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Submission + - X fined $350K for contempt for delay in producing Trump data (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: A federal appeals court upheld and affirmed that X, formerly known as Twitter, should be fined $350,000 for contempt for their delay in producing the records of Donald Trump after a subpoena. On January 19, 2023, federal prosecutors served to X a subpoena for the records of Donald Trump. Also with the subpoena was an order not to inform Trump of the subpoena for 180 days. The deadline for the records request was January 29. X did not respond until February 1 where it tried to raise objections over subpoena. A hearing was held on February 7 on why X should not be sanctioned for their failure to both respond to the subpoena and comply with the subpoena. At the hearing X raised specific objections over the gag order; however, the judge noted that the prosecutor's concerns about evidence destruction was warranted given the suspect's prior history. The government asked for contempt for the delay and asked for sanctions for every day X did not produce the data. The judge asked if X was capable of producing the data by 5PM that day, and X responded that they could. The judge set a fine of $50,000 per day and doubling for every day they did not comply. While X produced some records on February 7, it was incomplete and X did not produce all the records requested until February 9. Based on the length of delay, X was fined $350,000 by the court on March 3.

X appealed the fine to a higher court. On June 20, the prosecutors lifted the gag order as they had obtained the necessary records. On July 18, the federal appeals court affirmed the fine noting that X's objections were late and that the fine was not unreasonable.

"Twitter never raised any objection to the sanctions formula, despite having several opportunities to do so," [Judge] Pan wrote in the opinion. "The company thus appeared to acquiesce to the formula. Moreover, the $350,000 sanction ultimately imposed was not unreasonable, given Twitter's $40 billion valuation and the court's goal of coercing Twitter's compliance."

Submission + - SPAM: The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Brave, the privacy-focused web browser, has come under scrutiny for its Brave Search API, which reportedly allows users to use copyrighted material. The company offers various API products, including "Data for AI," which claims to assign users rights to cache, store, and use search data for AI training. In a detailed analysis, the author found that Brave's "Extra alternate snippets" feature delivers generous excerpts from web content, ranging from 150 to 260 words.

While search engines traditionally sidestep copyright issues by linking to the original source as a form of attribution, Brave simply scrapes the data and then assigns "rights" on top of charging for the data, potentially violating copyright licenses. Additionally, the author notes Brave has a non-transparent web crawler that doesn't offer an option for site owners to block it specifically.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Ancient Lead-Covered Telephone Cables Have US Lawmakers Demanding Action (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Newly raised concerns about lead-covered telephone cables installed across the US many decades ago are putting pressure on companies like AT&T and Verizon to identify the locations of all the cables and account for any health problems potentially caused by the toxic metal. US Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote a letter to the USTelecom industry trade group this week after a Wall Street Journal investigative report titled, "America Is Wrapped in Miles of Toxic Lead Cables." The WSJ said it found evidence of more than 2,000 lead-covered cables and that there "are likely far more throughout the country."

WSJ reporters had researchers collect samples as part of their investigation. They "found that where lead contamination was present, the amount measured in the soil was highest directly under or next to the cables, and dropped within a few feet—a sign the lead was coming from the cable," the article said. Markey wrote to USTelecom, "According to the Wall Street Journal's investigation, 'AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants have left behind a sprawling network of cables covered in toxic lead that stretches across the US, under the water, in the soil and on poles overhead... As the lead degrades, it is ending up in places where Americans live, work and play.'"

Markey wants answers to a series of questions by July 25: "Do the companies know the locations and mileage of lead-sheathed cables that they own or for which they are responsible—whether aerial, underwater, or underground? Are there maps of the locations and installations? If not, what plans do the companies have to identify the cables? Why have the companies that knew about the cables—and the potential exposure risks they pose—failed to monitor them or act?" Markey also asked what plans telcos have to address environmental and public health problems that could arise from lead cables. He asked the companies to commit to "testing for soil, water, and other contamination caused by the cables," to remediate any contamination, and warn communities of the potential hazards. Markey also asked USTelecom if the phone companies will guarantee "medical treatment and compensation to anyone harmed by lead poisoning caused by the cables."

Submission + - AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Amiga Trombone
Amiga Trombone writes: With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do.

AlmaLinux announced a few minutes ago:

"After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.

We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community’s needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux."

AlmaLinux will be evaluating what other options they may have now that they aren't sticking to 1:1 rebuild of RHEL. AlmaLinux also reaffirmed their commitment to being fully open-source and good open-source citizens.

