Tech news
What do you guys think of this app?
www.bbc.com
The system works on Android phones, essentially any phone that isn't an iPhone. Android phones, which are often more affordable, make up about 80% of the phones in Turkey. "If Google makes a promise, or makes an implicit promise, to deliver a service like earthquake early warning, then to me, it raises the stakes," says Prof Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. "They have a responsibility to be able to follow through on something that is directly related to life and limb." Google's product lead on the system, Micah Berman, insisted it had worked. "We are confident that this system fired and sent alerts," he told the BBC. However, the company did not provide evidence that these alerts were widely received. More than 50,000 people died in February's earthquake.
I figured since they weren't going to share it with us anyways that I'd share it with everyone here. I guess what's your favorite app so far?
cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/425629 > https://www.pdos.org/vlog/vlog.htm > > Main site: https://www.pdos.org/ > > PD Software Philosophy: https://sourceforge.net/p/pdos/gitcode/ci/master/tree/pdpgoal.txt > > In the public domain software world I still mostly only see PDOS and various TempleOS related projects and forks
https://polycentric.io/ https://gitlab.futo.org/polycentric/polycentric
www.theguardian.com
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly billed as a rival, claiming the company has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”. In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, first published by the news outlet Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”. “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Alex Spiro wrote in the letter. Meta launched Threads, a text-based conversation app intended to rival Twitter, on Wednesday to a largely positive reception. The company said Threads garnered 30m sign-ups in less than 24 hours after launching, apparently making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the process to sign up seamless between apps and giving the Twitter copycat a built-in user base. “With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” the letter reads. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.
www.theguardian.com
Prof Stuart Russell, a British computer scientist based at the University of California, Berkeley, said that personalised ChatGPT-style tutors have the potential to hugely enrich education and widen global access by delivering personalised tuition to every household with a smartphone. The technology could feasibly deliver “most material through to the end of high school”, he said.
www.theguardian.com
Mark Zuckerberg has taken a swipe at Elon Musk’s Twitter as his competitor to the platform, Threads, reached 30m sign-ups less than 24 hours after launching. The chief executive and founder of Meta used his new Threads account to say Twitter had not “nailed” its opportunity to become a mega app and implied that it had underachieved because of the amount of hostility on the microblogging platform. Zuckerberg’s competitive move against Twitter has already resulted in Musk challenging his fellow billionaire to a cage fight, an offer that the Meta boss appears to have accepted. Appropriately, Zuckerberg said in an exchange with a mixed martial arts fighter on Threads that Twitter had not taken its chance to become a leading platform. Replying on his new Threads account to MMA fighter Mike Davis, who had asked if Threads could become bigger than Twitter, Zuckerberg wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1bn+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.” Zuckerberg indicated in another Threads exchange that Twitter had not reached its potential because it had not been a friendly experience for users. “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” he wrote. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
futurism.com
The steady march of AI in journalism continues — though the outcome, both for the health of the information ecosystem and the financial wellbeing of publishers that embrace it, remains as hazy as ever. G/O Media, a major online media company that runs publications including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, Jezebel, and Deadspin, has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites. The company joins a growing number of media entities experimenting with the technology, including Red Ventures, which owns sites including Bankrate and CNET, as well as Men's Journal and BuzzFeed. These trials have already led to a flood of error-laden, plagiarized, and poorly written content due to badly implemented — and, some would argue, inherently unsuited AI models — that still have a strong tendency to make up facts. Pushes to AI content have also preceded sweeping layoffs at CNET and BuzzFeed. In an email to staff, G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown argued that the news shouldn't come as a surprise since "everyone in the media business" has been considering AI.
edition.cnn.com
CNN — OpenAI, the company behind the viral ChatGPT tool, has been hit with a lawsuit alleging the company stole and misappropriated vast swaths of peoples’ data from the internet to train its AI tools. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a California federal court, claims that OpenAI secretly scraped “massive amounts of personal data from the internet,” according to the complaint. The nearly 160-page complaint alleges that this personal data, including “essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take,” was also seized by the company without notice, consent or “just compensation.” Moreover, this data scraping occurred at an “unprecedented scale,” the suit claims. OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment Wednesday. Microsoft, a major investor into OpenAI, was also named as a defendant in the suit and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “By collecting previously obscure personal data of millions and misappropriating it to develop a volatile, untested technology, OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk that is incalculable – but unacceptable by any measure of responsible data protection and use,” Timothy K. Giordano, a partner at Clarkson, the law firm behind the suit, said in a statement to CNN Wednesday.
edition.cnn.com
cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/160175 > Malaysia said Friday it would take legal action against Facebook parent company Meta for failing to remove “undesirable” posts, the strongest measure the country has taken to date over such content. > > Last year’s closely fought national election has led to a rise in ethnic tensions, and since coming to power in November, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration has vowed to curb what it calls provocative posts that touch on race and religion. > > Facebook (FB) has recently been “plagued by” a significant volume of undesirable content relating to race, royalty, religion, defamation, impersonation, online gambling and scam advertisements, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said in a statement. > > It also said Meta had failed to take sufficient action despite the body’s repeated requests and that legal action was necessary to promote accountability for cybersecurity and protect consumers. > > Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The commission also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what legal action might be taken.
www.techspot.com
cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/121003 > cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/45222 > > > Among the many changes, the new rules would require batteries in consumer devices like smartphones to be easily removable and replaceable. That's far from the case today...
www.vance.senate.gov
“Taxpayer-funded innovations should benefit American workers and industry, not our foreign adversaries. For far too long, we’ve allowed American breakthroughs to be offshored to nations like China and Russia – this legislation will bring those abuses to an end,” said Senator Vance. “It’s common sense: products developed with American taxpayer dollars should be manufactured by American workers on American soil.” “When taxpayer dollars are used to fund innovation, American companies and workers are the ones who should be reaping the benefits,” said Senator Baldwin. “By building on the progress we’ve made to manufacture more products in the USA, the Invent Here, Make Here Act ensures cutting-edge American innovation is also American-made, strengthening our manufacturing sector and our domestic supply chains, and supporting American jobs.”
cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/89325 > via r/datahoarder