Technology

The 12-metre high machine has coke bottle eyes and a crude Wall-E-like head, as well as large arms that can be fitted with blades or paint brushes

The South Korean tech giant is benefiting from the AI boom which has lifted the prices of advanced chips.

Privacy measures apparently helping criminals evade capture

Elon Musk’s X is exploring more ways to integrate xAI’s Grok into the social networking app. According to a series of recent discoveries, X is developing new features like the ability to ask Grok about X accounts, use Grok by highlighting text in the app, and access Grok’s chatbot through a pop-up on the side […]

In its latest step targeting a major marketplace, the European Commission sent Amazon another request for information (RFI) Friday in relation to its compliance under the bloc’s rulebook for digital services.

After multiple rejections, Apple has approved Fortnite maker Epic Games' third-party app marketplace for launch in the EU.

Update, 7/5/24, 5:28 PM ET This post was updated from its original version with the latest development involving Apple’s approval of Epic Games’ marketplace app in the EU.

The U.N. intellectual property agency says China has requested far more patents than any other country when it comes to generative AI, with the United States a distant second.

“While these uses of GenAI are often neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ content policies or terms of services, their potential for harm is significant.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/18579636

Authority cited by FTC just a "housekeeping statute," US judge in Texas rules.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/490647

Archived link

“[Russian] information operations are underway […] to gradually demoralise the public debate so that Russian narratives can be disseminated. These are part of an information war to stop the flow of material aid to a struggling Ukraine,” warned the Czech National Centre for Combating Organised Crime (NCOZ) in a report.

“The Kremlin’s efforts to diminish public trust in institutions and the state is not new, but the increase in the intensity of influence operations is a threat,” the Czech Strategic Communications Coordinator Otakar Foltýn said in reaction to the NCOZ report.

• According to the NCOZ, Russian activities are aimed at influencing the population of Western European countries while increasing the threat of sabotage against critical and transport infrastructure, with local residents and criminal networks are becoming more involved in various activities.

• These include gathering information, identifying targets, putting pressure on specific individuals, such as those from the exiled diaspora, and even direct attacks on infrastructure and public places.

• “This issue has been persistent for several years, with Russian and Chinese influence attempting to infiltrate Czech society,” Jurečka said. “We must cultivate a society that can critically think, resist disinformation, and not succumb to fear,” Jurečka added.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/488027

Archived link

• Russia has increased its information war against Moldova joining the European Union (EU), Kremlin disinformation campaigns are heavily using social media: Facebook, Tik Tok, Telegram and others.

• Russia’s disinformation in Moldova pursues three key goals: to derail Moldova’s accession to the EU, undermine support for the pro-Europe government of President Maia Sandu and bring Moldova back into Russia’s orbit.

• Some of the disinformation attacks are startlingly transparent lies: A prominent Russian, pro-Kremlin commentator, Vladimir Solovyov, last year posted a photo on social media of a Moldovan rally supporting EU membership, simply relabeling it an anti-EU demonstration in a different city. Other attacks are increasingly sophisticated, including the use of artificial intelligence to create “deepfaked” videos of President Maia Sandu, according to Moldova-based journalists and Sandu’s office.

The Russian campaign uses several core narratives, according to a study:

1. A risk of war over Transnistria, a separatist enclave at Moldova’s eastern edge, if Moldova should press for the withdrawal of Russian troops based there.

2. Risk of communal conflict between Moldova’s ethnic or linguistically Romanian citizens (roughly 80 percent or more of the population) and the minorities of Russians or other Russian-speaking citizens.

3. NATO’s threat of war. Moldova is constitutionally mandated to be militarily neutral, but it cooperates with NATO. Russia warns that Moldova may join NATO, making war almost inevitable.

4. Anti-LGBT propaganda. Russia warns that liberal EU policies include “homosexual propaganda” that will turn Moldovan children to homosexuality.

5. Russia is good, Europe is bad. Russian narratives say that deeply impoverished Moldova owes its few advantages — such as Soviet-built factories — to its rule from Moscow, while “nothing good came out of Europe.”

Russian Disinformation: Impact and Response

• Investigations have found that 35% of Moldovans are agreeing that "Russia invaded Ukraine to protect people marginalized by Nazi sympathizers.” Similarly, 31% agreed that “the Russian Federation is the guarantor of peace and stability in Moldova.” Russia’s disinformation campaigns “lead to decreased support for human rights, exacerbate relations between linguistic groups, and may increase vulnerability to political violence, especially among the youth.”

• Because Moldova is a small media market, the limited advertising or other revenue available to its news media leaves fact-based journalism massively overmatched by the millions of dollars per month that experts say Russia is spending on disinformation.

• International partners find ways to help Moldova’s Association of Electronic Press or other institutions build capacities for real-time detection and countering of faked information. This could include initiatives like StopFals, a fact-checking project run by Moldova’s Independent Press Association.

Cops want more access to OnlyFans to detect more child sex abuse, report says.

The tech will be transferred “out to the agriculture ecosystem.”

But what about fax machines?

So long, Wall-E-esque guard bot.

The Federal Trade Commission would like to remind you that yes, you can repair your own PC.

Madrid unveils a digital wallet to help porn platforms verify users’ ages.

It’s no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That’s in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice in assaults, and more weapons and ammunition that it can use to pound Ukrainian positions and cities. As Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, told the UK Times: “We don’t have as many human resources as Russia, they fight, they die, they send more people, they don’t care, but that’s not how we see war.” Since it can’t match Russia in raw manpower and firepower, Ukraine has turned to technology to help it fight back.

Artists must wait weeks for Glaze defense against AI scraping amid TOS updates.

The platform says it's because of "evolving" industry standards but sellers say they feel "betrayed."

A security breach at the maker of ChatGPT last year revealed internal discussions among researchers and other employees, but not the code behind OpenAI’s systems.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/aubJh

What if you could never turn off motion smoothing?

The ‘ongoing attack’ had some high-profile targets.

Thousands of pedophiles who download and share child sexual abuse material (CSAM) were identified through information-stealing malware logs leaked on the dark web, highlighting a new dimension of using stolen credentials in law enforcement investigations.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/461229

The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.

Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.

Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.