity on late afternoons in the summer, when power demand is the highest. Solar energy, a small, but rapidly growing segment of the state's energy mix, also has the advantage of generating power when it is needed most -- hot, sunny summer afternoons.

In the summer, Gulf Coast wind generation could overtake West Texas wind capacity from about 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. when sea breezes kick in, Rice research showed. From about 8 a.m. until 6 p.m., solar power average capacity also could exceed wind generation in West Texas, which increases as evening turns to night. In the winter, winds in West Texas strengthen and generation increases, dropping off about 9 a.m., when solar energy begins to ramp up. "It's all a matter of timing," said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at the state's grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Weather, however, remains unpredictable. Texas would still need battery storage and natural gas-fired power plants to fill in gaps when, for example, winds might slacken earlier than expected.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Almost a third of new cars sold in Norway last year were pure electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025. In a bid to cut carbon emissions and air pollution, Norway exempts battery-driven cars from most taxes and offers benefits such as free parking and charging points to hasten a shift from diesel and petrol engines. The independent Norwegian Road Federation (NRF) said on Wednesday that electric cars rose to 31.2 percent of all sales last year, from 20.8 percent in 2017 and just 5.5 percent in 2013, while sales of petrol and diesel cars plunged. The sales figures consolidate Norway's global lead in electric car sales per capita, part of an attempt by Western Europe's biggest producer of oil and gas to transform to a greener economy. For comparison, electric cars had a 2.2 percent share in China in 2017 and 1.2 percent in the United States, according to IEA data.

Why would you go with the smaller brand, faced with those offerings from tech's behemoths? Or, at the previous displays, why not just buy the cheaper models? Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian: That's the challenge for many consumer electronics firms. Not how to make things, or how to distribute them and get them in front of potential buyers. It's how to make a profit. Out of Fitbit, GoPro, Parrot and Sonos -- each operating in different parts of the consumer electronics business -- only the latter made an operating profit in the last financial quarter, and all four have made a cumulative operating loss so far this year. Making a profit in hardware has always been difficult. By contrast, in software, all the significant costs are in development; reproduction and distribution are trivial -- a digital copy is perfect, and the internet will transport 0s and 1s anywhere, effectively for free. If your product is free and ad-supported, you don't even need anti-piracy measures; you want people to copy it and use it. Software companies typically have gross margins of around 80%, and operating profits of 40% or so.

In hardware, though, the world now seems full of companies living by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's mantra that "your [profit] margin is my opportunity". Indeed, Amazon is one of the reasons why long-term profit is more elusive: it provides a means for small startups to distribute products without formal warehousing arrangements, and compete with bigger businesses at lower cost. That, together with the rise of a gigantic electronic manufacturing capability in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, about an hour's drive north of Hong Kong, has made the modern hardware business one where only those with huge reserves of capital and brand recognition can hope to thrive.

schwit1 shares a report: Mining corporation Rio Tinto says that an autonomous rail system called AutoHaul that it's been developing in the remote Pilbara region of Australia for several years is now entirely operational -- an accomplishment the company says makes the system the "world's largest robot." "It's been a challenging journey to automate a rail network of this size and scale in a remote location like the Pilbara," Rio Tinto's managing director Ivan Vella told the Sydney Morning Herald, "but early results indicate significant potential to improve productivity, providing increased system flexibility and reducing bottlenecks." The ore-hauling train is just one part of an ambitious automation project involving robotics and driverless vehicles that Rio Tinto wants to use to automate its mining operations. The company conducted its first test of the train without a human on board last year, and it now claims that the system has completed more than a million kilometers (620,000 miles) of autonomous travel.

From a 9to5Mac report: As the new year begins in Pacific Time, where Apple's Cupertino headquarters are based, the AirPower charging mat has officially missed its 2018 release window. The charging mat promised to charge iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods on a single compact mat with flexibility on where devices can be placed. However, the product has been rumored to have faced internal development challenges as late as this past summer, which prevented Apple from bringing the product to market as smoothly as it expected.

