The artificial intelligence research company OpenAI will eliminate the waiting list for access to the API of its natural language processing program (NLP) GPT-3. From a report: The move will accelerate access to the world's best-known reading and writing AI model, and is a sign that OpenAI believes the program is safe enough -- and can be monitored sufficiently -- to be disseminated more widely. Developers from supported countries will be able to sign up to access GPT-3's API and begin experimenting immediately, OpenAI said in an announcement Thursday morning. Previously developers had to sit on a waiting list as OpenAI reviewed them before they could even get experimental access. "We've added a lot of improvements across our API and added a number of safety features," says Peter Welinder, VP of products and partnerships at OpenAI. "We think a lot of value can come from getting more developers to build solutions to problems that they see in their environments."

The battle between the appetites of European Union Member States' governments to retain their citizens' data -- for fuzzy, catch-all 'security' purposes -- and the region's top court, the CJEU, which continues to defend fundamental rights by reiterating that indiscriminate mass surveillance is incompatible with general principles of EU law (such as proportionality and respect for privacy) -- has led to another pointed legal critique of national law on bulk data retention. From a report: This time it's a German data retention law that's earned the slap-down -- via a CJEU referral which joins a couple of cases, involving ISPs SpaceNet and Telekom Deutschland which are challenging the obligation to store their customers' telecommunications traffic data. The court's judgement is still pending but an influential opinion put out today by an advisor to the CJEU takes the view that general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data can only be permitted exceptionally -- in relation to a threat to national security -- and nor can data be retained permanently. In a press release announcing the opinion of advocate general Manuel Campos Sanchez-Bordona, the court writes that the AG "considers that the answers to all the questions referred are already in the Court's case-law or can be inferred from them without difficulty"; going on to set out his view that the German law's "general and indiscriminate storage obligation" -- which covers "a very wide range of traffic and location data" -- cannot be reconciled with EU law by a time limit imposed on storage as data is being sucked up in bulk, not in a targeted fashion (i.e. for a specific national security purpose).

Facebook advertisers promoted false and misleading claims about climate change on the platform in recent weeks, just as the COP26 conference was getting under way. From a report: Days after Facebook's vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, touted the company's efforts to combat climate misinformation in a blog as the Glasgow summit began, conservative media network Newsmax ran an ad on Facebook (FB.O) that called man-made global warming a "hoax." The ad, which had multiple versions, garnered more than 200,000 views.

In another, conservative commentator Candace Owens said, "apparently we're just supposed to trust our new authoritarian government" on climate science, while a U.S. libertarian think-tank ran an ad on how "modern doomsayers" had been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades. Newsmax, Owens and the Daily Wire, which paid for the ad from Owens's page, did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, does not have a specific policy on climate misinformation in ads or unpaid posts. Alphabet's Google said last month it would no longer allow ads that contradict scientific consensus on climate change on YouTube and its other services, though it would allow content that discusses false claims.

According to a report from Nikkei Asia (paywalled), "The Japanese-made Fugaku captured its fourth consecutive title as the world's fastest supercomputer on Tuesday, although a rival from the U.S. or China is poised to steal the crown as soon as next year." From a report: But while Fugaku is the world's most powerful public supercomputer, at 442 petaflops, China is believed to secretly operate two exascale (1,000 petaflops) supercomputers, which were launched earlier this year. The top 10 list did not change much since the last report six months ago, with only one new addition -- a Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2. Voyager, featuring AMD Epyc CPUs and Nvidia A100 GPUs, achieved 30.05 petaflops, making it the tenth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The other systems remained in the same position - after Japan's Arm-based Fugaku comes the US Summit system, an IBM Power and Nvidia GPU supercomputer capable of 148 petaflops. The similarly-architected 94 petaflops US Sierra system is next. Then comes what is officially China's most powerful supercomputer, the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight, which features Sunway chips. The Biden administration sanctioned the company earlier this year. You can read a summary of the systems in the Top10 here.

Last week, YouTube announced a controversial decision to make the "dislike" count on videos private across its platform. Not only did the move upset many Slashdotters, but it upset the third co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, too. According to The Verge, Karim suggests that the move "will lead to YouTube's decline." From the report: "Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed," writes Karim. "The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good."

Karim has been getting his own message out in an unusual way: by editing the description to the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, a banal clip titled "Me at the zoo" which stars the 25-year-old Karim himself. Karim originally edited the description of the video a few days ago to read: "When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube [face palm emoji]." But this morning he changed this description once again to give a more detailed condemnation: "The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform," writes Karim. "Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can't be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that's OK. [...] The process works, and there's a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre?"

