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Comment Re:really trying to make Scrape happen (Score 1) 57

by ALB1 (#65449905) Attached to: Increased Traffic from Web-Scraping AI Bots is Hard to Monetize
All User-generated content and news websites' terms of use specify that the content shall not be used by automated processes, such as Wikimedia's : "Engaging in automated uses of the Project Websites that are abusive or disruptive of the services, violate acceptable usage policies where available, or have not been approved by the Wikimedia community". AI is viewed positively by investors and shareholders because of the promise of a quick buck for their capital, and very negatively by most of the working population who have no capital and only a job... Well, it figures. That's my 2 cents

Submission + - AI generated summer reading list printed in newspapers with nonexistant books (thestar.com)

Submitted by doconnor
doconnor writes: The list, published as part of a “summer guide” insert in the Chicago Sun-Times on May 18 and the Philadelphia Inquirer on May 15, included 15 recommended novels, “new and old,” that promised to “deliver the perfect summer escape.” People on social media were quick to point out that 10 of the entries were novels that do not exist. In an interview with 404media, Buscaglia said that he was “completely embarrassed” by the errors and takes full responsibility. “I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious,” he said. “No excuses.” Buscaglia said that he uses AI “for background at times,” but always double checks the material.

Submission + - The Information: Microsoft Engineers Forced to Dig Their Own AI Graves

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In what reads a bit like a Sopranos plot, The Information suggests some of those in the recent batch of terminated Microsoft engineers may have in effect been forced to dig their own AI graves.

The (paywalled) story begins: "Jeff Hulse, a Microsoft vice president who oversees roughly 400 software engineers, told the team in recent months to use the company's artificial intelligence chatbot, powered by OpenAI, to generate half the computer code they write, according to a person who heard the remarks. That would represent an increase from the 20% to 30% of code AI currently produces at the company, and shows how rapidly Microsoft is moving to incorporate such technology. Then on Tuesday, Microsoft laid off more than a dozen engineers on Hulse 's team as part of a broader layoff of 6,000 people across the company that appeared to hit engineers harder than other types of roles, this person said."

The report comes as tech company CEOs have taken to boasting in earnings calls, tech conferences, and public statements that their AI is responsible for an ever-increasing share of the code written at their organizations. Microsoft's recent job cuts hit coders the hardest. So how much credence should one place on CEOs' claims of AI programming productivity gains — which researchers have struggled to measure for 50+ years — if engineers are forced to increase their use of AI, boosting the numbers their far-removed-from-programming CEOs are presenting to Wall Street?

Submission + - US chip exports controls have been a "failure" (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: US chip exports controls have been a “failure”, the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, told a tech forum on Wednesday, as the Chinese government separately slammed US warnings to other countries against using Chinese tech.

“The local companies are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development,” Huang told media the Computex tech show in Taipei.

“China has a vibrant technology ecosystem, and it’s very important to realise that China has 50% of the world’s AI researchers, and China is incredibly good at software,” Huang said.

Submission + - 30-day forecast? Weather prediction might be able to look beyond 2 weeks (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It’s a truism almost as old as modern weather prediction: Any forecast beyond 2 weeks will fall apart because of the way tiny perturbations compound in the atmosphere. The 2-week limit, grounded in chaos theory and notions of the “butterfly effect” from the 1960s, has been handed down from generation to generation, says Peter Dueben, head of earth system modeling at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the world’s leading forecaster. “It’s basically a God-given rule.”

But even the gods can be wrong.

Using an artificial intelligence (AI) weather model developed by Google, atmospheric scientists have found that forecasts of 1 month or more into the future might be possible. “We haven’t found a limit to how far you can go out,” says Trent Vonich, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW) who led the work, released late last month as a preprint on arXiv. “We ran out of memory first.”

The result has caused a stir ever since Vonich and Gregory Hakim, his adviser, spoke this year at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, says Amy McGovern, a computer scientist and meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma. Using powerful computer models, researchers have already pushed meaningful forecasts out to about 10 days, coming ever closer to the 2-week limit. Showing this limit can in principle be broken “means that AI will be able to do this someday, which is really exciting,” she says.

Submission + - Microsoft's cut access to accouts related to the International Criminal Court (techzine.eu)

Submitted by denisbergeron
denisbergeron writes: In February, the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. As a result, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan has no access to the emails on his Microsoft account. The incident once again demonstrates the risks of dependence on US IT services.

