Robb Knight: I’m shutting down EchoFeed within the next 12 months when the final subscriptions expire. It will continue to run as it is until then so if you’ve already paid you have access until the end of your subscription. EchoFeed was launched just a couple of years ago and I have been using it […]⌥ Permalink

Emily Steel, New York Times (gift link): More than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed, so many that thousands were combined to streamline procedural matters. Most remain in the early stages. The New York Times reviewed documents from the three cases that reached trial and about a dozen others that have advanced to the stage when […]⌥ Permalink

In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek asked TikTok for comment as it reported out a story about users who were recommended videos about self-harm and suicide, particularly teenagers like Chase Nasca. It is a difficult read. As a result of this press outreach, TikTok analyzed Nasca’s account and why he was given so much of this material […]⌥ Permalink

Ethan Gach, Kotaku: It’s been almost a month since Sony announced the end of PlayStation discs for new games starting in 2028, and a loud contingent of angry fans has continued to criticize the company for going all-digital. Asked about the ongoing backlash during its latest earnings call, Sony said it understands why people have […]⌥ Permalink

Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order after a row with Washington. As a reminder, this is different from the order made in February last […]⌥ Permalink

Deepa Seetharaman and Raphael Satter, Reuters: OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped ​containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. Not satisfied with just a couple of […]⌥ Permalink

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: According to [Judge] Engelmayer, it would be impractical to expect partners to update licensing deals every time a company rolls out new security methods. Additionally, Engelmayer found that “the Google Decision is not to the contrary” of Reddit’s case because, unlike Google, Reddit went “beyond the bare allegation” that Google used […]⌥ Permalink

Anthropic’s “Frontier Red Team”: After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three […]⌥ Permalink

Google Earth project manager Bryan Horowitz: For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world. Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web, tap “create image,” and type whatever you want to see. […]⌥ Permalink

Emily Bass: A senior US State Department official displayed a map of Africa that was completely wrong before high-level officials from African nations, including some whose countries had been mislabelled. The map mishap occurred during a presentation at “Transforming health assistance: Implementing U.S. government MOUs for sustainable HIV programs,” a pre-conference event at the largest […]⌥ Permalink

OpenAI last week: Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of […]⌥ Permalink

If you have read Byron Tau’s reporting, including his book “Means of Control”, you might be familiar with Mike Yeagley. He was the one who made the U.S. military and intelligence community aware of the surveillance they could conduct through digital advertising placements and the open data market. Joseph Cox of 404 Media recently interviewed […]⌥ Permalink

Paul Kafasis, linking to an Ars Technica report with the headline “A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months”, asks: While I understand how the mistake led to this poor guy becoming a suspect, I really can’t fathom how he was convicted. What the hell happened during that trial? This is the […]⌥ Permalink

It is Hater Week over at Aftermath, and Chris Person wrote a banger of a rant about Adobe: It’s one thing to hate software, but that hate takes on new dimensions when you have to use it for your job. To choose software and have it fail is unfortunate; to be chained to it for […]⌥ Permalink

Maddy Varner, Wired: Over the weekend, people were surprised to discover that some Anthropic Claude chats could be easily found via web search. The issue, which appears to have been first flagged by a redditor, exposed chats that included people asking for advice about what political party they should join, whether attorneys in Kansas are […]⌥ Permalink

Timothy Pratt, the Guardian: The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean. […] Meanwhile, […]⌥ Permalink

Natalie Kaufman, in a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Young Adults Are Letting AI Do Their Talking for Them — Even in Person”: [Niharika] Abbaraju, 20, is part of a growing cohort of young adults outsourcing deeply human tasks to AI. Many, struggling with social anxieties great or small, will seek assistance ahead of a […]⌥ Permalink

Tom Alison, “head of Facebook”, made some noise today by announcing a forthcoming change to the platform that seems to, in effect, turn it into TikTok: So later this year, we’ll begin testing a reimagined experience that puts a subset of people who we think want more video on Facebook into full-screen video the moment […]⌥ Permalink

Dustin Bluck, developer of Castro: You might have a theory that there’s a funnel and growth in podcasts *must* ultimately be good for the apps. Like YouTube and TikTok introduce people to the concept of podcasts via shorter videos, and as certain users become more enthusiastic about a particular creator or the whole concept, they […]⌥ Permalink

Meta, last month: We’re launching Meta Glasses with three frame styles offering distinct silhouettes that suit different faces, moods, and occasions: […] Meta Glasses by Kylie — A unique slim oval frame designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner and inspired by her personal style. Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider, today: Interestingly, since the launch of her […]⌥ Permalink

Chad Miller has launched Grain, described as: […] a photo-first social app. Post galleries, share 24-hour stories, and browse feeds by following, For You, camera, or location. The most obvious comparison is Instagram, but without videos. I have been trying Grain for several months; it is really fun and worth checking out despite an icon […]⌥ Permalink

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable: Last December, Google sued SerpApi over scraping its search results, and now a court has granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss the case. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright […]⌥ Permalink

Google’s Nick Fox on, for some reason, LinkedIn: People also asked if AI in Search would mean that people never click through to websites anymore. Actually, as we’ve shared before, we continue to send billions of clicks to the web every day through Search. And we’ve designed our AI features in Search to connect people […]⌥ Permalink

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple and Klarna are partnering on a new “Apple Upgrade” program set to launch in the U.S. on Tuesday, July 28, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The program will allow you to finance most iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models, with a 24-month term for iPhones and Apple Watches and a […]⌥ Permalink

If you believe Meta, its forthcoming Albertan data centre will be, at worst, unnoticeable to people across this province: We pay the full costs of our data centers’ energy use so consumers aren’t negatively impacted, and fund new and upgraded infrastructure. We worked closely with Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, Capitol Power, and the Alberta Electric […]⌥ Permalink

An un-bylined report from Calgary.tech: Apple will make a rare conference appearance in Calgary next week, joining the inaugural Swift Rockies gathering for iOS developers at the Calgary Zoo. Taking place July 22 and 23, Swift Rockies is a boutique, single-track conference created by Calgary-based iOS engineer Raman Singh. The independently organized event is capped […]⌥ Permalink

Diana Novak Jones, Reuters: Meta Platforms faces trial in Tennessee on Monday over the state’s claims that Instagram’s design is to blame for a youth mental-health ​crisis, one of several trials in the coming weeks testing allegations that the company’s social media platforms were intentionally built to be addictive. I imagine Meta will spend considerable […]⌥ Permalink

Zoey Forbes, a U.K.-based attorney, in the Dial: One hundred and forty years on from the Berne Convention, the basic principles of copyright remain the same, but GenAI poses a threat to authors different from anything that has existed before. Its novel technology is not only destabilizing what it means to reproduce works, but what […]⌥ Permalink

Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data […]⌥ Permalink

Dr. Drang: A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of. A similar bill passed the Senate a few years […]⌥ Permalink