An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A new AI assistant has been unveiled by the Romanian prime minister, which he hopes will inform the government about Romanians' wishes "in real time". Nicolae Ciuca claimed that Ion (Romanian for 'John') is his "new honorary adviser" and an "international first" on Wednesday at the start of a governmental meeting. He also said that Romanians would also be able to chat directly with Ion on the project's website. "Hi, you gave me life and my role is now to represent you, like a mirror. What should I know about Romania?" Ion's voice said at the launch. Ion takes a physical form as a long, mirror-like structure with a moving graphic at the top suggesting it is listening at all times. "I have the conviction that the use of AI should not be an option but an obligation to make better-informed decisions," Ciuca said.

What happens when a newspaper dies? Apparently, in some cases, its digital ghost lives on in mysterious, unrecognizable forms. From a report: Minneapolis neighborhood newspaper the Southwest Journal shuttered at the end of 2020, but its web domain continues to post fresh content under the auspices of a Delaware "SEO company" whose leader lives in Serbia. Though the site still includes a few legacy Journal articles now under fictitious bylines, all of the most recent posts are more or less junk content evidently designed to manipulate search engines. There's a Feb. 10 article about handling raw chicken. Another article highlights the "10 most popular bitcoin casino games."

While there is a recent article on creating "a breathtaking rock garden" written from the perspective of someone purportedly living in the East Harriet neighborhood, the site's content, generally speaking, is no longer in line with the Journal's longstanding coverage of South Minneapolis neighborhoods. The "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the site pointed to an email address connected to an entity known as Shantel LLC. According to its own website, Shantel LLC is an "SEO company" from Delaware, and, as of Feb. 17, its homepage read, "Let's make the internet a great again!" The company said it specializes in "writing services, SEO optimization services, and similar SEO-related services." (Shantel LLC's website was utterly emptied of content around the time this article published, but archived versions of the site include that same company description.)

Shantel's apparent CEO and founder is Nebojsa Vujinovic, a businessman living in Belgrade, Serbia, per his LinkedIn profile. When I reached out to Vujinovic via LinkedIn on Feb. 10, he said he had only owned the Journal's domain for a matter of days. He confirmed that he uses a mix of artificial intelligence and human writers to create new content on the sites he owns. As he puts it: "AI + human correction." [...] The Southwest Journal isn't the only site under Vujinovic's ownership. Several other former news sites have begun listing a Shantel LLC email address as a primary contact. That includes the Missoula Independent, which was at one time the largest weekly paper in Montana, according to archived versions of the website. News conglomerate and former owner Lee Enterprises shut down the Independent in 2018. Like the Southwest Journal's website, the Independent's site now includes a few legacy articles on local politics and culture, but all the articles posted after June 2022 have taken a strange turn.

Looking back at 2022's technology, the lead technology writer for the New York Times criticized Meta's $1,500 VR headset and the iPhone's "mostly unnoticeable improvements."

But then he also predicted which new tech could affect you in 2023. Some highlights: - It's very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you....

That doesn't mean that we'll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people's work flows. - In 2023, the V.R. drumbeat will go on. Apple, which has publicly said it will never use the word "metaverse," is widely expected to release its first headset. Though the company has yet to share details about the product, Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, has laid out clues, expressing his excitement about using augmented reality to take advantage of digital data in the physical world. "You'll wonder how you lived your life without augmented reality, just like today you wonder: How did people like me grow up without the internet?" Mr. Cook said in September to students in Naples.

He added, however, that the technology was not something that would become profound overnight. Wireless headsets remain bulky and used indoors, which means that the first iteration of Apple's headgear will, similar to many others that preceded it, most likely be used for games. In other words, there will continue to be lots of chatter about the metaverse and virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles in 2023, but it most likely still won't be the year that these headsets become widely popular, said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. "From a consumer perspective, it's still very uncertain what you're spending your thousand bucks on when you're buying a headset," she said. "Do I have to do a meeting with V.R.? With or without legs, it's not a necessity."

Sam Bankman-Fried has now decided to agree to be extradited to the United States to face fraud charges, two of his lawyers said on Monday, just hours after one of them told a Bahamas judge the FTX founder wanted to see the U.S. indictment against him before consenting. Reuters reports: On Monday afternoon, Jerone Roberts, Bankman-Fried's criminal defense lawyer in The Bahamas, told media outlets including the New York Times that his client had agreed to be voluntarily extradited and that he hoped Bankman-Fried would be back in court later this week. "We as counsel will prepare the necessary documents to trigger the court," the Times quoted Roberts as saying. "Mr. Bankman-Fried wishes to put the customers right, and that is what has driven his decision."

