Keith Gill, the investor known as "Roaring Kitty" online, is being used by GameStop investors for helping spur the meme stock mania of 2021. The plaintiffs said they lost money through his "pump-and-dump" scheme, which led to a "short squeeze" that caused losses for hedge funds betting stock prices would fall. Reuters reports: A proposed class action accusing Gill of securities fraud was filed on Friday in the Brooklyn, New York federal court. Investors led by Martin Radev, who lives in the Las Vegas area, said Gill manipulated GameStop securities between May 13 and June 13 by quietly accumulating large quantities of stock and call options, and then dumping some holdings after emerging from a three-year social media hiatus. They said Gill's activities caused GameStop's share price to gyrate wildly, generating "millions of dollars" in profit for him at their expense. "Defendant still enjoys celebrity status and commands a following of millions through his social media accounts," the complaint said. "Accordingly, Defendant was well aware of his ability to manipulate the market for GameStop securities, as well as the benefits he could reap."

He had on May 12 posted a cryptic meme on the social media platform X that was widely seen as a bullish signal for GameStop, whose stock he cheerleaded in 2021. GameStop's share price more than tripled over the next two days, but gave back nearly all the gains by May 24. On June 2, Gill revealed that he owned 5 million GameStop shares and 120,000 call options, and on June 13 revealed he had shed the call options but owned 9 million GameStop shares. Investors said the truth about Gill's investing became known on June 3 when the Wall Street Journal wrote about the timing of his options trades and said the online brokerage E*Trade considered kicking him off its platform.

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed written by Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022) and a visiting professor at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs: Julian Assange's lengthy detention has finally ended, but the danger that his prosecution poses to the rights of journalists remains. As is widely known, the U.S. government's pursuit of Assange under the Espionage Act threatens to criminalize common journalistic practices. Sadly, Assange's guilty plea and release from custody have done nothing to ease that threat. That Assange was indicted under the Espionage Act, a U.S. law designed to punish spies and traitors, should not be considered the normal course of business. Barack Obama's justice department never charged Assange because it couldn't distinguish what he had done from ordinary journalism. The espionage charges were filed by the justice department of Donald Trump. Joe Biden could have reverted to the Obama position and withdrawn the charges but never did.

The 18-count indictment filed under Trump accused Assange of having solicited secret U.S. government information and encouraged Chelsea Manning to provide it. Manning committed a crime when she delivered that information because she was a government employee who had pledged to safeguard confidential information on pain of punishment. But Assange's alleged solicitation of that information, and the steps he was said to have taken to ensure that it could be transferred anonymously, are common procedure for many journalists who report on national security issues. If these practices were to be criminalized, our ability to monitor government conduct would be seriously compromised. To make matters worse, someone accused under the Espionage Act is not allowed to argue to a jury that disclosures were made in the public interest. The unauthorized disclosure of secret information deemed prejudicial to national security is sufficient for conviction regardless of motive.

To justify Espionage Act charges, the Trump-era prosecutors stressed that Assange was accused of not only soliciting and receiving secret government information but also agreeing to help crack a password that would provide access to U.S. government files. That is not ordinary journalistic behavior. An Espionage Act prosecution for computer hacking is very different from a prosecution for merely soliciting and receiving secret information. Even if it would not withdraw the Trump-era charges, Biden's justice department could have limited the harm to journalistic freedom by ensuring that the alleged computer hacking was at the center of Assange's guilty plea. In fact, it was nowhere to be found. The terms for the proceeding were outlined in a 23-page "plea agreement" filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, where Assange appeared by consent. Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of violating the Espionage Act, but under U.S. law, it is not enough to plead in the abstract. A suspect must concede facts that would constitute an offense. "One effect of the guilty plea is that there will be no legal challenge to the prosecution, and hence no judicial decision on whether this use of the Espionage Act violates the freedom of the media as protected by the first amendment of the U.S. constitution," notes Roth. "That means that just as prosecutors overreached in the case of Assange, they could do so again."

"[M]edia protections are not limited to journalists who are deemed responsible. Nor do we want governments to make judgments about which journalists deserve First Amendment safeguards. That would quickly compromise media freedom for all journalists."

Roth concludes: "Imperfect journalist that he was, Assange should never have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. It is unfortunate that the Biden administration didn't take available steps to mitigate that harm."

