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upstart writes:

Jail terms for sharing or creating explicit images without consent:

People caught sharing or creating explicit images without consent could face time in jail in England and Wales.

Amendments to the Online Safety Bill will introduce a six-month prison term for sharing deepfake and revenge porn. This would rise to two years if intent to cause distress, alarm or humiliation, or to obtain sexual gratification can be proved.

Those who share an image for sexual gratification could also be placed on the sex offenders' register.

"Revenge porn" is sharing an intimate image without consent. "Deepfake porn" involves creating a fake explicit image or video of a person. Revenge porn was criminalised in 2015 but up until now prosecutors had to prove there was an intention to cause humiliation or distress.

[...] The government announced its intention to legislate last year, and the amendments are part of the Online Safety Bill, which is due to be voted on by MPs later this month before it becomes law.

owl writes:

https://www.5volts.ch/posts/mfmreader/

I still have some floppy drives laying around and I always planned to integrated them into my new SBC projects. In the 1990s I had once built a floppy disk controller for an Apple II and also built a SBC around a 65SC816 processor with a floppy disk controller using WD2797 FDC chips. Both worked quite will. FDCs are now obsolete and so I thought about emulating a FDC using a microcontroller. I also could have used new old stock controllers but that was not my intention.

In the internet you find several discussions about this topic and in many cases the conclusion was that it is not possible to read floppies without a controller. However there are also some projects describing a floppy disk emulator using a microcontroller with no or only little hardware support. Also there are several projects that read the raw MFM data and send it to a PC to decode the data. I was really tempted to give it a try.

My goal was to read and write HD floppies without any additional hardware and be able to read and write the content of individual sectors.

Original Submission

MIT brain science researchers took a look at comprehension of (and preference for) the use of legalese (legal language used in contracts and so on) vs. the same thoughts expressed in simple sentences. While lawyers did better at understanding their own dialect, nearly everyone, lawyer or not, preferred ordinary English. https://news.mit.edu/2023/new-study-lawyers-legalese-0529

Parsing legal language

Since at least the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon declared that federal regulations should be written in "layman's terms," efforts have been made to try to simplify legal documents. However, another study by Martínez, Mollica, and Gibson, not yet published, suggests that legal language has changed very little since that time.

The MIT team began studying the structure and comprehensibility of legal language several years ago, when Martínez, who became interested in the topic as a student at Harvard Law School, joined Gibson's lab as a research assistant and then a PhD student.

In a study published last year, Gibson, Martínez, and Mollica used a text analysis tool to compare legal documents to many other types of texts, including newspapers, movie scripts, and academic papers. Among the features identified as more common in legal documents, one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences.

Linguists have previously shown that this type of structure, known as center-embedding, makes text much more difficult to understand. When the MIT team tested people on their ability to understand and recall the meaning of a legal text, their performance improved significantly when center-embedded structures were replaced with more straightforward sentences, with terms defined separately.

More detail in TFA along with references to related work.

I've had to read my share of contracts and complex NDA/secrecy agreements, some of which were pretty sneaky, others very easy to follow. In my experience, the long sentence with strings of qualifiers in the middle is common, but once you know that is the structure it is possible to mentally assemble the start and end of the sentence and understand what's being said. Then add back in all the conditions where it applies, or does not apply.

I've been caught out a couple of times to my business and financial embarrassment. Once burned I've learned that, when there is a lot on the line, reading the fine print is often worth the effort. I've also learned that a contract presented to me isn't always cast in stone--reasoned objections are often negotiable and clauses can be struck or modified. While always an option, I resist hiring a lawyer, preferring to work through the language myself.

Full paper here, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302672120 behind a paywall for me (perhaps the text is available elsewhere?)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/rip-to-my-pixel-fold-dead-after-four-days/

A flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. That was my brief experience with the Pixel Fold, which was a wonderful little device until the display died, along with my hopes and dreams. I barely used it, but it was beautiful.

I didn't do anything to deserve this. The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.

The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100 percent brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen.
[...]
Manufacturers keep wanting to brush off the significant durability issues of flexible OLED displays, thinking that if they just shove the devices onto the market, everything will work out. That hasn't been the case, though, and any time you see a foldable phone for sale, you don't have to look far to see reports of dead displays. I'm sure we'll see several reports of broken Pixel Folds once the unit hits the general public. Corning may save us with an exterior foldable glass cover, but until then, buying any foldable feels like a gamble.

Original Submission

kreuzfeld writes:

Free-software aficionado Ploum has an interesting take on Meta and the Fediverse:

There are rumours that Meta would become "Fediverse compatible". You could follow people on Instagram from your Mastodon account. I don't know if those rumours have a grain of truth, if it is even possible for Meta to consider it. But there's one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning.