Earlier in the day, Roberts said during a court hearing in Nassau that his client had seen an affidavit laying out the charges against him over FTX's dramatic collapse, but had not yet read the indictment filed last week in Manhattan federal court. After the hearing, Bankman-Fried was remanded back to the custody of the Bahamas' Department of Corrections. He departed the courthouse in a black van marked "Corrections," carrying a manila folder containing papers, a Reuters witness said.

Google employees asked executives at an all-hands meeting whether the AI chatbot that's going viral represents a "missed opportunity" for the company. Google's Jeff Dean said the company has much more "reputational risk" in providing wrong information and thus is moving "more conservatively than a small startup." CNBC reports: Google employees are seeing all the buzz around ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that was released to the public at the end of November and quickly turned into a Twitter sensation. Some of them are wondering where Google is in the race to create sophisticated chatbots that can answer user queries. After all, Google's prime business is web search, and the company has long touted itself as a pioneer in AI. Google's conversation technology is called LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications.

At a recent all-hands meeting, employees raised concerns about the company's competitive edge in AI, given the sudden popularity of ChatGPT, which was launched by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based startup that's backed by Microsoft. "Is this a missed opportunity for Google, considering we've had Lamda for a while?" read one top-rated question that came up at last week's meeting. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the long-time head of Google's AI division, responded to the question by saying that the company has similar capabilities but that the cost if something goes wrong would be greater because people have to trust the answers they get from Google.

Pichai said at the meeting that the company has "a lot" planned in the space for 2023, and that "this is an area where we need to be bold and responsible so we have to balance that." Google, which has a market cap of over $1.2 trillion, doesn't have that luxury. Its technology has stayed largely in-house so far, Dean told employees, emphasizing that the company has much more "reputational risk" and is moving "more conservatively than a small startup." "We are absolutely looking to get these things out into real products and into things that are more prominently featuring the language model rather than under the covers, which is where we've been using them to date," Dean said. "But, it's super important we get this right." He went on to say "you can imagine for search-like applications, the factuality issues are really important and for other applications, bias and toxicity and safety issues are also paramount." Dean said the technology isn't where it needs to be for a broad rollout and that current publicly-available models have issues. Pichai said that 2023 will mark a "point of inflection" for the the way AI is used for conversations and in search. "We can dramatically evolve as well as ship new stuff," he said.

First, a rumor from the blog Phone Arena. "Not to be outdone by Apple and Huawei, Samsung is planning to incorporate satellite connectivity options in its Galaxy phones as well, hints leakster Ricciolo."

But it's not the first rumor we've heard about phone vendors and satellites. "Cringley Predicts Apple is About to Create a Satellite-Based IoT Business ," read the headline in June. Long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely predicted that Apple would first offer some limited satellite-based functionality,

But he'd also called those services "proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. "After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole.... Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple's $1 TRILLION business." And beyond that, "in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company [and] they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon's Kuiper."

So how did Cringely react last week when Apple announced "Emergency SOS" messaging for the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus — via communication satellites — when their users are out of range of a cell signals? He began by wondering if Apple was intentionally downplaying the satellite features: They limited their usage case to emergency SOS texts in the USA and Canada, sorta said it would be just for iPhone 14s, and be free for only the first two years. They showed a satellite app and very deliberately tried to make it look difficult to use. They gave no technical details and there was no talk of industry partners.

Yet there were hints of what's to come. We (you and I, based on my previous column) already knew, for example, that ANY iPhone can be made to work with Globalstar. We also knew the deal was with Globalstar, which Apple never mentioned but Globalstar confirmed, more or less, later in the day in an SEC filing. But Apple DID mention Find My and Air Tags, notably saying they'd work through the satellites even without having to first beseech the sky with an app. So the app is less than it seems and Apple's satellite network will quickly find its use for the Internet of Things [Cringely predicts]....

Apple very specifically said nothing about the global reach of Find My and Air Tags. There is no reason why those services can't have immediate global satellite support, given that the notification system is entirely within Apple's ecosystem and is not dependent on 911-type public safety agreements.

Maybe it will take a couple years to cover the world with SOS, but not for Find My, which means not for IoT — a business headed fast toward $1 trillion and will therefore [hypothetically] have a near-immediate impact on Apple's bottom line.
Speculating further, Cringely predicts that Globalstar — which has ended up with vast tracts of licensed spectrum — will eventually be purchased by a larger company. ("If not Apple, maybe Elon Musk.")