[...] Unusually, Apple has not provided a statement to press with an update on AirPower's status. Apple refused to acknowledge the product at its September and October events, and has not responded to press requests for comment at the end of December. The product therefore enters 2019 still in limbo.

Long-time Slashdot reader reporter shared this article from NPR: The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. Prosecutors say the TEPCO executives didn't do enough to protect the nuclear plant, despite being told in 2002 that the Fukushima facility was vulnerable to a tsunami....

"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury....

All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.

"In Japan, a robot may create a new way to mourn," reports one Colorado news team: This robot is supposed to sound like a loved one. Now imagine the same robot having a 3D-printed mask of their face. You will be able to stay with that robot for 49 days which is the period of mourning after the funeral in Japan. That is the concept of Digital Shaman project, which uses a humanoid.

Users will have an interview with the artist while they're alive. Their physical characteristics and messages will be recorded then. After the user dies, the bereaved ones will be able to install the program into the robot. It mimics the deceased one's personality, speech, and gestures. The robot can imitate hand and head movements the person was making during the interview.... As unreal as it may seem, the artist is planning to sell digital shaman to the public in the future.

People may wonder if the creator is planning to allow the deceased to live forever through the program. She's not. "I think it will seriously hinder those left behind to move on." We live in a digital world. And now a robot has brought together "IT technology" and "Death".
It's part of a larger research project on Japanese funeral rites, and one of a series of works on "digital shamanism" that "attempt to blend Japanese folk beliefs with technology."

An artist's statement calls it "a new mode of mourning in keeping with the technical advances of today."

MojoKid writes: ARM-based server processors have threatened to take on Intel in the data center for some time but not much has materialized thus far in terms of significant deployments. However, a new breed of low cost ARM server implementations may be in the works with a many-core platform called Banana Pi. The latest Banana Pi device being teased is something very different in the form of a 24-core ARM server that speculation suggests might be sold as a Banana Pi server board or as a finished server product.

A video has surfaced that reportedly shows a 24-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with 32GB of RAM, though the OS only sees 29.4GB of that RAM. The OS is Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with MATE desktop. Unless the processor used in this device is something unannounced, and that seems unlikely, the chip itself would likely be a SocioNext SC2A11. The same processor is used in the Linaro Developer Box. The demo shows the server fully loaded at 100% CPU utilization building a Linux kernel and reportedly the system also supports NVMe storage as well as TensorFlow workloads for machine learning. Not much else is known about the system at this time but it's an interesting development in the Linux server space to be sure.

For most of us, using up the Christmas leftovers means endless rounds of turkey sandwiches and lashings of Brussel sprout curry in the days leading up to New Year. So, to help inject some creativity into this year's leftover eat-up, BBC turned to artificial intelligence for some culinary assistance. From a report: A number of research teams around the world have been developing AI systems that are capable of learning from existing recipes and then coming up with some of their own. We asked researchers behind two innovative algorithms to see what their AI's take would be on Christmas food. One, developed by computer scientists at Stanford University, can turn whatever food is left in your fridge into a unique recipe based on those ingredients. The other, created by AI researchers at the University of Illinois, puts a cultural twist on a meal by creating dishes from one country in the style of another cuisine.

The first algorithm, called Forage, uses a type of AI known as deep neural networks, which attempts to replicate the way the human brain works. Networks like these are able to handle problems involving complex data and are increasingly being used to tackle tasks as diverse as controlling self-driving cars and recognising the early signs of cancer in health scans. [...] The second algorithm we used was developed by Lav Varshney and his team at the University of Illinois. It was trained on nearly 40,000 recipes from 20 different countries using a system that can apply semantic reasoning to replace certain ingredients with those it considers to be equivalent from a different cuisine.

Huawei's 2018 was tumultuous, to put it mildly, but the company has at least a few reasons to brag. The Chinese mobile giant has revealed that it shipped over 200 million smartphones in the year, setting a new record. Last year, Huawei moved 153 million smartphones units. From a report: The Chinese phone maker said the numbers were largely driven by the success of products like its P20, Honor 10 and Mate 20 series. Huawei's smartphone shipments have grown from 3 million units in 2010, it added. Last year, it said it sold 153 million units. The company overtook Apple in the second quarter of 2018 to become the world's second largest phone vendor, according to researcher Canalys. "In the global smartphone market, Huawei has gone from being dismissed as a statistical 'other' to ranking among the Top 3 players in the world," Huawei said in its statement.

