SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Mozilla won't abandon Microsoft's tried and tested platform anytime soon:

The Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox will keep supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 until at least until 2024. Mozilla programmer Mike Kaply confirmed the decision through the Bugzilla platform, stating that the corporation "will not be ending support for Windows 7/Windows 8 before the release of the Firefox 115 ESR," and that the Firefox 115 ESR release will support the aged operating systems "at least until 3Q 2024."

Mike Kaply also hinted at the fact that Mozilla still has to decide exactly when support for Windows 7/8 will be finally removed. Firefox ESR is stable release of the open-source browser which Mozilla supports for an extended period of time compared to regular, "rapid" releases coming out every month. During its one-year support cycle, each Firefox ESR version only gets incremental updates containing security fixes with no new features or performance enhancements.

As stated by Firefox's official release calendar, Firefox 115 ESR should come out on July 4, 2023. The Firefox Public Data Report also reveals that Windows 7 still provides a sizable portion of the overall Firefox userbase (13.44%), while Windows 10 is the leading platform with 71% of users. The much-maligned Windows 8.1 is still used by 2.3% of Firefox installations.

[...] Windows 7 was already abandoned by Google Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers), which doesn't run on the OS anymore starting from Chrome 110. Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 in January 2023, and Valve will do the same with Steam on January 1, 2024.

Are you one of the 13.44%?

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

These read like a proof of concept for replacing human writers:

Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard.

"I think that there are two paths for AI in digital media," Peretti told CNN. "One path is the obvious path that a lot of people will do — but it's a depressing path — using the technology for cost savings and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles that are lower quality than what a journalist could do, but a tenth of the cost."

[...] Indeed, the first AI content BuzzFeed published — a series of quizzes that turned user input into customized responses — were an interesting experiment, avoiding many of the missteps that other publishers have made with the tech.

It doesn't seem like that commitment to quality has held up, though. This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti's multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid.

[...] A BuzzFeed spokesperson told us that the AI-generated pieces are part of an "experiment" the company is doing to see how well its AI writing assistance incorporates statements from non-writers.

The linked article includes many laughable examples of bland and similar phrases in multiple stories published on the site.

Previously: BuzzFeed Preps AI-Written Content While CNET Fumbles

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/ftc-chair-refused-musks-meeting-request-told-him-to-stop-delaying-investigation/

Twitter owner Elon Musk requested a meeting with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan late last year, but he was rebuffed and told to stop dragging his heels on providing documents and depositions needed for the FTC investigation into Twitter's privacy and data practices, a New York Times report said yesterday.

"In a Jan. 27 letter declining the meeting, Ms. Khan told a Twitter lawyer to focus on complying with investigators' demands for information before she would consider meeting with Mr. Musk," the NYT wrote.

Twitter has to comply with conditions in a May 2022 settlement in which it agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Last year's settlement was reached after the FTC said Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 settlement that prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.

Related:
FTC Fines Twitter $150M for Using 2FA Info for Targeted Advertising (20220527)
Twitter Faces FTC Probe, Likely Fine Over Use of Phone Numbers for Ads (20200804)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A620 chipset is missing features, but (mostly) not the important ones:

If you're trying to build a low-end to midrange gaming PC or workstation with inexpensive but modern parts, it has been hard to recommend AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors. That's partly because Intel's CPUs have offered more cores for similar money, but motherboards with AMD's socket AM5 have remained stubbornly expensive, and their lack of support for DDR4 memory means you'll pay more to get DDR5 RAM.

That may change somewhat thanks to the new entry-level AMD A620 chipset, which the company quietly announced last week. AMD says it should bring the prices of AM5-based motherboards down to around $85, not far north of what low-end Intel-based H610 and B660 motherboards cost, though they'll still require DDR5 (for the DDR5-6000 that AMD recommends for optimal Ryzen performance, the price premium is still not quite double what you'll pay for the same amount of DDR4-3200).

Compared to X670 and B650-based motherboards, A620 chipsets will have more limited connectivity. There's no PCI Express 5.0 support at all for either graphics cards or SSDs—not a huge blow since no GPUs and few SSDs support PCIe 5.0 at this point anyway, but a step back for future-proofing. The processor will still provide enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for a GPU and a single SSD, but the chipset only supports PCIe 3.0 speeds for additional SSDs. The chipset also supports fewer USB ports overall and no 20Gbps USB ports.

