British Prime Minister Keir Starmer inaugurated London's first Google-funded AI Campus in Camden, aiming to equip young people with AI and machine learning skills. Reuters reports: The center, based in Camden, an area which Starmer represents in parliament and which is also home to Google's future offices in Kings Cross, has already started a two-year pilot project for local students. An first cohort of 32 people aged 16-18 will have access to resources in AI and machine learning and receive mentoring and expertise from Google's AI company DeepMind, the tech giant said. The students will tackle real-world projects connecting AI to fields such as health, social sciences and the arts at the campus, which has been established in partnership with the local authority, Google said.

Google's UK and Ireland managing director Debbie Weinstein announced 865,000 pounds ($1.10 million) of funding for an AI literacy program across the UK. The money will be used by charities Raspberry Pi Foundation and Parent Zone to help train teachers with an aim of reaching over 250,000 students by the end of 2026, she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The founder of an artificial intelligence start-up focused on education was arrested and charged with defrauding her investors, lying about the company's profits and falsely claiming that some of the largest school districts in the country, including New York City's, were her customers. The founder, Joanna Smith-Griffin, started the company, AllHere Education, in 2016, with the goal of using artificial intelligence to increase student and parent engagement and curb absenteeism. In the years that followed, Ms. Smith-Griffin, 33, misrepresented AllHere's revenue and customer base to fraudulently raise almost $10 million in funds, according to the indictment. Once the company's valuation had climbed, she sold some of her stake in it and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a down payment for a new home and on her wedding.

Ms. Smith-Griffin was arrested Tuesday in North Carolina, where she lives, and charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and aggravated identity theft. She faces more than 40 years in prison. AllHere is now in bankruptcy proceedings, prosectors said, and all of its employees have been laid off. "Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses," said James E. Dennehy, the F.B.I. assistant director in New York leading the investigation into Ms. Smith-Griffin. "The F.B.I. will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of educational opportunities for our city's children will be taught a lesson." Smith-Griffin is the latest Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree to be indicted on fraud. "The Forbes-to-Fraud pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of Alameda Research; fintech Frank founder Charlie Javice; and 'Pharma bro' Martin Shkreli," notes TechCrunch.

Microsoft is retiring its "Get Licensing Ready" website, a resource for software licensing education. Going forward, content licensing will be located at microsoft.com/licensing. The Register also notes Microsoft's plans to enhance learning with AI tools, though specifics for licensing applications remain unclear. From the report: Software licensing is notoriously labyrinthine, so resources like the site Microsoft will close -- Get Licensing Ready -- can be very handy. Today, the site offers over 50 training modules plus documentation. But Microsoft has decided not to keep it around in its current form. Indeed, visitors to the site currently see a pop-up that explains "Microsoft will be ending support for licensing certifications through this platform and phasing out the Get Licensing Ready resource."

The site's "retirement" date is January 1. Users have until December 1 to complete any active modules and download certificates. If you're a user of the site, get cracking: Redmond warns it is "unable to provide copies of certification after December 31st, 2024." An email alias dedicated to the site will also go away on New Year's Day. A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register the software megalith "remains committed to supporting licensing knowledge and solution-building for our partners and customers" -- in part with "new AI capabilities to further enhance learning and engagement."

Craig Newmark "is alarmed about potential cybersecurity risks in the U.S.," according to Yahoo Finance. The 71-year-old Craigslist founder says "our country is under attack now" in a new interview with Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi on his Opening Bid podcast.

But Newmark also revealed what he's doing about it: [H]e started Craig Newmark Philanthropies to primarily invest in projects to protect critical American infrastructure from cyberattacks. He told Sozzi he is now spending $200 million more to address the issue, on top of an initial $100 million pledge revealed in September of this year. He encouraged other wealthy people to join him in the fight against cyberattacks. "I tell people, 'Hey, the people who protect us could use some help. The amounts of money comparatively are small, so why not help out,'" he said... The need for municipalities and other government entities to act rather than react remains paramount, warns Newmark. "I think a lot about this," said Newmark.

