Nine members of non-lethal weapons-maker Axon's AI ethics board resigned Monday after the company's CEO announced plans to build drones equipped with tasers to prevent US school shootings. 

When an 18-year-old shot dead nineteen students and two teachers, whilst wounding several others at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Axon's founder and CEO, Rick Smith, began thinking about how he could help stop mass shootings. His best idea: deploying taser-equipped drones in classrooms and public venues.

Axon develops body cameras and non-lethal weapons for law enforcement. Smith thought he could combine both capabilities and install them onto a drone that, in theory, could immobilize shooters. Smith announced Axon had formally begun developing such systems last week.

"The only viable response to a mass shooter is another person with a gun," Smith said in a statement. "In the aftermath of these events, we get stuck in fruitless debates. We need new and better solutions. For this reason, we have elected to publicly engage communities and stakeholders, and develop a remotely operated, non-lethal drone system that we believe will be a more effective, immediate, humane, and ethical option to protect innocent people."

But not everyone at Axon supported Smith's vision. The company's AI ethics board – a group made up of legal and technical experts from industry and academia – voted against development of taser-equipped drones and did not approve Smith's announcement.

"Only a few weeks ago, a majority of this board – by an 8-4 vote – recommended that Axon not proceed with a narrow pilot study aimed at vetting the company's concept of Taser-equipped drones," nine members, who left the board, declared in a statement. "In that limited conception, the Taser-equipped drone was to be used only in situations in which it might avoid a police officer using a firearm, thereby potentially saving a life."

"We understood the company might proceed despite our recommendation not to, and so we were firm about the sorts of controls that would be needed to conduct a responsible pilot should the company proceed. We just were beginning to produce a public report on Axon's proposal and our deliberations."

Smith, however, decided to override the ethics board and continue working on what he believed could be a viable solution to school shootings. He launched a live Q&A session on Reddit, inviting netizens to post their questions about Axon's idea.

"I know drones in schools can sound nuts. Except that it can't be any crazier than another mass shooting in a school. Obviously, there are complicated issues at stake, but the best place to start is to listen to what people think and answer questions," he said. 

Days later, however, he announced the project had been paused. "Our announcement was intended to initiate a conversation on this as a potential solution, and it did lead to considerable public discussion that has provided us with a deeper appreciation of the complex and important considerations relating to this matter," Smith said.

"I acknowledge that our passion for finding new solutions to stop mass shootings led us to move quickly to share our ideas. However, in light of feedback, we are pausing work on this project and refocusing to further engage with key constituencies to fully explore the best path forward."

Although Smith said he'd pause working on the idea, the majority of its AI ethics board resigned anyway, citing years-long efforts to thwart Axon's "use of real-time, persistent surveillance in its products". The technology "will harm communities of color and others who are overpoliced, and likely well beyond that" they said, and "has no realistic chance of solving the mass shooting problem."

Axon declined to comment beyond Smith's latest statement.

"A remotely operated non-lethal taser-enabled drone in schools is an idea, not a product, and it's a long way off," Smith reiterated. "We have a lot of work and exploring to see if this technology is even viable and to understand if the public concerns can be adequately addressed before moving forward. Pursuing an extended research path is just one element of getting this right." ®

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.

Attempting to visit the Windows Insider portal was returning the familiar "Your connection is not private" warning – as if webpages larded with scripts and trackers can truly be called "private." The problem has now been fixed, and someone's no doubt getting an earful.

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will attempt to deter visitors from accessing the webpage, but will provide a link for those who ignore the warnings and persist on clicking through to advanced options.

RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.

The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.

The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.

As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.

For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.

That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.

MEPs backed a plenary vote on Wednesday for "zero-emission road mobility by 2035" – essentially meaning no more diesel and gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.

The ambitious target means the automotive battery industry will have to service a much larger demand over the coming years, and electric carmakers stand to benefit hugely – that is, if they can source the requisite semiconductors and batteries.

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.

Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil. 

Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.

"We are beginning to roll this feature out, so it isn't available to all Insiders in the Dev Channel just yet," the software giant said.

The Register was one of the lucky ones and we have to commend Microsoft on the implementation (overdue as it is). The purpose of the functionality is to allow users to work on more than one location at a time in File Explorer via tabs in the title bar.

Over recent years, Uncle Sam has loosened its tight-lipped if not dismissive stance on UFOs, or "unidentified aerial phenomena", lest anyone think we're talking about aliens. Now, NASA is the latest body to get in on the act.

In a statement released June 9, the space agency announced it would be commissioning a study team, starting work in the fall, to examine unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs, which it defined as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena."

NASA emphasized that the study would be from a "scientific perspective" – because "that's what we do" – and focus on "identifying available data, how best to collect future data, and how NASA can use that data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward."

The UK government has committed to ending its reliance on legacy applications, or at least those it deems the highest priority, by 2025.

In a policy paper released yesterday, the Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO) said the costly issue of technical debt had been allowed to build up over multiple financial cycles and was now a barrier to the delivery of policy and services.

In the US, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the government spent over $100bn in fiscal 2021 on IT.

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