Perhaps more significantly, A620 chipsets don't support any kind of processor overclocking, nor do they support the Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) or Curve Optimizer features for automated overclocking or undervolting. This is consistent with past AMD A-series chipsets and non-Z-series Intel chipsets, which have also limited their support for overclocking features. AMD says that memory overclocking will still be supported by "most [motherboard] models."

[...] AMD says that more A620-based boards are coming from the usual suspects—ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and Biostar are all planning to release a range of A620 motherboard options.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Strawberries tend to be blander and less nutritious when treated with particular pesticides:

Have you ever bitten into a plump, red strawberry, only to find it bland and watery? Certain pesticides might be responsible. A team reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has found that two common strawberry fungicides can impact cellular mechanisms, creating berries with subdued flavor and sweetness, as well as a lower nutritional value.

The flavor profile of any produce, including berries, is a result of its taste and smell — sweetness often arises from the amount of dissolved glucose or fructose, and a unique aroma comes from volatile compounds, such as esters and terpenes. In addition, many fruits are also full of nutrients, including vitamin C, folic acid and antioxidants. But because fungicides are designed to disrupt the cellular processes of detrimental fungi, they could accidentally interfere with these processes in crops, inhibiting production of these important flavor and nutritional compounds. So, Jinling Diao and colleagues wanted to investigate how two common pesticides used on strawberries — boscalid (BOS) and difenoconazole (DIF) — affect specific molecular pathways in berries.

[...] Looking more closely, the team found that BOS had a direct effect on the regulation of genes involved in cellular pathways related to producing sugars, volatile compounds, nutrients and amino acids. Finally, in a blind taste test, people consistently preferred the untreated strawberries. The researchers say that this work could provide guidance to farmers about the use of pesticides.

The researchers found that, despite having the same size and color of untreated strawberries, the ones treated with the pesticides had lower levels of soluble sugar and nutrients, the sugars were converted into acids, and the amounts of volatile compounds changed, which subdued the taste and aroma.

Journal Reference:
Yuping Liu, Rui Liu, Yue Deng, et al., Insights into the Mechanism of Flavor Loss in Strawberries Induced by Two Fungicides Integrating Transcriptome and Metabolome Analysis, J. Agric. Food Chem. 2023, 71, 8, 3906–3919, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.2c08157

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/stable-diffusion-copyright-lawsuits-could-be-a-legal-earthquake-for-ai/

The AI software Stable Diffusion has a remarkable ability to turn text into images. When I asked the software to draw "Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonald's sign," for example, it generated the picture you see above.

Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web. Some of these images were in the public domain or had been published under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. Many others were not—and the world's artists and photographers aren't happy about it.

In January, three visual artists filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup that created Stable Diffusion. In February, the image-licensing giant Getty filed a lawsuit of its own.
[...]
The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit describe Stable Diffusion as a "complex collage tool" that contains "compressed copies" of its training images. If this were true, the case would be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs.

But experts say it's not true. Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had "technical inaccuracies" and was "stretching the truth a lot." Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images.

Related:
Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer. (20230324)
Paper: Stable Diffusion "Memorizes" Some Images, Sparking Privacy Concerns (20230206)
Getty Images Targets AI Firm For 'Copying' Photos (20230117)
Pixel Art Comes to Life: Fan Upgrades Classic MS-DOS Games With AI (20220904)
A Startup Wants to Democratize the Tech Behind DALL-E 2, Consequences be Damned (20220817)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Transparency? Redmond's heard of it:

Microsoft is close to resolving antitrust complaints lodged against it with the European Commission by local suppliers OVHcloud, Aruba S.p.A and Danish Cloud Community (DCC) over alleged commercial abuses.

The details of the said settlement remain under wraps and likely won't be published in detail, which is frustrating others' efforts to take the US software and cloud giant to task over alleged controlling market behavior.

OVHcloud, Aruba and DCC fired a joint complaint against Microsoft in May, with OVH itself confirming they were pressing the authorities for a "level playing field among cloud providers," saying Microsoft "undermines fair competition."