"I've started to fund networks of smart volunteers who can help people protect infrastructure, particularly [for] the small companies and utilities across the country who are responsible for most of our electrical and power supplies, transportation infrastructure, [and] food distribution.... A lot of these systems have no protection, so an adversary could just compromise them, saying unless you do what we need, we can start shutting off these things," he continued. Should that happen, recovery "could take weeks and weeks without your water supply or electricity."
A web page at Craig Newmark Philanthropies offers more details Craig was part of the whole "duck and cover" thing, in the 50s and 60s, and realizes that we need civil defense in the cyber domain, "cyber civil defense." This is patriotism, for regular people.

He's committed $100 million to form a Cyber Civil Defense network of groups who are starting to protect the country from cyber threats. Attacks on our power grids, our cyber infrastructure and even the internet-connected gadgets and appliances in our homes are real. If people think that's alarmist, tell them to "Blame Craig." The core of Cyber Civil Defense [launched in 2022] includes groups like Aspen Digital, Global Cyber Alliance, and Consumer Reports, focusing on citizen cyber education and literacy, cyber tool development, and cybersecurity workforce programs aimed at diversifying the growing field.
It's already made significant investments in groups like the Ransomware Task Force and threat watchdog group Shadowserver Foundation...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Between the time [construction worker Florencio] Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a "golden ticket" to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting. Mr. Rendon says he didn't land a single interview.

Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news. "They said: 'Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,'" she said. "It was really disconcerting." In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent. "I loved what we were doing," he said. "We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn't want that to turn sour."

Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent. "I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I've seen in 25 years," said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
A Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers found that 60% had used AI coding tools this year, the article points out. And it includes two predictions about the future:

• Armando Solar-Lezama, leader of MIT's Computer-Assisted Programming Group, "believes that A.I. tools are good news for programming careers. If coding becomes easier, he argues, we'll just make more, better software. We'll use it to solve problems that wouldn't have been worth the hassle previously, and standards will skyrocket."

• Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, said of the job prospects for coding boot camp graduates" "I think it's pretty grim."

The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund launched this week with an initial commitment of $1.25 million, reports TechCrunch, using "capital from contributors including American Express, 1Password, Shopify, Stripe, and GitHub's own parent company Microsoft." GitHub briefly teased the new initiative at its annual GitHub Universe developer conference last month, but Tuesday it announced full details and formally opened the program for applicants, which will be reviewed "on a rolling basis" through the closing date of January 7, 2025, with programming and funding starting shortly after...

Tuesday's news builds on a number of previous GitHub initiatives designed to support project maintainers that work on key components of critical software, including GitHub Sponsors which landed in 2019 (and which is powering the new fund), but more directly the GitHub Accelerator program that launched its first cohort last year — the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund is essentially an extension of that.

"We're trying to acknowledge the fact that we're the home of open source, ultimately, and we have an obligation to help ensure that open source can continue to thrive and have the support that it needs," GitHub Chief Operating Officer Kyle Daigle told TechCrunch in an interview. Qualifying projects can be pretty much any project that has an open source license, but of course GitHub will be looking at those that need the funds most — so Kubernetes can hold fire with its application. "We're looking for the outsized impact, which tends to be big projects with few maintainers that we all rely on," Daigle said.

The sum of $1.25 million might sound like a reasonable amount, but it will be split across 125 projects, which means just $10,000 each — better than nothing, for sure, but a drop in the ocean on the grand scheme of things. However, Daigle is quick to stress that money is only part of the prize here — as with the initial accelerator program, maintainers embark on a three-week program, which includes mentorship, certification, education workshops, and ongoing access to GitHub tools.
From GitHub's announcement: Since introducing support for organizations through GitHub Sponsors, more than 5,800 organizations, including Microsoft and Stripe, have invested in maintainers and projects on GitHub, up nearly 40% YoY. Cumulatively, the platform has unlocked over $60 million in funding for maintainers to help them spend more time working on their projects.