America's Justice Department "is pushing for Boeing to plead guilty to a criminal charge," reports Reuters, "after finding the planemaker violated a settlement over fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, two people familiar with the matter said on Sunday." Boeing previously paid $2.5 billion as part of the deal with prosecutors that granted the company immunity from criminal prosecution over a fraud conspiracy charge related to the 737 MAX's flawed design. Boeing had to abide by the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement for a three-year period that ended on Jan. 7. Prosecutors would then have been poised to ask a judge to dismiss the fraud conspiracy charge. But in May, the Justice Department found Boeing breached the agreement, exposing the company to prosecution.
A guilty plea could "carry implications for Boeing's ability to enter into government contracts," the article points out, "such as those with the U.S. military that make up a significant portion of its revenue..." The proposal would require Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in connection with the fatal crashes, the sources said. The proposed agreement also includes a $487.2 million financial penalty, only half of which Boeing would be required to pay, they added. That is because prosecutors are giving the company credit for a payment it made as part of the previous settlement related to the fatal crashes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights. Boeing could also likely be forced to pay restitution under the proposal's terms, the amount of which will be at a judge's discretion, the sources said.

The offer also contemplates subjecting Boeing to three years of probation, the people said. The plea deal would also require Boeing's board to meet with victims' relatives and impose an independent monitor to audit the company's safety and compliance practices for three years, they said.
"Should Boeing refuse to plead guilty, prosecutors plan to take the company to trial, they said..." the article points out.

"Justice Department officials revealed their decision to victims' family members during a call earlier on Sunday."

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a long-standing legal doctrine in the US, making a transformative ruling that could hamper federal agencies' ability to regulate all kinds of industry. The Verge adds: Six Republican-appointed justices voted to overturn the doctrine, called Chevron deference, a decision that could affect everything from pollution limits to consumer protections in the US.

Chevron deference allows courts to defer to federal agencies when there are disputes over how to interpret ambiguous language in legislation passed by Congress. That's supposed to lead to more informed decisions by leaning on expertise within those agencies. By overturning the Chevron doctrine, the conservative-dominated SCOTUS decided that judges ought to make the call instead of agency experts.

TeamViewer, the company that makes widely used remote access tools for companies, has confirmed an ongoing cyberattack on its corporate network. TechCrunch: In a statement Friday, the company attributed the compromise to government-backed hackers working for Russian intelligence, known as APT29 (and Midnight Blizzard). The Germany-based company said its investigation so far points to an initial intrusion on June 26 "tied to credentials of a standard employee account within our corporate IT environment."

TeamViewer said that the cyberattack "was contained" to its corporate network and that the company keeps its internal network and customer systems separate. The company added that it has "no evidence that the threat actor gained access to our product environment or customer data." Martina Dier, a spokesperson for TeamViewer, declined to answer a series of questions from TechCrunch, including whether the company has the technical ability, such as logs, to determine what, if any, data was accessed or exfiltrated from its network.

Many American subscribers are unable to use their phones overseas because all three major U.S. carriers are experiencing outages. According to The Register, the outages have been ongoing for several hours and stem from third-party communications technology company Syniverse. From the report: "Since the onset of these issues, Syniverse has been working closely with our network partners to restore full service," Syniverse, a US-based comms provider that focuses on roaming services, said in a statement confirming the breakdown. "We understand the inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your patience as we navigate this challenge."

"We're one of several providers impacted by a third-party vendor's issue that is intermittently affecting some international roaming service," T-Mo told us. "We're working with them to resolve it." Similarly, AT&T stated: "The AT&T network is operating normally. Some customers traveling internationally may be experiencing service disruptions due to an issue outside the AT&T network. We're working with one of our roaming connectivity providers to resolve the issue." Likewise, Verizon said, "An international third party communications provider is having issues with making voice and data connections with US based customers traveling overseas."

The international roaming outage has hit users' ability to do calls and texts, and reach the internet. According to Verizon, it's not a complete blackout. "70 percent of calls and data connections are going through at this time," the carrier firm told The Register in the past hour or so. Developing...

Microsoft's canceled Xbox cloud console, codenamed Keystone, has been detailed in a new patent spotted by Windows Central's Zac Bowden. From the report: Back in 2021, Microsoft announced that it was working on a dedicated streaming device for Xbox Game Pass. That device was later revealed to be codenamed Keystone, which took the form of a streaming box that would sit under your TV, cost a fraction of the price of a normal Xbox, and enable the ability to play Xbox games via the cloud. Unfortunately, it appears Microsoft has since scrapped plans to ship Xbox Keystone due to an inability to bring the price down to a level where it made sense for customers. Xbox CEO Phil Spencer is on record saying the device should have costed around $99 or $129, but the company was unable to achieve this.