The complaint was focused on the higher costs of buying and running Microsoft software in clouds other than Azure, and technical adjustments needed to run some programs on competitors' clouds.

Fast-forward to this week and chatty sources close to the situation indicate Microsoft has agreed to settle the case and will propose binding commitments imminently, according to Bloomberg.

[...] Representing 24 cloud providers, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) group itself filed a formal competition complaint against Microsoft in November, saying the vendor uses: "unjustified and discriminatory bundling, tying, self-preferencing pricing and technical and economic lock-in" to "restrict choice".

It claimed the actions of Microsoft were in violation of Article 102 TFEU, and provide grounds for the EC to launch a formal investigation.

Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at CISPE, which counts OVH, Aruba and many others as members, told us today the decision by the trio to settle with Microsoft was "disappointing on many levels."

upstart writes:

The space agency's Crawler Transporter 2 has officially broken the Guinness World Record for the heaviest self-powered vehicle:

NASA's Crawler Transporter 2 was originally designed to carry Saturn V rockets during the Apollo program nearly 60 years ago. The aging giant recently got a much-needed upgrade for supporting the Artemis SLS megarocket, beating its twin vehicle for a world record.

On Wednesday, Guinness World Records presented NASA teams at the Kennedy Space Center with a certificate confirming that, at a whopping 6.65 million pounds (3 million kilograms), Crawler Transporter 2 is the world's heaviest self-powered vehicle, NASA announced in a statement.

"Anyone with an interest in machinery can appreciate the engineering marvel that is the crawler transporter," Shawn Quinn, program manager of Exploration Ground Systems, said in the statement. [...]

"NASA's crawlers were incredible pieces of machinery when they were designed and built in the 1960s," John Giles, NASA's Crawler Element Operations manager, said in the statement. "And to think of the work they've accomplished for Apollo and shuttle and now Artemis throughout the last six decades makes them even more incredible."

Due to how heavy the Crawler Transport is, the vehicle essentially crawls its way to the launch pad. It takes about eight to 12 hours for the rocket-carrying vehicle to drive the 4.2 miles (6.7 kilometers) from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad, going at a slow and steady speed of one mile per hour (1.6 kilometers per hour). It could take you a shorter time to walk that distance by foot.

Here's a crawler-transporter fact sheet [pdf]

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-assistant-might-be-doomed-division-reorganizes-to-focus-on-bard/

Is the Google Assistant doomed? The evidence is starting to pile up that the division is going down the tubes. The latest is news from CNBC's Jennifer Elias that says the Google Assistant division has been "reshuffled" to "heavily prioritize" Bard over the Google Assistant. It all sounds like the team is being reassigned.

We'll get into the report details in a minute, but first a quick recap of the past two years of what the assistant has gone through under Google:

• Google Assistant saw eight major speaker/smart display hardware releases in five years from 2016-2021, but the hardware releases seem to have stopped. The last hardware release was in March 2021. That was two full years ago.
• 2022 saw Google remove Assistant support from two in-house product lines: Nest Wi-Fi and Fitbit wearables.
• 2022 also saw a report from The Information that said Google wanted to "invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google."
• Google Assistant's driving mode was shut down in 2022.
• Google Assistant's "Duplex on the web" feature was also shut down in 2022.
• One of Google Assistant's core unique features, Reminders, is being shut down in favor of Google Task Reminders soon.
• Google Assistant has never made money. The hardware is sold at cost, it doesn't have ads, and nobody pays a monthly fee to use the Assistant. There's also the significant server cost to process all those voice commands, though some newer devices have moved to on-device processing in a stealthy cost-cutting move. The Assistant's biggest competitor, Amazon Alexa, is in the same boat and loses $10 billion a year.

Each one of those developments could maybe be dismissed individually, but together they start to paint the familiar picture of a looming Google shutdown.

Original Submission

Ometecuhtli writes:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ddb/restrict-act-insanely-broad-ban-tiktok-vpns

[...] The bill could have implications not just for social networks, but potentially security tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that consumers use to encrypt and route their traffic, one said. Although the intention of the bill is to target apps or services that pose a threat to national security, these critics worry it may have much wider implications for the First Amendment.

"The RESTRICT Act is a concerning distraction with insanely broad language that raises serious human and civil rights concerns," Willmary Escoto, U.S. policy analyst for digital rights organization Access Now told Motherboard in an emailed statement. [...]