But we know we're just scratching the surface when it comes to organizations and corporate support of open source. This summer, we partnered with the Linux Foundation and researchers from Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) to learn more about the state of open source funding today. Diving in, we assessed organizations funding behaviors, potential misalignments, and opportunities to improve. In the report launched today, we found:


- Responding organizations annually invest $1.7 billion in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested across the entire open source ecosystem annually.

- 86% of investment is in the form of contribution labor by employees and contractors working for the funding organization, with the remaining 14% being direct financial contributions.

- Organizations generally know how and where they contribute (65%) but lack specific clarity of their contributions (38%).

- Security efforts focus on bugs and maintenance; only a few (6%) said comprehensive security audits are a priority.


We all stand to benefit from unlocking more funding for open source. By tackling problems like open source security as an ecosystem, we believe we can help create more available funding and resources that are vital to the sustainability of open source. Not every open source project or maintainer has access to funding and training for security. That's why we created a fund that everyone potentially eligible can apply for...

This is the beginning of a journey into helping find ways to secure open source. On its own, it's not the answer, but we are confident it will help. We will be monitoring the impact of these investments and share what we learn as we go.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Past corporate-sponsored Hour of Code tutorials for the nation's schoolchildren have blurred the lines between coding lessons and product infomercials. So too is the case again with this year's newly-announced Hour of Code 2024 flagship tutorials, which include Microsoft Minecraft, Amazon Music, and Transformers One movie-themed intros to coding. The press release announcing the tutorials from tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which organizes the Hour of Code and counts Microsoft and Amazon as $30+ million donors, boasts of its "decade of partnership with [Microsoft] Minecraft this year, reaching more than 300 million sessions of Minecraft Hour of Code since 2015!"

Interestingly, The Transformers (Paramount Pictures, which released Transformers One in the U.S., is a $25,000+ Code.org donor) is cited as one of the OG's of children's Saturday morning cartoon advertising (aka 30-minute commercials) that prompted the Children's Television Act (CTA) of 1990, an act of Congress that ordered the FCC to put in place regulations to protect children from advertising. Throughout the 1980s, Action for Children's Television (ACT) criticized children's television programs that "blur(red) the distinction between program content and commercial speech."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment. Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son's grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.

The Harris' motion for an injunction was rejected in an order (PDF) issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials "have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law."

"On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH [the Harris' son, referred to by his initials] had cheated," Levenson wrote. "Nor were the consequences Defendants imposed so heavy-handed as to exceed Defendants' considerable discretion in such matters." "On the evidence currently before the Court, I detect no wrongdoing by Defendants," Levenson also wrote. "The manner in which RNH used Grammarly -- wholesale copying and pasting of language directly into the draft script that he submitted -- powerfully supports Defendants' conclusion that RNH knew that he was using AI in an impermissible fashion," Levenson wrote. While "the emergence of generative AI may present some nuanced challenges for educators, the issue here is not particularly nuanced, as there is no discernible pedagogical purpose in prompting Grammarly (or any other AI tool) to generate a script, regurgitating the output without citation, and claiming it as one's own work," the order said.

Levenson concluded with a quote from a 1988 Supreme Court ruling that said the education of youth "is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges." According to Levenson, "This case well illustrates the good sense in that division of labor. The public interest here weighs in favor of Defendants."

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols interviews Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation and "head janitor of open source." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the article: When I first met Zemlin, he was the head of the Free Standards Group (FSG). The FSG's main project was the Linux Standard Base (LSB) project. The LSB's goal was to get everyone in the Linux desktop world to agree on standards to ensure compatibility among distributions and their applications. Oh well, some struggles are never-ending. Another group, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), was simultaneously working on standardizing enterprise Linux. The two non-profits had the same goal of making Linux more useful and popular, so they agreed to merge. Zemlin was the natural pick to head this new group, which would be called The Linux Foundation.

At the time, he told me: "The combination of the two groups really enables the Linux platform and all the members of the Linux Foundation to work really effectively. I clearly understand what the organization's charter needs to be: We need to provide services that are useful to the community and industry, as well as protect, promote, and continue to standardize the platform." While initially focused on Linux, the Foundation's scope expanded significantly around 2010. Until then, the organization had hosted about a dozen projects related to the Linux operating system. However, as Linux gained dominance in various sectors, including high-performance computing, automotive, embedded systems, mobile devices, and cloud computing, the Linux Foundation started to broaden its horizons. Zemlin says there are three words that sum up the Linux Foundation's effort to keep open source safe and open to a new generation of developers: helpful, hopeful, and humble.

