Quote:CBS News reports that the tech giant has set aside $35 million to compensate users who reported covered audio issues to Apple or paid for repairs related to the problem. The settlement comes as a result of a lawsuit filed in 2019 by plaintiffs Joseph Casillas and De’Jhontai Banks, who claimed they experienced distorted sound and inability to hear callers without using the speaker function on their iPhone 7 devices purchased in 2017.
According to the complaint, “Plaintiff Casillas noticed that his phone’s sound was distorted with audible static while attempting to play a video on his phone. Plaintiff Banks noticed that she was unable to hear callers unless she used her iPhone’s speaker function. These are common indications of the Audio IC Defect.”
The lawsuit alleged that the audio chip issue was caused by inadequate casing on the phones and that Apple was aware of the problem but routinely refused to repair affected devices free of charge. However, in the settlement agreement, Apple denied the existence of any audio issues and maintained that it did nothing improper or unlawful.
How to know if you’re eligible
Customers who either paid for a iPhone 7 or 7 Plus audio repair or reported an audio issue to Apple without paying for a repair are eligible.
You must have owned an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus between September 16, 2016, and January 3, 2023.
Customers who paid for repairs are eligible to receive up to $349.
Those that reported issues but did not pay for repairs are eligible to receive up to $125.
The minimum payout is $50.
You can find out if you qualify for compensation and submit a claim by June 3rd at the settlement website here.
Quote:The European Union on Friday banned four more Russian media outlets from broadcasting in the 27-nation bloc for what it calls the spread of propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine and disinformation as the EU heads into parliamentary elections in three weeks.
The latest batch of broadcasters consists of Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which the EU claims are all under control of the Kremlin. It said in a statement that the four are in particular targeting “European political parties, especially during election periods.”
Belgium already last month opened an investigation into suspected Russian interference in June’s Europe-wide elections, saying its country’s intelligence service has confirmed the existence of a network trying to undermine support for Ukraine.
The Czech government has imposed sanctions on a number of people after a pro-Russian influence operation was uncovered there. They are alleged to have approached members of the European Parliament and offered them money to promote Russian propaganda.
Since the war started in February 2022, the EU has already suspended Russia Today and Sputnik among several other outlets.
Quote:Fortune reports that at an event held at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced the new class of AI-imbued personal computers, emphasizing their potential to anticipate users’ needs and intentions. “We’re entering this new era where computers not only understand us, but can actually anticipate what we want and our intent,” Nadella stated.
The new AI-powered features include Windows Recall, which provides the Copilot assistant with a “photographic memory” of a user’s virtual activity. Microsoft claims that its privacy settings will be protected by allowing them to filter out unwanted tracking and keeping the tracking data on the device itself.
The announcement comes amidst heightened competition from rival tech giants, such as Google and OpenAI, who have recently unveiled their own generative AI technologies. Google introduced a revamped search engine that incorporates AI-generated summaries and showcased its in-development AI assistant, Astra, which can interact with users based on visual inputs from a smartphone camera. Meanwhile, OpenAI launched a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot, demonstrating an AI voice assistant capable of engaging in natural conversations and even attempting to assess a person’s emotions.
Microsoft’s new AI-enhanced Windows PCs, set to launch on June 18, will be available on devices manufactured by partners such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, as well as on Microsoft’s own Surface line. However, these cutting-edge features will be reserved for premium models starting at $999.
Quote:The Register reports that Google, the tech giant facing an antitrust jury trial over allegations of monopolizing the online advertising market, has taken an unconventional approach to avoid the case being heard by a jury. According to a recent federal court filing in Virginia, Google has offered the DoJ a check for an undisclosed amount, claiming that it covers the entirety of the monetary damages sought by the government.
The move comes as Google asserts that the DOJ’s request for a jury trial is unwarranted, arguing that the case is highly technical and beyond the comprehension of most prospective jurors. “DOJ manufactured a damages claim at the last minute in an attempt to secure a jury trial in a case even they describe as ‘highly technical’ and ‘outside the everyday knowledge of most prospective jurors,’” Google stated to the Register.
Despite offering the payment, Google maintains its innocence against the charges of abusing its monopoly position in the online advertising market. The company emphasizes its eagerness to defend its operations and strategies in court, albeit without the involvement of a jury.
The antitrust case, filed in early 2023, has garnered significant attention, with the number of state plaintiffs growing to 17 in addition to the DoJ. The original complaint accused Google of acquiring competitors, coercing publishers and advertisers into using its tools, and manipulating ad space auctions to eliminate or diminish any threat to its dominance in the digital advertising technology sector.
While the exact amount offered by Google remains undisclosed, the company claims that the DOJ’s damages case has significantly diminished from its initial description. Originally, the DOJ claimed damages exceeding $100 million for ads placed by certain federal agencies. However, Google asserts that through the discovery process, the claim has been reduced to less than a million dollars, an amount less than what the company spent on hiring experts for the case.
Quote:The Verge reports that the CSRB report, released in April, highlighted Microsoft’s “deprioritized” approach to enterprise security, which has led to preventable errors and serious breaches. Google, in a blog post on Monday, capitalized on these findings, emphasizing the importance of platforms holding strong security practices and their responsibility to do so.
Without directly naming its rival, Google repeatedly referred to Microsoft as “the vendor” throughout its post, underlining the need for governments to use “systems and products that are secure-by-design.” The tech giant recently committed to new security principles and urged public sector entities to regularly subject their tech products and services to security recertification.
In a pointed recommendation, Google advised governments to avoid “using the same vendor for operating systems, email, office software, and security tooling” – a clear jab at Microsoft, which provides all of these services and more to its vast enterprise customer base.
Microsoft’s security woes have been compounded by an ongoing breach perpetrated by Midnight Blizzard, a Russian hacker group that has gained access to the company’s executive communications and stolen source code. This breach, along with others, was cited in the CSRB report as evidence of Microsoft’s deprioritization of enterprise security.
As Microsoft grapples with the fallout and attempts to win back trust, CEO Satya Nadella has urged employees to prioritize security whenever faced with competing priorities. However, the company has yet to outline a clear plan to address its security shortcomings.
Quote:Semafor reports that in the face of dwindling clicks from Facebook due to algorithm changes and erratic search traffic due to Google’s tinkering with searches, many digital publishers found themselves struggling by the end of 2023. However, a new lifeline emerged in the form of Apple News+, a partnership program that has proven to be a lifesaver for struggling publications.
The leftist outlet Daily Beast joined the Apple News+ program in late 2023, making its exclusive content available to paying Apple subscribers behind the platform’s paywall. The impact was immediate, with the Beast on track to generate between $3-4 million in revenue from Apple News alone this year, surpassing its standalone subscription program without incurring significant additional costs. Clearly, Apple’s slush fund for corporate media will support the Daily Beast in pushing fake news narratives, such as its claim that Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” was stolen.
The Beast is not the only publication reaping the benefits of Apple News+. Executives from major media companies, including Condé Nast, Penske Media, Vox, Hearst, and Time, have all reported substantial revenue streams from the partnership. Time, for example, considers Apple News as one of its most important partners, delivering 7-figure annual revenue and attracting 5 million unique visitors in a single month.
Apple News, with its free version being the most widely used news application in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia, boasted over 125 million monthly users in 2020. The launch of News+ in 2019, following Apple’s acquisition of the startup Texture, marked a deepening business relationship between the tech giant and news publishers.
Over the past two years, Apple News+ has rapidly expanded its partnerships, adding dozens of local and regional newspapers to its roster. The company licenses articles from behind publishers’ paywalls and pays them monthly based on the time audiences spend on each piece. Publishers can also sell advertising on their content and keep 100% of any affiliate link revenue generated through product recommendations and reviews.
Quote:Ars Technica reports that Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company owned by Elon Musk, has encountered challenges with its first human patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal reveals that only about 15 percent of the electrode-bearing threads implanted in Arbaugh’s brain continue to work properly. The remaining 85 percent of the threads became displaced, with many of the threads that were left receiving little to no signals being shut off.
The company’s brain-chip consists of 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair and carrying multiple electrodes. In total, the chip boasts 1,024 electrodes, which are surgically implanted near neurons of interest to record signals that can be decoded into intended actions. Neuralink had previously disclosed in a May 8 blog post that “a number” of these threads had “retracted” in the first patient’s brain.
Arbaugh shared his emotional journey with the Journal, admitting that he had cried upon learning of the setback and had asked Neuralink to perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant. However, the company declined, stating that it wanted to wait for more information. Arbaugh has since recovered from the initial disappointment and remains hopeful about the technology’s potential, stating, “I thought that I had just gotten to, you know, scratch the surface of this amazing technology, and then it was all going to be taken away. But it only took me a few days to really recover from that and realize that everything I’ve done up to that point was going to benefit everyone who came after me.”
As Neuralink gears up to implant its chip into a second trial participant, the company believes it can prevent thread movement by implanting the fine wires deeper into brain tissue. The FDA, which oversees clinical trials, has reportedly given the green light for Neuralink to implant the threads 8 millimeters into the brain of the second patient, a significant increase from the 3 mm to 5 mm depth used in Arbaugh’s implantation. The company hopes to perform the second surgery sometime in June.
Quote:Bloomberg reports that in a letter addressed to shareholders on Monday, a coalition led by Amalgamated Bank and SOC Investment Group, along with six other signatories, argued that Musk’s involvement in five other companies he controls is detrimental to Tesla’s best interests. The group also urged shareholders to vote against the reelection of directors Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother, and James Murdoch.
The shareholders’ letter stated, “Tesla is suffering from a material governance failure which requires our urgent attention and action.” This plea comes as Tesla’s board is asking investors to approve Musk’s pay package for a second time, following a Delaware judge’s decision to void the deal in January due to shareholders being inadequately informed of key details.
Musk’s pay package, initially approved by shareholders in 2018, granted him equity awards as Tesla achieved certain market capitalization and operational targets. Despite the company meeting all the conditions for Musk to receive the full payout of stock options, the judge’s ruling has necessitated a revote. In response, Tesla’s board has hired a strategic adviser to increase retail investor participation ahead of the annual meeting scheduled for June 13.
The shareholder group expressed concerns about Musk’s numerous commitments, noting that many of the signatories had published a separate open letter to Tesla’s board more than a year ago, seeking a meeting with board chair Robyn Denholm, which went unanswered. They argue that Musk’s decision to buy X/Twitter has “played a material role in Tesla’s underperformance,” undermining one of the board’s primary justifications for the substantial pay award – to keep Musk focused on the company’s long-term success.
The shareholders wrote, “If this was one of the primary reasons for the 2018 pay package, then it has been an abysmal failure, as six years later Musk’s outside business commitments have only increased.” They also pointed out that Musk founded another startup last year, xAI, which has hired away artificial intelligence specialists from Tesla.
Quote:CNBC reports that Tesla has been grappling with a series of challenges that have led to multiple rounds of layoffs over the past month. The latest round of layoffs, reported in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act filing obtained by CNBC, impacted a wide range of positions, from entry-level roles to directors, spanning various departments such as factory workers, software developers, and robotics engineers. This move comes as Tesla faces weakening demand for its electric vehicles and increased competition in the market.
CEO Elon Musk had previously announced in an April memo that the company would cut more than 10 percent of its global workforce, which stood at 140,473 employees at the end of 2023. Prior filings revealed that Tesla would cut over 6,300 jobs across California, Austin, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
During Tesla’s quarterly earnings call on April 23, Musk suggested that the company had built up a 25 percent to 30 percent “inefficiency” over the past several years, implying that the ongoing layoffs could impact tens of thousands more employees than initially stated.
The job cuts in Fremont, home to Tesla’s first U.S. manufacturing plant, included 378 positions involved in staffing and running vehicle assembly, as well as 65 cuts at the company’s Kato Rd. battery development center. Among the highest-level roles eliminated were two environmental health and safety directors and a user experience design director. In Palo Alto, Tesla’s engineering headquarters, 233 more employees lost their jobs, including two directors of technical programs.
According to two former employees, Tesla has also terminated a majority of employees involved in designing and improving apps made for customers and employees. The WARN filing confirms this, with many cuts coming from the team at Tesla’s Hanover Street location in Palo Alto.
Quote:Ars Technica reports that in a recent ruling, US District Judge Rita Lin in the Northern District of California determined that a lawsuit filed by California resident Thomas LoSavio against Tesla can move forward on allegations of fraud. The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, made false claims about the self-driving capabilities of Tesla vehicles starting in October 2016.
LoSavio, who purchased a 2017 Tesla Model S with “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving Capability,” points to specific representations made by Tesla that he claims were misleading. These include statements that Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability and that a Tesla car would be able to drive itself cross-country in the coming year.
Judge Lin dismissed some of LoSavio’s claims but allowed the lawsuit to proceed on the basis of the alleged misrepresentations. The ruling stated:
The remaining claims, which arise out of Tesla’s alleged fraud and related negligence, may go forward to the extent they are based on two alleged representations: (1) representations that Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability and, (2) representations that a Tesla car would be able to drive itself cross-country in the coming year. While the Rule 9(b) pleading requirements are less stringent here, where Tesla allegedly engaged in a systematic pattern of fraud over a long period of time, LoSavio alleges, plausibly and with sufficient detail, that he relied on these representations before buying his car.
The complaint argues that Tesla’s cars have not achieved the promised level of autonomy, stalling at SAE Level 2 (“Partial Driving Automation”), which requires constant human supervision and control. LoSavio alleges that Tesla’s cars lack the necessary combination of sensors, including lidar, to achieve full autonomy.
Tesla had previously won a significant ruling in the case when a different judge upheld the carmaker’s arbitration agreement, requiring four plaintiffs to go to arbitration. However, LoSavio had opted out of the arbitration agreement and was allowed to file an amended complaint.
Quote:China’s largest-ever military drills with Cambodia on Thursday included a showcase performance by the literal dogs of war — a squad of robot dogs with automatic rifles mounted on their backs.
Both the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China and the U.S. military have experimented with militarizing the increasingly common “robodog” design. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported in March that the PLA saw an opportunity to pull ahead in killer robot research because American designers seemed more interested in using the robots for utility tasks on the battlefield, such as carrying supplies.
A Chinese research team published a study in February that found robodogs equipped with 7.62mm guns firing 750 rounds per minute could achieve respectable accuracy at ranges up to a hundred meters, equaling or exceeding the average accuracy of human riflemen.
The team thought quadruped platforms could become game-changing weapons for urban warfare, if the kinks in navigating dense and confusing city environments could be worked out. The paper suggested American planners were making a mistake by simply strapping guns to their military robodog test platforms, rather than customizing the weapon mounts to give the robot better accuracy and absorb recoil. Chinese researchers predicted they could use artificial intelligence (AI) to design a robot system that accounts for all the complexities of movement, recoil, and visibility on the battlefield.
“Chinese robotic dogs can now navigate stairs, perform acrobatic feats such as backflips, traverse garbage dumps or tropical rainforests, and maintain a continuous run for nearly four hours while carrying a 20kg load,” the SCMP noted.
American quadruped platforms appear to be somewhat more sophisticated for the time being, but China is catching up rapidly and its manufacturing advantages allow it to deliver field-ready units at prices far lower than U.S. companies. The industry-leading Boston Dynamics “Spot” robodog costs at least $70,000 per unit, while China’s model costs $3,000.
Quote:Mashable reports that in a joint blog post released on Thursday, Reddit and OpenAI shed light on the details of their agreement, which involves Reddit trading its content for access to AI tools and an advertising partnership. The move has raised concerns among Reddit users about the privacy and control of their posts, comments, and images.
According to the blog post, “Keeping the internet open is crucial, and part of being open means Reddit content needs to be accessible to those fostering human learning and researching ways to build community, belonging, and empowerment online.” The post further emphasizes the importance of Reddit as a “uniquely large and vibrant community that has long been an important space for conversation on the internet.”
Under the terms of the agreement, OpenAI will utilize Reddit’s Data API to access real-time, structured, and unique content from the platform. This will enable OpenAI’s AI tools, including ChatGPT, to better understand and showcase Reddit content, particularly on recent topics. The implications for Reddit users are significant, as any content posted on the platform, past or present, will be used to train the AI.