Read the full article here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Extending Earth's Internet to Mars With Orbital Data Servers:

You've done it. After years of effort and training, sacrifice, and pain, you become an astronaut and have finally set foot on Mars. Time to post your triumph on TikTok for that sweet social media cred. If only you can get a signal.

While that might seem like a silly scenario, the need for internet connectivity on Mars is real. It's not just a matter of allowing astronauts to doomscroll and post on Reddit. Landing humans on Mars will require a tremendous amount of data transfer with Earth, which is not easy. So how can we create an information network on Mars that is robust enough for both logistic and personal needs? A paper posted on the arxiv proposes an idea.

[...] One of these ideas, as the paper outlines, is edge computing. Although you probably don't notice it, edge computing is why you can watch streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. It takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth to stream television and movies, so streaming services distribute their servers to get you better speeds. [...]

This latest work looks at what it would take to have an edge computing network around Mars. The key is not only to have data locally accessible, but also to have a certain level of redundancy. So they propose building a constellation of satellites around Mars. Their system would have 9 satellites each in 9 orbital planes, for a total of 81 satellites. As with many constellations, the satellites would communicate with each other to have redundant backups of data. This means various landing sites on Mars would be able to communicate with 2 or 3 satellites at any given time. For extended missions, ground-based servers could be used for even faster data retrieval.

Building such a system would not be cheap, so the authors propose building the constellation in stages. As exploratory missions to Mars lay the groundwork for crewed landing, a few constellation satellites could go along for the ride. By the time long-term stations are being built, the constellation could already be in place.

Journal Reference:
Pfandzelter, Tobias, and David Bermbach. "Can Orbital Servers Provide Mars-Wide Edge Computing?" arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09756 (2023).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Australia gives Twitter legal notice to clean up online hate content:

Twitter now has 28 days to respond to the legal notice from Australia and detail what the social media website is doing to deal with online hate posted on its platform, which accounts for the most complaints over the past year. Continuing violations could lead to daily fines of up to AU$700,000 ($474,670).

The social media platform is the source of one in three complaints sent to Australia's online safety regulator, eSafety.

The number of reported online abuse on Twitter also has been climbing since Elon Musk took control of the company last October, according to eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. She noted that the spike in complaints coincided with Twitter's move to cut its global workforce from 8,000 to 1,500, which included its trust and safety teams. The company also removed its public policy presence in Australia.

In addition, Musk announced a "general amnesty" in November, during which 62,000 banned or suspended users reportedly were reinstated to the platform, including 75 that had more than 1 million followers, said Inman Grant. She also pointed to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts that "emboldened extreme polarizers, peddlers of outrage and hate." These included neo-Nazis in Australia and overseas.

While Twitter's current terms of use and policies prohibit hateful conduct on the site, the increase in complaints to eSafety and reports of hate content that remained on the platform indicate that Twitter is unlikely to be enforcing its rules, she noted.

Citing eSafety's own research, she said almost one in five Australians had experienced some form of online hate.

"Twitter appears to have dropped the ball on tackling hate," Inman Grant said. "We need accountability from these platforms and action to protect their users. You cannot have accountability without transparency and that's what legal notices like this one [issued by eSafety] are designed to achieve."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft Says It Will Build a Quantum Supercomputer Within Ten Years:

Microsoft yesterday announced its very own roadmap towards building a quantum supercomputer, crystallizing its path along the company's years-long research into topological qubits. Just last year, Microsoft had the breakthrough it "bet" would pay-off out of its research into topological qubits, an (even more) exotic qubit type than usual. Now, the company is saying it can get from the research breakthrough towards a functional quantum supercomputer in less than a decade.

[...] Now, that's. quite an aggressive "roadmap". Of course, Microsoft has been on the road it has publicly committed to for a while now - the company has advanced its research into quantum computing in numerous other areas, even with the lack of a single, coherent, topological qubit being shown until last year. There are many areas of quantum computing that could be worked on while Microsoft waited for its topological qubits to come to pass - such as control mechanisms, noise reduction, deployment, and others. Areas where the company's research was already aligned with the certainty that they'd actually be able to produce, entangle, and keep them coherent.

"Today, we're really at this foundational implementation level," Svore told TechCrunch. "We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They're built around physical qubits and they're not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit."

Essentially, Microsoft has to do the same work that other companies have been doing on their own qubits: Microsoft has to scale the number of qubits it can deploy; it has to make sure those qubits are resilient (stable) so they can be used for complex calculations; and it has to find ways to reduce the error rate. Microsoft expects it will achieve its quantum supercomputer once it can reach a rate of one million quantum operations per second, with a failure rate of one per trillion operations.