Intel's channel organization is vowing increased communication and transparency with partners on issues such as the current CPU shortage, which has caused delays, price hikes and other challenges this year. From a report: In an exclusive interview with CRN, Todd Garrigues, director of partner sales programs at Intel, said better transparency about supply issues, new business opportunities and new technologies is one of the company's top priorities for partners heading into 2019. "We got some feedback -- some critical feedback if I'm honest -- from some partners through our advisory boards, and we're working hard to make sure we do better at that," he said. "The request, bluntly, was just to work harder at being transparent as close to real time as possible. And we took that to heart -- a lot of internal discussions on how we enable that."

One of the challenges, Garrigues said, has been engaging with Intel's broader base of partners that the company may not have one-on-one relationships with. To mitigate the issue, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is investing more in its relationships with distributors to boost Intel's signal. "One of the big priorities I've placed on this year is really working very close with our distribution partners who do serve that broad channel base more directly," said Jason Kimrey, Intel's U.S. channel chief. "I would tell you that we are having much more direct, open transparent dialogue with them to help them plan and help our mutual customers plan to roadmaps and plan around the supply."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares this article from the Verge: An autonomous food delivery robot burst into flames on a Berkeley, California walkway, as first reported by The Daily Californian. Kiwi, the startup that makes and manages the one hundred-strong fleet of robots, issued a statement to say that the fire was quickly extinguished by a passerby before the city's fire department arrived and doused the machine in foam.... It said that it believed the fire was caused by human error, when a faulty battery was manually inserted into the robot, eventually causing thermal runaway -- the same issue that resulted in the recall of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phones. Kiwi says that a new piece of software will "rigorously monitor the state of each battery" to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Kiwi said the incident resulted in "some smoke and minor flames." But video captured of the event shows the robot engulfed in the kind of fiercely burning fireball typically associated with battery fires.
Though no one was hurt, Kiwi's fleet of 100 delivery robots was still deactivated while the company investigated the fiery wreck.

A reader shares a report from The Verge: Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis. But according to the company, this is a side effect of the device's manufacturing process and shouldn't worsen over time or negatively affect the flagship iPad's performance in any practical way. Apple does not consider it to be a defect. The bend is the result of a cooling process involving the iPad Pro's metal and plastic components during manufacturing, according to Apple. Both sizes of the new iPad Pro can exhibit it.

Those who are annoyed by the bend shouldn't have any trouble exchanging or returning their iPad Pro at the Apple Store or other retailers within the 14-day return window. But it's not clear if swaps will be permitted outside that policy. I've asked Apple if it has communicated with stores about the issue, as I've read some accounts of employees telling people it's accidental damage and warrants an AppleCare+ claim (and deductible) to replace. That shouldn't be the case for a slight bend. Apple also says it has not seen a higher-than-normal return rate for the 2018 iPad Pro so far.

"Qualcomm was granted a second injunction against Apple on Thursday, banning it from selling some iPhone models in Germany that use chips from Intel and parts from another supplier, Qorvo," reports CNBC. This is the second major win for Qualcomm against Apple after a Chinese court granted an injunction against Apple for an alleged patent violation on Dec. 10." From the report: In a statement, Apple said it plans to appeal the ruling. Under this condition, Judge Matthias Zigann told the court earlier Thursday, the ruling would not go into immediate effect. However, Apple said that throughout the appeal process, iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models will not be sold in its 15 retail stores in Germany. Its newest models, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR, will still be sold in those stores, Apple said in the statement. All iPhone models will still be sold through carriers and other third-party retailers in Germany, Apple said. But Qualcomm said in a press release that the injunction will be in effect as soon as it posts the required bonds. It said it would complete the process "within a few days."