Reddit’s User Agreement sheds light on the rights users relinquish when posting on the platform. By creating or submitting content, users grant Reddit a “worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license” to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display their content across all media formats and channels. This license allows Reddit to make user content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by partnering companies, organizations, or individuals.
For users concerned about their privacy and the use of their content for AI training, the options are limited. While refraining from posting or commenting on Reddit moving forward may prevent future content from being used, the fate of previously posted content remains unclear. Even if users decide to delete their content, it may already be too late, as deleted content can still be archived.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:The FTC is investigating whether Microsoft structured its recent deal with artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI to avoid a government antitrust review.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in March, Microsoft hired Inflection AI’s co-founder and nearly all of its employees, agreeing to pay the startup approximately $650 million as a licensing fee to resell its technology. The deal has caught the attention of the FTC, which is now scrutinizing the transaction to determine if Microsoft crafted the agreement to gain control of Inflection while dodging FTC review.
Companies are required to report acquisitions valued at more than $119 million to federal antitrust-enforcement agencies, which have the option to investigate a deal’s impact on competition. The FTC and the Department of Justice share antitrust authority and can sue to block mergers or investments if an investigation finds the deal would substantially reduce competition or lead to a monopoly.
FTC Chair Lina Khan has expressed concern that tech giants could eventually acquire or control the most promising AI applications, giving them a tight grip on systems with humanlike abilities to converse, create art, and write computer code. The FTC has been sifting through AI investments made by leading companies such as Microsoft and Google.
The agency is now focusing on Microsoft’s deal with Inflection, seeking information about how and why they negotiated their partnership. Civil subpoenas sent recently to Microsoft and Inflection seek documents going back about two years. If the agency finds that Microsoft should have reported and sought government review of its deal with Inflection, the FTC could bring an enforcement action against Microsoft, potentially leading to fines and a suspension of the transaction pending a full-scale investigation.
Inflection AI, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, built one of the world’s biggest large language models and launched an AI chatbot called Pi. The company is one of several that have built and sold access to large language models, alongside OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Google.
Microsoft was an investor in both OpenAI and Inflection. In January, the FTC opened a broad investigation of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and Alphabet’s relationship with Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI founded by former OpenAI engineers in 2021.
Quote:PragerU announced on Friday that Google took down its app from the Google Play Store, accusing the organization of “hate speech” over its documentary Dear Infidels: A Warning to America.
PragerU published a screenshot of message from Google, in which the tech giant notified the organization of its suspension due to content on its app “asserting that a protected group is inhuman, inferior or worthy of being hated.”
“We don’t allow apps that promote violence, or incite hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” the tech giant said of its hate speech policy.
PragerU slammed Google for “using Soviet-style tactics and attempting to silence us.”
“According to Google, sharing the stories of a former Palestinian refugee, an Arab Muslim born in Israel, and brave U.S. Navy SEALs who witnessed the horrors of Muslim extremism constitutes ‘hate speech,”‘ PragerU said in a statement on its website. “This is a blatant attempt to silence truth and censor speech. We urgently need your help to fight back against this suppression.”
PragerU also asked for donations to “help us counter these attacks, expand our reach on other platforms, and continue our mission to educate and inspire Americans with the truth.”
Quote:PragerU announced that its app had been reinstated to the Google Play Store hours after Google removed it claiming it promoted “hate speech.”
The organization, which is known as Prager University, posted an update in a post on X, writing that Google had “reinstated the PragerU app on Google Play store” after conducting another review.
Following an earlier report by Breitbart News about the app’s removal from the Google Play Store, a Google spokesperson told Breitbart that the PragerU app was suspended in error and was quickly reinstated upon further investigation.
As Breitbart News reported, PragerU posted screenshots of a message from Google in which the tech company claimed the non-profit organization had asserted “that a protected group is inhuman, inferior or worthy of being hated.”
“In an email from Google, they said our recently removed app is now available ‘after further re-review,'” PragerU wrote. “Thank you to all of our amazing supporters who helped publicize this issue to force Google to reverse their earlier decision to remove our app from the store entirely.”
In its explanation revealing that the PragerU app had been suspended, Google said it does not “allow apps that promote violence, or incite hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin,” among other things:
We don’t allow apps that promote violence, or incite hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.
...
PragerU was founded by Dennis Prager, a radio talk show host. The organization is known for creating short educational videos centered around conservative topics.
In 2017, PragerU sued Google and YouTube, claiming that the organizations had censored their videos. Years later, in January 2019, PragerU filed another lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of censorship and “engaging in unlawful, misleading, and unfair businesses practices.”
PragerU Chief Marketing Officer Craig Strazzeri described the removal of the PragerU app from the Google Play Store as not being “that surprising given their track record” of restricting the organization’s videos.
Quote:Despite the U.S. government’s efforts to prevent advanced AI chips from falling into the hands of Chinese companies, some American corporations are finding ways to circumvent these restrictions. Oracle in particular has reportedly helped China’s TikTok by “renting” AI chips to the communist social media company.
Engadget reports that in 2022, the United States banned companies like Nvidia from selling their most advanced AI chips to China, citing concerns over potential military, surveillance, and economic implications. However, a recent report by the Information has revealed that U.S.-based cloud computing company Oracle is allowing TikTok owner ByteDance to “rent” Nvidia’s cutting-edge H100 chips to train AI models on US soil.
ByteDance, a Chinese company that has direct ties to the Chinese government, is reportedly taking advantage of this loophole to access the coveted chips. While the practice runs against the spirit of the U.S. government’s chip regulations, it is technically allowed because Oracle is merely renting out the chips on American soil, not selling them directly to companies in China.
Former ByteDance employees have raised concerns about the company’s Project Texas initiative, which claims to separate TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese leadership. They describe the project as “largely cosmetic,” alleging that ByteDance’s U.S. wing regularly works closely with its Beijing-based leadership.
ByteDance is not the only Chinese company seeking to exploit these loopholes. Alibaba and Tencent are reportedly discussing similar arrangements to gain access to the sought-after chips. These deals could be more difficult to prevent, as these companies have their own U.S.-based data centers and would not need to rent servers from American companies.
The U.S. Commerce Department, responsible for closing such loopholes, may already be aware of these practices. Earlier this year, the department proposed a rule requiring U.S. cloud providers to verify foreign customers’ identities and notify the U.S. if any of them were training AI models that “could be used in malicious cyber-enabled activity.” However, most cloud providers disapproved of the proposal, claiming that the additional requirements might outweigh the intended benefits, leaving the proposed rule in limbo.
Quote:Joan Donovan, a supposed expert on “misinformation” and former research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, has been accused of spreading misinformation about her departure from the once prestigious institution.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Joan Donovan, a supposed expert on misinformation and former research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, finds herself embroiled in a controversy surrounding her departure from the Ivy League institution. Donovan, known for her work on media manipulation and the spread of disinformation online, has made several claims about the circumstances of her leaving Harvard, which have been called into question by former colleagues and university officials.
In a 248-page document released in December 2022, Donovan alleged that Harvard had mistreated her and her team, the Technology and Social Change Project, due to the university’s ties to Meta (formerly Facebook). She claimed that Harvard had eliminated her role and the team she led under pressure from Meta executives, particularly Elliot Schrage, a former Facebook executive and Harvard alumnus. Donovan pointed to a Zoom call in October 2021, during which Schrage allegedly monopolized the discussion and accused her of inaccurately reading documents related to Facebook. However, a recording of the meeting contradicts Donovan’s account, showing that Schrage spoke for only three minutes and did not bring up the leaked Facebook files.
Interviews with former team members, Shorenstein Center staff, and university officials have revealed inconsistencies in Donovan’s narrative. Eleven former Technology and Social Change Project members and Shorenstein staffers stated that they had seen no evidence of Meta exerting pressure on Donovan’s team or that its influence led to the team’s disbandment. Some of Donovan’s other claims, such as Harvard owning the copyright to her book “Meme Wars” and the university stealing her plans to publish confidential Facebook documents, have also been disputed by those directly involved.
Donovan’s allegations regarding the FBarchive, a project aimed at creating a searchable archive of leaked Facebook documents, have also been contested. While Donovan claims that the project was her brainchild and that she was cut out of it due to Meta’s influence, Latanya Sweeney, a professor who worked on the project, called Donovan’s version of events “gross mischaracterizations and misstatements.” Sweeney stated that she had acquired her own cache of the files before Donovan and that the vast majority of the work on the project was done by Sweeney and her team.
Former colleagues have also expressed concerns about Donovan’s management style and behavior during her final years at Harvard. They cite instances of canceled meetings, complaints about university administrators, and attempts to influence funders to withdraw their support for the team, which would have put staff members’ jobs at risk earlier than anticipated. Brandi Collins-Dexter, a former associate director of research, felt that Donovan was using her as “a shield and a weapon” in service of her own brand and public perception.
Quote:A former OpenAI governance researcher has made a chilling prediction: the odds of AI either destroying or catastrophically harming humankind sit at 70 percent.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI governance researcher and signee of an open letter claiming that employees are being silenced against raising safety issues, accused the company of ignoring the monumental risks posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI) due to its decision-makers being enthralled with its possibilities. “OpenAI is really excited about building AGI,” Kokotajlo stated, “and they are recklessly racing to be the first there.”
Kokotajlo’s most alarming claim was that the chance AI will wreck humanity is around 70 percent—odds that would be unacceptable for any major life event, yet OpenAI and its peers are barreling ahead with anyway. The term “p(doom),” which refers to the probability that AI will usher in doom for humankind, is a topic of constant controversy in the machine learning world.
After joining OpenAI in 2022 and being asked to forecast the technology’s progress, the 31-year-old became convinced not only that the industry would achieve AGI by 2027 but also that there was a great probability it would catastrophically harm or even destroy humanity. Kokotajlo and his colleagues, including former and current employees at Google DeepMind and Anthropic, as well as Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” who left Google last year over similar concerns, are asserting their “right to warn” the public about the risks posed by AI.
Kokotajlo became so convinced of the massive risks AI posed to humanity that he personally urged OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to “pivot to safety” and spend more time implementing guardrails to reign in the technology rather than continue making it smarter. Although Altman seemed to agree with him at the time, Kokotajlo felt it was merely lip service.
Fed up, Kokotajlo quit the firm in April, telling his team in an email that he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly” as it continues trying to build near-human-level AI. “The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready,” he wrote. “And I’m concerned we are rushing forward regardless and rationalizing our actions.”
Covert Chinese Propaganda Outlet But It's Not TikTok
Quote:NewsBreak, the most downloaded news app in the United States, has come under fire for publishing fake news stories generated by AI and its ties to China, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation and data privacy.
Reuters reports that popular news app NewsBreak, which has offices in Mountain View, California, Beijing, and Shanghai, recently published an alarming but entirely false story about a Christmas Day shooting in Bridgeton, New Jersey. The local police department dismissed the AI-generated article as “fiction” in a Facebook post on December 27. NewsBreak eventually removed the inaccurate story four days after publication, attributing the error to the content source.
As local news outlets across America have struggled in recent years, NewsBreak has become an option to fill the void, boasting over 50 million monthly users. The app publishes licensed content from media outlets and rewrites information scraped from the internet using AI. However, Reuters found that NewsBreak’s use of AI tools has led to the publication of at least 40 fake news stories since 2021, affecting the communities it aims to serve.
In addition to false news stories, NewsBreak has faced copyright infringement lawsuits from local news providers, including Patch Media and Emmerich Newspapers, for republishing content without permission or credit. The app has also been criticized for creating stories under fictitious bylines, a practice that former consultant Norm Pearlstine warned could “destroy the NewsBreak brand.”
NewsBreak’s ties to China have also raised concerns. The app was initially launched as a subsidiary of Yidian, a Chinese news aggregation app, and both companies were founded by Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak’s CEO. Although Yidian divested from NewsBreak in 2019, the two companies share a U.S. patent for an “Interest Engine” algorithm. About half of NewsBreak’s 200 employees, including a significant portion of its engineering staff, are based in China.
The app’s use of China-based engineers has raised questions about the potential access to American user data in China, drawing comparisons to the recent controversy surrounding TikTok. NewsBreak maintains that it complies with U.S. data and privacy laws and stores data on U.S.-based Amazon servers, with staff in China only accessing anonymous data.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Small businesses across various industries are facing an onslaught of attacks from online scammers who use their videos, logos, and social media posts to assume their identities and sell cheap knockoffs or simply take customers’ money. Meanwhile, Meta, Amazon, and other tech giants are doing little to help them.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the rise of social media, online sales platforms, and AI technology has made it easier for even the smallest businesses to reach customers across the globe, but it has also opened up new opportunities for scammers. Copycats are using advanced tactics, such as outbidding legitimate brands for top positions in search results and leveraging artificial intelligence to avoid language or spelling errors that often signal fraud.
Jen Rose, a ceramist from Dallas, has seen hundreds of fake listings pop up on Amazon and other shopping platforms, using her face and images to steal customers from her handmade Bee Cups. “They are taking my images that show my face and my employees,” said Rose, who receives about 25 emails a day from people complaining about receiving plastic cups or requesting refunds.
Darn Tough Vermont, a maker of merino socks, has also been targeted by scammers promising large discounts on their products. The ads carried Darn Tough’s logo, images, and wording, making it difficult for customers to differentiate between real and fake listings. Ryan Dahlstrom, global director of digital commerce for Darn Tough, spent half of his day, five days a week, tracking down and taking down these scams.
Jim Carter, an industrial designer who started Ideam in 2020, saw his sales of Cascade Wild Bird Feeders tumble from $54,000 to just $537 last August as one-star reviews for impostor bird feeders piled up. Carter estimates they have lost more than $400,000 in sales and spent nearly $100,000 fighting fakes.
Policing copycats is particularly challenging for small businesses with limited financial resources and few employees. While online giants such as Amazon and Meta Platforms say they use technology to identify and remove misleading ads, fake accounts, or counterfeit products, small businesses are at a significant disadvantage. It’s clear that tech giants are not stepping up to protect small businesses from the seemingly unlimited number of scammers, many originating from foreign countries.
Quote:Google has selected the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC) to oversee the distribution of $100 million annually to eligible Canadian news organizations.
CBC reports that in a move to comply with the Online News Act, which requires tech companies to enter into agreements with news publishers, Google has chosen the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC) to manage the distribution of $100 million to Canadian news outlets. The CJC, a federally incorporated non-profit organization founded in May by a group of independent publishers and broadcasters, will be responsible for ensuring that eligible news organizations receive their share of the funds in a fair and transparent manner.
The steering committee of the CJC consists of 12 independent media outlets representing various sectors of the Canadian news ecosystem, including French language, community, and Indigenous news, as well as publications that cater to Black and minority Canadians. Some of the organizations involved in the collective include Pivot, The Resolve, IndigiNews, Village Media, and the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations.
Sadia Zaman, the CJC’s independent board director, expressed the collective’s commitment to distributing the funding inclusively, stating, “We look forward to working with the full diversity of the Canadian news ecosystem, including traditional print and broadcast organizations, and independent local news publishers, including those who serve Indigenous, Black and racialized communities and francophone communities.”
To be eligible for a share of the $100 million, newsrooms must meet certain criteria, such as being designated as qualified Canadian journalism organizations under the Income Tax Act, producing news content of public interest, operating in Canada, and employing at least two journalists. The funds will be distributed proportionately based on the number of full-time journalists employed by each organization.
Small print and digital outlets can expect to receive approximately $17,000 per journalist they employ, according to an official from the Canadian Heritage Department. However, there are caps on the amount of money certain organizations can receive. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) and other broadcasters are limited to a maximum of $7 million and $30 million, respectively, from the annual fund. The remaining $63 million will be shared among other qualifying news outlets, such as newspapers and digital platforms.
The payment of the funds is contingent on Google formally receiving an exemption from the federal broadcast regulator. Google expressed hope that the next steps will be completed quickly, allowing Canadian publishers and journalists to begin receiving the proceeds of this new contribution model soon.