In his statement today, Karim compares the video in which Matt Koval, YouTube's "creator liason," announced the removal of dislikes to infamous footage of US soldier Jeremiah Denton, who was captured during the Vietnam War. In 1966, Denton was forced to give a television interview by his captors, during which he blinked in Morse code to spell out the word "torture." You can read Karim's full statement in the description of this video.

Discord has been quietly building its own app platform based on bots over the past few years. More than 30 percent of Discord servers now use bots, and 430,000 of them are used every week across Discord by its 150 million monthly active users. Now that bots are an important part of Discord, the company is embracing them even further with the ability to search and browse for bots on Discord. From a report: A new app discovery feature will start showing up in Discord in spring 2022. Verified apps and bots (which total around 12,000 right now) will be discoverable through this feature. Developers will be able to opt into discoverability, once they're fully prepared for a new influx of users that can easily find their bots. Bots are powerful on Discord, offering a range of customizations for servers. Discord server owners install bots on servers to help moderate them or offer mini-games or features to their communities. There are popular bots that will spit out memes on a daily basis, bots that help you even create your own bot, or music bots that let Discord users listen to tunes together.

Is the ocular product EyeDetect a leap ahead of the polygraph? Or just the same dubiousness in a more high-tech box? From a report: In 2018, John Rael, a volunteer track coach in Taos, N.M., was on trial for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl when his lawyer made an unusual request. He wanted the judge to admit evidence from "EyeDetect," a lie-detection test based on eye movements that Rael had passed. The judge agreed, and five of the 12 jurors wound up voting not to convict. A mistrial was declared. EyeDetect is the product of the Utah company Converus. "Imagine if you could exonerate the innocent and identify the liars ... just by looking into their eyes," the company's YouTube channel promises. "Well, now you can!" Its chief executive, Todd Mickelsen, says they've built a better truth-detection mousetrap; he believes eye movements reflect their bearer far better than the much older and mostly discredited polygraph. Its popularity may be growing: the company says EyeDetect has gone from 500 customers in 2019 to 600 now.

Its critics, however, say the EyeDetect is just the polygraph in more algorithmic clothing. The machine is fundamentally unable to deliver on its claims, they argue, because human truth-telling is too subtle for any data set. And they worry that relying on it can lead to tragic outcomes, like punishing the innocent or providing a cloak for the guilty. EyeDetect raises a question that draws all the way back to the Garden of Eden: Are humans so wired to tell the truth we'll give ourselves away when we don't? And, to a more 21st-century query: Can modern technology come up with the tools to detect those tells? An EyeDetect test has a subject placed in front of a monitor with a digital camera and, as with the polygraph, lobbed generically true-false queries like "have you ever hurt anybody" to establish a baseline. Then come specific questions. If the subject's physical responses are more demonstrative there, they are presumed to be lying; less demonstrative, they're telling the truth.

In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger's voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen. From a report: One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved. The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind. In Cambodia, everyone from tuk-tuk drivers to Prime Minister Hun Sen prefers to send voice notes instead of messages. Facebook's study revealed that it wasn't just Cambodians who favor voice messages -- though nowhere else was it more popular. In the study, which included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and that single Cambodian, 87% of respondents said that they used voice tools to send notes in a different language from the one set on their apps. This was true on WhatsApp -- the most popular platform among the survey respondents -- along with Messenger and Telegram.

One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard. In Cambodia's case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language's 74 characters, the most of any script in the world. It was a daunting task. Javier Sola, a Spanish-born, Phnom Penh-based computer scientist, was part of the team working on the initial KhmerOS project in 2005. "There are many, many more symbols in Khmer than in [the] Latin script," Sola, now executive director of Cambodian NGO the Open Institute, told Rest of World. On a Latin keyboard, a user could see all of the alphabet at once, making typing intuitive. But in Khmer, each key hosted two different characters, which required flipping repeatedly between two keyboard layers. Not only that, but limited fonts meant that some messages failed to appear if the recipient's computer lacked the same font as the sender's. Still, users made it work. Facebook became popular in Cambodia around 2009, just at the same time as cheap smartphones and internet access, which meant that its usage exploded. Today, it's still the country's most popular overall platform. But on a small smartphone screen, that same typing system became nearly impossible.

