Technology

Meta has a suggestion for folks who forgot to go outside and look at the Northern Lights on Thursday night: just use AI to fake it! But Threads users who replied to Meta’s idea, posted along with three AI-generated images of the Aurora Borealis Meta last night, seem to disagree.

According to recent user reports, uBlock Origin is quickly disappearing from the Chrome Web Store. The official page for the ad-blocking extension now states that it is unavailable because it doesn't comply with Chrome's "best practices" for add-ons. However, we can confirm that the page is still accessible from our EU Windows client.

The UK Government has begin a consultation into whether USB-C should be made a common charging standard.

The experiment involved participants utilizing specialized equipment including sensors and earbuds. On September 24, one participant sleeping at home induced lucid dreaming, a state in which you are aware that you are dreaming. It is apparently a trainable skill, although I have only ever personally experienced it a handful of times throughout my life.

Giving new meaning to 'sucking up dirt.'

Microsoft is busy rolling out the scheduled release of Windows 24H2, but some users have already encountered major compatibility and stability issues after installing the upgrade. In recent days, owners of NVMe SSDs from Western Digital have flooded the company's forums with reports of bugs and blue screen of death crashes.

The Wayback Machine is back online.

With the deal, Google joins Microsoft and Amazon in turning to nuclear power to satiate its thirst for electricity.

The FIDO Alliance has published a working draft of a new set of specifications for secure credential exchange that, when standardized and implemented by credential providers, will enable users to securely move passkeys and all other credentials across providers. The specifications are the result of commitment and collaboration amongst members of the FIDO Alliance’s Credential Provider Special Interest Group including representatives from: 1Password, Apple, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Enpass, Google, Microsoft, NordPass, Okta, Samsung and SK Telecom.

After years of research, scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a method to make sound waves travel in a single direction. The study was led by Professor Nicolas Noiray, who has spent much of his career studying and preventing potentially dangerous self-sustaining thermo-acoustic oscillations in aircraft engines, believed there was a way to harness similar phenomena for beneficial applications.

TikTok is reportedly ditching more of its human moderators to focus on AI-powered moderation instead.

Some companies let you opt out of allowing your content to be used for generative AI. Here’s how to take back (at least a little) control from ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and more.

Wikipedia has a new initiative called WikiProject AI Cleanup. It is a task force of volunteers currently combing through Wikipedia articles, editing or removing false information that appears to have been posted by people using generative AI.

Steam has begun displaying a new notice in its shopping cart, explicitly clarifying the nature of the transaction: "A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam." The change is Valve's way of complying with an incoming California law prohibiting digital marketplaces from implying that customers own the games, movies, ebooks, and other digital content they buy.

A US web-hosting company has been issued a notice by Hong Kong police asking it to take down the website of Flow HK, a media outlet co-founded by pro-democracy activists who have left the city, on national security grounds.

Automattic, the company behind web content management system WordPress, told HKFP on October 7 2024 that it had received a take-down demand from Hong Kong authorities relating to the website of Flow HK. The company said it had not complied with the order and had notified the site owner.

In an emailed reply to HKFP, Sunny Cheung — one of the co-founders of Flow HK — said Hong Kong police had said the outlet was suspected of violating a national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020 and a separate security law enacted in March, the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, known locally as Article 23.

Cheung said police suspected Flow HK of committing offences including secession, subversion, and collusion under the Beijing-imposed security law, as well as sedition under Article 23.

[...]

Flow HK was founded in early 2021. According to its mission written in Chinese on the website, the publication aims to connect the Hong Kong diaspora and “pass on the torch of resistance.”

Other editorial members include wanted activist Ray Wong, an ex-leader of political group Hong Kong Indigenous who was granted political asylum in Germany in 2018, as well as digital rights activist Glacier Kwong, who also lives in Germany.

The restricted items include microchips, and India is exceeded only by China.

The Wayback Machine will be back soon.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3693618

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3693467

Chinese social media giant Bytedance was dealt a stinging blow last September when Ireland’s data privacy watchdog issued it a record $370 million fine over its failure to properly safeguard the personal data of children using its app TikTok. New corporate filings suggest that Bytedance expects more fines like this to come. The company has explicitly set aside $1 billion to cover future fines from European privacy regulators.