Quote:Google has successfully circumvented a jury trial in an antitrust case by sending a $2.3 million check to the DOJ, which a judge deemed sufficient to cover potential damages.
Ars Technica reports that Google has managed to avoid a jury trial in an antitrust case by sending a $2.3 million check to the U.S. Department of Justice. The preemptive payment was deemed adequate by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema to cover any damages that might have been awarded by a jury. As a result, the case will now proceed with a bench trial, overseen by Judge Brinkema, set to begin in September.
The unusual move by Google came in response to the U.S. government’s request for a jury trial, which is atypical in antitrust cases. The U.S. argued that a jury should determine damages because government agencies were allegedly overcharged for advertising. However, Google’s payment of $2,289,751 was seen as sufficient by the judge, who stated, “I am satisfied that the cashier’s check satisfies any damages claim.”
The U.S. government, along with eight states, initially sued Google in January 2023, alleging that the company “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry” through a series of acquisitions and by forcing publishers and advertisers to use its products. The lawsuit claimed that federal agencies had purchased over $100 million in advertising since 2019 and sought to recover treble damages for alleged overcharges.
Despite the U.S. government’s opposition to Google’s motion to strike the jury demand, arguing that the payment did not fully compensate for the claimed damages, Judge Brinkema sided with Google. She likened the receipt of the unconditional payment to “receiving a wheelbarrow of cash,” regardless of whether Google prevailed in its arguments to strike a jury trial.
While the U.S. government lost its bid to obtain more damages than Google offered, the lawsuit also seeks a declaration that Google illegally monopolized the market. The complaint requests a breakup, requiring Google to divest its Google Ad Manager suite, including its publisher ad server, DFP, and ad exchange, AdX.
Quote:Apple’s has announced announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT technology to devices ranging from iPhones to Mac computers. Elon Musk has responded by threatening to ban Apple devices from his companies’ premises if the integration moves forward. Mike Benz, the founder of anti-censorship organization the Foundation for Freedom Online, harshly criticizes the partnership, tweeting, “Apple merging together with Microsoft’s ChatGPT today on a Woke Death Star AI is basically like Coke + Pepsi merging to create an inescapable death drink.”
Business Insider reports that at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference on Monday, Apple unveiled its plans to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4, across its software, including the enhanced Siri virtual assistant. The integration, set to be available for free in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, aims to provide users with access to ChatGPT’s broad knowledge base and generate answers directly through Siri, pending user permission.
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However, the announcement was met with fierce criticism from Elon Musk, who took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his concerns. Musk, who co-founded and initially helped finance OpenAI, has been vocal about his distaste for the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. In his posts, Musk threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies, calling the integration an “unacceptable security violation.”
[X Post]
Musk’s primary concern appears to be Apple’s partnership with a third-party AI that it “doesn’t understand” and “can’t themselves create.” He questioned Apple’s inability to develop its own AI and expressed doubts about OpenAI’s ability to protect users’ security and privacy once their data is handed over.
In response to Musk’s allegations, Apple stated in its announcement that “protections are built in for users who access ChatGPT,” ensuring that device IP addresses remain private and that OpenAI will not store user requests. The company also clarified that users who choose to connect their accounts will be subject to ChatGPT’s data-use policies.
This is not the first time Musk has clashed with Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, though the two seemed to have reconciled during Musk’s visit to Apple HQ in November 2022. Since parting ways with OpenAI, Musk has launched his own rival AI company, xAI, and a ChatGPT competitor named Grok.
Quote:Microsoft has announced that its controversial Recall AI feature will not be launching with the first batch of Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs on June 18, as previously planned.
Engadget reports that in a recent update on the Windows Blog, Microsoft revealed that the Recall AI feature, which has faced criticism over privacy concerns, will now shift from being a “preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs” to a preview that is only accessible through the Windows Insider Program. The company stated that it will only release the feature for all Copilot+ PCs after receiving feedback from its Insider Community of testers.
Microsoft’s decision to adjust Recall’s release stems from its desire to “ensure the experience meets [its] high standards for quality and security.” The Recall AI feature, which was announced at an event in May, allows users to find anything they have previously viewed on their computer, including web pages, images, documents, emails, presentations, and chat threads. It achieves this by capturing screenshots of a user’s activity every few seconds and storing them in the “Recall timeline.”
Despite Microsoft’s assurances that Recall processes data locally and keeps user information secure, the feature has faced significant criticism and privacy concerns. In response to these concerns, the company announced additional privacy and security changes to Recall earlier this month, including making it an opt-in feature. When setting up a Copilot+ PC, users will be asked whether they want to enable Recall, and they will need to verify their identities through a Windows Hello authentication method, such as facial recognition or fingerprint scan, to access the encrypted Recall timeline. However, some critics argue that this is not foolproof, as anyone with knowledge of the user’s PIN will still be able to view their Recall snapshots.
Microsoft’s decision to delay Recall’s launch suggests that the company acknowledges the need for further improvements to address privacy and security concerns. While an exact date for Recall’s availability in the Windows Insider Program has not been provided, the company stated that it will be accessible to testers in the coming weeks. Microsoft plans to publish a new blog post with instructions on how to access the preview version when it becomes available. It is important to note that testers will need a Copilot+ PC to access the feature, as it requires advanced CPUs with neural processing units (NPUs) for AI tasks.
Quote:The state of Utah is suing China’s TikTok, alleging the popular app’s “Live” feature is “a virtual strip club” for minors that lets adults pay children “to strip, pose, and dance provocatively” in exchange for money.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox ® and Attorney General Sean D. Reyes ® announced the lawsuit last week, alleging the Chinese app “has consciously allowed young people to be sexually exploited on the TikTok platform in exchange for money.”
The governor and attorney general go on to claim that the app’s feature known as TikTok LIVE “lets adult users give TikTok currency to young users in exchange for sexual solicitation and exploitation while the company takes a cut of each payment.”
The lawsuit describes TikTok as “a virtual strip club involving minors” that has become “a seedy underbelly of sexual exploitation,” and cites “TikTok’s own internal studies and the admissions of its employees.”
“TikTok LIVE has allowed adults to pay young users to strip, pose, and dance provocatively for currency that can be cashed out for real money,” Gov. Cox and Attorney General Reyes say.
“LIVE is far from a safe place for users — particularly children — and these dangers are no accident,” the complaint states. “The harmful and unconscionable acts on LIVE stem directly from TikTok’s inapp virtual economy, which has already facilitated billions of dollars in transactions.”
Quote:Elon Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has announced plans to hide all users’ “likes” in an effort to “better protect your privacy,” a move that has sparked concerns about potential blackmail, abuse, and the inability to validate post engagement — making it easier than ever for bots to distort and disrupt the platform.
The Register reports that the decision to make “likes” private, which was initially available only to Premium users last year, will now be applied to all X/Twitter users. The platform’s engineering team shared the news on their account, stating that the change would be implemented sometime this week. Once the switch is flipped, the Likes tab on user profiles will disappear, though users will still be able to see a list of posts they have personally “liked.”
This change means that X/Twitter users will no longer be able to see who has liked a specific post or what posts a particular person has liked. However, users will still have access to metrics from their own posts and a full list of people who have liked their content.
The decision has raised concerns about the potential for blackmail and abuse. While X/Twitter owner Elon Musk may not have to worry about being blackmailed with his now-secret likes, others might not be so lucky. In the past, Twitter accounts belonging to prominent politicians have been caught liking pornographic posts. With such engagement now secret to all but the original poster, the possibilities for misuse of this information by bad actors are alarming.
X/Twitter’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has encouraged users to embrace the change, stating that “public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior.” Wang suggested that many people feel discouraged from liking “edgy” content due to fear of retaliation from trolls or to protect their public image. He added that with the new system, users should freely “like” posts, as it will improve their “For you” algorithm.
Quote:Elon Musk’s heavily touted Tesla Full-Self Driving (FSD) feature has been the subject of scrutiny as recent videos showcase the system’s struggles in navigating complex and unexpected road situations.
Futurism reports that Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) feature, despite its ambitious name, has been facing challenges in delivering on its promise of autonomous driving. Recent videos shared by Tesla enthusiasts and critics alike have highlighted instances where the system falters when confronted with real-world scenarios that deviate from ideal driving conditions.
In a video posted by Scott Woods, a Tesla fan and personality behind the Whole Mars Catalog account on X (formerly Twitter), a Tesla equipped with FSD can be seen navigating the roads between Sausalito and San Francisco. While the vehicle manages to handle most of the journey without human intervention, it encounters a perplexing situation when confronted by a construction worker wearing bright orange safety gear and holding a stop sign.
The Tesla, seemingly unsure of how to proceed, begins to steer towards the left as if attempting to circumvent the road worker, a clear violation of traffic laws. The vehicle remains stopped in the middle of the road, straddling the yellow median line, as the construction worker repeatedly gestures for the Tesla to move off the road. It is only when another vehicle approaches from the opposite direction that Woods intervenes, manually steering the Tesla to the right to allow the other vehicle to pass.
This incident has drawn criticism from Tesla skeptics, with entrepreneur and Tesla critic Dan O’Dowd sharing the video on X, directly addressing Tesla CEO Elon Musk and asserting that “your defective software should be banned from public roads.”
Quote:Tesla shareholders have voted to reapprove CEO Elon Musk’s colossal pay package, despite a Delaware court judge voiding it earlier this year.
The Verge reports that the vote, widely regarded as a referendum on Musk’s leadership during a tumultuous period for the electric vehicle giant, saw investors also approve the relocation of Tesla’s legal home from Delaware to Texas and the reappointment of board members James Murdoch and Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother.
Tesla has faced numerous challenges in recent months, including declining sales, softening demand, and falling revenue. The company has also undergone significant layoffs, affecting at least 10 percent of its workforce. Additionally, Tesla’s vehicle lineup is aging and in need of an overhaul, while the success of Musk’s ventures into AI and robotics remains uncertain.
Breitbart News reported in April:
Alexander Potter of Piper Sandler expects Tesla’s deliveries to slip 0.5 percent to just under 1.8 million vehicles in 2024. Similarly, Philippe Houchois of Jefferies foresees a roughly three percent drop to 1.77 million vehicles. This gloomy outlook comes on the heels of Tesla’s disappointing first-quarter delivery numbers, which missed consensus estimates by the biggest margin ever in Bloomberg data going back seven years. This is particularly startling because Tesla has boasted about massive sales growth as the most prominent EV maker in the country.
The analysts cite slowing growth as a major concern for the electric vehicle maker. “Growth is slowing, and there’s no quick fix,” Potter wrote in his April 9 report. He believes that Tesla should be able to overcome demand issues by 2026, anticipating a lower-cost vehicle, scaled-up production of the Cybertruck, and more than half his price target stems from bullishness on the company’s driver-assistance software.
Despite these obstacles, Tesla shareholders demonstrated their unwavering support for Musk by approving a compensation package that solidifies his position as one of the highest-paid chief executives in modern history. Upon taking the stage with his arms raised in victory, Musk exclaimed, “I just want to start off by saying, hot damn, I love you guys.”
Quote:Eight former SpaceX employees have reportedly escalated their legal battle against Elon Musk and his aerospace company by filing a lawsuit in California state court, alleging sexual harassment and retaliation.
Bloomberg reports that the eight former SpaceX employees who filed the lawsuit allege that Musk “knowingly and purposefully created an unwelcome hostile work environment” through his conduct. The plaintiffs claim that Musk shared inappropriate sexual content in the workplace, including “vile sexual photographs, memes, and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community.”
As a result of Musk’s actions, some of the plaintiffs allegedly experienced harassing comments from coworkers who “mimicked Musk’s posts” from X/Twitter, further contributing to a hostile work environment. In response to these concerns, the workers collaborated on an open letter in 2022, addressing Musk’s behavior and the company’s culture. They allege that they were subsequently fired in retaliation for their activism.
The complaint suggests that Musk personally made the decision to terminate the employees, despite a human resources official’s recommendation to conduct an investigation first. According to the filing, when the official suggested an investigation, Musk replied, “I don’t care – fire them.” SpaceX has denied wrongdoing and stated that the fired employees violated company policies, maintaining that Musk was not involved in their terminations.
Prior to this lawsuit, the same employees had filed complaints with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), claiming that SpaceX illegally retaliated against them. Although NLRB prosecutors agreed with the employees, SpaceX challenged the agency’s structure in January, claiming it was unconstitutional. This led to an appeals court injunction that has put the labor board case on hold.
Quote:Federal officials are investigating how parts made with titanium sold with falsified documentation wound up in Boeing and Airbus passenger jets.
By DAVID KOENIGAP Airlines Writer The Associated Press
Federal regulators are investigating how parts made with titanium that was sold with falsified quality documentation wound up in Boeing and Airbus passenger jets that were built in recent years.
Boeing and Airbus said Friday that planes containing the parts are safe to fly, but Boeing said it was removing affected parts from planes that haven’t been delivered yet to airline customers.
It will be up to regulators including the Federal Aviation Administration to decide whether any work needs to be done to planes that are already carrying passengers.
The FAA said it is “investigating the scope and impact of the issue.” The agency said Boeing reported the problem covering material from a distributor “who may have falsified or provided incorrect records.” The FAA did not name the distributor.
Boeing and Airbus declined to say how many planes were flying with parts made from the undocumented titanium.
Quote:A mandatory cellphone locking system will be introduced at a Seattle school from September aimed at advancing academic performance, student engagement, and mental health across the board.
A decrease in bullying is also anticipated to be delivered by the planned “digital de-stress.”
Hamilton International Middle School principal Dr. Eric Marshall approved the plan in an effort to lift the academic environment.
Fox 13 news reports the initiative will use simple canvas pouches as supplied by a company renowned for creating phone-free spaces.
The pouches, which can only be unlocked with a special base at the end of the school day, are reported to allow students to keep their phones in their possession without allowing access and subsequent distractions during school hours.
The Seattle school move follows other efforts across the country to disengage students from their phones during school hours.
Quote:Apple and OpenAI recently struck a deal that will see the tech giant compensate the AI company for the use of its ChatGPT technology through distribution, rather than traditional financial means. This means that the eyeballs of every iPhone user in America are worth much more than billions of dollars to OpenAI.
Bloomberg reports that the recently announced partnership between Apple and OpenAI, criticized by conservatives as creating a “woke AI Death Star” which will integrate the AI-powered ChatGPT into Apple’s Siri virtual assistant and new writing tools across its iPhone, iPad, and Mac platforms, has raised questions about the financial arrangements between the two companies. According to sources familiar with the matter, Apple will not be making direct monetary payments to OpenAI for the use of its technology. Instead, the iPhone maker believes that the exposure and distribution of OpenAI’s brand and technology to its vast user base is of equal or greater value than cash compensation.
This unorthodox arrangement is part of Apple’s broader push into the world of artificial intelligence, as showcased during the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Alongside the OpenAI partnership, Apple unveiled its own suite of in-house AI features, collectively known as Apple Intelligence.
While the collaboration with OpenAI is not exclusive, and Apple is reportedly in talks with Google to offer its insanely woke Gemini chatbot as an additional option, the partnership could prove costly for OpenAI in the long run. The AI company relies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing systems to host ChatGPT, and the increased usage resulting from the Apple integration could lead to a significant rise in computing expenses.
Despite the potential costs, both Apple and OpenAI stand to benefit from the partnership in the future. The companies could monetize the integration by converting free users to paid accounts, with OpenAI’s subscription plans starting at $20 a month for additional features. Furthermore, Apple aims to generate revenue from AI by establishing revenue-sharing agreements with AI partners that monetize chatbot results on its platforms, potentially offsetting any losses from the declining relevance of traditional search engines.
The partnership between Apple and OpenAI is not without its issues, particularly when it comes to expanding the AI services to other languages and countries. Apple faces potential hurdles in China, one of its biggest overseas markets, where services like ChatGPT and Gemini are currently barred. The company is considering arrangements with local Chinese providers, such as Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, to handle chatbot features in the region.
