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Submission + - WA State, IRS Records Show Code.org Became CodeAI Months Before Announcement

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On June 2nd, computer science education nonprofit Code.org ("the leading provider of K-12 AI and CS education curriculum across the globe") rebranded itself as CodeAI, solidifying the tech-backed nonprofit's shift to AI education. Not everyone was pleased, including one commenter who noted that the CodeAI rebranding was followed by a June 4th College Board announcement of an AP CS Principles course redesign to modernize AP CSP with AI for the 2027-28 school year.

The move came 13 years after Code.org launched with the belief "that every student should learn the basics of computer programming." In a video announcing the rebranding, Code.org Founder & Chairman of the Board Hadi Partovi explained, "We have a responsibility to prepare the next generation for the biggest change In society since the invention of public education. [...] Starting today, Code.org becomes CodeAI." Code.org also immediately disbanded its nine-year-old, 100+ member Code.org Advocacy Coalition, explaining in a June 3rd video conference that members could either apply to join a new CodeAI Advocacy Coalition that will be "bringing in new AI focused entities that will help us advance this mission", or go their own way if they are "not in line with the direction that CodeAI is heading."

Interestingly, WA State Dept. of Revenue records indicate that Code.org became CodeAI in the eyes of WA state on February 6th, nearly four months earlier than the June 2nd public announcement. And Code.org's 2024 990 filing, dated March 10th, informed the IRS it was doing business as CodeAI. The filings provide new context for the timing of earlier organizational changes at the nonprofit, including the Code.org Chief Academic Officer's jump to Microsoft on January 12th (where he later penned an 'obituary' for 'coders' on Feb. 26), the layoff of 18 Code.org employees 'to ensure long-term sustainability' that was reported on January 21st, and the shakeup in its top leadership ranks that it announced on February 20th.

The apparent decision by Code.org to keep details of its planned 'next chapter' as CodeAI and its mission realignment from educators, partners, and the public until the end of the school year would seem at odds with its self-proclaimed core value of transparency ("We are accountable to and transparent with our team, Board, donors, facilitators, partners, teachers, and community. [...] We proactively share information, research, data, processes, decisions, and results."). Interestingly, the after-the-fact CodeAI rebranding reveal comes as Code.org lead donors Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta have increasingly been facing and responding to regulatory and community-driven demands for greater transparency around their AI efforts, particularly regarding AI data center secrecy.

Submission + - Apple has had over a decade to fix this iOS email copy bug, and it still hasn (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Apple has a maddening bug that has persisted across well over a decade of iOS releases. When you long-press an email address on iPhone or iPad and choose âoeCopy Email Address,â what ends up on your clipboard is not just the email address — it is âoemailto:someone@example.com.â A URI prefix you did not ask for, tacked onto something the menu explicitly told you it was copying correctly. Paste it somewhere that does not strip it automatically and you have a problem.

The astonishing part is not the bug itself — it is that Apple has never fixed it. This is a company that has overhauled its chip architecture, shipped new programming languages, and added satellite connectivity to a phone. But âoeCopy Email Addressâ still does not copy just the email address. The fix is trivially simple: strip the prefix when the user picks that option. Apple knows this is broken. At some point, leaving it unfixed stops being an oversight and starts being a choice.ââââââââââââââââ

Submission + - Proton Mail Suspended Journalist Accounts at Request of Cybersecurity Agency (theintercept.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The company behind the Proton Mail email service, Proton, describes itself as a “neutral and safe haven for your personal data, committed to defending your freedom.” But last month, Proton disabled email accounts belonging to journalists reporting on security breaches of various South Korean government computer systems following a complaint by an unspecified cybersecurity agency. After a public outcry, and multiple weeks, the journalists’ accounts were eventually reinstated — but the reporters and editors involved still want answers on how and why Proton decided to shut down the accounts in the first place.

