A lesson I learned early in life: never piss off a librarian. Apparently District Court Judge John G. Koetl skipped out on a formative traumatic-shushing experience, because his recent ruling against the Internet Archive, a beloved digital library nonprofit, has riled up the biblio-archivist community. Some brief background: During the early days of Covid lockdowns,
Month: March 2023
Atop my escooter, I am a human in a city of apes. With my back straight, I tower above my fellow road-users who are hunched over car steering wheels and bike handles. This newfound poise, however, lasts for only seconds at a time. At junctions, it is replaced by another emotion: the fear of being
The literally unprecedented indictment against Donald Trump marks an outright dangerous—and politically fraught—moment for the United States and serves as a reminder of the unparalleled level of criminality and conspiracy that surrounded the 2016 election. It’s easy to look back at the 2016 election as though its outcome was inevitable—that Hillary Clinton was too weak
The big news this week was a call from tech luminaries to pause development and deployment of AI models more advanced than OpenAI’s GTP-4—the stunningly capable language algorithm behind ChatGPT—until risks including job displacement and misinformation can be better understood. Even if OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other tech heavyweights were to stop what they’re doing—and they’re not going to stop
The Soapstone is similar to other investment properties advertised by Arrived, like the Sheezy in Chattanooga, Tennessee, or the Mimosa in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The first homes to be advertised on the platform likely won’t be sold for two to three years, giving them time to appreciate, says Frazier, Arrived’s CEO. Then investors can cash out. The average
The motivations on each side of claim sales are different, but complementary. The seller either needs immediate cash to meet bills, wants to write down their losses for tax purposes, or believes they can earn a greater return by investing the money elsewhere. The buyer, meanwhile, is wagering that the value eventually returned to creditors
My personal term for the inexact nature of the messy, fuzzy world was muzzy. But then, in 1980, I acquired an Ohio Scientific desktop computer and found prompt, lasting relief. All its operations were built on a foundation of binary arithmetic, in which a 1 was always exactly a 1 and a 0 was a
As soon as Lars Ruiter steps out of his car, he is confronted by a Microsoft security guard, who is already seething with anger. Ruiter, a local councillor, has parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rises out of the flat North Holland farmland. He wants to see the construction site. The guard,
Manish Kumar runs a car rental service in the city of Jalandhar in India’s northern state of Punjab. For the past two weeks, his business has been struggling—starting on March 18, when, for four days, mobile internet was shut down across large areas of the state on the order of the government. Many of his
Stone, a signatory of the letter, says he does not agree with everything in it, and is not personally concerned about existential dangers. But he says advances are happening so quickly that the AI community and the general public barely had time to explore the benefits and possible misuses of ChatGPT before it was upgraded with
Kawakami “was afraid that Nishimura could be arrested by the police,” says Sei, author of the upcoming book The World of 2 Channel. Sei recently interviewed Kawakami. “So he dismissed Nishimura as a director.” The two, however, remained friends, he says. In November 2014, according to Sei’s reporting, Dwango bought out Nishimura’s stake in Niconico for
Jakkal says that while machine learning security tools have been effective in specific domains, like monitoring email or activity on individual devices—known as endpoint security—Security Copilot brings all of those separate streams together and extrapolates a bigger picture. “With Security Copilot you can catch what others may have missed because it forms that connective tissue,”
Predictably, it was harder than Whitener thought. It took him two years to persuade AT&T, which hadn’t made a tube since 1988 but still owned Western Electric, to license the brand and sell him its tube-manufacturing equipment. He set up shop in Western Electric’s former tube factory in Kansas City, Missouri, where the mothballed machines
More than is typical even for technology entrepreneurs, Neha Palmer is in the business of predicting the future. TeraWatt Infrastructure, a startup unicorn based in San Francisco, is a bet on the idea that some future day, companies from taxicab operators to e-retailers will have large fleets of electric trucks, cars, and vans—and need somewhere
Ecosia, which uses Bing results and invests its profits in environmental projects, is considering potential partners to develop its own chatbot. Its leaders would be eager to license Bing’s chatbot technology if Microsoft was willing to share. “It’s important to ensure that this isn’t another tool for these companies to further entrench dominance,” says CEO Christian