Quote:OpenAI, the troubled startup behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has announced the appointment of retired U.S. Army General and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone to its board of directors, claiming it will leverage his extensive experience in cybersecurity to safeguard its cutting-edge technology.
Bloomberg reports that in a statement released on Thursday, OpenAI revealed that General Paul Nakasone, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.S. Cyber Command, will join the company’s board of directors. Nakasone will be a part of the Safety and Security Committee, a specialized group tasked with making critical decisions related to safety and security at OpenAI.
Bret Taylor, chair of OpenAI’s board, emphasized the significance of Nakasone’s addition, stating, “Artificial Intelligence has the potential to have huge positive impacts on people’s lives, but it can only meet this potential if these innovations are securely built and deployed. General Nakasone’s unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission.”
The appointment of General Nakasone follows a series of recent changes to OpenAI’s board composition. In March, CEO Sam Altman rejoined the board after an independent investigation cleared him of wrongdoing related to his ouster in November. The company also added several prominent figures to its board, including Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former Sony Entertainment executive; and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.
Quote:Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X/Twitter and CEO of Tesla, has voluntarily dismissed his breach of contract claims against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman.
The Financial Times reports that the lawsuit, filed three months ago in a San Francisco court, accused OpenAI of compromising its original mission to benefit humanity by entering into a multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft. Musk alleged that the $86 billion start-up behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT was working on “proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world.”
OpenAI, however, rejected Musk’s claims, calling them “incoherent” and “frivolous.” The company published a blog post in March that included several of Musk’s emails from the early days of the company, which appeared to show he acknowledged the ChatGPT maker needed to raise large sums of money to fund the computing resources required to develop AI models.
Musk’s relationship with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, has been strained for some time. Despite co-founding the company in 2015 and donating $44 million to the group, Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018 due to disagreements with Altman over the direction of its research. A year later, OpenAI established a for-profit division, which attracted significant investment from Microsoft.
In response to the growing competition in the AI industry, Musk launched his own AI start-up, xAI, last year. The company has since raised $6 billion from venture capital and sovereign wealth funds to support its development. Despite his involvement in the AI sector, Musk has repeatedly warned about the potential dangers of the technology, calling it an “existential threat” to humanity in the past.
The dismissal of the lawsuit comes amidst Musk’s criticism of a new partnership between OpenAI and Apple. In a recent post on X/Twitter, Musk stated that if OpenAI’s technology is integrated into iPhones, Apple devices would be banned at his companies. He went as far as to say, “Visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”
Quote:Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed a bill that commits Russia to work with its partner in tyranny, China, on building a moon base.
China’s state-run Global Times boasted that Russia joined more than 30 other “countries and international organizations” on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project, 20 of which have signed agreements of some kind to formalize their involvement.
The Global Times did not name the other partners, although it mentioned that Egypt and Bahrain have signed on to China’s next Chang’e lunar probe mission. Egypt was among the countries that expressed interest when China rolled out its moonbase plan in 2021, along with Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, South Africa, Thailand, and Nicaragua.
China’s Chang’e-6 unmanned probe landed on the dark side of the moon on June 2 to collect soil samples, making China the fourth nation to achieve a lunar landing after the United States, Japan, and India.
Chinese state media reported the Chang’e-7 launch, the one involving Egypt and Bahrain, is scheduled for 2026 and will survey the Moon’s south polar region. Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Thailand, and a group called the International Lunar Observatory Association have also committed to providing payloads for the Chang’e-7 mission.
After that, China hopes to achieve a manned lunar landing by 2030, lay the foundations of a moonbase near the lunar south pole by 2035, and bring the base online by 2045. The lunar base was envisioned as a springboard for missions to Mars and beyond. The base would ostensibly be constructed using basalt mined from the Moon’s surface.
China has touted its lunar base project as an international endeavor since its earliest public statements. The animated video that introduced the lunar base plan in 2021 depicted a NASA Space Shuttle lifting off from the base.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:KADOKAWA CORPORATION (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Chief Executive Officer: Takeshi Natsuno;
hereinafter “KADOKAWA”) expresses deep apologies for the significant inconvenience and trouble caused to its
readers, users, writers, creators, business partners, shareholders, investors and other stakeholders by the
system failure currently affecting the KADOKAWA Group.
On Saturday, June 8, the servers located in the KADOKAWA Group’s data center experienced a significant
cyberattack including ransomware, targeting Niconico and the related services.
KADOKAWA is currently considering solutions and workarounds quickly on a company-wide basis in order to
normalize its systems and business activities. The current status of the key businesses affected by the system
failure, workarounds, and the progress of the investigation of information leakage are as follows.
It seems the corporation has been hacked!
I'm leaving here what they stated concerning the online services they normally provide.
Quote:Web Services business:
○ All Niconico family services are still suspended. Users remain unable to log into external
services through their Niconico account.
○ Meanwhile, KADOKAWA has started providing provisional services to users, including Niconico
Video (Re: tmp), Niconico Live Streaming (Re: tmp), and Niconico Commons (Re: tmp).
Additionally, it has resumed existing services, such as the Niconico Manga smartphone version
and NicoFT. KADOKAWA plans to restart an existing service, Niconico Channel Plus on Friday,
June 28.
○ KADOKAWA will gradually restart its services as they become available.
As you might have noticed by now, it revolves around Niconico and not Komodo Plaza. Anyway, they have also included their opinion on the hack as well.
Quote:3. The status of the investigation into a potential information leakage
KADOKAWA is investigating the possibility for information leakage with the support of external professional
organizations.
KADOKAWA does not retain any credit card information of the Group’s customers, including Niconico service
users, in its system, and therefore, no credit card information will have been leaked.
More accurate information based on the investigation results is expected to be available in July. KADOKAWA
will announce the information as soon as it is obtained.
They have ruled out that hackers could get access to credit cards, which sounds good so far. Yet, that doesn't include some extra data like physical addresses.
Quote:A Russia-linked hacking group claimed responsibility for a recent cyberattack that crippled major Japanese video streaming website niconico, posting a statement on the dark web Thursday.
It was not immediately clear whether the statement by the group purporting to be BlackSuit ransomware gang was true or not.
The hackers threatened that they have gained access to "very personal information regarding Japanese citizens" and "everything will go public" on Monday unless Kadokawa Corp., the parent company of niconico operator Dwango Co., pays a ransom.
Kadokawa, a major Japanese publisher, declined to comment on the latest development.
On June 8, servers located in Kadokawa group's data center experienced a significant cyberattack, including ransomware, targeting niconico and related services, according to the company.
Kadokawa has been investigating information leakage following the incident, but it has explained that it does not retain any credit card information of its group's customers, including niconico service users, in its system and no such breach has taken place.
Users can share videos ranging from music to animals on niconico and they can also watch the live streaming of government officials' press conferences.
So it seems that Niconico is pretty much like a mix of YouTube streaming, normal videos and shorts.
Quote:Google is up to its regular election tricks, according to the Media Research Center. An MRC investigation found that when searching for a candidates name with “presidential race 2024,” Joe Biden’s campaign website is the top result, while Donald Trump’s campaign website doesn’t appear on the first page.
The MRC reports that as the 2024 presidential race heats up, concerns are growing about the role of technology giants in shaping public opinion and access to information. A recent investigation MRC has uncovered what they claim to be evidence of bias in Google’s search results, potentially impacting the visibility of presidential candidates’ campaign websites.
The MRC’s research, conducted just days before tonight’s highly anticipated presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, revealed stark differences in how Google presents search results for various candidates. When searching for a candidate’s name along with “presidential race 2024,” researchers found that President Biden’s campaign website appeared as the top result, while former President Trump’s website was notably absent from the first page of results.
This discrepancy has led to accusations of election interference. MRC President Brent Bozell stated, “Google is blatantly interfering in the 2024 election.” The organization’s findings suggest that the issue extends beyond just these two candidates, with pro-life candidates seemingly receiving less favorable treatment in search rankings.
The study involved two sets of search queries. The first set focused on individual candidates, while the second examined results for party-specific searches. In both cases, researchers noted significant disparities in how different candidates’ websites were ranked.
For the party-specific searches, the results were equally concerning to the MRC. A search for “republican party presidential campaign websites” placed Trump’s campaign site at the 39th position out of 40 results, while a similar search for Democratic candidates prominently featured Biden’s website at the top.
No kidding! It takes its time to finally find an allegedly official website of the Trump Campaign. One of the first entries only sends you to an archived version of Trump's old campaign website.
In fact, you can find Marianne Williamson's website way before you finally hit Trump's!
On the other hand, Biden's website shows up second on a Google search.
Quote:Police in northern Sweden said Thursday they were looking into the unexplained deaths of three men who had died within a short period after working at an electric vehicle battery plant in the Arctic. They want to find out whether the deaths are linked, whether a crime has been committed, or if they are a string of accidental workplace fatalities.
The deaths have puzzled Swedish media which have reported about the three people who died after working at Northvolt’s plant in Skelleftea, some 620 kilometers (385 miles) north of Stockholm. Two of them died in January and February, while a third one passed away last year. Two were working at the plant and the third one was a cleaning person.
Local newspaper, Norran, said that a 33-year-old cleaner was found dead in his bed in January, the day after his evening shift. A month later, a 19-year-old employee was also found dead in his bed hours after late-night work. Last year, a man in his 60s was found dead on his balcony after having worked at the plant, the newspaper said.
Police investigator Johan Stabbfors told The Associated Press that an investigation has been opened, noting “there is some kind of indication that there has been some type of exposure in one of the cases.” He did not elaborate.
Stabbfors said that police had to “be open to the fact that there can be other circumstances” responsible for the deaths.
“But for now, we have nothing,” he said of the probe that was opened last week.
New Jersey Guy is a Sore Loser... & Very Dangerous
Quote:A 20-year-old man from New Jersey allegedly flew to Florida to physically assault his online gaming rival, in a case of an online deathmatch entering the real world. Perplexed by the case, Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper commented, “This is a weird one. Some things make you say hmm.”
CBS12 reports that Edward Kang, a 20-year-old man from New Jersey, was arrested on Sunday after after authories say he traveled across the country to attack a fellow player of the online multiplayer game ArcheAge. The incident, which took place in Fernandina Beach, Florida, has shocked local authorities and raised concerns about the escalation of online disputes into real-world violence.
Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper, visibly perplexed by the case, stated during a Monday briefing, “This is a weird one. Some things make you say hmm.” The sheriff’s office revealed that Kang had meticulously planned his attack, booking a flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to Jacksonville International Airport and reserving a hotel room in Florida.
According to authorities, Kang’s journey began when he became enraged at the victim during an online gaming session. Under the guise of visiting a friend, he informed his mother of his travel plans and proceeded to Florida. Upon arrival, Kang checked into his hotel around 2:00 a.m. on Friday and, in a chilling move, visited an Ace Hardware store the following day to purchase a hammer and flashlight.
The attack unfolded in the early hours of Sunday morning when Kang, dressed entirely in black and wearing gloves and a mask, allegedly broke into the victim’s home. Sheriff Leeper reported that Kang assaulted the victim with the hammer, causing severe head wounds. The victim’s stepfather, awakened by screams for help, discovered the struggle and, together with the victim, managed to restrain Kang until law enforcement arrived.
Fortunately, despite the severity of the attack, the victim’s injuries were deemed non-life-threatening. Kang was subsequently booked into the Nassau County Jail on charges of burglary and attempted murder.
Quote:Elon Musk’s X platform, formerly Twitter, appears to have recently suspended a slew of accounts, causing popular conservative X accounts to experience a large loss in followers. Despite many claiming this purge is aimed at the bot accounts plaguing the platform, multiple complaints of legitimate accounts being suspended have also surfaced.
While it remains unclear why accounts were suspended, many conservatives took to X/Twitter to comment that they have noticed their follower count drop by large numbers. Moreover, the suspended accounts do not appear to have been entirely bots, but also actual users of the social media platform.
“Anyone else lose followers last night? I lost 5,000.” the popular conservative X account Catturd wrote.
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“I lost a few thousand. I’m guessing it was a bot purge,” the editor-in-chief Vigilant News Network commented.
“Lost a little over 6k,” the popular X account Clown World wrote.
“Yep, I noticed that I lost followers last night,” the popular X account known as General replied.
Quote:Social media companies like Facebook are free to continue censoring conservatives according to a divided Supreme Court, over a vigorous conservative dissent.
“During the 2020 election season and the COVID–19 pandemic, social-media platforms frequently removed, demoted, or fact checked posts containing allegedly false or misleading information,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett began for the majority. “At the same time, federal officials, concerned about the spread of “misinformation” on social media, communicated extensively with the platforms about their content-moderation efforts.”
Barrett recounted the facts of various officials in the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the surgeon general, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“Though the platforms restricted the plaintiffs’ content, the plaintiffs maintain that the Federal Government was behind it,” Barrett explained. “Acting on that belief, the plaintiffs sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging that they pressured the platforms to censor the plaintiffs’ speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
We begin—and end—with standing,” she declared. “At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute.”
The majority held that the plaintiffs failed to show they had suffered legal injuries that were traceable to Facebook and the company formerly called Twitter, that resulted from Biden administration coercion, and that a court could fix by issuing an order.
...
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote a blistering dissenting opinion, joined by fellow conservative Clarence Thomas and also Neil Gorsuch, who leans libertarian.
“Victims of the campaign perceived by the lower courts brought this action to ensure that the Government did not continue to coerce social media platforms to suppress speech,” Alito began. “All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.”
“If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years,” Alito declared. “Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.”
“Our country’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be allowed,” he announced. “I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value.”
US Surgeon General Talks About Tobacco-Like Warning for Social Media
Quote:The U.S. Surgeon General is urging Congress to issue a warning label, similar to those seen on cigarette packs, for social media platforms and their impacts on young people.
“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Hallegere Murthy wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
“A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe,” Murthy added.
The surgeon general noted that while tacking a warning label onto social media platforms will not make them safe for young people, it would potentially change users’ behavior.
“Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior,” Murthy said.
Notably, issuing a tobacco-like warning label on social media platforms means that Congress would have to action.
“The measures should prevent platforms from collecting sensitive data from children and should restrict the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use,” Murthy wrote.
The surgeon general also asked why society has failed to address the negative impacts social media has on young people.
“The moral test of any society is how well it protects its children,” Murthy asserted. “We have the expertise, resources and tools to make social media safe for our kids. Now is the time to summon the will to act. Our children’s well-being is at stake.”
We could say it's been pretty much influenced by the ongoing TikTok dispute.
Quote:Toys “R” Us has partnered with ad agency Native Foreign to create what they claim is the first-ever “brand film” utilizing OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora. The creepy result has largely been mocked on social media.
Ars Technica reports that the retail giant Toys “R” Us has taken a surprising step into the future of advertising by leveraging OpenAI’s text-to-video technology, Sora, to produce a unique commercial. Titled “The Origin of Toys ‘R’ Us,” the commercial aims to tell the story of the company’s founder, Charles Lazarus, through AI-generated video clips. This creative endeavor showcases the potential of Sora, which can create up to one-minute-long videos featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters, all generated from text instructions.
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Kim Miller Olko, Toys “R” Us Studios President and executive producer of the project, expressed excitement about the collaboration, stating, “Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time, and we wanted to honor his legacy with a spot using the most cutting-edge technology available.”
The video depicts a child version of Lazarus, presumably generated by Sora, falling asleep and embarking on a journey through a dreamland of toys. During this adventure, the young Lazarus encounters Geoffrey, the iconic Toys “R” Us mascot, who presents him with a small red car – a symbolic gesture representing the birth of a retail empire.
While the use of AI in advertising is not entirely new, the Toys “R” Us commercial represents a significant leap forward in terms of complexity and ambition. However, the video is not without its telltale signs of AI generation. Keen observers have noted unnatural movements, strange visual artifacts, and irregularities in certain elements like eyeglasses – all hallmarks of current AI-generated imagery.
The reception of this AI-generated commercial has been mixed, with some praising its innovative approach while others criticize various aspects of its production and implications. Critics have raised concerns about the potential displacement of human creative jobs, the environmental impact of energy-intensive AI models, and the use of human-created artwork to train these AI systems.