"You must be genuinely helpful to developers. We're the janitors of open source. The Linux Foundation takes care of all the boring but important stuff necessary to support software development so developers can focus on code. This work includes events, project marketing, project infrastructure, finances for projects, training and education, legal assistance, standards, facilitation, open source evangelism, and much, much more."

He continued: "The hopeful part is really the optimistic part. When in 2007, people were saying that this would never work. When leaders of huge companies tell everyone that you know all that you're doing is a cancer or terrible, you have to have a sense of optimism that there are better days ahead. You have to always be thinking, 'No, we can do it and stick with it.'"

However, Zemlin concluded that the number one trait that's "important in working in open source is this idea of humility. I work with hundreds of people every day, and none of them work at the Linux Foundation. We must lead through influence, and that really has been the secret for 20 years of working here without going totally insane. If you can check your ego and take criticism, open source actually turns out to be a really fun community to work with."

schwit1 writes: Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold.

And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students' MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.

This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year's $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.

While master's degrees are increasingly popular -- with 40% of U.S. bachelor's degree holders now having postgraduate credentials -- new research reveals many don't deliver improved earnings despite soaring costs.

Analysis from the U.S. and UK indicates that about 40% of U.S. master's programs fail to provide positive financial returns, with some even leading to financial losses for graduates, as captured in a new Economist story. Similarly, British master's graduates earn no more than bachelor's holders by age 35 after accounting for background factors. This is particularly significant because U.S. students now average $50,000 in postgraduate debt, triple the real cost since 2000, while UK fees have risen 70% since 2011 to $12,000 annually.

Returns vary dramatically by field: computer science and engineering show strong gains, while humanities degrees often lead to reduced earnings compared to bachelor's-only peers. Women are more likely than men to see earnings increases, succeeding in 14 out of 31 subject areas compared to men's six. Choice of institution impacts outcomes, though data shows no strong correlation between program cost and graduate earnings.

A new study reveals that many users, particularly students and Redditors, view Z-Library as a vital resource for overcoming economic barriers to education, reflecting a "Robin Hood" mentality that prioritizes access to knowledge over copyright concerns. TorrentFreak reports: The research looks at the motivations of two groups; Reddit users and Chinese postgraduate students. Despite the vast differences between these groups, their views on Z-Library are quite similar. The 134 Reddit responses were sampled from the Zlibrary subreddit, which is obviously biased in favor of the site. However, the reasoning goes well beyond a simple "I want free stuff" arguments. Many commenters highlighted that they were drawn to the site out of poverty, for example, or they highlighted that Z-Library was an essential tool to fulfill their academic goals.

"Living in a 3rd world country, 1 book would cost like 50%- 80% already of my daily wage," one Redditor wrote. The idea that Z-Library is a 'necessary evil' was also highlighted by other commenters. This includes a student who can barely make ends meet, and a homeless person, who has neither the money nor the space for physical books. The lack of free access to all study materials, including academic journal subscriptions at university libraries, was also a key motivator. Paired with the notion that journal publishers make billions of dollars, without compensating authors, justification is found for 'pirate' alternatives. "They make massive profits. So stealing from them doesn't hurt the authors nor reviewers, just the rich greedy publishers who make millions just to design a cover and click 'publish'," one Redditor wrote.