Bytedance has faced a barrage of lawsuits and investigations from regulators around the world over TikTok’s addictive design, handling of user data and lack of safeguards for teenage users. Only yesterday, the attorneys general of thirteen states and the District of Columbia filed separate lawsuits claiming that TikTok was designed to be used compulsively and had harmed children and teens as a result.

The $1 billion provision for future fines was revealed in corporate accounts for TikTok’s European operations filed this week with the United Kingdom’s Companies House. The accounts also showed that TikTok’s European revenues surged to $4.57 billion last year, up from $2.6 billion in 2022. Its losses have also nearly tripled to $1.3 billion in 2023, up from $512 million.

[...]

The scale of total fines and penalties facing TikTok on the European continent could be even larger than the $1 billion provision in its 2023 accounts. The European Commission opened an investigation into TikTok under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in February 2024. The European Union can fine companies up to 6% of global revenue for breaches of the DSA, or impose a ban.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/18362688

Summary:

In the video, Mrwhosetheboss argues that Google Search has become worse. He believes that Google has prioritized sponsored links and shopping ads over organic search results. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the information you are looking for on Google. He also criticizes Google for its use of generative AI, which he believes is not accurate and could eventually replace the need to visit other websites.

Silicon Valley founders like Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale have been grappling with fully autonomous weapons.

All your content are belongs to us.. sorry what they mean is "We’re always experimenting with different ways to connect our users with high-quality and helpful information. "

Quite funny how all recipe posts have (frustratingly) a ton of content before you get to the recipe I assume to assist with ranking on their search and then Google just lifts the good stuff.

I wonder what the site gets as part of the agreement.

Though it consistently ranks among the world’s safest big cities, police in the Asian financial hub say the new cameras are needed to fight crime – and have raised the possibility of equipping them with powerful facial recognition and artificial intelligence tools.

That’s sparked alarm among some experts who see it as taking Hong Kong one step closer to the pervasive surveillance systems of mainland China, warning of the technology’s repressive potential.

Hong Kong police had previously set a target of installing 2,000 new surveillance cameras this year, and potentially more than that each subsequent year. The force plans to eventually introduce facial recognition to these cameras, security chief Chris Tang told local media in July – adding that police could use AI in the future to track down suspects.

[...]

Hong Kong police have repeatedly pointed to other jurisdictions, including Western democracies, that also make wide use of surveillance cameras for law enforcement. For instance, Singapore has 90,000 cameras and the United Kingdom has more than seven million, Tang told local newspaper Sing Tao Daily in June.

[...]

“The difference is how the technology is being used,” said Samantha Hoffman, a nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research who has studied China’s use of technology for security and propaganda.

Places like the United States and the UK may have problems with how they implement that technology, too – but “this is fundamentally different… It has to do specifically with the system of government, as well as the way that the party state… uses the law to maintain its own power,” said Hoffman.

[...]

Hong Kong has more than 54,500 public CCTV cameras used by government bodies – about seven cameras per 1,000 people, according to an estimate by Comparitech, a UK-based technology research firm.~~

Buchanan walks through his process of experimenting with low-cost fault-injection attacks as an alternative when typical software bugs aren't available to exploit.

A multi-year competition challenge to Facebook (aka Meta), which saw Germany’s antitrust authority become a pioneering champion for privacy rights in 2019 after it sought to block the social media giant’s ‘superprofiling’ of users on the grounds that consentless cross-site tracking of users is an “exploitative abuse” of Facebook’s monopoly position, finally concluded Thursday with Germany’s federal competition regulator, Bundeskartellamt, announcing the procedure’s end.

Microsoft's LinkedIn will update its User Agreement next month with a warning that it may show users generative AI content that's inaccurate or misleading.

LinkedIn thus takes after its parent, which recently revised its Service Agreement to make clear that its Assistive AI should not be relied upon.

LinkedIn, however, has taken its denial of responsibility a step further: it will hold users responsible for sharing any policy-violating misinformation created by its own AI tools.

The relevant passage, which takes effect on November 20, 2024.

In short, LinkedIn will provide features that can produce automated content, but that content may be inaccurate. Users are expected to review and correct false information before sharing said content, because LinkedIn won't be held responsible for any consequences.