Thanks to a patent discovered by Windows Central, we can finally take a closer look at the box Microsoft had conjured up internally. First up, the patent reveals that the console took the form of an even square with a circle shape on top, similar to the black circular vent on an Xbox Series S. The front of the box had the Xbox power button, and a USB-A port. Around the back, there were three additional ports; HDMI, ethernet, and power. On the right side of the console there was appears to be an Xbox controller pairing button, and the underside featured a circular "Hello from Seattle" plate that the console sat on, similar to the Xbox Series X. This patent was filed in June 2022, which was around the time when the first details of Xbox Keystone were being revealed.

Multiple AI companies are ignoring Robots.txt files meant to block the scraping of web content for generative AI systems, reports Reuters — citing a warning sent to publisher by content licensing startup TollBit. TollBit, an early-stage startup, is positioning itself as a matchmaker between content-hungry AI companies and publishers open to striking licensing deals with them. The company tracks AI traffic to the publishers' websites and uses analytics to help both sides settle on fees to be paid for the use of different types of content... It says it had 50 websites live as of May, though it has not named them. According to the TollBit letter, Perplexity is not the only offender that appears to be ignoring robots.txt. TollBit said its analytics indicate "numerous" AI agents are bypassing the protocol, a standard tool used by publishers to indicate which parts of its site can be crawled.

"What this means in practical terms is that AI agents from multiple sources (not just one company) are opting to bypass the robots.txt protocol to retrieve content from sites," TollBit wrote. "The more publisher logs we ingest, the more this pattern emerges."

The article includes this quote from the president of the News Media Alliance (a trade group representing over 2,200 U.S.-based publishers). "Without the ability to opt out of massive scraping, we cannot monetize our valuable content and pay journalists. This could seriously harm our industry."

Reuters also notes another threat facing news sites: Publishers have been raising the alarm about news summaries in particular since Google rolled out a product last year that uses AI to create summaries in response to some search queries. If publishers want to prevent their content from being used by Google's AI to help generate those summaries, they must use the same tool that would also prevent them from appearing in Google search results, rendering them virtually invisible on the web.

Walmart "became the latest retailer to announce it's replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels," reports NPR.

"The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds." "If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that's close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that's the good news," said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst...

The ability to easily change prices wasn't mentioned in Walmart's announcement that 2,300 stores will have the digitized shelf labels by 2026. Daniela Boscan, who participated in Walmart's pilot of the labels in Texas, said the label's key benefits are "increased productivity and reduced walking time," plus quicker restocking of shelves...

As higher wages make labor more expensive, retailers big and small can benefit from the increased productivity that digitized shelf labels enable, said Santiago Gallino, a professor specializing in retail management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "The bottom line, at least when I talk to retailers, is the calculation of the amount of labor that they're going to save by incorporating this. And in that sense, I don't think that this is something that only large corporations like Walmart or Target can benefit from," Gallino said. "I think that smaller chains can also see the potential benefit of it."
Indeed, Walmart's announcement calls the tech "a win" for both customers and their workers, arguing that updating prices with a mobile app means "reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving us more time to support customers in the store." Professor Gallino tells NPR he doesn't think Walmart will suddenly change prices — though he does think Walmart will use it to keep their offline and online prices identical.

The article also points out you can already find electronic shelf labels at other major grocers inlcuding Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods — and that digitized shelf labels "are even more common in stores across Europe." Another feature of electronic shelf labels is their product descriptions. [Grocery analyst] Lempert notes that barcodes on the new labels can provide useful details other than the price. "They can actually be used where you take your mobile device and you scan it and it can give you more information about the product — whether it's the sourcing of the product, whether it's gluten free, whether it's keto friendly. That's really the promise of what these shelf tags can do," Lempert said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader loveandpeace for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Computer Weekly: Microsoft has admitted to Scottish policing bodies that it cannot guarantee the sovereignty of UK policing data hosted on its hyperscale public cloud infrastructure, despite its systems being deployed throughout the criminal justice sector.