For every one of these companies, however, I saw just as many (if not more) that employed crypto while trying very hard to avoid mentioning that fact. Two companies claimed to be building the future of social media. Dig deep enough into their websites and they both offered users crypto-based incentives, but neither chose to
Assuming democracy remains intact in the years to come, Levitsky thinks the GOP will have to eventually moderate its stance in response to changing demographics. The current extremism will not be sustainable if the party hopes to win enough elections to wield power in the future. However, Levitsky thinks any adjustments could take longer than
ChatGPT and tools like it have made AI available to the masses. We can now get all sorts of responses back on almost any topic imaginable. These bots can come up with sonnets, code, philosophy, and more. However, while you can just type anything you like into ChatGPT and get it to understand you, there
ChatGPT warned me against asking legendary engineer Bob Metcalfe about his 1996 prediction that the internet would collapse. This came after I sought the chatbot’s guidance on what questions to ask the man who this week received the ACM Turing Award, the $1 million prize dubbed the Nobel of computing. The AI oracle suggested I stick
For many companies, those indirect emissions dwarf all the rest. Some companies and business groups contend that it is unfair to hold them responsible for pollution that they may not directly control. A graphics card maker, for example, may say it cannot control the coal plants that power its suppliers’ factories in distant countries; an
In one sense, today’s US congressional hearing on TikTok was a big success: It revealed, over five hours, how desperately the United States needs national data-privacy protections—and how lawmakers believe, somehow, that taking swipes at China is a suitable alternative. For some, the job on Thursday was casting the hearing’s only witness, TikTok CEO Shou
Ahead of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s much-anticipated testimony in the United States House of Representatives today, the embattled tech firm conducted a full-court press on Capitol Hill. This included paying to bring TikTok influencers face-to-face with their home state lawmakers, staffers, and journalists, as well as sharing their journey with their collective audience of
Teleoperating a physical robot could become an important job in future, according to Sanctuary AI, based in Vancouver, Canada. The company also believes that this might provide a way to train robots how to perform tasks that are currently well out of their (mechanical) reach, and imbue machines with a physical sense of the world some argue
The platform also appears to be vulnerable to censorship and algorithmic manipulation. This month, a company executive openly said they had overridden the app’s algorithm to push content on TikTok, and the platform has been reported to suppress content from users with Down syndrome, autism, and other disabilities, as well as users deemed “poor or ugly.”
In January that year, an Internal Revenue Service contract for online account verification with startup ID.me, which uses selfies and face recognition to verify new accounts, triggered public backlash over discrimination and privacy concerns. A WIRED story on the NIST standard driving use of the technology referred to Login.gov documentation that said it sometimes asked users
March has been brutal for TikTok. Last week, the UK joined the US, Canada, and Belgium in banning TikTok on government devices. And FBI director Christopher Wray warned lawmakers that misinformation spread through the app can “divide Americans.” At the start of the month, Senate intelligence chair Mark Warner unveiled a new measure, the Restrict Act, which
A lot of the young online support gravitated toward Obi, 61, a businessman and former member of the PDP who campaigned on a platform of reforming Nigeria’s state institutions, which have often been tainted by corruption. He also said that he would officially apologize to victims of police brutality, a promise that spoke directly to
The viral, AI-generated images of Donald Trump’s arrest you may be seeing on social media are definitely fake. But some of these photorealistic creations are pretty convincing. Others look more like stills from a video game or a lucid dream. A Twitter thread by Eliot Higgins, a founder of Bellingcat, that shows Trump getting swarmed by synthetic cops, running
China’s censorship regime requires Baidu and other internet companies to block access to certain websites and avoid politically sensitive subjects. The words or phrases that should be blocked can be updated rapidly in response to protests or during special events. But Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who studies China’s tech industry, says that concerns about
Stuart Alderoty, chief legal officer at Ripple, says the company is certain that XRP does not meet any of the Howey criteria, but that it is particularly confident that there is no common enterprise—a group undertaking that affects the fortunes of XRP investors—among XRP holders, only “common interest.” However, the SEC has long said that the majority