The second part of the study is conducted in a more structured format among 103 postgraduate students in China. This group joined a seminar where Z-Library and the crackdown were discussed. In addition, the students participated in follow-up focus group discussions, while also completing a survey. Despite not all being users of the shadow library, 41% of the students agreed that the site's (temporary) shutdown affected their ability to study and find resources for degree learning. In general, the students have a favorable view toward Z-Library and similar sites, and 71% admit that they have used a shadow library in the past. In line with China's socialist values, the overwhelming majority of the students agreed that access to knowledge should be free for everyone. While the students are aware of copyright law, they believe that the need to access knowledge outweighs rightsholders' concerns. This is also reflected in the following responses, among others. All in all, Z-Library and other shadow libraries are seen as a viable option for expensive or inaccessible books, despite potential copyright concerns. The paper has been published in the Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: Google Scholar -- the largest and most comprehensive scholarly search engine -- turns 20 this week. Over its two decades, some researchers say, the tool has become one of the most important in science. But in recent years, competitors that use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the search experience have emerged, as have others that allow users to download their data. The impact that Google Scholar -- which is owned by web giant Google in Mountain View, California -- has had on science is remarkable, says Jevin West, a computational social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who uses the database daily. But "if there was ever a moment when Google Scholar could be overthrown as the main search engine, it might be now, because of some of these new tools and some of the innovation that's happening in other places," West says.

Many of Google Scholar's advantages -- free access, breadth of information and sophisticated search options -- "are now being shared by other platforms," says Alberto Martin Martin, a bibliometrics researcher at the University of Granada in Spain. AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT and other tools that use large language models have become go-to applications for some scientists when it comes to searching, reviewing and summarizing the literature. And some researchers have swapped Google Scholar for them. "Up until recently, Google Scholar was my default search," says Aaron Tay, an academic librarian at Singapore Management University. It's still top of his list, but "recently, I started using other AI tools." Still, given Google Scholar's size and how deeply entrenched it is in the scientific community, "it would take a lot to dethrone," adds West. Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar, at Google, says he welcomes all efforts to make scholarly information easier to find, understand and build on. "The more we can all do, the better it is for the advancement of science." Acharya says Google Scholar uses AI to rank articles, suggest further search queries and recommend related articles. What Google Scholar does not yet provide are AI-generated summaries of search query results. According to Acharya, the company has yet to find "an effective solution" for summarizing conclusions from multiple papers in a brief manner that preserves all the important context.

Bhutan, the tiny kingdom that introduced Gross National Happiness to the world, has a problem: young people are leaving the country in record numbers. CNN: The country boasts free health care, free education, a rising life expectancy and an economy that's grown over the last 30 years -- still, people are leaving. Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay believes it is ironically the success of Gross National Happiness that has made young Bhutanese so sought after abroad. "It is an existential crisis," he said.

Bhutan, which is about the size of Maryland, was largely isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. The kingdom was so protective of its unique Buddhist culture that it only started allowing foreign tourists to visit in the 1970s and didn't introduce television until 1999. Buddhism is the country's national religion. Bhutanese, especially older men and women, spend hours spinning prayer wheels full of Buddhist scriptures. Prayer flags flutter on hillsides and in forests, turning nature itself into a shrine. Bhutan's capital city of Thimpu still has no traffic lights. The nation's roads are shared by cars and cows.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An AI-generated nude photo scandal has shut down a Pennsylvania private school. On Monday, classes were canceled after parents forced leaders to either resign or face a lawsuit potentially seeking criminal penalties and accusing the school of skipping mandatory reporting of the harmful images. The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported. Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney's general office called "Safe2Say Something." But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.

Cops arrested the student accused of creating the harmful content in August. The student's phone was seized as cops investigated the origins of the AI-generated images. But that arrest was not enough justice for parents who were shocked by the school's failure to uphold mandatory reporting responsibilities following any suspicion of child abuse. They filed a court summons threatening to sue last week unless the school leaders responsible for the mishandled response resigned within 48 hours. This tactic successfully pushed Micciche and the school board's president, Angela Ang-Alhadeff, to "part ways" with the school, both resigning effective late Friday, Lancaster Online reported.

In a statement announcing that classes were canceled Monday, Lancaster Country Day School -- which, according to Wikipedia, serves about 600 students in pre-kindergarten through high school -- offered support during this "difficult time" for the community. Parents do not seem ready to drop the suit, as the school leaders seemingly dragged their feet and resigned two days after their deadline. The parents' lawyer, Matthew Faranda-Diedrich, told Lancaster Online Monday that "the lawsuit would still be pursued despite executive changes." Classes are planned to resume on Tuesday, Lancaster Online reported. But students seem unlikely to let the incident go without further action to help girls feel safe at school. Last week, more than half the school walked out, MSN reported, forcing classes to be canceled as students and some faculty members called for resignations and additional changes from remaining leadership.