Submission + - Real Photo Disqualified From Photography Contest For Being AI (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

A genuine picture taken on an iPhone was thrown out of a photography competition after the judges suspected that it was generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Suzi Dougherty had captured a striking photo of her son with two smartly-dressed mannequins in an intriguing pose while visiting a Gucci exhibition. Happy with her creation, she entered it into a photo competition.

Dougherty didn’t think much more of it until a friend showed her an Instagram post declaring her photo ineligible because the competition’s organizers suspected it to be an AI image.

“I wouldn’t even know how to do an AI photo,” Dougherty tells The Guardian. “I’m just getting my head around ChatGPT.”

There will be much more of this and the reverse going forward. (The photo looks like a chavs meets psychedelia remake of The Shining. Which AI will probably generate as well eventually.)

Submission + - A Third of US Deer Had COVID...And Passed It Back to Humans (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by ole_timer
ole_timer writes: New study builds on data suggesting white-tailed deer could be a virus reservoir. Leading to a raging discussion oh how they got it, and vice versa.

People in the US transmitted the pandemic coronavirus to white-tailed deer at least 109 times, and the animals widely spread the virus among themselves, with a third of the deer tested in a large government-led study showing signs of prior infection. The work also suggests that the ubiquitous ruminants returned the virus to people in kind at least three times.

FURTHER READING
New study suggests SARS-CoV-2 spreading widely within wild deer population
The findings, announced this week by the US Department of Agriculture, are in line with previous research, which suggested that white-tailed deer can readily pick up SARS-CoV-2 from humans, spread it to each other, and, based on at least one instance in Canada, transmit the virus back to humans.

https://i1.wp.com/www.ericnest...

Submission + - Apple claims 99% iPhone 14 satisfaction. Is that possible? (No). We investigate (perfectrec.com) 2

Submitted by Kitkoan
Kitkoan writes: A 99% approval rating is nearly statistically impossible. Apple says it gets one every year.
Key Points:

In its May earnings call, Apple claimed that the iPhone 14 had a 99% customer satisfaction rating citing a third party research firm it hired.

Apple has made a similar claim in every single earnings call for the past seven years.

A customer satisfaction rating this high is nearly impossible to find using traditional survey methods and a representative sample.

Independent sources find iPhone satisfaction ratings significantly lower than what Apple claims.

Appleâ(TM)s claimed iPhone satisfaction is far higher than what other consumer companies and brands claim for beloved products.

We asked Appleâ(TM)s press team to explain how the company arrived at these results. They opened our email 73 times, but didnâ(TM)t respond.

Our best guess is that Apple wants to make bold customer satisfaction claims, and has hired a third-party research firm that will produce those numbers to make them seem more credible â" and perhaps to provide plausible deniability.

That firm is likely using a highly unrepresentative sample of tech enthusiasts and early adopters to generate extraordinary satisfaction numbers that Apple then presents as representative of consumers generally.

Submission + - Silk Road's second-in-command gets 20 years in prison (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Nearly 10 years ago, the sprawling dark-web drug market known as the Silk Road was torn offline in a law enforcement operation coordinated by the FBI, whose agents arrested the black market's boss, Ross Ulbricht, in a San Francisco library. It would take two years for Ulbricht's second-in-command—an elusive figure known as Variety Jones—to be tracked down and arrested in Thailand. Today, a decade after the Silk Road's demise, Clark has been sentenced to join his former boss in federal prison.

In a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, Roger Thomas Clark—also known by his online handles including Variety Jones, Cimon, and Plural of Mongoose—was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for his role in building and running Silk Road. Clark, a 62-year-old Canadian national, will now likely spend much of the rest of his life incarcerated for helping to pioneer the anonymous, cryptocurrency-based model for online illegal sales of drugs and other contraband that still persists on the dark web today. The sentence is the maximum Clark faced in accordance with the plea agreement he made with prosecutors.

Clark “misguidedly turned his belief that drugs should be legal into material assistance for a criminal enterprise,” Judge Sidney Stein said in his sentencing statement. “These beliefs crossed over into patently illegal behavior.”

Stein added that Clark was “clear-eyed and intentional” in his work as Ulbricht's “right-hand man” in the Silk Road's operations. “The sentence must reflect the vast criminal enterprise of which he was a leader,” Stein said.