Miramax filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Quentin Tarantino of copyright infringement by selling NFTs based on the screenplay for "Pulp Fiction." From a report: Tarantino announced the sale at a recent crypto-art convention in New York. "I'm excited to be presenting these exclusive scenes from 'Pulp Fiction' to fans," Tarantino said in a Nov. 2 press release. The plan is to auction off NFT -- non-fungible tokens -- based on excerpts from Tarantinoâ(TM)s original handwritten script for the film, accompanied by commentary. The NFT is pitched as "secret," meaning that its contents will be viewable exclusively by the owner. But according to the suit, Tarantino did not consult beforehand with Miramax -- which still owns the rights to the director's 1994 classic. Miramax's attorneys have sent a cease and desist letter seeking to block the sale, but that has not stopped Tarantino and his team from moving forward. Miramax alleges that Tarantino's actions have interfered with the studio's own plans to enter the market for "Pulp Fiction" NFTs. In a statement, Miramax attorney Bart Williams accused Tarantino's team of a "deliberate, pre-meditated, short-term money grab."

Microsoft has confirmed that x64 emulation will no longer be offered in future Windows 10 Insider Preview builds (or release builds). Paul Thurrott reports: "We have received questions about the status of x64 emulation in Windows 10," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. "Microsoft wants to share an update that x64 emulation for Windows is only generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing x64 emulation, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Microsoft is committed to supporting customers on Windows 10 on Arm through October 14, 2025."

Microsoft announced the availability of x64 emulation in Windows 10 on ARM in the Windows Insider Program last December, before Windows 11 existed, but the original post has now been updated to note that this support is only available in Windows 11 on ARM. "x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11," Microsoft says. "For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required." And let's get real here. Windows on ARM won't be viable until Qualcomm ships its next-generation Nuvia-based chipsets for PCs anyway. And today, the firm revealed that that won't happen until the end of 2023 at the very earliest.

Along with the release of Windows 10's November 2021 update, Microsoft announced that it will no longer provide Windows 10 updates twice per year. Instead, it's switching to a once-per-year schedule. As Ars Technica notes, "This is meant to sync Windows 10's update schedule with Windows 11's, which is also going to receive major feature updates once per year." From the report: Microsoft hasn't committed to the number of yearly updates it will provide for Windows 10, but the company will support "at least one version" of the OS until update support ends in October of 2025. Microsoft is promising 18 months of support for Windows 10 21H2, so it seems safe to assume that we'll at least see 22H2 and 23H2 releases for Windows 10. For businesses using Windows 10 Enterprise, version 21H2 is also a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) update and will receive update support for five years instead of 18 months. While more Windows 10 updates will be welcome news for anyone who isn't ready to move to Windows 11 or whose hardware doesn't support the new OS, it's not clear what "feature updates" will entail for an operating system that has been replaced.

Google Chrome 96 was released yesterday, and users are reporting problems with Twitter, Discord, and Instagram caused by the new version. BleepingComputer reports: The issues have been reported to Google in a Chromium bug post where Google employees have started to investigate the problems. "We're continuing to see user reports about this behavior, including reports from our social team," notes Google product manager Craig Tumblison. "One user has shared that disabling the "chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialless" flag resolves the behavior. Another report shares a specific error message: "The connection was rejected at https://cards-frame.twitter.com". Test team, would you be able to try enabling that flag to see if the behavior appears?"

The 'chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialles' flag is related to a new Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy feature released with Chrome 96. Google states that you can fix these bugs in some cases by setting the "chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialless" to disabled. If you are affected by these issues, you can copy and paste the above chrome:// address into the Google Chrome address bar and press enter. When the experimental flag appears, please set it to Disabled and relaunch the browser when prompted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Lucid Air, the first model from California-based electric car start-up company Lucid Motors, has been named MotorTrend's 2022 Car of the Year. It's the first time any automaker has won the award with its first car. MotorTrend's panel of judges lauded the Lucid Air for its extraordinary range and efficiency -- some versions can go up to 520 miles on a single charge -- as well as its performance and luxurious interior. In its announcement, MotorTrend called the Air "the new [electric vehicle] benchmark." While the judges generally liked the Air's interior design, they did criticize what they saw as an over-reliance on touch screens for many basic controls. The judges praised the car's Lucid-designed stereo-system.

It's not the first time a start-up automaker has won the award. The Tesla Model S won it in 2012. But the Model S was Tesla's second car, after the Tesla Roadster. The Air is Lucid's first car, and it only recently went into production. Despite its high cost, MotorTrend's judges thought the Lucid Air represented a strong value. They tested the Grand Touring version with a starting price around $140,000. Less expensive versions, with prices starting around $77,000, will be available later, but they won't have the driving range and power of the pricier cars. Lucid's CEO, Peter Rawlinson, once worked at Tesla and helped engineer the Model S. In creating the Lucid Air, he has said, efficiency has been a primary focus. The Lucid is actually the most energy efficient electric car sold in America, according to EPA estimates.