Comedy writer Mike Drucker encapsulated several of these criticisms in a post on social media platform X, saying, “Love this commercial is like, ‘Toys R Us started with the dream of a little boy who wanted to share his imagination with the world. And to show how, we fired our artists and dried Lake Superior using a server farm to generate what that would look like in Stephen King’s nightmares.’”
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:As artificial intelligence continues to make headlines, some companies are being accused of “AI washing” — overstating the capabilities of their AI technology.
BBC News reports that the phenomenon of “AI washing” has been gaining attention in recent months, as more companies claim to use AI in their products and services. The term, a play on “green washing,” refers to companies making over-inflated claims about their use of AI. This can take several forms, such as claiming to use AI when using less-sophisticated computing, overstating the efficacy of AI over existing techniques, or suggesting that AI solutions are fully operational when they are not.
One high-profile example is Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, which claims to use AI to enable customers at many of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go shops to simply pick their items and leave, with the AI using sensors to determine what they have chosen and automatically billing them. However, reports earlier this year questioned the extent of AI’s role in the system, suggesting that around 1,000 workers in India were needed to manually check almost three quarters of the transactions. Amazon denied these reports, stating that the Indian workers were simply reviewing the system.
The rise of AI washing can be attributed to several factors, including competition for funding and the desire to appear on the cutting edge. According to OpenOcean, a UK and Finland-based investment fund for new tech firms, only 10 percent of tech start-ups mentioned using AI in their pitches in 2022, but this rose to more than a quarter in 2023 and is expected to be more than a third this year. However, as Sri Ayangar, a team member at OpenOcean, notes, “a significant disparity exists between companies claiming AI capabilities, and those demonstrating tangible AI-driven results.”
The problem is compounded by the lack of a single agreed definition of AI. As Douglas Dick, UK head of emerging technology risk at KPMG, explains, “If I asked a room of people what their definition of AI is, they would all give a different answer. The term is used very broadly and loosely, without any clear point of reference. It is this ambiguity that is allowing AI washing to emerge.”
AI washing can have concerning impacts for businesses, from overpaying for technology and services to failing to meet operational objectives the AI was expected to help them achieve. For investors, it can make it harder to identify genuinely innovative companies. And for consumers, unmet expectations from products claiming to offer advanced AI-driven solutions can erode trust in start-ups doing genuinely ground-breaking work.
Spoiler Punishes Pro-Putin Artists But Not Chinese Ones
Quote:The music service Spotify has deleted the pages of several Russian musicians openly supportive of President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, according to an independent Russian media report on Thursday.
The artists removed from the world’s largest music streaming platform include Shaman, Chicherina, Polina Gagarina, Grigory Leps, Oleg Gazmanov, and a rock group called Lyube.
The European Union (EU) sanctioned Gagarina, 37, along with 68 other individuals, in June for supporting Putin’s war.
The EU cited Gagarina, a breakout star at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2015, for performing at a Moscow political rally in March to support the war and Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Canada slapped sanctions on Gagarina in 2023 for spreading Russian propaganda. Several of her concerts were canceled in the wake of her appearance at the pro-Putin political rally in March.
The EU sanctioned Shaman, a 32-year-old singer whose real name is Yaroslav Yuryevich Dronov, on Monday because he “repeatedly participated in Kremlin-organized concerts, including the Kremlin’s anniversary event for [the Ukraine] war, and given concerts in the illegally occupied regions of Ukraine.”
The EU noted that Shaman has also performed “as part of troop entertainment events for the Russian Armed Forces.”
The EU sanctioned Leps, Gazmanov, and the band Lyube in 2022 for “actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”
Spotify is no longer available in Russia, having suspended operations there in March 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Spotify also removed its content from Russian state media outlets.
The company cited Putin’s authoritarian media laws, which threaten anyone who disparages the Russian military with up to 15 years in prison, as the main reason it could no longer do business in Russia.
“Unfortunately, recently enacted legislation further restricting access to information, eliminating free expression, and criminalizing certain types of news puts the safety of Spotify’s employees and possibly even our listeners at risk,” the company said.
Spotify told the Moscow Times on Thursday that content from all of the Russian artists it removed “met the threshold” for content that “explicitly violates our content policies or local laws.”
The streaming service took note of speculation in Russian media that the pages of the artists in question were hacked and clarified that they were deliberately removed on the instructions of Spotify management.
The Moscow Times pointed out that all of the banned Putin-supporting artists can still be found, at least for the moment, on platforms such as Apple Music and YouTube.
Spotify continues to host other artists whose conduct is reprehensible or legally questionable such as Diddy, who was caught on video beating his girlfriend; R. Kelly, who was convicted of racketeering and sexually abusing his young fans; and VaVa, a popular female Chinese rap artist who openly supports the genocidal tyranny in Beijing.
Quote:An AI version of sports commentator Al Michaels will deliver “personalized” recaps to Peacock subscribers during the 2024 Olympics.
NBC says it will use generative AI to re-create the iconic sportscaster’s voice, which will give Peacock subscribers “personalized” recaps during the 2024 Olympic games in Paris, according to a report by Hollywood Reporter.
The company reportedly announced its AI plan — which it calls “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” — at a press event at its headquarters.
Peacock streamers will have the option to submit their names and select up to three types of sports for which they want to be given highlights. After that, an AI version of Michaels’ voice will provide daily updates based on the user’s customized request.
The AI-generated voice of the sports commentator will reportedly address users by name as it provides its daily 10-minute recap, which can also include viral moments and athlete backstories, among other categories.
There are 7 million possible ways in which the playlists could be customized for the Olympics, according to an NBCUniversal executive.
Michaels, who has provided Olympics coverage on NBC since 2010, has approved the use of his voice. “When I was approached about this, I was skeptical but obviously curious,” the sportscaster said. “Then I saw a demonstration detailing what they had in mind. I said, ‘I’m in.'”
NBCUniversal’s John Jelley said a team of NBC Sports editors developed a process to “integrate, optimize and validate state-of-the-art large language model and voice synthesis technology,” according to a report by Mashable.
Michaels is not the first individual whose voice is being trained by AI, which has become an ever-increasingly powerful tool, raising eyebrows of people concerned with how far the technology will go.
As Breitbart News reported in December, the late legendary Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart, who was known for his distinctive drawl, can now put users of the subscription-based wellness app Calm to sleep thanks to artificial intelligence.
Quote:A new study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab reveals that Microsoft’s Bing translation service in China employs stricter censorship measures than its Chinese counterparts, raising concerns about the tech giant’s operations in the country.
Rest of World reports that Microsoft’s Bing translation service in China has come under scrutiny following a groundbreaking study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. The research, shared exclusively with Rest of World, indicates that Bing’s censorship practices in China are more stringent than those of leading Chinese services, including Baidu Translate and Tencent Machine Translation.
The study’s findings challenge the common perception that U.S. tech companies might be more resistant to Chinese censorship demands than their local counterparts. Jeffrey Knockel, senior research associate at Citizen Lab, explained the severity of Bing’s censorship: “If you try to translate five paragraphs of text, and two sentences contain a mention of Xi, Bing’s competitors in China would delete those two sentences and translate the rest. In our testing, Bing always censors the entire output. You get a blank. It is more extreme.”
This extensive censorship extends beyond Bing’s translation service to its China-based search engine, which was found to censor more extensively than Chinese firms’ services. The implications of these practices are significant, as Knockel noted, “Microsoft’s practices harm people’s ability to communicate with an entire demographic of people.”
Microsoft has maintained a presence in China for over two decades, with its Windows operating system capturing more than 80 percent of the market share. Bing, while not the market leader, still holds a substantial 25 percent share of the search engine market in China, according to Statcounter.
The Citizen Lab study, which analyzed 10,000 unique censorship applications across five translation services, found that Bing is the only China-based translation service to consistently produce blank outputs when encountering sensitive content. In contrast, other services like Baidu, Tencent, and NetEase silently omit triggering sentences, while Alibaba displays an error message but still translates content once the user removes the sensitive text.
Benjamin Fung, a McGill University professor and expert on AI and cybersecurity technology, suggests that Microsoft’s approach may be driven by a desire to avoid Chinese government backlash. “On a technical level, censoring more is easier to achieve. They don’t have to detect exactly which phrase is sensitive. The software just has to make the binary decision: translate or not translate,” Fung explained to Rest of World.
The study also revealed that Microsoft may have recently expanded its China-based censorship. Newly discovered censored terms on Bing’s search engine include references to the September 2023 arrest of Chinese dissident Zheng Baocheng and the Bluebird Movement protests in Taiwan from the previous month.
Quote:Bloomberg News on Tuesday published an exposé on the relationship between China’s Huawei telecom giant and Optica, a nonprofit scientific foundation based in Washington, DC.
According to documents reviewed by Bloomberg, Huawei and Optica had much deeper and stronger ties than either was willing to acknowledge in public.
Tuesday’s report was a follow-up to Bloomberg’s report in May that revealed Huawei has been “secretly funding cutting-edge research at American universities” through Optica. The Chinese Communist-linked firm turned out to be the sole funder for an annual research competition administered by Optica, a fact that was not disclosed to entrants in the competition.
Several major U.S. universities said they would not have participated in the research competition if they had known it was financed by Huawei. After the report prompted a congressional investigation, Optica returned Huawei’s funding and removed representatives of the company from the panel of judges for its research competition.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg cited “internal Optica corporate records” that said the group was far more closely linked to Huawei than previously revealed. Among other details, a whistleblower inside the company revealed that Optica CEO Elizabeth Rogan paid a visit to Huawei headquarters in April that she did not disclose, even though her trip to China that month was public knowledge and she was chronicling her journey in real-time on social media.
The same whistleblower expressed concerns that the Chinese company was using its relationship with Optica to compromise sensitive projects funded by the U.S. government, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Contrary to earlier denials by Huawei and Optica, the documents viewed by Bloomberg indicated that Huawei did have a role in choosing the winners of the research competition, and it used the contest as an opportunity to develop contractual relationships with the participants. Optica representatives said Bloomberg’s analysts were misinterpreting these documents and exaggerating the role Huawei played in choosing the winners.
Bloomberg pointed to circumstantial evidence that China has used its pipeline to the American scientific community to acquire banned technology, such as Huawei cheekily rolling out “a new smartphone featuring a 7-nanometer chip whose development U.S. export controls were supposed to foil” while Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China last August.
Tuesday’s report uncovered another program that did not disclose its sponsorship by Huawei, the Global Environmental Measurement and Monitoring Initiative (GEMM). The co-chair of this program was a “U.S. government chemist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”
Optica’s alliance with Huawei appears to date back to at least 2007, five years before the House Intelligence Committee released a landmark report that identified the Chinese company as a national security threat. Some of the U.S. scientists profiled in the report also had sponsorship deals with Huawei that predated the company’s classification as a national security threat.
The general response from Huawei and Optica has been that the titanic Chinese corporation was sincerely interested in sponsoring cutting-edge research, and the American foundation took the money without realizing how alarming its connections to Huawei might appear. Optica representatives ascribed the failures of disclosure described by Bloomberg as carelessness, rather than deliberate efforts to conceal ties to a Chinese Communist entity.
Bloomberg seemed unconvinced, noting that Optica may yet be prosecuted under the False Claims Act for “causing researchers to file fraudulent information to the U.S. government regarding their sources of funds” by concealing Huawei’s involvement from them.
Quote:Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin announced on Tuesday that his office is suing the Chinese mobile phone shopping app Temu for violating fraud and personal information laws, declaring the app “functionally malware” and a threat to America.
“Temu is not an online marketplace like Amazon or Walmart. It is a data-theft business that sells goods online as a means to an end,” Griffin said in a statement, noting that Temu is “led by a cadre of former Chinese Communist Party officials, which raises significant security risks to our country and our citizens.”
The application, which has become one of the largest e-commerce companies operating in America in the span of two years, stands accused of violating the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (ADTPA) and the Arkansas Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
Temu is a shopping app that offers a wide variety of extremely inexpensive products of dubious quality, shipped directly from China. It is a subsidiary of PinDuoDuo (PDD), a Chinese corporation known for its cutthroat e-commerce tactics of selling products at steep discounts to eliminate competitors, elbowing them out of the market. Like all Chinese companies, Temu is legally required to share data it gathers from customers or any other source with the Communist Party and, thus, with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Temu is also implicated in China’s ongoing genocide of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz people, and other ethnic Turkic peoples in occupied East Turkistan. A report by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party published in June 2023 concluded that there is an “extremely high risk” of obtaining products tainted by slave trade when shopping on Temu and fellow Chinese e-commerce app Shein.
The Arkansas lawsuit focuses on the threat of Americans’ personal data falling into the hands of the PLA through Temu, rather than the slave trade, as lawmakers have stated Temu appears to be selling slave-tainted products to Americans through a loophole in the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).
Quote:Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck has encountered yet another setback as the electric vehicle manufacturer has issued two new recalls addressing windshield wiper malfunctions and potentially detaching trunk bed trim.
PCMag reports that Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Elon Musk, is once again facing challenges with its bizarre Cybertruck. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has reported that the vehicle’s sole front wiper may cease functioning, significantly increasing the risk of accidents due to compromised visibility in adverse weather conditions.
The wiper issue, which impacts an estimated 230 Cybertrucks out of a possible 11,600, has already been reported by several owners. One driver described the dire situation of having to “hang out the window” to see the road during rainfall when the wiper failed. The problem, attributed to an electrical issue causing “excessive electrical current” in the wiper motor, will be addressed by Tesla through free replacements. The company plans to notify affected truck owners by mid-August.
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Concurrently, Tesla is recalling Cybertrucks manufactured between November 13, 2023, and May 26, 2024, due to a separate issue involving improperly adhered trunk bed trim. The NHTSA estimates that 113 vehicles out of a potential 11,383 may have loose trim that could detach while driving, posing a hazard to other motorists on the road. Tesla has committed to rectifying this problem at no cost to owners as well.
These latest recalls come on the heels of previous issues that have plagued the Cybertruck since its launch. Just two months ago, Tesla recalled the vehicles due to faulty accelerator pedal covers that could potentially dislodge and force the accelerator down unexpectedly. The company has also faced scrutiny for its pattern of delaying or cancelling Cybertruck deliveries shortly before recall announcements, raising questions about transparency and quality control measures.
The Cybertruck’s troubled history is further highlighted by the fact that all four of its recalls have occurred within this year alone. The first recall addressed a warning light issue that affected virtually every Tesla vehicle ever produced. Additionally, Tesla recently issued a separate recall for 125,000 vehicles due to a faulty seatbelt warning system, although this particular issue is being resolved through an over-the-air software update.
Quote:Artificial intelligence (AI) companies Suno and Udio faced legal action Monday launched by major record labels Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records. Allegations include committing mass copyright infringement by using the labels’ recordings to train music-generating AI systems.
The New York Post reports the companies allegedly copied music without permission to teach their systems to create music that will “directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out” human artists’ work, according to federal lawsuits filed against Udio in New York and Suno in Massachusetts.
“Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,” Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement.
Representatives for Udio did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the outlet. The Post report further set out:
The complaints said Suno and Udio users have been able to recreate elements of songs including The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and could generate vocals that are “indistinguishable” from musicians such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.
The labels asked the courts to award statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song the defendants allegedly copied.
They accused Suno of copying 662 songs and Udio of copying 1,670.
Musicians around the world have described AI as a threat to creativity however Cambridge, Mass.-based Suno and New York-based Udio have raised millions in funding this year for their bespoke systems, which create music in response to user text prompts.
The labels’ complaints said the companies have been “deliberately evasive” about the material they used to train their technology, and revealing it for public scrutiny would “admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”
Quote:Meta’s recent initiative to label AI-generated images on its social media platforms has ignited a heated debate within the photography community, as many professionals claim their non-AI images are being incorrectly tagged.
TechCrunch reports that in February, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced its plan to start labeling photos created with AI tools across its social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The company began implementing this feature in May, attaching a “Made with AI” label to certain images. However, the rollout has not been without its challenges, as numerous users and photographers have reported instances of the label being incorrectly applied to photos that were not created using AI tools.