To make matters worse, Khan’s bank accounts have also been frozen, according to the Associated Press. If he takes a flight to the US, he will likely be arrested upon arrival. According to the Associated Press, the ICC has been paralyzed by the forced Microsoft blockade. The conflict between the ICC and the US arose in November, when the former issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Submission + - AMD baited 8000G APUs as supporting ECC, then switched to "oh it does not"

Submitted by ffkom
ffkom writes: AMD specified their 8000G series APUs on their official web site as supporting ECC, weeks later silently switched to write the opposite, leaving customers who bought ECC DIMMs for their APUs with no memory protection but extra cost at lower speeds. The article on tomshardware.com has references to the archived documents, and technical specifications from board manufacturers like Asus document even today the initially advertised ECC support.

Submission + - F-Zero Courses From a Dead Nintendo Satellite Service Restored Using VHS and AI (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nintendo's Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released. That includes a host of content for Nintendo's own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live "Soundlink" CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts.

As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.

Submission + - Apple's iMessage Avoids EU's Digital Markets Act Regulation (macrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple's iMessage will avoid regulation requiring interoperability with other messaging platforms under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), following the conclusion of an investigation by the regulator (via Bloomberg). The probe concluded that the iMessage platform and Microsoft's Bing do not hold a dominant enough position to be brought under the DMA's strict rules for services provided by big tech's so-called digital "gatekeepers," which include Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok, according to the EU.

The EU has been working on legislation under the DMA that would have required Apple to make changes to iMessage to make it available on other platforms. The interoperability rules would have meant that Meta apps like WhatsApp or Messenger could request to interoperate with Apple's iMessage framework, and Apple would have been forced to comply within the EU. However, the EU probe found that iMessage falls outside the legislation because it is not widely used by businesses. The reprieve for Apple is part of a five-month market investigation by the European Commission.

Submission + - France Uncovers a Vast Russian Disinformation Campaign In Europe (economist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russia hasbeen at the forefront ofinternet disinformationtechniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea. According to French authorities, the Kremlin is at it again. On February 12th Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries, tied in part to the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the elections to the European Parliament in June. Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames “Portal Kombat." Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. Over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022. Current traffic to these sites, which exist in various languages including French, German, Polish and English, is low. But French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.

Viginum says it watched the sites between September and December 2023. It concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread “deceptive or false” content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media. The underlying objective is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe. According to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organization. [...] As the campaign for the European Parliament elections draws near, France is thought to be a particular target for Moscow. According to an article in theWashington Postin December, Kremlin documents show that Russia has been intensifying its effort to undermine French backing for Ukraine. It also has a clear interest in promoting division in France, at a time when Marine Le Pen is riding high in the polls for the next presidential election in 2027. The hard-right leader, who financed previous campaigns with a Russian bank loan, stands to benefit the most from France’s polarized politics

Submission + - Climate Change Reversing Gains In Air Quality Across the US, Study Finds (axios.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After decades of progress in the U.S. toward cleaner air, climate change-related events will cause a steady deterioration through 2054. New research from the nonprofit First Street Foundation is part of a hyperlocal air quality model showing shifts down to the property level between 2024 and 2054. Its conclusions flow from methods contained in three peer-reviewed studies published by the coauthors. The report itself is not peer reviewed, however. The study finds that climate change is increasing the prevalence of two of the air pollutants most harmful to human health: particulate matter, commonly referred to as PM2.5, and tropospheric ozone.

PM2.5 are tiny particles emitted by vehicles, power plants, wildfires and other sources. They can get lodged in people's lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing or exacerbating numerous health problems. Through the use of air quality observations and the development of the new model, First Street's researchers found that the West will be particularly hard hit by increasing amounts of PM2.5 emissions, as wildfires become more frequent and severe. [...] Future projections estimate a continued increase in PM2.5 levels by nearly 10% over the next 30 years, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street, tells Axios in an interview. This would "completely" erase air quality gains made in the last two decades, he said.

Porter says that whereas pollutants from cars and factors could be targeted by regulations over the past few decades (and the EPA is proposing tightening some further), climate-related deterioration in air quality is a much tougher problem to solve. Instead of national regulations, climate action requires global emissions cuts, and even sharp declines in greenhouse gas emissions may not alter trend lines for the next few decades. The population exposed to "dangerous" days on the air quality index is likely to grow to 11.2 million between 2024 and 2054, an increase of about 13%. A 27% gain in the population exposed to "hazardous" (or maroon) days on the AQI is likely between the present climate and 30 years from now, the report finds. Porter said that while 83 million people are exposed to at least one "unhealthy" (red) day, this is likely to grow to over 125 million during the next three decades. "The climate penalty, associated with the rapidly increasing levels of air pollution, is perhaps the clearest signal we've seen regarding the direct impact climate change is having on our environment," Porter told Axios via email.