Ford: the US Can't Compete With China on Electric Vehicles, for Now

upstart writes:

"We need to be ready, and we're getting ready":

Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, has warned that when it comes to the production of electric vehicles, the United States is still not ready to compete with China. Speaking about China's EV industry during an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Ford said "They developed very quickly, and they developed them in large scale. And now they're exporting them [...] They're not here but they'll come here we think, at some point, we need to be ready, and we're getting ready."

The US automaker in February announced that it would be investing $3.5 billion in building an electric vehicle plant in Michigan. Reuters writes that the deal will use technology from Chinese battery company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd, which led to Senator Marco Rubio asking the Biden administration to review the deal. Ford says the Michigan battery plant is a chance for Ford engineers to learn the technology and use it for themselves.

"It [Michigan] is a wholly owned Ford facility. They'll be our employees, and all we're doing is licensing the technology. That's it." Ford said.

[...] Buttigieg added that the US must build relationships domestically and internationally for raw materials and refining capacity. Chinese firms make up more than half of the EV battery market and provide as much as 90% of the demand for some battery materials.

hubie writes:

Butterfly tree of life reveals an origin in North America:

About 100 million years ago, a group of trendsetting moths started flying during the day rather than at night, taking advantage of nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees. This single event led to the evolution of all butterflies.

Scientists have known the precise timing of this event since 2019, when a large-scale analysis of DNA discounted the reigning hypothesis that pressure from bats prompted the evolution of butterflies after the extinction of dinosaurs.

Now, scientists have discovered where the first butterflies originated and which plants they relied on for food.

Before reaching these conclusions, researchers from dozens of countries had to create the world's largest butterfly tree of life, assembled with DNA from more than 2,000 species representing all butterfly families and 92% of genera. Using this framework as a guide, they traced the movements and feeding habits of butterflies through time in a four-dimensional puzzle that led back to North and Central America. According to their results, published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, this is where the first butterflies took flight.

[...] There are some 19,000 butterfly species, and piecing together the 100 million-year history of the group required information about their modern distributions and host plants. Prior to this study, there was no single place that researchers could go to access that type of data.

"In many cases, the information we needed existed in field guides that hadn't been digitized and were written in various languages," Kawahara said.

Undeterred, the authors decided to make their own, publicly available database, painstakingly translating and transferring the contents of books, museum collections and isolated web pages into a single digital repository.

upstart writes:

Meta says its new speech-generating AI tool is too dangerous to release:

Meta has unveiled a new AI tool, dubbed 'Voicebox', which it claims represents a breakthrough in AI-powered speech generation. However, the company won't be unleashing it on the public just yet - because doing so could be disastrous.

Voicebox is currently able to produce audio clips of speech in six languages (all of which are European of origin), and - according to a blog post from Meta - is the first AI model of its kind capable of completing tasks beyond what it was 'specifically trained to accomplish'. Meta claims that Voicebox handily outperforms competing speech-generation AIs in virtually every area.

So what exactly is it capable of? Well, for starters, it can spew out reasonably accurate text-to-speech replications of a person's voice using a sample audio file as short as two seconds, a seemingly innocuous ability that holds a huge amount of destructive potential in the wrong hands.

[...] Meta clearly believes its new tool is good enough to fool at least the majority of people [since] it's explicitly not releasing Voicebox to the public, but instead publishing a research paper and detailing a classifier tool that can identify Voicebox-generated speech from real human speech. Meta describes the classifier as "highly effective" - though notably not perfectly effective.

[...] A little caution, patience, and respect for the magnitude of this technology is a welcome sight - although I doubt Meta will sit on Voicebox for too long, since the shareholders will no doubt be wondering how much money it can make them...

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Writing with AI help can shift your opinions:

Artificial intelligence-powered writing assistants that autocomplete sentences or offer "smart replies" not only put words into people's mouths, they also put ideas into their heads, according to new research.

Maurice Jakesch, a doctoral student in the field of information science asked more than 1,500 participants to write a paragraph answering the question, "Is social media good for society?" People who used an AI writing assistant that was biased for or against social media were twice as likely to write a paragraph agreeing with the assistant, and significantly more likely to say they held the same opinion, compared with people who wrote without AI's help.

The study suggests that the biases baked into AI writing tools – whether intentional or unintentional – could have concerning repercussions for culture and politics, researchers said.

"We're rushing to implement these AI models in all walks of life, but we need to better understand the implications," said co-author Mor Naaman, professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. "Apart from increasing efficiency and creativity, there could be other consequences for individuals and also for our society – shifts in language and opinions."