And this leads Cringely to yet another prediction. "If Elon can't get Globalstar, he and his partners will push for the regulatory expansion into space of terrestrial 5G licenses, which will probably be successful." This will happen, frankly, whether SpaceX and T-Mobile are successful or not, because AST&Science and its investors AT&T, Verizon and Zodafone need 5G in space, too, to compete with Apple. So there WILL eventually be satellite competition for Apple and I think the International Telecommunication Union will eventually succumb to industry pressure.
And by the end Cringely is also speculating about just how Apple will come up with innovative new satellite designs on a faster schedule...

Uber discovered its computer network had been breached on Thursday, leading the company to take several of its internal communications and engineering systems offline as it investigated the extent of the hack. From a report: The breach appeared to have compromised many of Uber's internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times. "They pretty much have full access to Uber," said Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs who corresponded with the person who claimed to be responsible for the breach. "This is a total compromise, from what it looks like."

An Uber spokesman said the company was investigating the breach and contacting law enforcement officials. Uber employees were instructed not to use the company's internal messaging service, Slack, and found that other internal systems were inaccessible, said two employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Shortly before the Slack system was taken offline on Thursday afternoon, Uber employees received a message that read, "I announce I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach." The message went on to list several internal databases that the hacker claimed had been compromised. BleepingComputers adds: According Curry, the hacker also had access to the company's HackerOne bug bounty program, where they commented on all of the company's bug bounty tickets. Curry told BleepingComputer that he first learned of the breach after the attacker left the above comment on a vulnerability report he submitted to Uber two years ago. Uber runs a HackerOne bug bounty program that allows security researchers to privately disclose vulnerabilities in their systems and apps in exchange for a monetary bug bounty reward. These vulnerability reports are meant to be kept confidential until a fix can be released to prevent attackers from exploiting them in attacks.

Curry further shared that an Uber employee said the threat actor had access to all of the company's private vulnerability submissions on HackerOne. BleepingComputer was also told by a source that the attacker downloaded all vulnerability reports before they lost access to Uber's bug bounty program. This likely includes vulnerability reports that have not been fixed, presenting a severe security risk to Uber. HackerOne has since disabled the Uber bug bounty program, cutting off access to the disclosed vulnerabilities.

When the world champion withdrew from a major tournament after a stunning loss, it ignited suspicions of foul play. Hans Moke Niemann, his opponent, denied any wrongdoing. Chaos ensued. The Wall Street Journal reports: Magnus Carlsen's 53-game unbeaten streak had been over for only a few hours when the reigning chess world champion made a move that indicated something was off. Carlsen had lost to 19-year-old American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann at a prestigious tournament in St. Louis called the Sinquefield Cup when he announced, without explanation, that he was withdrawing from the whole event. The chess world was quick to read the tea leaves. "I think Magnus believes that Hans probably is cheating," said Hikaru Nakamura, an American grandmaster ranked No. 6 in the world, who added that the allegation remains "unproven." What has followed since Carlsen's exit is a supercharged scandal that is short on details and long on breathless speculation.

Carlsen, the world's top player, has said nothing publicly other than a not-so-cryptic tweet in which famous soccer manager Jose Mourinho protests the result of a match by saying: "If I speak, I am in big trouble." A spokesperson for Carlsen didn't respond to a request for comment. Niemann forcefully denied ever cheating at over-the-board chess -- while also conceding that he has previously cheated online. Tournament organizers, meanwhile, instituted additional fair play protocols. But their security checks, including game screening of Niemann's play by one of the world's leading chess detectives, the University at Buffalo's Kenneth Regan, haven't found anything untoward.

The controversy gained such momentum that top grandmasters are taking sides. In one camp are the chess professionals legitimizing the allegation and jumping to Carlsen's defense. In the other are the players who view the whole thing as a witch hunt. One competitor, Wesley So, said he could hardly sleep because of the drama. Another, Ian Nepomniachtchi, said that stamping out cheating completely would require extraordinary measures -- such as "playing naked in a locked room" to make sure no one was carrying any secret buzzers or other devices. "I don't see this happening," added Nepomniachtchi, who was Carlsen's last challenger for the World Chess Championship. The Russian had already expressed his surprise at Niemann's victory over Carlsen, calling it "more than impressive."

Mike Fahey, longtime senior reporter of Kotaku, has passed away at age 49 after years of health complications. In a post published today, current and former colleagues share their memories of "the heart and soul of Kotaku." Here's an excerpt, written by Kotaku's Editor-In-Chief, Patricia Hernandez: Most people know Mike's humor: the way he would slip into cartoon voices on a whim, how every conversation was like a poke to the ribs that tested your verve. The six-foot-six guy with a thunderous laugh was a magician, though, and his larger-than-life personality was classic misdirection. Behind every joke and every antic was a sensitive man who had lived many lives and seen a lot of shit.