The controversy surrounding Meta’s labeling approach has gained significant attention, with several high-profile cases coming to light. One notable example involves a photo of the Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League Cricket tournament, which was erroneously tagged as AI-generated. Interestingly, the label is only visible on mobile apps and not on the web version of Meta’s platforms, adding another layer of complexity to the issue.
Photographers have been particularly vocal about their concerns, arguing that simple editing techniques should not warrant the “Made with AI” label. Former White House photographer Pete Souza found himself at the center of this debate when one of his photos was tagged with the AI label. In an email to TechCrunch, Souza explained that a change in Adobe’s cropping tool, which now requires users to “flatten the image” before saving it as a JPEG, may have triggered Meta’s algorithm to attach the label.
Souza expressed his frustration, stating, “What’s annoying is that the post forced me to include the ‘Made with AI’ even though I unchecked it.” This sentiment is echoed by many other photographers who feel their work is being misrepresented by the labeling system.
Meta has been relatively tight-lipped about the specifics of their labeling process. In a February blog post, the company mentioned that it utilizes image metadata to detect and apply the label. Meta claimed to be developing “industry-leading tools that can identify invisible markers at scale,” specifically referencing the “AI generated” information in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards.
Quote:Google has announced the expansion of its woke Gemini AI technology to teen students using school accounts, alongside the introduction of new tools for educators. The leftist tech giant is extending its AI plans to reach teens and children whose education often includes a Google account.
TechCrunch reports that Google’s decision to bring Gemini to teen students through their school accounts marks a major step in the tech giant’s efforts to prepare the next generation for an AI-driven future. This expansion follows the earlier rollout of Gemini to teens using personal accounts, signaling Google’s attempts to make AI technology more accessible to younger users in educational settings.
The company’s rationale behind this move is clear: to equip students with the necessary skills to navigate a world where generative AI is increasingly prevalent. Google believes that exposure to Gemini will enable students to learn more confidently, benefiting from real-time feedback and enhanced learning experiences.
The company has emphasized its commitment to responsible AI implementation in educational environments. One of the key assurances provided is that data from student interactions with Gemini will not be used to train or improve Google’s AI models. This commitment addresses potential privacy concerns that often arise when introducing new technologies in educational settings.
Sure. As if that AI monster had never created black founding fathers that never existed or even fake popes.
Now they wants to believe they won't take advantage of their future AI monopoly. Right...
Quote:Google has also implemented several safeguards to ensure the appropriate use of Gemini by teen students. These include built-in guardrails to prevent inappropriate responses, particularly those related to illegal or age-restricted content. In an effort to promote critical thinking and information literacy, Google is actively encouraging teens to utilize the double-check feature within Gemini.
The rollout of Gemini to school accounts will be available in English across more than 100 countries. It’s important to note that the feature will be turned off by default for teen users, giving educational administrators the control to activate it as they see fit. This approach allows for a measured and controlled introduction of the technology in school environments.
Google is also enhancing its suite of tools for educators. New features include improved capabilities for creating, managing, and sharing interactive lessons. Additionally, teachers will now have the ability to manually mark assignments as missing or complete and perform bulk scoring actions, streamlining administrative tasks and allowing more time for actual teaching.
Google’s Gemini AI made big news earlier this year when the ultra-woke artificial intelligence ran amok rewriting history. Illustrating AI’s threat to students, Google’s system generated everything from black founding fathers to female indian popes.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Intuit, the financial software giant behind QuickBooks and TurboTax, has revealed plans to lay off approximately 1,800 employees worldwide, representing 10 percent of its workforce, as part of a strategic shift towards AI and other priority areas.
Fortune reports that Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi has announced a significant restructuring of the company’s workforce, affecting 1,800 employees globally. This decision, communicated through an internal email obtained by Fortune, is part of Intuit’s broader transformation strategy aimed at increasing investments in generative AI technologies.
Goodarzi emphasized that these layoffs are not cost-cutting measures but rather a strategic realignment of the company’s resources. “We do not do layoffs to cut costs, and that remains true in this case,” he stated in the email. The CEO outlined plans to hire approximately 1,800 new employees with specific skill sets in engineering, product development, and customer-facing roles, maintaining that the overall headcount is expected to grow in the 2025 fiscal year.
The restructuring appears to be driven by Intuit’s ambition to reimagine its products from traditional workflows to AI-native experiences. A key focus of this transformation is the development of Intuit Assist, a generative AI-powered financial assistant. The company is also prioritizing money movement, mid-market expansion for small businesses, and international growth.
The restructuring also involves geographical consolidation, with Intuit closing two sites in Edmonton and Boise, affecting over 250 employees. Some of these employees will be relocated to other Intuit sites, while others will leave the company. Intuit is consolidating 80 tech roles to growing technology hubs in Atlanta, Bangalore, New York, Tel Aviv, and Toronto. Furthermore, more than 300 roles across the company are being eliminated to “streamline work and reallocate resources toward key growth areas,” according to Goodarzi’s email.
Intuit has committed to providing generous severance packages for departing employees. U.S. employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks of pay, plus two additional weeks for every year of service. They will have 60 days before leaving the company, with a last day of September 9. Similar support will be provided to employees outside the U.S., taking into account local requirements. The company has described this as the most generous severance package it has ever offered.
AI Safety Agency & the Government-Big Tech Collusion
Quote:A Senate Commerce Committee document exposes how the head of an AI safety agency at the Commerce Department could stifle competition, consolidate AI developments in the hands of a few big tech companies, and facilitate “government-Big Tech collusion seen during the pandemic and the 2020 election,” Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
The document, which was obtained by Breitbart News, details that in response to Biden’s October 2023 executive order on AI, Commerce Committee Secretary Gina Raimondo created the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to establish AI safety standards and guidance for the private sector and government agencies.
In April 2024, Raimondo announced that Paul Christiano would head the AI Safety Institute (AISI), and NIST employees threatened to resign over Christiano’s appointment because they feared his association with Effective Altruism and longtermism could “compromise” the institute’s objectivity and integrity.
Venture Beat reported in March 2024 that Christiano’s hiring was reportedly rushed through the hiring process without anyone knowing until he was chosen as the head of the agency.
Disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist, whose fraud and conspiracy led to the collapse of his digital currency exchange and $11 billion in estimated lost funds.
Venture Beat described effective altruism as:
… an “intellectual project using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible” — has turned into a cult-like group of highly influential and wealthy adherents (made famous by FTX founder and jailbird Sam Bankman-Fried) whose paramount concern revolves around preventing a future AI catastrophe from destroying humanity. Critics of the EA focus on this existential risk, or “x-risk,” say it is happening to the detriment of a necessary focus on current, measurable AI risks — including bias, misinformation, high-risk applications and traditional cybersecurity.
The Senate Commerce Committee document also detailed how Christiano also believes that AI could result in a “10-20 percent chance of [an] AI takeover” that results in humanity perishing, and a “50-50 chance of doom shortly after you have AI systems that are human level.”
Quote:Peloton, the once-booming exercise equipment company, is facing a lawsuit that claims it illegally sold customer data for use in training AI systems. The company is sweating its legal trouble as a California judge has denied its attempt to dismiss the lawsuit.
The Register reports that the fitness technology giant Peloton is facing a significant legal challenge after a California judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the company of violating state privacy laws. The case, filed in June 2022 in California federal court, alleges that Peloton allowed a third-party company, Drift, to intercept and record chat conversations between Peloton representatives and customers without obtaining proper consent.
At the heart of the lawsuit is the claim that Peloton’s use of Drift’s software violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). According to the complaint, web chats between Peloton and its customers were first routed through Drift’s systems, which then used these conversations to improve its own AI systems. The plaintiff argues that this practice constitutes a breach of privacy, as Peloton “did not obtain visitors’ consent to either the wiretapping or sharing of their private conversations.”
This recent denial marks Peloton’s second unsuccessful attempt to have the case dismissed. In March 2023, the judge dismissed the original complaint for failure to state a claim. However, the plaintiff’s lawyers filed an amended complaint with a narrower scope, focusing specifically on one violation of CIPA – “aiding and abetting” Drift’s alleged violations of the law.
The crux of the plaintiff’s argument is that Peloton aided and abetted Drift because the latter used the intercepted communications to enhance its own software-as-a-service and machine learning capabilities. Under CIPA, this usage classifies Drift as an eavesdropper rather than a party to the conversation, as the harvested content was not solely used for Peloton’s benefit.
It’s worth noting that Drift, while mentioned in the lawsuit, is not a party to the complaint. The company, which was acquired by sales software firm Salesloft in February 2023, has not responded to inquiries about the case.
Quote:Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman have announced their collaboration on a new AI-driven health startup, Thrive AI Health, aimed at revolutionizing personalized healthcare and wellness — at the potential cost of your privacy.
Decrypt reports that the announcement of Thrive AI Health, made through an op-ed published in Time magazine on Monday, marks a creepy new advancement of AI into the health and wellness sector. This initiative comes at a time when AI is increasingly being recognized for its potential to transform various aspects of healthcare, from early disease detection to personalized treatment plans — but also presents dangers to patient privacy.
Huffington, known for co-founding the Huffington Post and later launching Thrive Global, has been at the forefront of leveraging technology for improving health and productivity outcomes. “AI has become central to [our] mission to improve health and productivity outcomes, and I’m incredibly passionate about the opportunity to leverage AI to deliver hyper-personalized behavior change,” Huffington stated on Twitter.
The new startup, Thrive AI Health, is a joint effort between Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund. It aims to create an AI-powered health coach that will be integrated into Thrive Global’s existing platform and mobile app. This AI coach is designed to offer personalized recommendations and real-time nudges to users, focusing on five key behaviors: sleep, nutrition, physical activity, stress reduction, and overall well-being.
At the helm of Thrive AI Health will be DeCarlos Love, who brings extensive experience from his previous roles at tech giants Google and Apple, where he worked on AI, sensors, and health and fitness wearables. This appointment signals the startup’s intention to blend cutting-edge technology with health expertise.
The core technology behind Thrive AI Health leverages generative AI to create highly personalized behavior change strategies. As described by Altman and Huffington in their op-ed, “It will learn your preferences and patterns across the five behaviors: what conditions allow you to get quality sleep; which foods you love and don’t love; how and when you’re most likely to walk, move, and stretch; and the most effective ways you can reduce stress.” This level of personalization, combined with the AI’s ability to retain long-term memory, promises to create a comprehensive and tailored health coaching experience.
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Quote:Artificial intelligence (AI) is resurrecting Hollywood stars — including Judy Garland, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds — with the approval of the late actors’ estates.
The AI voice-cloning software company ElevenLabs is creating AI-generated voices of deceased actors to read audiobooks for its recently launched Reader app, according to a report by CNN.
Garland’s AI-generated voice, for example, will reportedly read an audiobook of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
“We deeply respect their legacy and are honored to have their voices as part of our platform,” ElevenLabs’ Dustin Blank said. “Adding them to our growing list of narrators marks a major step forward in our mission of making content accessible in any language and voice.”
ElevenLabs said it made deals with the late celebrities’ estates.
Notably, the company made headlines earlier this year when it was reported that its AI technology was used to create a fake robocall from President Joe Biden urging New Hampshire residents not to vote in the state’s Democrat presidential primary.
Northern Illinois University David Gunkel professor, who tracks AI in media and entertainment, said, “ElevenLabs’ new partnerships are all well within the realm of what the law allows.”
“An estate will get a considerable amount of money from licensing and agreements,” Gunkel added. “It’s not unlike a company negotiating a copyright deal to use a popular song by Queen in an ad. The record company also could in theory say no, no matter how much money they’re offered.”
This is not the first time an individual’s voice is being trained by AI — a practice that has become an ever-increasingly powerful tool, raising eyebrows of people concerned with how far the technology will go.
As Breitbart News reported last week, an AI version of sports commentator Al Michaels will deliver “personalized” recaps to Peacock subscribers during the 2024 Olympics.
In December, it was reported that a voice clone of the late legendary Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart, who was known for his distinctive drawl, can now put users of the subscription-based wellness app Calm to sleep.
Quote:Universities reportedly fail to catch answers generated by OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot ChatGPT in exams, which typically result in students obtaining higher scores than their peers who turn in real work.
A staggering 94 percent of university exam submissions — for a psychology degree — created via ChatGPT go undetected as having been AI-generated, according to a report by New Scientist.
University of Reading professor Peter Scarfe and his colleagues conducted an experiment by using ChatGPT to create answers to 63 test questions in the school’s psychology department, then submitted the AI-generated answers as 33 fake students turning in exams that students were allowed to take at home.
The individuals grading the exams were not informed that among real students existed 33 fake students handing in AI-generated work. As a result, Scarfe and his colleagues found that a mere six percent of AI-generated submissions were successfully flagged.
“On average, the AI responses gained higher grades than our real student submissions,” Scarfe said. “Current AI tends to struggle with more abstract reasoning and integration into information.”
Moreover, it was found that AI-generated answers had an 83.4 percent chance at scoring higher than students who turned in real work.
The researchers insist that the experiment they conducted is the largest and most vigorous study of its kind to date.
While the study only checked work involving the University of Reading’s psychology degree, Scarfe says the results are concerning for academics as a whole.
“I have no reason to think that other subject areas wouldn’t have just the same kind of issue,” the professor said.
Imperial College London senior teaching fellow Thomas Lancaster said, “The results show exactly what I’d expect to see. We know that generative AI can produce reasonable sounding responses to simple, constrained textual questions.”
Lancaster also pointed out that unsupervised exams have always been susceptible to cheating.
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Quote:Telecommunications giant AT&T says cybercriminals have stolen phone records belonging to “nearly all” of its customers. The compromised data includes millions of phone numbers, calling and text records, and information revealing its customers’ locations.
AT&T said it will begin contacting around 110 million of its customers to notify them of a data breach that resulted in cybercriminals obtaining their phone records, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch on Friday.
The spokesperson added that AT&T customer records were stolen from the cloud data giant Snowflake, which reportedly blamed recent data thefts on its customers for not using multi-factor authentication to secure their accounts.
AT&T also announced “unlawful access of customer data” on its website.
“Our investigation found that the downloaded data included phone call and text message records of nearly all of AT&T cellular customers from May 1, 2022 to October 31, 2022 as well as on January 2, 2023,” the company said.
While “the access point has been secured,” the stolen data includes AT&T landline (home phone) customers, as well as customers of other cell carriers that rely on AT&T’s network or have interacted with AT&T wireless numbers, AT&T added.
Stolen records also included counts of those calls or texts and total call durations for specific days or months, as well as information that can be used to determine the approximate location of where a call was made or text message sent during the six-month period.
“We do not believe the data is publicly available,” AT&T said.
The stolen data does not include the content of any calls or texts, nor the time stamps for the calls or texts, the company added. It also does not include any details involving Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information.
AT&T said it is working with law enforcement in their efforts to arrest the cybercriminals involved in the breach, and that “at least one person has been apprehended.”
Quote:Apple has once again sounded the alarm for iPhone users worldwide, issuing threat notifications about possible mercenary spyware attacks targeting individuals across 98 countries.
TechCrunch reports that tech giant Apple has launched its second major alert campaign of the year, warning iPhone users of potential mercenary spyware attacks. This latest round of notifications, sent out on Wednesday, reaches users in 98 countries, surpassing the scope of a similar campaign in April that targeted 92 nations.
Since 2021, Apple has consistently alerted users to potential threats, reaching individuals in over 150 countries. These notifications serve as a crucial line of defense against sophisticated cyber attacks that often target specific individuals due to their profession or personal circumstances.
The warning message sent to affected users is both clear and urgent: “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID.” The company emphasizes the seriousness of the threat, stating, “This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it’s never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning — please take it seriously.”
While Apple has not disclosed the identities of the attackers or specified which countries were targeted in this latest campaign, reports indicate that users in India are among those who received the warnings. This comes in the wake of similar notifications sent to Indian journalists and politicians in October, highlighting the global nature of these cyber threats.