Martin Shelton, deputy director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, highlighted that numerous newsrooms use Proton’s services as alternatives to something like Gmail “specifically to avoid situations like this,” pointing out that “While it’s good to see that Proton is reconsidering account suspensions, journalists are among the users who need these and similar tools most.” Newsrooms like The Intercept, the Boston Globe, and the Tampa Bay Times all rely on Proton Mail for emailed tip submissions. Shelton noted that perhaps Proton should “prioritize responding to journalists about account suspensions privately, rather than when they go viral.” On Reddit, Proton’s official account stated that “Proton did not knowingly block journalists’ email accounts” and that the “situation has unfortunately been blown out of proportion."

The two journalists whose accounts were disabled were working on an article published in the August issue of the long-running hacker zine Phrack. The story described how a sophisticated hacking operation — what’s known in cybersecurity parlance as an APT, or advanced persistent threat — had wormed its way into a number of South Korean computer networks, including those of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the military Defense Counterintelligence Command, or DCC. The journalists, who published their story under the names Saber and cyb0rg, describe the hack as being consistent with the work of Kimsuky, a notorious North Korean state-backed APT sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2023. As they pieced the story together, emails viewed by The Intercept show that the authors followed cybersecurity best practices and conducted what’s known as responsible disclosure: notifying affected parties that a vulnerability has been discovered in their systems prior to publicizing the incident.

Submission + - Google's $45 Million Contract With Netanyahu's Office to Spread Israeli Propagan (dropsitenews.com) 1

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: Publicly available government contracts show that Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms.

“There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie,” asserted a propaganda video published by Israel’s foreign ministry to Google’s YouTube video sharing platform in late August and viewed more than 6 million times. Much of the video’s reach results from an ad placed during an ongoing and previously unreported $45 million (NIS 150 million) advertising campaign initiated between Google and Netanyahu’s office in late June. The contract—which is with both YouTube and Google's advertising campaign management platform, Display & Video 360—explicitly characterizes the ad campaign as hasbara, a Hebrew word whose meaning is somewhere between public relations and propaganda.

Records show that the Israeli government similarly spent $3 million (NIS 10 million) for an advertising campaign with X. The French and Israeli advertising platform Outbrain/Teads is also set to receive roughly $2.1 million (NIS 7 million).

The existence of an Israeli Google ads campaign to discredit the UN’s primary aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, was similarly reported by WIRED last year. Hadas Maimon, head of public awareness for Israel’s diaspora ministry, stated during the March 2 Knesset hearing that, “For almost a year now, we have been leading a major campaign on the issue of UNRWA.”

Submission + - New AI Model Turns Photos Into Explorable 3D Worlds, With Caveats (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, Tencent released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, a new open-weights AI model that generates 3D-consistent video sequences from a single image, allowing users to pilot a camera path to "explore" virtual scenes. The model simultaneously generates RGB video and depth information to enable direct 3D reconstruction without the need for traditional modeling techniques. However, it won't be replacing video games anytime soon.

The results aren't true 3D models, but they achieve a similar effect: The AI tool generates 2D video frames that maintain spatial consistency as if a camera were moving through a real 3D space. Each generation produces just 49 frames — roughly two seconds of video — though multiple clips can be chained together for sequences lasting "several minutes," according to Tencent. Objects stay in the same relative positions when the camera moves around them, and the perspective changes correctly as you would expect in a real 3D environment. While the output is video with depth maps rather than true 3D models, this information can be converted into 3D point clouds for reconstruction purposes.

Submission + - AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. “In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the narrator says in a fake British accent. “By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire,” it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn’t seen before, called “Sleepless Historian.” I took my headphones out, didn’t think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.

The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don’t know much about. Some video titles include “Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses,” “The Entire History of the American Frontier,” “What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii,” and “What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.” One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.

In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on “mass produced” videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change.

Submission + - Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself.

As far as scientists can tell from its genome—the only evidence of its existence so far—it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”

Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms—or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”

What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.

Submission + - Help wanted to build open source Advanced Data Protection for everyone

Submitted by WaywardGeek
WaywardGeek writes: Recall that Apple was ordered to back-door Advanced Data Protection in the UK. We need to take action now to protect users.