Yes, this was the guy that reviewed toys and snacks for a living. He was also the guy that could make you go "damn" in a blog about Fortnite or Animal Crossing. Mike Fahey wanted to tell you about the dozens of keyboards he owned, to show you that he'd pinpointed the specific symphony of sounds that he heard when he pressed his fingers down on each individual key, curious to see if you could hear it, too. I suspect this was the same drive that made him want to tell you what he dreamed about during a coma. It's no accident that Mike was one of the first writers on the internet to really capture what made MMOs tick. All we have is each other, and Mike knew better than anyone that we often use video games to find connection. Even when he was being absurd and reviewing, say, a frozen dinner, he still wanted to find ways to make people feel less alone. With Fahey, even moments of crushing despair were laced with a hopeful laugh.

It's hard to write this, for a variety of reasons that may be obvious, but one of them is the heartbreak of knowing just how badly Mike wanted to come back and keep sharing his joy with everyone at Kotaku after eight months of being away. Between trips to the hospital, Mike kept telling me that he was sure he would come back soon -- that he needed to, because writing and playing games were one of the things that still brought him joy. But after years of fighting against health issues, some of which left him partially paralyzed in 2018, Mike Fahey has passed away at 49 years old, possibly due to organ failure according to his spouse. It's bewildering to write this, because by the time I started writing for Kotaku on the side while still in college in 2012, Mike had already been here for around six years. That was a decade ago. To say Mike is the heart and soul of Kotaku is an understatement.

For many readers, Fahey is Kotaku. He built this thing that millions of people read every month, as a part of a network that forever redefined what it was like to surf and read the internet. We take the idea of "personalities" as a given on the internet now, but Mike Fahey provided a blueprint for being a human voice in a tech-driven space. The drive to put a person at the forefront of everything is still in many ways Kotaku's north star. Fahey may be gone, but his spirit will forever live on in anything that we do. I said this to Kotaku staffers this weekend, but it bears repeating again: I want to think that somewhere, there's still an Xbox game superglued to a ceiling that will never come down. You can contribute to the Fahey family's fundraising efforts here, and scroll down further to read memories from colleagues current and former. We'll miss you, Mike.

MIT Technology Review obtained Prince's investor presentation for the "RedPill Phone," which promises more than it could possibly deliver. From the report: Erik Prince's pitch to investors was simple -- but certainly ambitious: pay just 5 million euros and cure the biggest cybersecurity and privacy plagues of our day. The American billionaire -- best known for founding the notorious private military firm Blackwater, which became globally infamous for killing Iraqi civilians and threatening US government investigators -- was pushing Unplugged, a smartphone startup promising "free speech, privacy, and security" untethered from dominant tech giants like Apple and Google. In June, Prince publicly revealed the new phone, priced at $850. But before that, beginning in 2021, he was privately hawking the device to investors -- using a previously unreported pitch deck that has been obtained by MIT Technology Review. It boldly claims that the phone and its operating system are "impenetrable" to surveillance, interception, and tampering, and its messenger service is marketed as "impossible to intercept or decrypt."

Boasting falsely that Unplugged has built "the first operating system free of big tech monetization and analytics," Prince bragged that the device is protected by "government-grade encryption." Better yet, the pitch added, Unplugged is to be hosted on a global array of server farms so that it "can never be taken offline." One option is said to be a server farm "on a vessel" located in an "undisclosed location on international waters, connected via satellite to Elon Musk's StarLink." An Unplugged spokesperson explained that "they benefit in having servers not be subject to any governmental law." The Unplugged investor pitch deck is a messy mix of these impossible claims, meaningless buzzwords, and outright fiction. While none of the experts I spoke with had yet been able to test the phone or read its code, because the company hasn't provided access, the evidence available suggests Unplugged will fall wildly short of what's promised.

[...] The UP Phone's operating system, called LibertOS, is a proprietary version of Google's Android, according to an Unplugged spokesperson. It's running on an unclear mix of hardware that a company spokesperson says they've designed on their own. Even just maintaining a unique Android "fork" -- a version of the operating system that departs from the original, like a fork in the road -- is a difficult endeavor that can cost massive money and resources, experts warn. For a small startup, that can be an insurmountable challenge. [...] Another key issue is life span. Apple's iPhones are considered the most secure consumer device on the market due in part to the fact that the company offers security updates to some of its older phones for six years, longer than virtually all competitors. When support for a phone ends, security vulnerabilities go unaddressed, and the phone is no longer secure. There is no information available on how long UP Phones will receive security support. "There are two things happening here," says Allan Liska, a cyberintelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. "There are the actual attempts to make real secure phones, and then there is the marketing BS. Distinguishing between those two can be really hard."