Chegg, the online education company, is laying off 319 workers as it struggles to compete against modern AI chatbots. SFGATE reports: Chegg announced the new layoff round, which will hit 21% of its workforce, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The company delivered the news alongside another brutal quarterly financial report; Chegg lost more than $212 million from July through September. CEO Nathan Schultz, in prepared remarks accompanying the report, expressed some optimism but called it a "trying time" for his company. Chegg provides grammar and plagiarism checkers, plus course-by-course study help, along with much-used textbook solution guides.

"Technology shifts have created headwinds for our industry and Chegg's business specifically," Schultz said. "Recent advancements in the AI search experience and the adoption of free and paid generative AI services by students, have resulted in challenges for Chegg. These factors are adversely affecting our business outlook and are requiring us to refocus and adjust the size of our business." He specifically called out Google's AI overviews, a recent change to search results that pulls information from news outlets and sites like Chegg and summarizes above the classic blue links. Schultz said that his team believes Google is "shifting from being a search origination point to the destination" in an attempt to keep market share.

Schultz also blamed generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying that students see the tool and others like it as "strong alternatives" to Chegg. Web traffic has dropped sharply as a result, Schultz wrote. A Wall Street Journal story published Saturday said Chegg "is trying to avoid becoming [ChatGPT's] first major victim" and that the company had lost more than 500,000 subscribers, some who paid almost $20 a month, since the chatbot's 2022 launch. Despite the negative business impact, it seems Chegg is experimenting with new tech. Schultz said in the remarks that the company had formed an "arena" to evaluate AI models and aims to "integrate AI into the full learning journey."

An update to OpenAI's ChatGPT app for macOS adds integration with third-party apps, including developer tools such as VS Code, Terminal, iTerm2 and Apple's Xcode. 9to5Mac reports: In a demo seen by 9to5Mac, ChatGPT was able to understand code from an Xcode project and then provide code suggestions without the user having to manually copy and paste content into the ChatGPT app. It can even read content from more than one app at the same time, which is very useful for working with developer tools. According to OpenAI, the idea is to expand integration to more apps in the future. For now, integration with third-party apps is coming exclusively to the Mac version of ChatGPT, but there's another catch. The feature requires a paid ChatGPT subscription, at least for now.

ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers will receive access to integration with third-party apps on macOS starting today, while access for Enterprise and Education users will be rolled out "in the next few weeks." OpenAI told 9to5Mac that it wants to make the feature available to everyone in the future, although there's no estimate of when this will happen. For privacy reasons, users can control at any time when and which apps ChatGPT can read. The app can be downloaded here.

Most companies are starting to figure out how AI will change the way they do business. Chegg is trying to avoid becoming its first major victim. WSJ: The online education company was for many years the go-to source for students who wanted help with their homework, or a potential tool for plagiarism. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs.

Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly students had a free alternative to the answers Chegg spent years developing with thousands of contractors in India. Instead of "Chegging" the solution, they began canceling their subscriptions and plugging questions into chatbots. Since ChatGPT's launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.

A former teacher has filed a federal lawsuit against PowerSchool, alleging the education technology giant illegally sells student data to third parties without proper consent. Emily Cherkin, lead plaintiff in the class action suit filed in San Francisco, claims PowerSchool has amassed 345 terabytes of data from 440 school districts, including sensitive information about students' health, behavior, and academic records. The company provides software services to more than 60 million students across 90 of the largest U.S. school districts.

The lawsuit alleges PowerSchool sells anonymized student data to over 100 partners, including educational consultants and government agencies, while marketing its analytics for workforce and policy planning. The company's Naviance college-planning software alone tracks 6 million high school students. PowerSchool has denied the allegations.

This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report: One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market...

What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.
There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")

"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.