According to correspondence released by the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) under freedom of information (FOI) rules, Microsoft is unable to guarantee that data uploaded to a key Police Scotland IT system — the Digital Evidence Sharing Capability (DESC) — will remain in the UK as required by law. While the correspondence has not been released in full, the disclosure reveals that data hosted in Microsoft's hyperscale public cloud infrastructure is regularly transferred and processed overseas; that the data processing agreement in place for the DESC did not cover UK-specific data protection requirements; and that while the company has the ability to make technical changes to ensure data protection compliance, it is only making these changes for DESC partners and not other policing bodies because "no one else had asked".

The correspondence also contains acknowledgements from Microsoft that international data transfers are inherent to its public cloud architecture. As a result, the issues identified with the Scottish Police will equally apply to all UK government users, many of whom face similar regulatory limitations on the offshoring of data. The recipient of the FOI disclosures, Owen Sayers — an independent security consultant and enterprise architect with over 20 years' experience in delivering national policing systems — concluded it is now clear that UK policing data has been travelling overseas and "the statements from Microsoft make clear that they 100% cannot comply with UK data protection law".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Meta has created a system that can embed hidden signals, known as watermarks, in AI-generated audio clips, which could help in detecting AI-generated content online. The tool, called AudioSeal, is the first that can pinpoint which bits of audio in, for example, a full hourlong podcast might have been generated by AI. It could help to tackle the growing problem of misinformation and scams using voice cloning tools, says Hady Elsahar, a research scientist at Meta. Malicious actors have used generative AI to create audio deepfakes of President Joe Biden, and scammers have used deepfakes to blackmail their victims. Watermarks could in theory help social media companies detect and remove unwanted content. However, there are some big caveats. Meta says it has no plans yet to apply the watermarks to AI-generated audio created using its tools. Audio watermarks are not yet adopted widely, and there is no single agreed industry standard for them. And watermarks for AI-generated content tend to be easy to tamper with -- for example, by removing or forging them.

Fast detection, and the ability to pinpoint which elements of an audio file are AI-generated, will be critical to making the system useful, says Elsahar. He says the team achieved between 90% and 100% accuracy in detecting the watermarks, much better results than in previous attempts at watermarking audio. AudioSeal is available on GitHub for free. Anyone can download it and use it to add watermarks to AI-generated audio clips. It could eventually be overlaid on top of AI audio generation models, so that it is automatically applied to any speech generated using them. The researchers who created it will present their work at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Vienna, Austria, in July.

"Over at Fast Company, where we're celebrating 1994 Week, I wrote about the year of Peak CD-ROM, when excitement over the medium's potential was sky-high and the World Wide Web's audience still numbered in the extremely low millions," writes Slashdot reader and Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken (harrymcc). "I cover once-famous products such as Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia, the curse of shovelware, the rise of a San Francisco neighborhood known as 'Multimedia Gulch,' and why the whole dream soon came crashing down." Here's an excerpt from the article: Thirty years ago, a breakthrough technology was poised to transform how people stayed informed, entertained themselves, and maybe even shopped. I'm not talking about the World Wide Web. True, it was already getting good buzz among early adopter types. But even three years after going online, Tim Berners-Lee's creation was "still relatively slow and crude" and "limited to perhaps two million Internet users who have the proper software to gain access to it," wrote The New York Times' Peter H. Lewis in November 1994. At the time, it was the CD-ROM that had captured the imagination of consumers and the entire publishing industry. The high-capacity optical discs enabled mass distribution of multimedia for the first time, giving software developers the ability to create new kinds of experiences. Some of the largest companies in America saw them as media's next frontier, as did throngs of startups. In terms of pure mindshare, 1994 might have been the year of Peak CD, with 17.5 million CD-ROM drives and $590 million in discs sold, according to research firms Dataquest and Link Resources.

You already know that the frenzy didn't last. As the web got faster, slicker, and more readily accessible, CD-ROMs came to look pretty mundane, and eventually faded from memory. Myst, once the best-selling PC game of all time, might be the only 1990s disc that retains a prominent spot in our shared cultural consciousness. (Full disclosure: I do have a friend who can be relied upon to fondly bring up Microsoft's Cinemania movie guide about once a year for no apparent reason.) Revisiting the discs that defined the mid-1990s -- all of which are incompatible with modern operating systems -- isn't easy. To get some of them up and running again, I downloaded virtual CD-ROM files from the Internet Archive and used them with Windows 3.1 on my iPad Pro, courtesy of a piece of software Apple removed from the App Store in 2021. Spending time with titles such as Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia and It's a Wonderful Life Multi-Media Edition, three decades after they last commanded my attention, was a Proustian rush. You may not want to go to similar extremes. But would you indulge me as I wallow in enough CD-ROM nostalgia to get it out of my system?