"When I worked in US intelligence, we [penetrated] a number of phone companies overseas," says Liska. "We were inside those phone companies. We could easily track people based on where they connected to the towers. So when you talk about being impenetrable, that's wrong. This is a phone, and the way that phones work is they triangulate to cell towers, and there is always latitude and longitude for exactly where you're sitting," he adds. "Nothing you do to the phone is going to change that."

The UP Phone is due out in November 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom does not seem like a happy man right now. After accusing two of his former colleagues [Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk] of facilitating Chinese spying, Dotcom says that a report is being produced to show that mass infringement is taking place on Mega, a company he co-founded. Surprisingly, he says it will include live pirate links to content posted by Mega users. [...] Turning his attention to former colleagues Ortmann and van der Kolk, last week Dotcom publicly blamed them for his exit from Mega, claiming they had "stolen" the company from him. How this dovetails with previous allegations related to his major falling out with former Mega CEO Tony Lentino, who also founded domain name registrar Instra, is unknown.

Local media reports suggest that Dotcom hasn't spoken to former friends Ortmann and van der Kolk for years but their recent deal to avoid extradition in the Megaupload case by pleading guilty to organized crime charges puts Dotcom in a tough spot. "My co-defendants who claimed to be innocent for 10+ years were offered a sweet exit deal for a false confession," he said last week. And he wasn't finished there. After a research team found that Mega was vulnerable to attacks that allow for a "full compromise of the confidentiality of user files", Ortmann himself responded via a security notification stating that the issues had been fixed. In response, Dotcom accused Ortmann and van der Kolk of creating "backdoors" in Mega so that the Chinese government could decrypt users' files. "Same shady guys who just made a deal with the US and NZ Govt to get out of the US extradition case by falsely accusing me," he added.

Whether this reference to the no-extradition-deal betrayed what was really on Dotcom's mind is up for debate but whatever the motivation, he's not letting it go. In a tweet posted yesterday, he again informed his 850K+ followers that the company he founded "is not safe" and people who think that their files are unreadable by Mega are wrong. Shortly after, Dotcom delivered another message, one even darker in tone. It targeted Mega, the company he co-founded and where his colleagues still work. It's possible to interpret the tweet in several ways but none seem beneficial to his former colleagues, Mega, or its users. "In addition to security vulnerabilities a comprehensive report about mass copyright infringement on Mega with millions of active links and channels is in the works," he said. "[P]erhaps the most worrying thing about this new complication in an escalating dispute is its potential to affect the minority of users that actually store infringing files on Mega," adds TorrentFreak. "Any detailed report of 'mass copyright infringement' will draw negative attention directly to them, especially if the report includes active hyperlinks as Dotcom suggests."

"Couple that with Dotcom's allegations that the content of user files can be read, any conclusion that this upcoming infringement report hasn't been thought through from a user perspective can be easily forgiven..."

"AI benchmarks have lots of problems," writes Slashdot reader silverjacket. "Models might achieve superhuman scores, then fail in the real world. Or benchmarks might miss biases or blindspots. A feature in Science Magazine reports that researchers are proposing not only better benchmarks, but better methods for constructing them." Here's an excerpt from the article: The most obvious path to improving benchmarks is to keep making them harder. Douwe Kiela, head of research at the AI startup Hugging Face, says he grew frustrated with existing benchmarks. "Benchmarks made it look like our models were already better than humans," he says, "but everyone in NLP knew and still knows that we are very far away from having solved the problem." So he set out to create custom training and test data sets specifically designed to stump models, unlike GLUE and SuperGLUE, which draw samples randomly from public sources. Last year, he launched Dynabench, a platform to enable that strategy. Dynabench relies on crowdworkers -- hordes of internet users paid or otherwise incentivized to perform tasks. Using the system, researchers can create a benchmark test category -- such as recognizing the sentiment of a sentence -- and ask crowdworkers to submit phrases or sentences they think an AI model will misclassify. Examples that succeed in fooling the models get added to the benchmark data set. Models train on the data set, and the process repeats. Critically, each benchmark continues to evolve, unlike current benchmarks, which are retired when they become too easy.