The involvement of highly sophisticated spyware like Pegasus, developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, adds another layer of complexity to the situation. Amnesty International, a prominent human rights advocacy group, recently reported finding Pegasus on the iPhones of several well-known Indian journalists, demonstrating the real-world impact of these cyber attacks.
Quote:A new report from blockchain research firm TRM Labs has unveiled a startling increase in cryptocurrency theft, with hackers more than doubling their illicit gains in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period last year. Crypto crooks have stolen an astounding $1.38 billion so far this year.
CNBC reports that the cryptocurrency world has been rocked by a dramatic surge in successful hacking attempts, according to a recent report from TRM Labs. The blockchain research firm’s findings reveal that between January 1 and June 24, 2024, cybercriminals managed to pilfer a staggering $1.38 billion worth of digital assets. This figure represents more than twice the amount stolen during the same timeframe in 2023, which stood at $657 million.
The report highlights a concerning trend in the crypto space, where a small number of large-scale attacks are responsible for the lion’s share of stolen funds. In fact, the top five hacks alone accounted for a whopping 70 percent of the total amount stolen in the first half of this year. This concentration of high-value thefts underscores the sophisticated nature of these cyber attacks and the potential vulnerabilities in even well-established cryptocurrency platforms.
Among the primary attack vectors identified in 2024 are compromises of private keys and seed phrases. A seed phrase, which consists of a sequence of random words, stores crucial information needed to access or recover a crypto wallet. The largest single heist of the year so far targeted the Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin, resulting in the theft of more than $300 million worth of bitcoin.
Hackers have employed various techniques to carry out these attacks, including the use of stolen private keys and a method known as “address poisoning.” This latter tactic involves attackers sending small amounts of cryptocurrency from wallets with addresses crafted to closely resemble those of intended recipients, tricking victims into sending funds to the wrong wallet. The complexity and length of crypto addresses make them particularly susceptible to such deception.
Interestingly, TRM Labs notes that there haven’t been significant changes in the overall security landscape of the crypto ecosystem that could explain the sharp increase in stolen funds. The number of attacks and the types of attack vectors remain relatively consistent with previous years. However, the firm points out that the higher average prices of cryptocurrencies in the first half of 2024 may have contributed to the increased value of stolen assets.
Social Media
Meta Allows Donald Trump to Go Back to Facebook & Instagram
Quote:Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has announced it will remove restrictions on former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
On Friday, Meta said it will soon withdraw the restrictions it placed on Trump’s accounts, claiming the company has decided to do so because it wants to treat both presidential candidates equally ahead of the 2024 election, according to a report by Axios.
Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said, “In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for president on the same basis.”
While Trump’s previously banned Meta accounts were reinstated in January 2023, the 45th president has still, nonetheless, been subjected to stricter rules placed onto his Facebook and Instagram profiles.
The social media giant designed these unique rules specifically for the purpose of limiting a public figure’s accounts “during civil unrest,” Axios reported, noting that Trump is the only public figure Meta has placed these types of restrictions on so far.
Clegg reportedly noted “these penalties were a response to extreme and extraordinary circumstances.”
Quote:X/Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed the European Union attempted to blackmail him into permitting secret censorship at the behest of Brussels, and accused other social platforms of taking such deals.
The European Union moved to make its new Digital Services Act (DSA) felt on Friday, accusing Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) of breaching these European Union rules, and threatening fines. Musk hit back immediately, saying the DSA itself was the source of “misinformation” and alleging the European Union had tried to broker a secret deal with him to achieve EU-directed censorship.
He wrote in his claim: “The European Commission offered [X] an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.” Musk asserted “The other platforms accepted that deal” but that he did not.
Musk said, further: “We look forward to a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth.”
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Brexit leader Nigel Farage — who long railed against closed-door European Union deal making and obscure practices in his successful campaign to get Britain out of the bloc and away from the influence of Brussels — responded to Musk’s allegation on Friday evening, stating approvingly: “Elon Musk reveals the truth about the EU. What a guy.”
As stated by Reuters today, the European Union has accused X of being insufficiently transparent, and notes the rules require social media platforms to tackle “illegal content” and “risks to public security”. The European Union has also said it is dissatisfied with X’s blue check system, saying it does not “correspond to industry practice”.
Per the report, if X/Musk refuses to bow to the European Union’s demands, the bloc could attempt to fine the company six per cent of its global turnover and “require significant changes” of the way the company is run. Twitter could be banned from operating in Europe at all, theoretically.
As reported last year on the launch of the DSA:
Under the European Union’s recently adopted Digital Services Act (DSA), which the bloc has described as providing “an unprecedented level of public oversight” on the internet, the European Commission will place at least 19 online platforms under its strictest level of censorship by August 25th.
Announcing the measure, European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said: “With great scale comes great responsibility,” adding: “They will not be able to act as if they are too big to care.”
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The driving force behind the legislation, Thierry Breton, a former French tech executive, has previously warned new Twitter boss Elon Musk that the microblogging site could run the risk of being banned in the European Union should it restore the free speech roots of the company.
Although the bill claims to try to protect free speech, Breton himself has backed Big Tech taking censorship into their own hands, seemingly expressing support for Twitter’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump in 2021, saying that tech companies “have recognised their responsibility, duty and means to prevent the spread of illegal viral content”.
Quote:X (formerly Twitter) and its owner Elon Musk have successfully petitioned a California court to dismiss a $500 million unpaid severance lawsuit, marking a temporary victory in the embattled company’s ongoing legal challenges.
Mashable reports that a California district court judge has dismissed a class action lawsuit against X and Elon Musk, which alleged unpaid severance to approximately 6,000 former employees. The court’s decision hinged on the determination that X’s severance plan was not governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), effectively nullifying the plaintiffs’ primary argument.
The lawsuit, initially filed in July 2022, came in the wake of Musk’s mass layoffs following his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. These layoffs resulted in a staggering 70 percent reduction in the company’s workforce. The plaintiffs claimed that laid-off employees were offered only a single month of severance pay, falling short of the benefits outlined in the company’s pre-existing severance plan.
The complaint alleged that Musk’s actions violated the merger agreement, which stated that employees would receive severance and benefits “no less favorable than” those offered immediately prior to his takeover. Specifically, the plaintiffs accused X and Musk of violating ERISA through denial of benefits, breach of fiduciary duty, and failure to provide complete and accurate information about the severance plan.
However, X and Musk’s legal team successfully argued that the company’s severance plan did not fall under ERISA jurisdiction. The court agreed, finding that X’s plan lacked an “ongoing administrative program” for determining severance claims and benefits, which is a key requirement for ERISA governance. Instead, X’s plan relied on set formulas and mathematical calculations rather than case-by-case discretionary analysis.
It’s important to note that while this ruling represents a significant victory for X and Musk, it does not necessarily absolve them of potential legal obligations regarding severance pay. The judge explicitly stated that the plaintiffs could amend and refile their complaint with alternative claims, such as breach of contract or promissory estoppel. This leaves the door open for further legal action, albeit under different legal frameworks.
Quote:A recent study conducted by the FTC and international consumer protection networks has uncovered alarming statistics on the prevalence of “dark patterns” in subscription-based websites and apps. Dark Patterns are a collection of manipulative design techniques created by Silicon Valley to make it difficult to separate yourself from subscription services.
TechCrunch reports that in an era where digital subscriptions have become increasingly common, consumers are facing a hidden threat: manipulative design techniques known as “dark patterns.” A comprehensive study released on Thursday by the FTC in collaboration with two international consumer protection networks, has shed light on the pervasive use of these deceptive practices in the digital subscription industry.
The study, which analyzed 642 websites and apps offering subscription services, revealed that an overwhelming majority – nearly 76 percent – employed at least one dark pattern. More alarmingly, almost 67 percent of the examined platforms utilized multiple dark patterns, raising serious concerns about consumer protection in the digital marketplace.
Dark patterns are subtle design elements intentionally implemented to influence user behavior, often leading consumers to make decisions they might not have made otherwise. These manipulative techniques can range from making it difficult to cancel subscriptions to pushing users towards more expensive options through visual trickery.
One of the most prevalent dark patterns identified in the study was “sneaking,” a tactic used by 81 percent of the analyzed platforms. This technique involves the inability to disable automatic subscription renewals during the initial sign-up or purchase process. Furthermore, 70 percent of the examined services failed to provide clear information on how to cancel subscriptions, while 67 percent neglected to specify the deadline for cancellation to avoid additional charges.
Another common dark pattern uncovered in the study was “obstruction,” which involves making certain actions, such as canceling a subscription or bypassing a free trial offer, unnecessarily complicated or tedious for users. This tactic often manifests in the form of hidden or grayed-out options, making it challenging for consumers to opt out of services they no longer wish to use.
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Quote:Elon Musk’s SpaceX has come under scrutiny for its expanding operations in Boca Chica, Texas, as the company’s initial promises of maintaining a “small, eco-friendly” footprint clash with the reality on the ground.
The Houston Chronicle reports that SpaceX’s ambitious plans to send humans to Mars have transformed parts of South Texas into what some are calling a “sacrifice zone” for the company’s space exploration goals. A recent report by the New York Times has shed light on the discrepancies between SpaceX’s initial proposals and the actual impact of its operations in Boca Chica.
When SpaceX first established its presence in the area, the company presented a vision of a smaller-scale operation that would coexist harmoniously with the surrounding environment. They assured local officials and residents that the area would remain largely untouched, preserving “an excellent wildlife habitat” nearby. However, Mark Spier, who served as the top local official for the National Park Service during SpaceX’s expansion, revealed a different story.
“They kept saying, ‘No, we are not going to do that, we are not going to do that,’ and then they came back and said, ‘Yes, we are,’” Spier told the Times, adding that his office being “misled.”
One of the main points of contention is the environmental impact study conducted by the FAA. The study was based on Musk’s original proposal to use Falcon rockets, not the significantly larger Starship. Instead of conducting a new assessment for the Starship project, the FAA opted to modify the existing one. This decision has raised concerns among environmental advocates and local residents.
The FAA’s approach to assessing the environmental impact has also been questioned. The agency decided to consider only the launchpad operations and control center, excluding the rocket factory from its evaluation. This decision was met with objections from Fish and Wildlife officials, who argued that the entire SpaceX complex should be taken into account.
Quote:Far-left climate change activists doused a Tesla Cybertruck electric vehicle exhibit in Germany on Saturday in a protest against “how the super-rich deal with global warming”.
In a further demonstration of dubious standards by green agenda radicals, members of the Letzte Generation (Last Generation) youth climate militant collective covered a Cybertruck in orange paint in Hamburg.
“The SUV has been touring Germany as an exhibit and symbolizes how the super-rich deal with global warming: armoured in a luxury vehicle, off to climate hell,” the group wrote on X, owned by Telsa chief Elon Musk.
Protester Hendrik Fauer added: “The truck perfectly illustrates where the anti-social policies of the last decades have led us: A few rich people drive well-armoured into the catastrophe – and take everyone with them.”
The Last Generation also accused Tesla founder Elon Musk of “endangering the health of thousands of people in other ways” citing the supposed dangers posed by Tesla’s Giga Factory in Grünheide.
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Quote:A routine car fire call in Upper Allen, Pennsylvania, turned into a complex firefighting operation when crews discovered the blaze involved a Tesla at an electric vehicle charging station. A massive response from multiple fire departments including a hazmat team was required to safely extinguish the blaze.
CBS 21 reports that on Monday evening, the Upper Allen Fire Department responded to what was initially reported as a standard car fire at a local Sheetz convenience store. However, upon arrival, firefighters quickly realized they were dealing with a more challenging situation: a Tesla electric vehicle engulfed in flames at a charging station.
[Local Fox News Station Post on X]
Unlike conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, EVs contain large lithium-ion battery packs that can reignite even after the initial fire appears to be extinguished. This characteristic requires firefighters to adopt specialized tactics and often prolongs the time needed to fully secure the scene.
The Upper Allen Fire Department and crews from nearby departments immediately began battling the flames upon arrival. Their initial efforts focused on controlling the visible fire, but the real challenge came after the main blaze was subdued. Firefighters then had to address the car’s battery, which posed an ongoing risk of reignition. To mitigate this danger, they employed specialized techniques to cool and douse the battery pack.
As celebrity car enthusiast Jeremy Clarkson explained in 2023, one thing that makes EV fires so dangerous is the “thermal runaway” that occurs within lithium-ion batteries:
Clarkson also pointed out the difficulty in extinguishing fires in electric vehicles, citing an incident where an electric car burned for days due to a phenomenon known as “thermal runaway” in the battery pack.
“The electrical car that Richard Hammond rolled down a hill while filming for the Grand Tour burned for days. And then, after the fire had died down, something in the battery pack called ‘thermal runaway’ caused it to rear back up again. And this went on for weeks,” Clarkson explained.
Multiple agencies responded to assist the Upper Allen Fire Department, bringing additional equipment and expertise to the scene. This collaborative effort underscores the importance of inter-agency cooperation and specialized training in dealing with emerging technologies in firefighting.
Quote:As Chinese companies test their autonomous vehicles on American roads, concerns are growing about the vast amounts of data these “rolling surveillance devices” are collecting and the potential national security implications.
Fortune reports that in recent years, Chinese-owned companies have been quietly testing their self-driving cars on American roads, particularly in California. While this may seem like a harmless part of technological advancement, experts are raising alarms about the potential national security risks associated with these vehicles.
Since 2017, self-driving cars owned by Chinese companies have traversed 1.8 million miles in California alone, according to data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. These vehicles, equipped with advanced cameras, sensors, and mapping technology, are capable of collecting massive amounts of data about their surroundings, including detailed video footage and precise geospatial information.
Among the 35 companies approved to test autonomous vehicles in California, seven are wholly or partly China-based. Five of these companies — WeRide, Apollo, AutoX, Pony.ai, and DiDi Research America — were active on California roads last year. Some of these companies also have permission to test in other states like Arizona and Texas.
The concern lies not just in the amount of data collected, but also in how it’s stored and potentially accessed. Some Chinese self-driving car companies appear to store U.S. data in China, according to privacy policies reviewed by Fortune. This situation effectively leaves the data accessible to the Chinese government, experts warn.
Craig Singleton, director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described the current situation as “literally the wild, wild west,” highlighting the lack of oversight and regulation in this area. The potential uses of this data range from mass surveillance to detailed mapping that could aid in war planning.
Despite these concerns, there is a surprising lack of scrutiny and regulation surrounding these Chinese-owned self-driving cars. State and federal agencies overseeing the testing of autonomous vehicles acknowledge that they do not currently monitor or have any process for checking what data these vehicles are collecting or how it’s being used.
This regulatory gap is particularly striking given the U.S. government’s stance on other Chinese-owned tech companies like TikTok and Huawei, which have faced intense scrutiny and potential bans due to similar data security concerns.
The data collected by these vehicles could provide valuable intelligence on infrastructure, population movements, and even individual behaviors. In the wrong hands, this information could be used for everything from targeted disinformation campaigns to more sinister purposes like assassination planning, according to some experts.
Adding to the concern is the stark contrast between how China and the U.S. handle such technologies. While Chinese companies are freely testing their autonomous vehicles in the U.S., American companies are not allowed to conduct similar tests in China without partnering with a licensed Chinese company.
Quote:The Biden Energy Department on Thursday announced nearly $2 billion will be released to save at-risk or shuttered plants if they convert to electric vehicles across swing states such as Michigan or Pennsylvania.
The Biden administration is using $2 billion that came from the Inflation Reduction Act, which is commonly referred to as a climate change bill, as it attempts to combine manufacturing and climate change policies.
The funds will be used to help with conversions and retooling projects across eight states to make electric vehicles and other related parts.
“This announcement is a hallmark of the Biden administration’s industrial strategy, which is a strategy to bring manufacturing and jobs back to America after years of offshoring,” Jennifer Granholm told reporters on Thursday.
However, some of the 11 facilities that will receive funding are in swing states as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Virginia. General Motors, Stellantis, Volvo, Harley-Davidson, and suppliers such as American Auto Parts will receive the funding, and Biden officials said it would ensure over 15,000 union workers keep their jobs, and create approximately 3,000 jobs.