[...] Under the RESTRICT Act, the Department of Commerce would identify information and communications technology products that a foreign adversary has any interest in, or poses an unacceptable risk to national security, the announcement reads. The bill only applies to technology linked to a "foreign adversary." Those countries include China (as well as Hong Kong); Cuba; Iran; North Korea; Russia, and Venezuela.

The bill's language includes vague terms such as "desktop applications," "mobile applications," "gaming applications," "payment applications," and "web-based applications." It also targets applicable software that has more than 1 million users in the U.S.

"The RESTRICT Act could lead to apps and other ICT services with connections to certain foreign countries being banned in the United States. Any bill that would allow the US government to ban an online service that facilitates Americans' speech raises serious First Amendment concerns," Caitlin Vogus, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project, told Motherboard in an emailed statement. "In addition, while bills like the RESTRICT Act may be motivated by legitimate privacy concerns, banning ICT services with connections to foreign countries would not necessarily help protect Americans' privacy. Those countries may still obtain data through other means, like by purchasing it from private data brokers." [...]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Amazon's smart speakers may've landed the tech giant in hot water:

A Federal Trade Commission complaint could lead the US government to sue Amazon over children's data the retail giant collected through its line of smart speakers, according to a Bloomberg report on Friday.

At issue is whether Amazon's series of Alexa-powered smart speakers were collecting data on children under the age of 13 without parental consent and retaining it even after users attempted to delete it, which children's advocacy organizations asked the FTC look into back in 2019, the report said.

Now the FTC is now recommending issuing a complaint that Amazon didn't confirm parental consent before collecting data and that most of the Alexa activities designed for kids didn't have a privacy policy, sources told Bloomberg. The Justice Department could take the next step and file a lawsuit against Amazon next month.

The Amazon suit comes amid an FTC crackdown on data collection over the last few years under Chair Lina Khan, including fining the company formerly known as Weight Watchers for improperly storing kids' info. The commission also ordered Fortnite creator Epic Games to pay $520 million in fines and refunds for tricking kids into making in-game purchases and violating their privacy.

[...] Should the lawsuit find Amazon at fault, it's unclear how much it could be forced to pay in penalties. While Amazon reportedly claimed to be in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), if it's found to have violated those rules dictating how children's data should be protected, the company could pay $50,000 per child affected, according to Politico.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/fearing-loss-of-control-ai-critics-call-for-6-month-pause-in-ai-development/

On Wednesday, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter on its website calling on AI labs to "immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." Signed by Elon Musk and several prominent AI researchers, the letter quickly began to draw attention in the press—and some criticism on social media.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-4, an AI model that can perform compositional tasks and allegedly pass standardized tests at a human level, although those claims are still being evaluated by research. Regardless, GPT-4 and Bing Chat's advancement in capabilities over previous AI models spooked some experts who believe we are heading toward super-intelligent AI systems faster than previously expected.

See Also: FTC Should Stop OpenAI From Launching New GPT Models, Says AI Policy Group

Related:
OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit (March 2023)
OpenAI's New ChatGPT Bot: 10 "Dangerous" Things it's Capable of (Dec. 2022)
Elon Musk Says There Needs to be Universal Basic Income (Aug. 2021)
Tesla Unveils Chip to Train A.I. Models Inside its Data Centers (Aug. 2021)
Elon Musk Reveals Plans to Unleash a Humanoid Tesla Bot (Aug. 2021)
Tesla Unveils its New Supercomputer (5th Most Powerful in the World) to Train Self-Driving AI (June 2021)
OpenAI Has Released the Largest Version Yet of its Fake-News-Spewing AI (Sept. 2019)
There's Still Time To Prevent Biased AI From Taking Over The World (May 2019)
The New Prometheus: Google CEO Says AI is More Profound than Electricity or Fire (Feb. 2018)
OpenAI Bot Bursts Into the Ring, Humiliates Top Dota 2 Pro Gamer in 'Scary' One-on-One Bout (Aug. 2017)
Elon Musk: Mark Zuckerberg's Understanding of AI is "Limited" (July 2017)
AI Software Learns to Make AI Software (Jan. 2017)
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking Win Luddite Award as AI "Alarmists" (Jan. 2016)
Elon Musk and Friends Launch OpenAI (Dec. 2015)
Musk, Wozniak and Hawking Warn Over AI Warfare and Autonomous Weapons (July 2015)
More Warnings of an AI Doomsday — This Time From Stephen Hawking (Dec. 2014)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

U of A expert contests popular claims about a "wood-wide web":

The idea that forest trees can "talk" to each other through a connective underground web of delicate fungal filaments tickles the imagination.