I helped build Google's Advanced Data Protection (Google Cloud Key VaultService) in 2018, and Google is way ahead of Apple in this area. I know exactly how to build it an can have it done in spare time in a few weeks, at least server side. The whole world would be able to use it for free, protecting backups, passwords, message history, and more, if we can get existing applications to talk to the new data protection service.

However, I need help. I've got the algorithms and server-side covered. This would be a distributed trust based system, so I need folks willing to run the protection service. I'll run mine on a Raspberry PI. Areas where I need help include:

* Running protection servers. This is a T-of-N scheme, where users will need say 9 of 15 nodes to be available to recover their backups.
* Android client app, and preferably tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service.
* Same with iOS
* Authentication. Users should register, and login before they can use any of their limited guesses to their phone unlock secret.

The scheme splits a secret among N protection servers, and when it is time to recover the secret, which is basically an encryption key, they must be able to get key shares from T of the original N servers. This uses a distributed oblivious pseudo random function algorithm, which is very simple.

In plain English, it provides nation-state resistance to secret back doors, and eliminates secret mass surveillance, at least when it comes to data backed up to the cloud. iOS and Android systems don't currently do that. The UK and similarly confused governments will need to negotiate with operators in multiple countries to get access to any given users's keys. There are cases where rational folks would agree to hand over that data, and I hope we can end the encryption wars and develop sane policies that protect user data while offering a compromise where lives can be saved.

So, nothing too serious :-)

Are you up for this challenge? Are you ready to plunge into this with me?

Comment iPhones are expensive in China⦠(Score 1) 56

by knoledgesponge (#65377719) Attached to: iPhone Shipments Crash 50% In China As Local Brands Dominate
Government taxes foreign phones in China making iPhones more expensive than those in other places, including Hong Kong. iPhones are not allowed to use the AI being sold with the phones elsewhere, plus a host of other restrictions. So basically, an iPhone purchased in China isnâ(TM)t the same as an iPhone purchased elsewhere. Many people buy them from third party distributors to get non-mainland SKUs or go elsewhere to buy iPhones to sidestep restrictions/tariffs/taxes/etc.

Submission + - China Halts Rare Earth Exports to U.S. (thegatewaypundit.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: China has halted exports of seven critical rare earth elements to the United States, a move that threatens to disrupt supply chains across key American industries, including automotive, semiconductor, and aerospace sectors. China’s Ministry of Commerce recently added seven rare earth elements—including dysprosium, terbium, and lutetium—to its restricted export list. These elements are essential for manufacturing high-performance magnets used in electric vehicles, advanced weaponry, and consumer electronics.

Additionally: US chipmakers outsourcing manufacturing will escape China's tariffs

U.S. chipmakers that outsource manufacturing will be exempt from China's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, according to a notice by the main Chinese semiconductor association on Friday.
Given the highly specialized and multi-country nature of chip supply chains, there was uncertainty within the industry about how tariffs would be applied to chip imports.
"For all integrated circuits, whether packaged or unpackaged, the declared country of origin for import customs purchases is the location of the wafer fabrication plant," the state-backed China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA), which represents the country's largest chip companies, said in an "urgent notice" on its WeChat account.
For U.S. chip designers such as Qualcomm and AMD that outsource manufacturing to Taiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC 2330.TW, Chinese customs authorities will classify these chips' place of origin as Taiwan, according to EETop, an information platform and forum for Chinese chipmakers.
This means China-based companies importing such chips will not be forced to pay China's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, EETop said on its WeChat account.

https://www.reuters.com/techno...

Submission + - AI proves that fingerprints are not unique, upending the legal system (earth.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Fingerprint analysis has been a dependable tool in crime-solving for more than a century. Investigators lean on fingerprint evidence to identify suspects or connect them to specific crime scenes, believing that every print offers a distinctive code.

Yet, a team of researchers has found that prints from different fingers of the same person can sometimes appear more alike.

This insight came from an artificial intelligence model that revealed surprising connections between prints.

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