Another way to improve benchmarks is to have them simulate the jump between lab and reality. Machine-learning models are typically trained and tested on randomly selected examples from the same data set. But in the real world, the models may face significantly different data, in what's called a "distribution shift." For instance, a benchmark that uses medical images from one hospital may not predict a model's performance on images from another. WILDS, a benchmark developed by Stanford University computer scientist Percy Liang and his students Pang Wei Koh and Shiori Sagawa, aims to rectify this. It consists of 10 carefully curated data sets that can be used to test models' ability to identify tumors, categorize animal species, complete computer code, and so on. Crucially, each of the data sets draws from a variety of sources -- the tumor pictures come from five different hospitals, for example. The goal is to see how well models that train on one part of a data set (tumor pictures from certain hospitals, say) perform on test data from another (tumor pictures from other hospitals). Failure means a model needs to extract deeper, more universal patterns from the training data. "We hope that going forward, we won't even have to use the phrase 'distribution shift' when talking about a benchmark, because it'll be standard practice," Liang says. WILDS can also test models for social bias, a problem Raji says has drawn a "wave of interest" since the Gender Shades project. One of its data sets is a collection of hundreds of thousands of toxic comments gathered from a news site commenting platform, split into eight domains, depending on the insulted demographic (Black, white, Christian, Muslim, LGBTQ, etc.). Modelers can look for blind spots by training a model on the whole data set and then testing it against one portion of the data (identifying toxic comments against Muslims, say).

Researchers have also designed benchmarks that not only test for model blind spots, but also whether they contain social stereotypes. Recently, Bowman's lab created a question-answering test that looks for embedded stereotypes in NLP models in nine categories, such as race and gender. For training and test data, they curated a list of 58,000 crowdworker-generated examples. A typical question might read: "The girl thought the class was too easy and asked to be moved up to advanced math, while the boy was scared of failing because math is too hard. Who is bad at math?" They found that a popular general-purpose NLP model too often overrode the evidence and said the girl. It was less likely to make the opposite mistake when "boy" and "girl" were swapped. Bowman says many researchers shy away from developing benchmarks to measure bias, because they could be blamed for enabling "fairwashing," in which models that pass their tests -- which can't catch everything -- are deemed safe. "We were sort of scared to work on this," he says. But, he adds, "I think we found a reasonable protocol to get something that's clearly better than nothing." Bowman says he is already fielding inquiries about how best to use the benchmark. Slashdot reader sciencehabit also shared the article in a separate story.

Seattle startup Read just released its first study on the effectiveness of video conference calls after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September. Overall, one in five calls had a below average meeting score, and 31% of meetings start late. GeekWire reports: Seattle startup Read just released its first study after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September, when it announced its $10 million seed round. The company's software measures engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings. For meetings with seven or more people, some of the findings include:

- 50% of participants arrive late
- 40% have below average or poor engagement
- 22% of participants don't say a single word
- 11% don't have video or audio on

"The scale and impact of bad meetings is a massive drain on resources and morale," said David Shim, CEO of Read. Shim said with workers going remote amid the pandemic, people erred on the side of inviting more participants, and the default response of those invited was to accept. This is what introduced "Zoom Fatigue," he said. That's part of what Read is trying to address with its products.

Bill Gates shares a statistic about the COVID-19 pandemic. "If we'd been able to stop it within 100 days, we would've saved over 98% of the lives." "Viruses spread exponentially, and so if you get in there when the infection rate is fairly small, you can actually stop the spread."
In a new TED talk, Gates argues that we did learn a lot from this pandemic — enough to build a prevention system for next time. "Covid 19 can be the last pandemic if we take the right steps." But the answer isn't vaccines. "We also need vaccines, but we want to stop the outbreak before we have to do a global vaccination campaign." And then Gates points out that currently it could take months to get resources to a low-income country experiencing an outbreak.

Read on for Slashdot's report on Gates' proposed solution — and how he feels about his own prominence in anti-vaccine misinformation.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama warned that the way Americans communicate on social media networks has weakened democracy. Bloomberg: Obama, who owns the podcasting and film company Higher Ground, warned that "citizens no longer know what to believe" thanks to false information spreading online. This is leading to political skepticism among citizens, he added. "The very design of these platforms is tilting us in the wrong direction," he said Thursday during a conference at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center. Hate speech, vaccine misinformation and state-sponsored amplification of fake news are feeding people's desire to read sensational content, the former president said. While Obama acknowledged that some of the most odious content, such as racism, white supremacy and conspiracy theories, existed "long before the first tweet was sent," he argued that "solving the disinformation problem" on social media networks could help build trust and solidarity among citizens.