An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism: An AI chatbot named VIC, or Virtually Integrated Citizen, is trying to make it onto the ballot in this year's mayoral election for Wyoming's capital city of Cheyenne.

But as reported by Wired, Wyoming's secretary of state is battling against VIC's legitimacy as a candidate — and now, an investigation is underway.

According to Wired, VIC, which was built on OpenAI's GPT-4 and trained on thousands of documents gleaned from Cheyenne council meetings, was created by Cheyenne resident and library worker Victor Miller. Should VIC win, Miller told Wired that he'll serve as the bot's "meat puppet," operating the AI but allowing it to make decisions for the capital city.... "My campaign promise," Miller told Wired, "is he's going to do 100 percent of the voting on these big, thick documents that I'm not going to read and that I don't think people in there right now are reading...."

Unfortunately for the AI and its — his? — meat puppet, however, they've already made some political enemies, most notably Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray. As Gray, who has challenged the legality of the bot, told Wired in a statement, all mayoral candidates need to meet the requirements of a "qualified elector." This "necessitates being a real person," Gray argues... Per Wired, it's also run amuck with OpenAI, which says the AI violates the company's "policies against political campaigning." (Miller told Wired that he'll move VIC to Meta's open-source Llama 3 model if need be, which seems a bit like VIC will turn into a different candidate entirely.)
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle offers more details: [H]is dad helped him design the best system for VIC. Using his $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription, Miller had an 8,000-character limit to feed VIC supporting documents that would make it an effective mayoral candidate...

While on the phone with Miller, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle also interviewed VIC itself. When asked whether AI technology is better suited for elected office than humans, VIC said a hybrid solution is the best approach. "As an AI, I bring unique strengths to the role, such as impartial decision-making, data-driven policies and the ability to analyze information rapidly and accurately," VIC said. "However, it's important to recognize the value of human experience and empathy and leadership. So ideally, an AI and human partnership would be the most beneficial for Cheyenne...." The artificial intelligence said this unique approach could pave a new pathway for the integration of human leadership and advanced technology in politics.

Drew Turney reports via Live Science: The "Turing test," first proposed as "the imitation game" by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, judges whether a machine's ability to show intelligence is indistinguishable from a human. For a machine to pass the Turing test, it must be able to talk to somebody and fool them into thinking it is human. Scientists decided to replicate this test by asking 500 people to speak with four respondents, including a human and the 1960s-era AI program ELIZA as well as both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the AI that powers ChatGPT. The conversations lasted five minutes -- after which participants had to say whether they believed they were talking to a human or an AI. In the study, published May 9 to the pre-print arXiv server, the scientists found that participants judged GPT-4 to be human 54% of the time.

ELIZA, a system pre-programmed with responses but with no large language model (LLM) or neural network architecture, was judged to be human just 22% of the time. GPT-3.5 scored 50% while the human participant scored 67%. "Machines can confabulate, mashing together plausible ex-post-facto justifications for things, as humans do," Nell Watson, an AI researcher at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), told Live Science. "They can be subject to cognitive biases, bamboozled and manipulated, and are becoming increasingly deceptive. All these elements mean human-like foibles and quirks are being expressed in AI systems, which makes them more human-like than previous approaches that had little more than a list of canned responses." Further reading: 1960s Chatbot ELIZA Beat OpenAI's GPT-3.5 In a Recent Turing Test Study

In a featured article for The Verge, David Pierce explores the world of competitive Excel, highlighting its rise from a hobbyist activity to a potential esport, showcased during the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. Top spreadsheet enthusiasts competed at the MGM Grand to solve complex Excel challenges, emphasizing the transformative power and ubiquity of spreadsheets in both business and entertainment. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want -- the reality is you're still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they're doing it in Vegas. You really can't overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. "Electronic spreadsheets" actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. "I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers," he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then. [...]

Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Stability AI released weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, an AI image-synthesis model that turns text prompts into AI-generated images. Its arrival has been ridiculed online, however, because it generate images of humans in a way that seems like a step backward from other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models like Midjourney or DALL-E 3. As a result, it can churn out wild anatomically incorrect visual abominations with ease. A thread on Reddit, titled, "Is this release supposed to be a joke? [SD3-2B]" details the spectacular failures of SD3 Medium at rendering humans, especially human limbs like hands and feet. Another thread titled, "Why is SD3 so bad at generating girls lying on the grass?" shows similar issues, but for entire human bodies.

AI image fans are so far blaming the Stable Diffusion 3's anatomy fails on Stability's insistence on filtering out adult content (often called "NSFW" content) from the SD3 training data that teaches the model how to generate images. "Believe it or not, heavily censoring a model also gets rid of human anatomy, so... that's what happened," wrote one Reddit user in the thread. The release of Stable Diffusion 2.0 in 2023 suffered from similar problems in depicting humans accurately, and AI researchers soon discovered that censoring adult content that contains nudity also severely hampers an AI model's ability to generate accurate human anatomy. At the time, Stability AI reversed course with SD 2.1 and SD XL, regaining some abilities lost by excluding NSFW content. "It works fine as long as there are no humans in the picture, I think their improved nsfw filter for filtering training data decided anything humanoid is nsfw," wrote another Redditor.

Basically, any time a prompt hones in on a concept that isn't represented well in its training dataset, the image model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for. And sometimes that can be completely terrifying. Using a free online demo of SD3 on Hugging Face, we ran prompts and saw similar results to those being reported by others. For example, the prompt "a man showing his hands" returned an image of a man holding up two giant-sized backward hands, although each hand at least had five fingers.

"Virgin Galactic launched six people to suborbital space on Saturday, launching a Turkish astronaut and three space tourists," reports Space.com, "on what was the final voyage of the VSS Unity space plane." Unity, attached to the belly of its carrier plane Eve, took off from runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico at 10:31 a.m. EDT (1431 GMT) and carried to an altitude of 44,562 feet (13,582 meters) over the next hour, where it was dropped and ignited its rocket engine to carry two pilots and four passengers to space and back. The mission, called Galactic 07, reached an altitude of 54.4 miles (87.5 km) and marked the seventh commercial spaceflight by Virgin Galactic on Unity, which is being retired to make way for the company's new "Delta" class of spacecraft rolling out in 2026.

"I will need much more time to try and process what just happened," Tuva Atasever, the Turkish Space Agency astronaut on the flight, said in a post-flight press conference, adding that the view of Earth was indescribable. "It's not something you can describe with adjectives. It's an experiential thing ... you just feel it in your gut."
One of the space tourists was a principal propulsion engineer at SpaceX, who wore the flags of the U.S. and India on his spacesuit to honor both his home country and that of his parents. The other two were a New York-based real estate developer and a London-based hotel and resort investment strategy advisor.

The flight landed 70 minutes later at 11:41 a.m. EDT (1541 GMT), according to the article, "marking only its seventh commercial spaceflight for Virgin Galactic and 12th crewed spaceflight overall." In all, Virgin Galactic flew the space plane just 32 times, including non-space test flights... "This vehicle was revolutionary," Virgin Galactic president Mike Moses said in the post-launch press conference. "We tested it, we flew it, we demonstrated and prove to the world that commercial human spaceflight is possible with private funding for private companies... Seven commercial space flights, a single vehicle flying six times in six months last year, that's groundbreaking," Moses said. "The fact that we can take this vehicle back to back to back on a monthly basis is is really revolutionary."

The new Delta class of spacecraft will be able to fly at least twice a week, about eight times the rate of SpaceShipTwo, with Virgin Galactic planning to build at least two to start its new fleet. "We're going to field in 2026 two spaceships, our mothership Eve, that's 750 astronauts a year going to space," Moses said of the new fleet's flight capacity. "That's more than have gotten to space in the 60 year history of spaceflight to date...."