In his own statement, Clark said that his work on the Silk Road had always been motivated by his political belief that drugs should be legalized, and the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dark-web drug sales he helped to facilitate were safer than drug deals that took place in the physical world. He argued in his sentencing statement that the site helped reduce violence in the drug trade, and that the Silk Road's ratings and reviews prevented the sale of adulterated drugs that would have caused greater harm.

“I just kept preaching to myself ‘harm reduction.’ That's how I got to sleep at night,” Clark told the judge, standing before a sparse audience in the courtroom looking thin and gaunt in baggy khaki clothes. “I'm proud and ashamed at the same time.”

Clark was, as prosecutors noted in their memo arguing for the two-decade sentence, more than a lieutenant on the Silk Road. He served as the site's security consultant, PR adviser, and even a kind of executive coach and friend to the site's boss, Ulbricht. Clark, who Ulbricht initially encountered as a marijuana seeds dealer on the market, was “the biggest and strongest-willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ulbricht wrote in his journal.

“He has advised me on many technical aspect of what we are doing, helped me speed up the site and squeeze more out of my current servers," Ulbricht wrote. “He also has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name, devising rules, and on and on. He also helped me get my head straight regarding legal protection, cover stories, devising a will, finding a successor, and so on. He’s been a real mentor.”

Clark was pivotal in key moments of the Silk Road’s history—including a particularly dark incident when he and Ulbricht resorted to violence, which loomed large in Clark’s sentencing. Clark played a crucial role in convincing Ulbricht that it was necessary to commission the murder of one of his employees who he believed had betrayed him and stolen bitcoins from the market. “At what point in time do we decide we’ve had enough of someone's shit and terminate them?” Clark wrote to Ulbricht at one point following the discovery of the theft, as recorded in chat logs that were recovered from Ulbricht's computer after his arrest. “We’re playing with big money with serious people, and that’s the world they live in.”

After Ulbricht agreed to have the staffer killed—in a bizarre turn, his death was instead faked by US federal agents investigating the Silk Road—Clark told Ulbricht that he had made the right move. "If you had balked, I would have seriously re-considered our relationship," he wrote. “We’re playing for keeps, this just drives it home. I’m perfectly comfortable with the decision, and I’ll sleep like a lamb tonight, and every night hereafter.”

Countering Clark's claims of interest in “harm reduction,” assistant US attorney Michael Neff pointed to those comments as evidence of Clark's “complete disregard for human life,” as he put it in Tuesday's sentencing hearing. For Clark, “the question of whether to end another man's life was simple and stress-free,” Neff told the judge in the prosecution's sentencing statement.

Submission + - New Lawsuit Against Bing Based on Allegedly AI-Hallucinated Libelous Statements (reason.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: When people search for Jeffery Battle in Bing, they get the following (at least sometimes; this is the output of a search that I ran Tuesday):

But it turns out that this combines facts about two separate people with similar names: (1) Jeffery Battle, who is indeed apparently a veteran, businessman, and adjunct professor, and (2) Jeffrey Leon Battle, who was convicted of trying to join the Taliban shortly after 9/11. The two have nothing in common other than their similar names. The Aerospace Professor did not plead guilty to seditious conspiracy.

And this Bing output doesn't just list the facts about each of the Battles separately, the way that search engine results have long listed separate pages separately. Rather, it expressly connects the two, with the "However, Battle was sentenced " transition, which conveys the message that all the facts are about one person. And to my knowledge, this connection was entirely made up out of whole cloth by Bing's summarization feature (which is apparently based on ChatGPT); I know of no other site that actually makes any such connection (which I stress again is an entirely factually unfounded connection).

Submission + - Tech-Backed Code.org Officially Adopts a No CS, No HS Diploma Stance

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On Wednesday, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org announced it was excited to "officially launch our 10th policy recommendation for all states to require all students to take computer science to earn a high school diploma."

"Artificial intelligence has increased the urgency to ensure our students are adequately prepared for a rapidly changing world," explained Code.org, whose Board of Directors includes Microsoft President Brad Smith and CTO Kevin Scott, who oversee Microsoft's Responsible AI Council, as well as execs from Amazon, Google, and YouTube. "It is no longer sufficient for students to know how to use technology; they must be creators and thoughtful contributors. [...] Without a graduation policy, we will not be able to ensure all students genuinely have the opportunity to learn computer science. [...] For a state to meet this policy recommendation, the state must have a policy that requires all students to earn a credit named 'computer science' or has a related name that includes 'computer science'."