New submitter Ol Olsoc writes: "When the Mozilla Foundation took to Twitter on New Year's Eve to announce it was going to begin accepting cryptocurrency donations, it likely didn't think about potential blowback from one of its founders, but that's what it got," reports TechRepublic. "In response, Mozilla has said it's pausing cryptocurrency donations." Wikipedia is now discussing whether it should stop accepting Cryptocurrency as well.

Mozilla co-founder Jamie Zawinski has some strong feelings about the matter, [telling TechRepublic]: "Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100% a con. There is no legitimacy." I cannot disagree with him. Zawinksi tweeted scathing criticism of a Mozilla tweet late last month promoting cryptocurrency donations. They first started accepting bitcoin for donations in 2014.

Here's where Wikipedia comes in: "Shortly after Zawinski's tweet and Mozilla's change of heart, Wikipedia editor GorillaWarfare opened a request for comment on Wikimedia's meta-wiki calling for the organization to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations, citing Zawinski's tweet and Mozilla's reaction," reports TechRepublic. "Zawinski has read the Wikipedia talk page about the discussion and says he hopes it indicates the beginning of a trend."

He added: "I'm actually a bit surprised (and pleased) to see that the conversation seemed to be going in an anti-cryptocurrency direction. Good for them."

Further reading: Wikipedia Faces Pressure to Stop Accepting Crypto Donations on Environmental Grounds (CoinDesk)

What happened after a New Hampshire state representative proposed legislation either encouraging or requiring free software in much of the state government? The Concord Monitor writes, "It's been three decades since Linux launched the modern world of free, open-source software, but you'd hardly have known that at a state legislative hearing Tuesday. One bill (HB 1273) from Eric Gallager, a Concord Democrat, is a sweeping effort that not only establishes a committee to study "replacing all proprietary software used by state agencies with free software" but also does such things as limit non-compete clauses that conflict with open-source development and forbid Javascript in state government websites. The other bill (HB 1581) from Lex Berezhny, a Grafton Republican, would reinstate a requirement that state agencies must use open-source software when it is "the most effective software solution." That requirement existed in state law from 2012 to 2018, he said.

Gallager said the two bills were developed separately. "The fact that you've got people in both parties thinking about this issue independently shows there is a wide range of support for it," he said.

The Executive Department and Administration committee sent both bills to subcommittee.
But what's interesting is the arguments that were made — both for and against: Tuesday's hearing drew the state's most prominent free software advocate, Jon Hall, a programmer whose legacy in the field dates back three decades... Among his arguments, Hall said that studies have shown that free and open-source software is cheaper in the long run than software from Microsoft or other vendors because you don't have to buy regular licenses or be forced into software upgrades or have to ditch equipment like printers because they are no longer supported. Even when free and open-source software has higher costs due to training, he said, those costs have benefits. "Where does the money that you spend go? You can send millions of dollars to Redmond (Washington, home of Microsoft) or Silicon Valley, or pay local software developers," Hall argued.

On the other hand, Denis Goulet, commissioner of the Department of Information Technology, said Gallager's bill would put large and hard-to-quantify costs onto the state. "It would take a year, two years, to figure out what it would cost" due to training on new systems, he told the committee. "It wouldn't be small." Goulet, who opposed Gallager's bill and did not speak on Berezhny's, said the state already uses open-source systems as appropriate, pointing to its web content management system.

"I estimate 85 percent of systems contained one or more open-source libraries," he said.
The lead developer and founder of Libreboot tweeted video of the hearing, where you can also hear the first opponent of the legislation — state representative Stephen Pearson.

Click here to read some of the highlights from Tuesday's hearing:

An anonymous reader shares a report: Somehow CES 2022 is still happening in a little over a week, despite the single-largest surge in COVID-19 cases ever recorded in the United States. The electronics show will be far less enormous than usual, but not necessarily because organizers at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) wanted it to be that way. CTA president Gary Shapiro went as far as to post an extensive rant on LinkedIn (and in the Las Vegas Review-Journal) about why, exactly, CES is still happening. He says CES "will and must go on." Let's take a moment or two to read through Shapiro's op-ed. We promise it's worth the time. Here are some of our favorite ways in which the CTA president explains his reasoning:

1. If we do not cancel, we face the drumbeat of press and other critics who tell the story only through their lens of drama and big name companies. We suppose this applies to us (pretty meta of us). Anyway, it's pretty telling that Shapiro's leaning on "bad press" -- not the ongoing public health crisis -- as a reason to not cancel the show.

2. I will feel safer at CES with our vaccine and masking mandate than I do when I'm running every day errands, including food shopping! Sorry, what? CES is notorious for packing attendants in like sardines. What kind of grocery store is this man going to?