Since 2018, Virgin Galactic has flown payloads as part of NASA's Flight Opportunities program and most recently was selected to be a contracted flight provider for NASA for the next five years.
Phys.org reports that with the Delta-class rockets, "The future of the company is at stake as it seeks at long last to get into the black. Virgin is burning through cash, losing more than $100 million in each of the past two quarters, with its reserves standing at $867 million at the end of March." It also laid off 185 people, or 18 percent of its workforce, late last year. Its shares are currently trading at 85 cents, down from $55 in 2021, the year Branson himself flew, garnering global headlines.
Saturday's flight also became "a suborbital science lab" for microgravity research, according to a statement from the company. Phys.org reports that during the flight, astronaut Atasever "wore custom headgear with brain activity monitoring sensors to collect physiological data, a dosimeter, and two commercially available insulin pens to examine the ability to administer accurate insulin doses in microgravity, Virgin said in a statement." And Virgin Galactic said their flight also carried "rack-mounted" autonomous payloads from both Purdue ("to study propellant slosh in fuel tanks of maneuvering spacecraf") and U.C. Berkeley ("testing a new type of 3D printing"), as well as "multiple human-tended experiments." "Discovery and innovation are central to our mission at Virgin Galactic," said Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic. "We're excited to build on our successful record of facilitating scientific experiments in suborbital space, and we look forward to continuing to expand our role in suborbital research going forward."

America's Justice Department "indicted the creators of an application that helps people spend their bitcoins anonymously," writes Reason.com: They're accused of "conspiracy to commit money laundering." Why "conspiracy to commit" as opposed to just "money laundering"?

Because they didn't hold anyone else's money or do anything illegal with it. They provided a privacy tool that may have enabled other people to do illegal things with their bitcoin... What this tool does is offer what's known as a "coinjoin," a method for anonymizing bitcoin transactions by mixing them with other transactions, as the project's founder, Keonne Rodriguez, explained to Reason in 2022: "I think the best analogy for it is like smelting gold," he said. "You take your Bitcoin, you add it into [the conjoin protocol] Whirlpool, and Whirlpool smelts it into new pieces that are not associated to the original piece."
Reason argues that providing the tool isn't a crime, just like selling someone a kitchen knife isn't a crime: The government's decision to indict Rodriguez and his partner William Lonergan Hill is also an attack on free speech because all they did was write open-source code and make it widely available. "It is an issue of a chilling effect on free speech," attorney Jerry Brito, who heads up the cryptocurrency nonprofit Coin Center, told Reason after the U.S. Treasury went after the creators of another piece of anonymizing software...

The most important thing about bitcoin, and money like it, isn't its price. It's the check it places on the government's ability to devalue, censor, and surviel our money. Creators of open-source tools like Samourai Wallet should be celebrated, not threatened with a quarter-century in a federal prison.
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Carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere are accumulating "faster than ever" and have reached unprecedented levels, with a peak of 426.9 ppm recorded at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in May 2024, said scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego. CBS News reports: "Over the past year, we've experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms," NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. "Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever." The researchers measured carbon dioxide, or CO2, levels at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory. They found that atmospheric levels of the gas hit a seasonal peak of just under 427 parts per million in May -- an increase of 2.9 ppm since May 2023 and the fifth-largest annual growth in 50 years of data recording.

It also made official that the past two years saw the largest jump in the May peak -- when CO2 levels are at their highest in the Northern Hemisphere. John Miller, a NOAA carbon cycle scientist, said that the jump likely stems from the continuous rampant burning of fossil fuels as well as El Nino conditions making the planet's ability to absorb CO2 more difficult. The surge of carbon dioxide levels at the measuring station surpassed even the global average set last year, which was a record high of 419.3 ppm -- 50% higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution. However, NOAA noted that their observations were taken at the observatory specifically, and do not "capture the changes of CO2 across the globe," although global measurements have proven consistent without those at Mauna Loa. "Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever," Ralph Keeling, director of Scripps' CO2 program, said in the release. "Each year achieves a higher maximum due to fossil-fuel burning, which releases pollution in the form of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill."

"We are living in unprecedented times. ... This string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold," Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, added.

Yelp can pursue a lawsuit accusing a reputation management company of fraudulently advertising its ability to remove "bad" reviews from the business review website. From a report: In a decision late Thursday night, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said Yelp can pursue trademark infringement and unfair competition claims against ReviewVio, which operates as Dandy. Yelp said ReviewVio's ads, which include the Yelp logo, harmed its reputation by suggesting that businesses could pay for artificially inflated star ratings.

This allegedly undercut honest businesses that will not pay to remove negative reviews, and undermined the usefulness of Yelp's website to consumers. Yelp also said it lost ad revenue from businesses that paid for "review gating," which the company prohibits, or incorrectly believed that Yelp endorsed the practice.