U.S. aviation regulators are having "very productive discussions" with the Federal Communications Commission and the telecommunications industry over concerns that 5G technology could interfere with aircraft equipment, an official said. From a report: At the same time, Federal Aviation Administration chief Steve Dickson on Tuesday said that the agency is considering safety measures including possible flight restrictions if necessary. Aviation industry officials have said that it's possible that the signals could disturb safety equipment on airliners and helicopters, while the FCC and the telecommunications industry has said there is no evidence of a problem.

Microsoft has created a new Media Player app for Windows 11, and it's beginning to test the app with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel today. The redesigned Media Player app will support both audio and video, and it includes a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements. From a report: "At the heart of Media Player is a full-featured music library that allows you to quickly browse and play music, as well as create and manage playlists," explains Dave Grochocki, a senior program manager lead for Microsoft's Windows inbox apps team. "The update to the new Media Player will replace the Groove Music app."

The playback view in this new Media Player app includes album art or artist imagery, which will appear both in full-screen modes and the mini player option. Media Player will also support video, which is usually handled in Windows 10 and Windows 11 in a separate Films & TV app. "All your content in the music and video folders on your PC will appear automatically in your library, but you can also tell Media Player where to look for additional content in app settings," says Grochocki.

Google, Instagram, AWS, Twitter, Spotify, Discord, Etsy, Shopify, TikTok and dozens of other services are facing outages, according to several users report on DownDetector. It's unclear at this time what has caused the issue and how widespread it is.

Cloudflare says it has blocked a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at just under 2 Tbps, making it one of the largest ever recorded. From a report: The internet company said in a blog post that the attack was launched from approximately 15,000 bots running a variant of the original Mirai code on exploited Internet of Things (IoT) devices and unpatched GitLab instances. The DDoS attack comes just two weeks after Rapid7 warned of a GitLab vulnerability -- rated a full 10.0 on the CVSS severity scale -- that could be exploited to allow an attacker to remotely run code, like botnet malware, on an affected server. Rapid7 found that at least half of the 60,000 internet-facing GitLab instances remain unpatched, and warned that it expected "exploitation to increase" as details of the bug became public. The company wasn't wrong; Cloudflare said it blocked the massive DDoS attack just one week later. From its analysis of the attack, Cloudflare believes that it was a multi-vector attack that combined both DNS amplification attacks along with UDP floods.

Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC "designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs" that would be able to go head to head with Apple's M-series processors. From a report: Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm's chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company's 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company's A-series chips. The company is making big promises, too: in addition to offering competition to Apple's stellar M-series chips (which power its latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and iMac and Mac Mini desktops), Qualcomm is aiming to lead the field for "sustained performance and battery life," too.

Mozilla launched Firefox Relay as a free product that gives you five email aliases you can use every time you need to sign up for a random account online. From a report: Now, the organization has introduced a paid Premium tier for the service that will give you access to even more aliases. You'll get your own subdomain (yourdomain.mozmail.com) when you subscribe, and you'll be able to create an unlimited number of emails. The tier will also give you access to a summary dashboard with the emails you make, the option to use your aliases when you reply to messages and a 150 kb attachment allowance. After you sign up for Relay, you'll have to install its Firefox extension to be able to take advantage of its features. Every time you visit a website that asks for an email address, the Relay icon will appear on your browser, and you can click it to generate a random address.The service will forward messages you get using your aliases to your primary email account, and you can block all messages from coming in or even delete the alias when it starts getting spam. Mozilla didn't say how much a Premium subscription will cost in the future, but it's offering the tier at an introductory price of $1/EUR1 per month for a limited time.

Google was so worried about Epic Games sidestepping its app store with Fortnite that it created a task force to confront the issue, according to a legal filing by the game developer. From a report: The task force was created after Epic began offering an Android version of the hugely popular game through Samsung Electronics's Galaxy Store and directly through Epic's website in 2018, giving users a way to bypass the Google Play store, according to the filing. Epic's efforts to avoid paying commissions on app stores from Google and Apple reached a flashpoint last year when both companies removed Fortnite and the game's creator sued them. The legal showdown has help draw criticism and regulatory scrutiny to the app store policies of Alphabet's Google and Apple, which are seen as a dominant force in mobile software. In October, Google countersued, arguing that Epic pushed an "unapproved" version of Fortnite on Android phones that placed users at risk. Google has said that its app store isn't a monopoly since the company allows other stores to run on Android devices, unlike Apple.