In fact, the concept is so intriguing, it's taken root in popular media, from a popular book to podcasts, TV and radio shows.

Dubbed the "wood-wide web," the idea that underground fungi allow trees to share resources with their seedlings — and even protect them — definitely puts the "fun" in fungus.

But the science behind those ideas is unproven, cautions University of Alberta expert Justine Karst.

In a perspective published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Karst and two colleagues contest three popular claims about the capabilities of underground fungi known as common mycorrhizal networks, or CMNs, that connect roots of multiple plants underground. Fungi are living organisms such as moulds, yeast and mushrooms.

"It's great that CMN research has sparked interest in forest fungi, but it's important for the public to understand that many popular ideas are ahead of the science," says Karst, associate professor in the U of A's Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

guest reader writes:

ACM Queue magazine has an article with the title "Catch-23: The New C Standard Sets the World on Fire". This article offers opinions and analysis of a new major revision of the C language standard, C23, expected to be voted on in 2023:

[...] Like the previous major revision, C11, the latest standard introduces several useful features. The most important, if not the most exciting, make it easier to write safe, correct, and secure code. For example, the new header standardizes checked integer arithmetic.

[...] C23 also adds new features to protect secrets from prying eyes and programmers from themselves. The new memset_explicit() function is for erasing sensitive in-memory data; unlike ordinary memset, it is intended to prevent optimizations from eliding the erasure.

[...] In addition to these new correctness and safety aids, C23 provides many new conveniences: Constants true, false, and nullptr are now language keywords; mercifully, they mean what you expect. The new typeof feature makes it easier to harmonize variable declarations. The preprocessor can now #embed arbitrary binary data in source files. Zero-initializing stack-allocated structures and variable-length arrays is a snap with the new standard "={}" syntax.

[...] Sadly, good news isn't the only news about C23. The new standard's nonfeatures, misfeatures, and defeatures are sufficiently numerous and severe that programmers should not "upgrade" without carefully weighing risks against benefits. Older standards such as C99 and C11 weren't perfect, but detailed analysis will sometimes conclude that they are preferable to C23.

[...] Developers should also note that C23 has drifted further from C++ than the earlier C standards. The notion that C is (mostly) a subset of C++ is further from reality than ever before.

Magazine article:
Terence Kelly and Yekai Pan. 2023. Catch-23: The New C Standard Sets the World on Fire. Queue 21, 1, Pages 30 (January/February 2023), 19 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3588242

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why sharing ebooks is good for people – and good for publishers:

One of the joys of reading is being able to share your favourite books with friends, family and colleagues. As I am sure is the case for most people, in these circumstances I often go on to buy my own copy of a book I have been lent and like. In this respect, sharing books is not only an important social act of generosity, it's also one of the best forms of marketing, since it represents a recommendation from a trusted source, and a chance to try before you buy.

Things have changed recently, with the increasing popularity of ebooks. Many use Digital Rights Management (DRM) to make it hard for people to share books. More generally, publishers have pushed the line that unlike physical books, ebooks should never be shared. Their main reason for this assertion seems to be that it's simply too easy to share digital books by making a copy, and so people shouldn't do it, because, well, copyright. But this new injunction is really part and parcel of publishers' wider fear of – and hatred for – anything digital. That's because they know that it is impossible to stop digital material being copied, no matter what laws are passed, or DRM is applied.

The idea that ebooks by definition must never be shared was always wrong – books released under sensible licences can be shared without problems. It is also dangerous, because it leads to this kind of stupidity, noticed by the Twitter user @emeraalds when looking to buy a (physical) book, and reported here on The Mary Sue site (via mvario):

The copyright page, which is from a book called Zodiac Academy #1: The Awakening by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti, reads, "This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it wasn't purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author."