The whole point of good cryptography is that the algorithm can be widely known without the system being compromised. I'd have to look at their implementation, but this is probably a fairly standard digital signature system. Basically, the camera takes a hash of the image and encrypts it with a private key. Anyone can decrypt the hash with the published public key and compare it to a hash of the file they received. If the two are identical, it's evidence the image hasn't been tampered with.

Public key crypto and hash algorithms are all well publicized and have been thoroughly tested. It's possible they'll be cracked eventually- we've gone through a whole series of hashing algorithms as old ones were cracked- but for the purposes of verifying news photographs that's not a huge problem. The biggest risk is of faking pictures of current events, and news photographers can always get new cameras or updated firmware that replaces vulnerable algorithms with up-to-date ones.

This won't completely eliminate the possibility of fake photographs. There are two obvious methods. The low-tech approach is to print the fake image and take a photograph of it. You would have to print it at high enough resolution to hide any printing artifacts- you don't want someone seeing the dots from your printer in the final photo- but it's not that hard. Another method is to extract the private key from the camera and use it to sign your fakes. Either one will only allow you to fake photos from a camera you control, since the keys will be specific to the individual camera.

The part that's at all new for this application is where to store the digital signature. It's not a hard problem- the logical place to store it is the EXIF header- but it would require agreement between the camera manufacturers about how to standardize it. There's probably some trick just because you probably want to sign the metadata in the EXIF as well as the image data, and adding the signature to the EXIF changes it from the signed version. Even that should be solvable by stripping the signature from the EXIF before taking the hash.

LLMs do not make verbatim copies of copyrighted works that are them reproduced without permission

Except this isn't true. The article includes cases where ChatGPT would reproduce NYT articles verbatim with the correct prompts. For example, you could ask it to give you the first paragraph of such and such an article, and it would do so. Asking for subsequent paragraphs would get it to reproduce the whole article.

Additionally, if I or LLMs falsely attribute facts to the Times, there may be a violation of slander or libel laws. Without ill intent, a simple retraction of the statement is satisfactory.

That's not the way the law works. The kind of lawsuit you're talking about is supposed to correct a single big statement. If there's a pattern of misbehavior, the law allows the wronged party to ask for an injunction, where the court orders the wrongdoer to stop what they're doing. It's hard to see how you could do anything else with something like ChatGPT, since each instance will repeat the misbehavior of each other instance. It shouldn't be up to NYT to play Whack-A-Mole and find every instance of ChatGPT claiming its hallucinations are supported by NYT articles, especially since most uses of ChatGPT don't produce any public trail.

Maybe OpenAI bought a subscription and scraped their site, which is probably a violation of their TOS. More likely someone they get information from bought a subscription and passed it on as part of their sales. I expect this kind of argument to be one of the legally stronger ones against AI companies. If the AI companies are breaking copyright law in assembling their training sets, the copyright holders have every right to sue.

I also expect the misatribution part of the suit to have some legs. Claiming misinformation comes from NY Times when it was just made up by your chatbot is serious misconduct. It's not quite as bad as one of the bots slapping the Getty Images watermark on fake photos, but the courts are unlikely to look kindly on it.

I certainly think more companies should be trying genuinely novel stuff, but Hyperloop wasn't. People have been looking at ways of running trains in a vacuum for a long time, and every time they've looked, they've concluded it just won't work. I guess someone needs to come back and reevaluate that conclusion once in a while, but it should come as no surprise when it remains valid.

Meanwhile, conventional high-speed rail has decades of successful operation. The problems HSR faces in the USA are political, not technological, and new technology was never going to solve those political problems.

Part of the reason the US doesn't have a strategy for its bitcoin is because it isn't acting like a single entity. Instead, each agency that has bitcoin has them for specific reasons and will decide what to do with them based on those reasons. Maybe the IRS will decide to sell its bitcoin strategically in an attempt to maximize the money the federal government gets for them, while the Secret Service will return bitcoin to the people they were stolen from, and DOJ will liquidate bitcoin as each individual case involving them concludes. Meanwhile, CIA will distribute bitcoin to its assets to fund ongoing operations, but will be careful to buy them on the open market rather than get them from other parts of the US government to maintain secrecy. That's what happens when things just kind of happen rather than being the result of some overriding strategy.

The US has plenty of extradition treaties that allow either country to demand the arrest and transfer of someone in the other country. It's quite normal for ordinary criminals; high profile criminals will always be a mess, though. There are also some limits. Most countries will refuse to extradite people for offenses they don't consider to be crimes, e.g. the US won't extradite people for what we view as free speech. They can also refuse extradition if they believe the person will be mistreated by the judicial system, which includes countries without capital punishment not extraditing people who might be executed. And, of course, the person who might be extradited can always challenge their extradition through the legal system.

Absolutely. What's interesting here in the LA area- and I assume in other metro areas- is that the older areas that were build around public transit are still very walkable. City layouts are conservative, so neighborhoods built before cars were common still have the necessities of life within easy walking distance of the homes. Home prices there tend to be expensive because people love the lifestyle, but despite that we've written zoning rules that prevent building new neighborhoods like that. It's maddening and really stupid.

in most of our cities it's been cheaper to build outward than upward, so you get sprawly abominations that don't lend themselves to mass transit.