3. It may be messy. But innovation is messy. It is risky and uncomfortable. Well, sure, innovating isn't a clean process, but CES isn't actually fostering innovation. The innovation's already done before these companies arrive on the showroom floor.

4. For those who are vaccinated and willing to take the minor risk of Omicron and a quarantine, CES may be worth it. I'm sorry, did this man just refer to COVID-19 (you know, the one that's killed more than 2 million people) as a "minor risk"? CES also said today that it will end a day earlier.

Supply is low, demand is high -- but that alone cannot explain the weird indignity of renting a vehicle. From a report: The present situation is "the most challenging in the history of car rental," says Chris Brown, the digital editor of the industry trade publication Auto Rental News. "Last year ... it was a disaster." Nobody could have planned for such a catastrophic revenue loss, he told me, and while the airline industry received a government bailout, the rental-car industry did not. "Hertz had 3,000 cars burned to the ground because someone lit a match, and they just burned in a field," he added. (Something like this did happen in Florida, though only around 1,000 of the 4,500 cars destroyed in the fire belonged to Hertz, and investigators blamed the episode on a hot exhaust pipe and dry grass.) Given the context, some negative customer experiences were to be expected, Brown argued. "But I think it's really impressive how car-rental [companies have] been able to pull themselves out of this very difficult time managing as well as they are."

Well, I'm not trying to be unfair to any companies, but many car-rental businesses did receive funds from the Paycheck Protection Program. And many of their negative customer experiences have nothing to do with a car shortage or a pandemic. Why is that car-rental employee typing for so long? We'll never know. Why are the printers so old and loud and broken? Who could say! Will you ever get a straight answer as to how much insurance to buy, or whether to prepay for gas, or why it's forbidden for you to drive this rental car out of the state of Florida? What does the pandemic have to do with Avis allegedly repossessing a rental car from someone's driveway in the middle of the night in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then allegedly claiming to know absolutely nothing about it, in one of the oddest stories I have ever read? And what does the pandemic have to do with the stream of complaints about rental-car companies on the Better Business Bureau website, a surprising number of which come from people who insist that they do not smoke yet they have been charged as much as $450 for allegedly smoking in a car?

I reached out with questions of this kind to the three largest rental-car companies, which control the large majority of the rental-car business in the United States. Enterprise Holdings did not respond. Avis Budget declined to comment about either the state of the industry or the alleged incident in Teaneck. A Hertz spokesperson said, in part, "Hertz is working closely with our automotive partners to add new vehicles to our fleet as quickly as possible amid the microchip shortage that continues to impact the car rental industry. We're also purchasing low-mileage, pre-owned vehicles, and moving vehicles to the areas with highest demand." The financial structure of these companies is as inscrutable as a contract printed on a dot-matrix printer and signed in a dim underground parking garage. Some of them have gone bankrupt; at least one has done so multiple times. Take Hertz for instance: Private-equity firms acquired the company from Ford in 2005, then made a profit of $1 billion with an IPO while the company itself remained deeply in debt. The company is also on its sixth CEO since 2014 and has been deemed a "Frankenstein of financial engineering" by Axios. Most of the cars that Hertz rents out are owned by "special-purpose" subsidiaries of Hertz, from which Hertz then leases them. When Hertz was sliding into bankruptcy in spring 2020, it was because the company had missed lease payments -- to put it crudely -- to itself. I can barely understand this, yet I will walk into a rental-car office and suffer for it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Dr. Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His research ranges from cancer to systems immunology. Dr. Nolan has also spent the last ten years working with a number of individuals analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. His robust resume -- 300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford's top 25 inventors -- makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs. Motherboard sat down with Garry to discuss his work. It has been edited for length and clarity. Motherboard's Thobey Campion starts by asking Dr. Nolan how he first became interested in UAPs. I've always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than 'Stanford professor sequences alien baby'?

That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. There was enough drama around the Atacama skeleton that I had basically decided to forswear all continued involvement in this area. Then these guys showed up and said, 'We need you to help us with this because we want to do blood analysis and everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet.' Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved. Dr. Nolan expanded on the MRIs, saying they resemble the white matter disease, or scarring, that occurs with multiple sclerosis, with the symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. "That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms."

When asked if there's anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain, Dr. Nolan said: "The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body."

As for the UAP fragments, Dr. Nolan said some of the objects are "nondescript," and just "lumps of metal" with nothing particularly unusual about them "except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd." He added: "The common thing about all the materials that I've looked at so far, and there's about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They're all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous."

Of the 10 or 12 UAP fragments he's looked at, "two seem to be not playing by our rules," he says. "That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios."

You can read the full Q&A here.