Code.org's call for a HS CS graduation requirement in response to recent AI breakthroughs comes two months after an Axios report on the launch of TeachAI, a Code.org-led effort supported by a coalition of tech and educational organizations (incl. Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, and Bill Gates-backed and ChatGPT-powered Khan Academy) that aims to help educators both use AI in the classroom and explain to their students how the technology works. "TeachAI," the initiative's website explains, "is committing to provide thought leadership to guide governments and educational leaders in aligning education with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world and connecting the discussion of teaching with AI to teaching about AI and computer science."

Submission + - When Open Becomes Opaque: The Changing Face of Open-Source Hardware Companies (adafruit.com)

Submitted by caseih
caseih writes: A thoughtful post on the Adafruit Blog chronicles the problems facing open-source hardware companies, and how more and more companies, including Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa, are becoming more and more proprietary. In Arduino's case, they are deliberately trying to stamp out the clones undercutting them. The new Arduino Pro is not open source in any way, and the web site has now removed references to being an open source company.

As always there are subtlies and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source.

With Red Hat recently taking a step towards becoming a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are slashdotters' thoughts on the future? Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development?

Submission + - Google plans to scrape everything you post online to train its AI (malwarebytes.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Additions to Google’s Privacy Policy are making some observers worry that all of your content is about to be fed into Google's AI tools. Alterations to the T&Cs now explicitly state that your “publicly available information” will be used to train in-house Google AI models alongside other products.

Given the controversy over AI use generally, it might not seem like the best idea to have this information be easily missed on a page where it should perhaps be a lot more prominent.

What does this mean in plain terms? In pre-AI times, if you posted something online, whether a blog, a photograph, a piece of music or something else, there’s a good chance it would end up scraped by a search engine. This is how search engines work, and this is how you find the content you’re looking for when entering search terms.

But what Google is saying here is that from now on, all of the above will still happen. It’s just that the new addition means your text, photos, and music could end up helping to train its products and “AI models”.

As Gizmodo notes, previously it only referenced the popular Translate tool. Now Bard and Cloud AI are thrown into the mix. Bard is Google’s AI chat service, and if you were wondering: it does indeed make use of images. It ran into teething problems shortly after release, sharing false information in its own announcement. It’s no wonder that Google would try and make as much data as possible up for grabs with regard to feeding the ever-hungry AI tools with more information.

With so many AI tools doing things like falsely claiming that people have written articles or just running into copyright trouble generally, we have no real way to know if this will actually improve anything. You may have had some objections to search engines making bank from content you post online, but there is some positive return there in the form of your content being placed in front of people. Now we have AI spam posing a threat to said engines, while your content is potentially being monetised twice over with new AI policies coming into force.

Although the initial outlook for AI-generated content and scraping looks grim, it’s arguable if the current spam laden system is much better. The problem is we may just be trading one set of poor results and faulty tools for another.

Submission + - Google hit by 'data theft to train AI' lawsuit (cnn.com)

Submitted by david.emery
david.emery writes: CNN reports on a wide-ranging class action lawsuit claiming Google scraped and misused data to train its AI systems. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11... This goes to the heart of what can be done with information that is available over the Internet.

The complaint alleges that Google “has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans” and using this data to train its AI products, such as its chatbot Bard. The complaint also claims Google has taken “virtually the entirety of our digital footprint,” including “creative and copywritten works” to build its AI products.

In response to an earlier Verge report on the update, the company said its policy “has long been transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate. This latest update simply clarifies that newer services like Bard are also included.”

“Google needs to understand that ‘publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose,” Tim Giordano, one of the attorneys at Clarkson bringing the suit against Google, told CNN in an interview. “Our personal information and our data is our property, and it’s valuable, and nobody has the right to just take it and use it for any purpose.”

The plaintiffs, the Clarkson Law Firm, previously filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI

Submission + - U.S. Is "Middleman" In Billion-Dollar Child Trafficking Op: Whistleblower (themainewire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes,” Rodas said. “Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in home country, smuggled to the US border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a Sponsors – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations.”

“Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income – this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking,”

Submission + - Suse announces that they're spending $10M on a fork of RHEL

Submitted by John.Banister
John.Banister writes: SUSE announces that they're spending $10 million on maintaining a fork of RHEL, the source code of the fork to be freely available to all. I don't know that people who want to copy RHEL source will necessarily see copying the source of a fork as furthering their goals, but it could be that SUSE will build a nice alternative enterprise Linux to complement their current product. And, I reckon, better SUSE than Oracle, since I keep reading comments on people getting screwed by Oracle, but not so many on people getting screwed by SUSE.

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