Except that isn't really true. Consider where I live: the Los Angeles metro area. It's considered to be the classic example of car-dependent sprawl, but we used to have a first-class public transit system before WWII. The Pacific Electric Red Car system went everywhere in the LA area, and there were street cars for local transit to get you to and from the Red Car station. The population density has gotten much higher since the Red Cars' heyday, which should make the area more amenable to mass transit, not less. So why did our mass transit system decay even as the city became theoretically more amenable?

It was a public policy choice. When we built new housing developments, we connected them to the city by roads but not by mass transit*. We spend a huge amount of money building freeways that could have been used to expand mass transit instead. We actually destroyed existing neighborhoods to provide a place for the new freeways, which require a lot more space than mass transit that can carry the same number of passengers. We decided we wanted cars rather than mass transit, so that's what we got.

*The Pacific Electric system was actually built as an adjunct to real estate development. The developer (Henry Huntington) knew people wouldn't move into his new housing developments if there were no way to get to and from them, so he built mass transit as part of the original design. If he had been building a generation or two later, he probably would have built roads instead.

You cannot have rail going to every city and town in a country, even in Europe.

[[Citation needed]]. Seriously, there's no reason we can't have rail go to every little town in a country; many countries did exactly that at the turn of the 20th Century. We went away from that because we decided it was better to build automobile roads rather than railroads, but there's no reason we couldn't go back to having rail to every town if we decided to make it a priority. Our societies are much, much richer than they were 125 years ago, so we could afford it. It's a matter of what we choose to do.

There used to be a lot of industrial rail that has mostly been replaced by roads and trucks. For instance, my home town used to have a whole network of railroads that were used for short distance transport of crops grown on the local farms, mostly sugar beets being taken to the local sugar factory. They were built in the early 20th Century, when trucks either weren't available yet or weren't a practical way of moving that much stuff. The track stayed in service for a long time because it was already paid for, and it was cheaper to keep using it than to buy trucks. Once the maintenance bills started to add up, trucks became a cheaper alternative, especially because the local government had built roads to all the farms to serve the people living there. Eventually, the factory closed down, and any use the rail still had was completely gone.

That general kind of thing happened in many places. Industries would build local rail to connect them to their suppliers or customers. Most of the country used freight rail for shipping goods, so it was also easy to connect to the national rail network to ship final products outside the local area. A lot of that has been abandoned over time, both as trucks became more cost effective (and the way goods were shipped longer distances) and as the industries that built the local rail went out of business.

A must-watch video is this one with Paul Janssen, one of the giants of pharma, in which he states that the vast majority of drug development budgets are wasted on tests imposed by regulators which "has little to do with actual research or actual development."

No, they have to do with important issues like safety and efficacy. Maybe drug companies think safety and efficacy testing is a waste, but as a consumer I think it's important the stuff I buy functions as promised and doesn't kill me.

More generally, it's stupid to take the word of someone from a highly regulated industry when they're talking about the necessity of that regulation. Of course drug companies don't like being regulated, and they're going to complain about how pointless that regulation is. That doesn't mean you should trust them. Naturally, they're going to blame excessive regulation for why drugs are so expensive and not excessive profits and high executive pay.

And how will they do that?

They'll finish stealing everything. Once there's nothing left to steal, it will be completely safe to go back online.

Because the legislators are not complete idiots, and because electronics are not the first items in commerce that have had the issue of third party repair, the bill actually defines what "fair and reasonable" means. The exact wording from the bill:

(4) "Fair and reasonable terms" means each of the following, as applicable:

(A) At costs and terms that are equivalent to the most favorable costs and terms under which the manufacturer offers the part, tool, or documentation to an authorized repair provider, accounting for any discount, rebate, convenient and timely means of delivery, means of enabling fully restored and updated functionality, rights of use, or other incentive or preference the manufacturer offers to an authorized repair provider.

(B) For documentation, including any relevant updates, the documentation is made available at no charge, except that, when the documentation is requested in physical printed form, a charge may be included for the reasonable actual costs of preparing and sending the copy.

(C) For tools, that the tools are made available by the manufacturer at no charge and without imposing impediments to access or use of the tools to diagnose, maintain, or repair and enable full functionality of the product, or in a manner that impairs the efficient and cost-effective performance of any such diagnosis, maintenance, or repair, except that, when a tool is requested in physical form, a charge may be included for the reasonable, actual costs of preparing and sending the tool.

(D) If a manufacturer does not use an authorized repair provider, "fair and reasonable terms" means at a price that reflects the actual cost to the manufacturer to prepare and deliver the part, tool, or documentation, exclusive of any research and development costs incurred.

That seems like a good job of letting the manufacturer recover their costs while not letting them choke independent repair shops by charging unreasonable prices for parts.

But what if I promise the friend to whom I sold the device that I'll fix it if it breaks. Doesn't that make me an authorized repair provider?

Then don't do that. If you can't guarantee parts availability, you shouldn't be promising you'll fix it if it breaks. Don't make promises you're unable to keep.

It's unlikely to be a problem in the real world, though, because these things are enforced by complaint. Unless your friend chooses to sue you in small claims court or something, the government will never find out about it. A big company like Apple or Google won't be able to get by hoping nobody complains when they're selling millions of widgets in California.

No, taking sand out of the oceans is not a good solution. Some of the other posters have calculated the amount of sand we're removing is something like 1% of the added volume from melting ice. There's no practical way to remove enough stuff from the ocean to make space for all that melting water.

Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we're most worried about.