[...] These technologies deserve more public discussion regarding how they could be misused and how they should be monitored and regulated, the researchers said.

"The more powerful these technologies become and the more deeply we embed them in the social fabric of our societies," Jakesch said, "the more careful we might want to be about how we're governing the values, priorities and opinions built into them."

Journal Reference:
Maurice Jakesch, Advait Bhat, Daniel Buschek, et al., Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users' Views [open], CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581196

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Megaupload Fugitive Arrested By Armed Police 11 Years After The Raid

Since 2012, Kim Dotcom has been fighting extradition to the United States where he faces serious charges related to cloud storage site Megaupload. During that time, very little has been said about Megaupload graphic designer, Julius Bencko. A wanted man in the U.S., Bencko was arrested this month by armed police in the Czech Republic, who filmed the event and published it online.

[...] In the United States government's superseding indictment dated February 16, 2012, Julius Bencko is described as a citizen and resident of Slovakia. A talented graphic designer, Bencko was responsible for Megaupload's logo and ensuring that other sites in the group looked good and accommodated advertising properly.

According to the United States government, this work earned Bencko more than $1 million in 2010 alone. Even for the guy responsible for integrating Megaupload's Flash player, that was still pretty good money.

The important context here is that Bencko was the director and sole shareholder of Basemax International Limited and through that entity, he effectively held 2.5% of Megaupload's shares. For someone who supposedly played a key role in the most significant piracy conspiracy of all time, the allegations against Bencko were underwhelming and, at times, borderline comical.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/ftc-xbox-exclusive-starfield-is-powerful-evidence-against-activision-deal/

For months now, Microsoft has sworn up and down that it has no interest in making Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox if and when its proposed $69 billion Activision acquisition is approved. But as the FTC's request for an injunction stopping that acquisition heads toward opening arguments this week, the federal regulator cites one piece of what it calls "powerful evidence" that it can't trust Microsoft's assurances. In short, as the FTC puts it, "Microsoft's actions following its 2021 acquisition of ZeniMax speak louder than Defendants' words."
[...]
Rather than focusing on what it calls a "strained analogy" to ZeniMax, Microsoft would prefer the court look at Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft-maker Mojang, which has continued to publish the game on a variety of platforms after becoming part of Microsoft. This is a better analogy for Call of Duty, Microsoft writes, because Minecraft was similarly "an existing, multi-player, cross-platform franchise like COD."
[...]
Call of Duty is unlike Minecraft, the FTC argues, in part because Minecraft is available in largely the same form on mobile phones, tablets, and the Switch. "Even if Microsoft took Minecraft off of rival consoles and subscription and cloud gaming services, it would still be available for play on many other devices. The context for Call of Duty is very different."

Regardless, the FTC also argues that this manufactured categorization doesn't matter, because Microsoft's exclusivity decision applied to "all future ZeniMax games." While Microsoft said in 2021 that "some" future Bethesda games would be Xbox exclusives, no Bethesda non-exclusives have been announced since then.

Previously:
US Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Takeover - 20230613
Microsoft and Activision Will Miss Their Contractual Merger Deadline - 20230115
FTC Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Acquisition - 20221209
The Biggest Deal in Gaming is Under Fire From U.S. Senators - 20220403

Related:
Microsoft Acquires ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5 Billion - 20200921

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/marvel-angers-artists-and-fans-with-ai-generated-secret-invasion-tv-intro/

On Wednesday, Marvel's latest comic book TV show, Secret Invasion, premiered on Disney+ to controversy: It features AI-generated motion graphics during its title sequence, and some fans and creators aren't happy about it. "For Marvel, whose whole empire is built on the work of artists to do this is disgusting and I for one shan't be watching," tweeted Marvel comic artist Christian Ward, who worked on Black Bolt.

For those unfamiliar, Secret Invasion is a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) series featuring Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. The storyline centers on a faction of shapeshifting aliens called "Skrulls" that have infiltrated Earth, prompting Fury and his former Skrull ally, Talos, to respond. The plot explores the tension and distrust caused by the Skrulls' shapeshifting abilities, which raises doubts about everyone's real identities.

As reported by Polygon, the show's producers think the melty, flowing, somewhat abstract AI-generated aesthetic (prompted as "Skrull cubism" to the AI model) in the title sequence is appropriate because the show features shapeshifting aliens that are hiding as humans in plain sight.
[...]
As a counterpoint to this common argument that has been surfacing all day on social media, voice actor LittleKuriboh quipped, "Look, if skrulls were as easy to detect as AI art is, the secret invasion would've lasted until suppertime on day zero."

Original Submission