Submission + - Spotify's Layoffs Put an End To a Musical Encyclopedia (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees found out they had been laid off in the company’s third round of job cuts last year. Not long after, music fans around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working. These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees who was let go that day, but his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn’t have access to internal Spotify data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which became a pivotal resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love.

“The project is to understand the communities of listening that exist in the world, figure out what they’re called, what artists are in them and what their audiences are,” McDonald told TechCrunch. “The goal is to use math where you can to find real things that exist in listening patterns. So I think about it as trying to help global music self-organize.” If you work at a big tech company and get laid off, you probably won’t expect the company’s customers to write nine pages of complaints on a community forum, telling your former employer how badly they messed up by laying you off. Nor would you expect an outpouring of Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you could possibly get the axe. But that’s how fans reacted when they heard McDonald’s fate.

Submission + - The US Government Makes a $42 Million Bet On Open Cell Networks (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US government has committed $42 million to further the development of the 5G Open RAN (O-RAN) standard that would allow wireless providers to mix and match cellular hardware and software, opening up a bigger market for third-party equipment that’s cheaper and interoperable. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) grant would establish a Dallas O-RAN testing center to prove the standard’s viability as a way to head off Huawei’s steady cruise toward a global cellular network hardware monopoly.

Verizon global network and technology president Joe Russo promoted the funding as a way to achieve “faster innovation in an open environment.” To achieve the standard’s goals, AT&T vice president of RAN technology Robert Soni says that AT&T and Verizon have formed the Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments Consortium (ACCoRD), which includes a grab bag of wireless technology companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, and Rakuten. Japanese wireless carrier Rakuten formed as the first O-RAN network in 2020. The company’s then CEO, Tareq Amin, told The Verge’s Nilay Patel in 2022 that Open RAN would enable low-cost network build-outs using smaller equipment rather than massive towers — which has long been part of the promise of 5G.

But O-RAN is about more than that; establishing interoperability means companies like Verizon and AT&T wouldn’t be forced to buy all of their hardware from a single company to create a functional network. For the rest of us, that means faster build-outs and “more agile networks,” according to Rakuten. In the US, Dish has been working on its own O-RAN network, under the name Project Genesis. The 5G network was creaky and unreliable when former Verge staffer Mitchell Clarke tried it out in Las Vegas in 2022, but the company said in June last year that it had made its goal of covering 70 percent of the US population. Dish has struggled to become the next big cell provider in the US, though — leading satellite communications company EchoStar, which spun off from Dish in 2008, to purchase the company in January.

Submission + - Precision Agriculture Has Its Cassandra. His Name Is Kevin. (substack.com) 1

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Farming in the United States is in the midst of a major transformation — the biggest since the arrival of mechanized agriculture more than a century ago.The transformative technology back then was the internal combustion engine, which allowed farmers to power a wide range of new machines and mechanize previously manual implements from tractors and reapers to combine harvesters.The transformative technology now? Precision agriculture, a catch-all term that describes a constellation of technologies that includes Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, “big data” analytics and cloud computing.

Once it is broadly adopted, precision agriculture technology promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms even more than the combustion engine did. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) But the risks it poses to small farms and farming communities are much bigger than that. First, as the USDA notes on its website (https://www.nifa.usda.gov/grants/programs/precision-geospatial-sensor-technologies-programs/adoption-precision-agriculture): the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage access to- and maintenance of vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms. That includes the risk of disruption due to cyber attacks on precision farming hardware, software and services — an issue that agricultural equipment makers are scrambling to address (https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulfroberts/2021/06/20/under-scrutiny-big-ag-scrambles-to-address-cyber-risk/), but reluctant to discuss.

The biggest risk, however, comes from the reams of valuable and proprietary operational data that precision agriculture equipment generates and collects about the operation of a farm — from soil quality to the application of fertilizers and other agents, to crop yields. For centuries, such information resided in farmers’ heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology wrests it from the farmer’s control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data. Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.

That’s a dark view of the future — and one that its hard to hear over the “rah rah rah!” of precision agriculture’s (corporate funded) boosters. But its not like nobody sees the writing on the wall, or is sounding the alarm bell. The blog Fight to Repair News (http://fighttorepair.news) recently interviewed Kevin Kenney an Alternative Fuel Systems Engineer at Grassroots Energy in Nebraska and one of the loudest voices warning about the dangers posed by precision agriculture technologies, including the wholesale theft and monetization of proprietary farmer data.

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