Granholm said it would help enable over one million “electrified” light-duty vehicles annually, which includes hybrid and electric vehicles.
Quote:Boeing has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges related to the fatal 737 Max crashes, a move that will brand the aerospace giant as a felon but allow it to avoid a trial. The company is likely to face of fine of $243 million — a drop in the bucket compared to its $78 billion in annual revenue, which a victims’ lawyer calls a “sweetheart deal.”
CNBC reports that aerospace giant Boeing has reached an agreement with the Justice Department to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges stemming from the fatal 737 Max crashes. This plea deal, unveiled late Sunday, comes as Boeing attempts to move past its safety and manufacturing crises. The agreement, which is subject to approval by a federal judge, outlines several key provisions that will significantly impact the company’s operations and reputation.
Under the terms of the deal, Boeing faces a potential fine of up to $487.2 million. However, the Justice Department has recommended that the court credit Boeing $243.6 million, which the company had previously paid under a 2021 settlement. This adjustment would effectively reduce the new fine to $243.6 million. The plea agreement also stipulates that Boeing must invest at least $455 million in compliance and safety programs, highlighting the government’s emphasis on preventing future safety lapses.
One of the most notable aspects of the deal is the installation of an independent compliance monitor who will oversee Boeing’s operations for three years during a probationary period. This measure is designed to ensure that the company adheres to strict safety and regulatory standards moving forward. Additionally, Boeing’s board of directors has agreed to meet with family members of the crash victims, a step towards acknowledging the human cost of the company’s failures.
The criminal fraud charges are related to Boeing’s misleading of regulators about the inclusion of a flight-control system on the 737 Max, which was implicated in two devastating crashes. These incidents – a Lion Air flight in October 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight in March 2019 – resulted in the deaths of 346 people. The plea deal comes after U.S. prosecutors stated in May that Boeing had violated a 2021 settlement, which had initially shielded the company from prosecution for three years.
Quote:Japan’s “digital minister,” Kono Taro, announced Wednesday that the Japanese government no longer uses floppy disks to store data.
Japan’s reliance on the outmoded technology has long been a major concern for allied cybersecurity experts.
“We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” Kono proclaimed on Wednesday, pointing to that date as the moment when the last regulations governing the use of floppy disks were eliminated and when the final disk drive stopped spinning for good.
Kono, now 61, is a former defense and foreign affairs minister who took charge of the Digital Ministry soon after it was created in 2021. Then-Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide established the agency after the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic greatly increased worldwide reliance on digital communications, forcing Japan to contend with how much of its bureaucracy was still rooted in an analog world.
Japan has a reputation as a tech pioneer and computer science powerhouse, but its government is actually very risk-averse and resistant to change. The bureaucracy was still using floppy disks because it felt they worked well enough for its needs. The system was not broken, so it refused to fix it.
Kono was such a perfect avatar for Japan’s digital transformation — a fusion of respectable maturity and childlike glee at the wonderful toys he gets to play with — that he might as well have been created in a laboratory.
As a matter of fact, a robot duplicate of him was built in a laboratory, and he merrily posed with it for selfies. Kono talked about sending his robot double to dreary budget meetings in his place. Later, he suggested Robo-Kono would be a great spokesdroid for the government’s national identification campaign because it would show people how easily they might be impersonated if they do not carry proper identification.
The ID card, known as the My Number Card, has run into a number of snags since then, but, in May 2024, it crossed an important hurdle when Apple agreed to integrate its functions into the iPhone.
Kono saw the War on Floppy Disks as one of his most important missions, in part because the government’s insistence on using the archaic technology was holding back Japanese private industry.
“There is no analog thing left in our remarkably advanced society. Oops, my fax machine is jamming!” he quipped on social media in August 2022, causing some irritation among fellow ministers who did not like being mocked for their reliance on old technology.
Corporate systems must interface with government systems, so Japan’s cutting-edge digital titans had to grit their teeth and keep using floppies — and fax machines, and reams of dead-tree paperwork, and even the hanko, a traditional carved stamp Japan has been using on important documents for centuries.
“Japan was quite good with analog technology, but when things moved to digital, we were too content with analog things, so we didn’t invest enough,” Kono observed in May 2023.
At that time, Japan had more than 9,000 government regulations requiring the use of outmoded technologies, including one that required certain forms to be submitted with an old-fashioned film-roll color photo of the person who filled them out.
Kono proudly announced on Wednesday that the last of those cobwebbed regulations had been wiped out. The last to fall was a vehicle recycling system that still mandated floppy disks until it was put out of its misery on June 28.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain.
Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage.
“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.”
The UK Cyber Security Center said they have noticed an increase in phishing attempts around this event.
Microsoft said 8.5 million devices running its Windows operating system were affected by the faulty cybersecurity update Friday that led to worldwide disruptions. That’s less than 1% of all Windows-based machines, Microsoft cybersecurity executive David Weston said in a blog post on Saturday.
He also said such a significant disturbance is rare but “demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem.”
What’s happening with air travel?
With their tightly timed, interwoven schedules and complex technology systems, many big airlines struggle to stay on time when everything goes well. It perhaps was not surprising that the industry was among the hardest hit by the outage, with crews and planes caught out of position.
By mid-afternoon Saturday on the U.S. East Coast, airlines around the world had canceled more than 2,000 flights, according to tracking service FlightAware. That was down from 5,100-plus cancellations on Friday.
About 1,600 of Saturday’s canceled flights occurred in the United States, where carriers scrambled to get planes and crews back into position after massive disruptions the day before. According to travel data provider Cirium, U.S. carriers canceled about 3.5% of their scheduled flights for Saturday. Only Australia was hit harder.
Canceled flights were running at about 1% in the United Kingdom, France and Brazil and about 2% in Canada, Italy and India among major air-travel markets.
Robert Mann, a former airline executive and now a consultant in the New York area, said it was unclear exactly why U.S. airlines were suffering disproportionate cancellations, but possible causes include a greater degree of outsourcing of technology and more exposure to Microsoft operating systems that received the faulty upgrade from CrowdStrike.
Which airlines are getting hit the hardest?
Delta Air Lines canceled more than 800 flights, or one-fourth of its schedule for Saturday, and that number did not include Delta Connection regional flights. It was followed by United Airlines, which dropped nearly 400 flights.
The worst airport to be, for a second straight day, was Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where Delta is the dominant carrier. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that thousands of people spent the night at the airport, many sleeping on the floors.
European airlines and airports appeared to be recovering slowly, although Lufthansa and its affiliates canceled dozens of flights. Its Eurowings budget subsidiary said check-in, boarding, booking and rebooking flights were all available again, although “isolated disruptions” were possible.
London’s Heathrow Airport said it was busy but operating normally on Saturday and that “all systems are back up and running.” Flights at Berlin’s main airport were departing on or close to schedule, German Press Agency dpa reported, citing an airport spokesman.
How are healthcare systems holding up?
Health care systems affected by the outage faced clinic closures, canceled surgeries and appointments and restricted access to patient records.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif., said “steady progress has been made” to bring its servers back online and thanked its patients for being flexible during the crisis.
“Our teams will be working actively through the weekend as we continue to resolve remaining issues in preparation for the start of the work week,” the hospital wrote in a statement.
In Austria, a leading organization of doctors said the outage exposed the vulnerability of relying on digital systems. Harald Mayer, vice president of the Austrian Chamber of Doctors, said the outage showed that hospitals need analog backups to protect patient care.
The organization also called on governments to impose high standards in patient data protection and security, and on health providers to train staff and put systems in place to manage crises.
“Happily, where there were problems, these were kept small and short-lived and many areas of care were unaffected” in Austria, Mayer said.
The Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital in northern Germany, which canceled all elective procedures Friday, said Saturday that systems were gradually being restored and that elective surgery could resume by Monday.
Quote:The Russian Digital Communications Ministry bragged on Friday that the worldwide information technology (IT) outage did not affect Russian airlines and banks, thanks to Russia’s countermeasures against Western sanctions.
“At the moment, the ministry has not received reports of system failures at Russian airports,” the ministry claimed.
“The situation with Microsoft once again shows the importance of import substitution of foreign software, primarily at critical information infrastructure facilities,” the ministry statement asserted.
This was a reference to Russia’s practice of replacing foreign imports with Russian-made alternatives after President Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 prompted a wave of Western sanctions. More sanctions were imposed after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, so the “import substitution” program grew more wide-reaching and more expensive.
Analysts outside the Russian government say import substitution has largely failed because Russia does not produce goods in the quantity and quality needed to make do without foreign products. Replacing food imports with heavily subsidized local agriculture, for example, wound up tripling food prices for Russian consumers.
Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies analyst Heli Simola calculated in June that production costs in several key industries have soared by up to 700 percent over the past two years as Russian manufacturers struggle to make do without foreign imports.
“Russia is especially dependent on technologically sophisticated imports. This makes import substitution even more difficult for the country, given its weak performance in most high-tech sectors and technological innovation development,” Simola noted.
If the claims of the Digital Communications Ministry are correct, Russia separating itself from the worldwide electronic ecosystem for Microsoft Windows might be the first real success for import substitution. On Friday, a faulty software update that cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike pushed out apparently caused thousands of computers worldwide to crash with the dreaded “blue screen of death.” Financial and transportation systems ground to a halt as a result and could take days to resume full operating capacity.
Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt captured the scope of the problem on Friday by calling it “the largest IT outage in history.”
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” he said.
Denis Kuskov, director-general of Russia’s TelecomDaily research agency, told the state-run Tass news service on Friday that Russian computers “will not be much affected by this outage because, in most cases, we no longer have a major connection to Microsoft.”
Kuskov and other Russian IT specialists said Russian computers running Windows tend to lag far behind the rest of the world in updates due to sanctions.
“Affected were airlines, railroads, logistics, warehouses, stores, stock exchanges. Everyone using Microsoft. Russia will not be affected because we have been making strenuous efforts to replace their cloud, their software for two years,” said Mobile Research Group analyst Eldar Murtazin.
Murtazin said Chinese computers would probably be unaffected by the global IT outage for similar reasons.
Let us read another report published days ago on Business Insider.
Quote:Emergency lines have gone down in several US states after a massive IT outage sparked chaos across the globe.
Major airlines, banks, and retailers are experiencing widespread disruptions after Microsoft reported problems with its online services, linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
The Alaska State Troopers service confirmed in a post on Facebook that 911 and non-emergency call services were down across the state due to the "nationwide" outage, with emergency services in New Hampshire and Ohio posting similar messages.
"Due to a nationwide technology-related outage, many 911 and non-emergency call centers are not working correctly across the State of Alaska," the police force wrote in a Facebook post.
It is unclear how widespread the outage is. Emergency services in other states also took to social media to warn of issues with 911 services.
The Office of Emergency Management for the city of Nashua, New Hampshire, posted on Facebook that "statewide 911 is down," while an X account for the Middletown Division of Police in Ohio wrote that they were experiencing a phone outage "that includes 911."
A spokesperson for the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates 911 communications, said the agency was aware of reports of 911 outages.
"The FCC is aware of reports of a systems outage that is causing disruptions in service, including 9-1-1. We're closely working with other federal agencies to provide assistance and determine the extent of these service disruptions," they said.
Business Insider did not receive a response to a request for comment from the Alaska State Troopers, the New Hampshire Office of Emergency Management, and the Ohio State Police, which were sent outside of working hours.
Details are still emerging about the scale of the global IT outage. The disruption has already impacted airlines, banks, and grocery stores worldwide.
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines are among the airlines that have issued ground stops for their aircraft due to communication issues.
Budget airline Frontier Airlines wrote on X on Thursday that its services were being impacted by a "major Microsoft technical outage."
Early Friday, it said that the ground stop had been lifted, its systems were "gradually normalizing," and it was in the process of resuming flight operations.
Quote:The FBI reportedly utilized advanced, unreleased technology from digital intelligence company Cellebrite to access the phone of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man identified as the shooter in the recent attack on former President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg reports that in the wake of the shooting incident at a rally in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, which left former President Donald Trump with a bullet wound to his ear and resulted in the death of a spectator as well as other injuries, the FBI faced a critical challenge in accessing the shooter’s phone. The device, identified as a newer Samsung model running Android’s operating system, proved resistant to the FBI’s initial attempts at data extraction using their existing Cellebrite software license.
The urgency of the situation reportedly prompted FBI agents to make a direct appeal to Cellebrite, an Israel-founded digital intelligence company that provides technology to various U.S. federal agencies. The FBI’s goal was to extract data from the device to help uncover the motives behind the attack carried out by Crooks, who was killed during the incident.
According to sources familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the local FBI bureau in Pittsburgh initially attempted to use their licensed Cellebrite software to identify or bypass the phone’s passcode. However, this attempt proved unsuccessful, necessitating further assistance from Cellebrite’s federal team.
In response to the FBI’s request, Cellebrite swiftly provided additional technical support and transferred new, unreleased software that was still in development to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. This rapid response underscores the critical nature of the investigation and the company’s ability to provide cutting-edge solutions in high-stakes situations.
The Washington Post, which first reported on the FBI’s use of Cellebrite technology in this case, revealed that once the FBI received the software update, it took approximately 40 minutes to unlock the phone. The specific method used to gain access to Crooks’ phone remains unclear, as Cellebrite’s software employs various techniques, including disabling built-in mechanisms that block repeated passcode attempts while simultaneously generating millions of codes.
Cellebrite, a Nasdaq-listed company, has reported that about a fifth of its public sector work is for federal customers. In the first quarter of 2024, the company announced annual recurring revenue of $89.6 million and claimed involvement in over 5 million cases. This incident highlights Cellebrite’s ongoing efforts to expand its business with US federal customers, as evidenced by a recent company statement.
While Cellebrite’s technology has proven invaluable in law enforcement investigations, it has not been without controversy. Privacy advocates have raised concerns about the ethical implications of such technology, arguing that it could be used for unethical hacking or by foreign governments against activists. In response to these concerns, Cellebrite reported to federal regulators in 2021 that it had ceased operations in certain locations, including China and Hong Kong, due to human rights concerns.
The company maintains that its software is used solely for unlocking seized phones in legally sanctioned cases and not for surveillance purposes. This stance reflects the ongoing debate surrounding the balance between law enforcement capabilities and individual privacy rights in the digital age.
And Elon Musk couldn't remain silent for a whole week:
Quote:Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and X/Twitter, has officially announced the relocation of both companies’ headquarters from California to Texas, citing concerns over California’s laws and urban safety issues.
Business Insider reports that on Tuesday, Elon Musk announced via X (formerly Twitter) that SpaceX would be relocating its headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to the SpaceX Starbase near Boca Chica Village, Texas. Musk attributed this decision to laws in California that he described as “attacking both families and companies.”
The specific legislation Musk referenced was a bill signed Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). This new law prohibits “forced disclosure” rules in public K-12 schools, effectively banning requirements for teachers to notify parents if a child changes their name, pronouns, or gender identity at school. California is the first state to outlaw such requirements, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Musk called this legislation “the last straw” and stated, “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.” He further claimed that families would have to “leave California to protect their children.”
In the same announcement, Musk revealed that X (formerly Twitter) would also be moving its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Texas. He justified this decision by stating he has “had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.” This move aligns with a recent report from the San Francisco Chronicle, which indicated that X was seeking to sublease all of its San Francisco headquarters.
These relocations follow a pattern established by Tesla, another of Musk’s companies, which moved its headquarters to Texas in 2021. Musk had also previously stated his intention to move SpaceX’s business incorporation from Delaware to Texas.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
News of the Cyber World
![[Image: SP1-Scripter.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-Scripter.png)
![[Image: SP1-Writer.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-Writer.png)
![[Image: SP1-Poet.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-Poet.png)
![[Image: SP1-PixelArtist.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-PixelArtist.png)
![[Image: SP1-Reporter.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/GmxWbHyL/SP1-Reporter.png)
As if that AI monster had never created black founding fathers that never existed or even fake popes.