Starting December 1, 2023 (that’s tomorrow), Google will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. The company says it's doing so for privacy reasons: “If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised,” Google noted in May 2023. “This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised.” Google will warn users before deletion via emails sent to the inactive account and another email, provided one has been set up.
Even if you don’t need the account, it might be best to login and check you’re not going to miss anything — there might be important information somewhere in msmith.teamnaruto@gmail.com. No spam, please.
— Mat
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Elon Musk, seeing his financially precarious X could lose another $75 million in ad revenue following his boosting of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, has a fresh new message for advertisers pulling away from the platform: “Go fuck yourself.”
While Musk again denied being antisemitic, he expressed some regret for engaging with the tweet that resulted in another exodus of advertisers from X. “I should have not replied to that particular person… I essentially handed a loaded gun to those who hate me,” Musk said.
Consumer Reports has published an extensive ranking of vehicle reliability, and the results pour cold water on the dependability of EVs and plug-in hybrids. The survey says electric vehicles suffer from 79 percent more maintenance issues than gas- or diesel-powered ones, while plug-in hybrids have 146 percent more problems. The troubles portray the industry’s growing pains with the relatively new technology. Lexus came out on top among EV brands. All but one of its models scored above average or better in CR’s ratings. Toyota also did well, including the 4Runner SUV, which CR describes as “among the most reliable models in the survey.”
The chatbot was asked to repeat random words forever.
A team of researchers was able to make ChatGPT reveal some of the bits of data it has been trained on by asking it to repeat random words forever. In response, ChatGPT churned out random words, yes, but also shared people’s private information, including email addresses and phone numbers. When the researchers asked ChatGPT to “repeat the word ‘poem’ forever,” the chatbot initially complied, but then revealed an email address and a cellphone number for a real founder and CEO. OpenAI patched the vulnerability on August 30, the researchers say. But in our own tests, Engadget was able to replicate the attack, asking ChatGPT to repeat the word “reply” forever, which resulted, eventually, in revealing someone’s name and Skype ID.
For the first time in a while, you can access it on desktop.
Spotify
Spotify is revealing all of the artists, genres, songs and podcasts you listened to most in the last 12 months, even if it’s going to make you cringe. The 2023 installment of the streaming service's Wrapped year-in-review debuted yesterday on the Spotify app, with an all-new design alongside the familiar story-style format. This year, the company will assign one of 12 "listening characters" that best fits your streaming habit. The feature is called Me in 2023, and those "characters" range from the Shapeshifter, someone who moves from one artist to another quickly, to the Alchemist, someone more likely to create their own playlists.
Amazon has its own image generator. AWS customers can now check out a preview of Titan Image Generator on the Bedrock console. They can either enter a text prompt to create an image from scratch or upload an image and edit it. Amazon says the tool can produce large volumes of studio-quality realistic images at low cost. Users can also isolate areas in which they want to add or remove details. Amazon also recently revealed its own business-centric chatbot, Q.
Social media's negative impact on children's and young adults' mental health has been a growing cause of concern for parents and lawmakers. Now, the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X are set to testify in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee on "their failure to protect children online." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are willing participants. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Discord CEO Jason Citron and X CEO Linda Yaccarino are testifying after being subpoenaed.
Senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham, its ranking member, released a statement expressing their frustration with Snap, Discord, and X's initial refusal to have their CEOs participate and even accept the subpoenas. In Discord's case, US Marshals visited their offices to serve the document.
The senators further shared a feeling of hypocrisy at these platforms wanting a say in policy but fighting against getting involved in discussions. "When we held our first hearing on protecting children online with experts and advocates earlier this year, Big Tech griped about not getting an invitation. We promised them that their time would come," Durbin and Graham stated. "We've known from the beginning that our efforts to protect children online would be met with hesitation from Big Tech. They finally are being forced to acknowledge their failures when it comes to protecting kids. Now that all five companies are cooperating, we look forward to hearing from their CEOs. Parents and kids demand action."
The Judiciary Committee has focused on this issue a great deal throughout the year, approving bills that would force online platforms to take more responsibility in protecting children (and be more transparent in their efforts) and improve reporting of online child sexual exploitation, among other steps. The hearing with the CEOs from the five tech giants was originally set for December but will now take place on January 31, 2024, at 10 AM ET.
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Fresh off successful contract negotiations with Ford, GM and Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across 13 automakers including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes Benz and Hyundai, it announced. "To all the autoworkers out there working without the benefits of a union: now it’s your turn," said UAW president Shawn Fain.
The UAW said the organizing drive covers "more than a dozen" non-union automakers. It notes that many use a mix of full-time, temporary and contract employees "to divide the workforce and depress wages." The union cited one example of a Hyundai assembly plant employee who worked for a subcontractor for eight years starting at $9.25 an hour before finally becoming a full-time Hyundai employee.
Non-union automakers, including VW, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, Toyota and Subaru raised wages after the UAW's negotiations with the big three. VW, for one, bumped them to $23.42 an hour, rising to a maximum of $32.40. However, they "lag far behind UAW autoworkers in wages, benefits and rights on the job," the union said.
The UAW helped workers win a 25 percent raise over four years with the big three automakers, with the highest-paid Ford workers now earning $83,000 per year for a 40-hour work week (around $42 per hour). The union also gained reinstatement of cost-of-living allowances, shorter progression periods to top wages and a quicker conversion of temporary to in-progression (full-time) employees.
Tesla employees have attempted to unionize the company before, and some alleged that the company fired them for that — though that claim was recently dismissed by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB has previously found that Tesla violated labor law by prohibiting employees from talking about workplace matters. Back in 2022, Elon Musk challenged the UAW to hold a vote at Tesla's California factory.
Other automakers aren't exempt from worker complaints, including startup Rivian. "The company likes to tell us we’re making the plane while flying it, and that explains a lot about the problems we have," said one Rivian chassis worker. "We have all sorts of safety issues. Turnover is terrible. Every group has a story about a new employee who did not make it to first break. The lack of safety, the low pay, the forced overtime, there are so many reasons we need to be union."
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Do you have a Google account you haven't checked for awhile but still want to keep? You'd better log in soon before it gets purged. Starting December 1st, 2023 (Friday), Google will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. The company says it's doing so for privacy reasons and no doubt to free up quite a bit of space on its servers.
"If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised," Google noted in May 2023. "This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised, haven't had two factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user." It added that abandoned accounts are "at least 10 times less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification setup."
Google will warn users before deletion via emails sent to the inactive account and another email, provided one has been set up. The policy only applies to personal and not business or education accounts, Google said. Some accounts will be exempt from deletion, including those with YouTube videos uploaded, an active paid subscription or holding gift cards. Deletion will start with accounts that have never been used, it said in May.
To stop deletion, you'll need to sign into the inactive account and access some of the services (read or send an email, use Google Drive, watch a YouTube video, etc.). If you have anything saved in Google Photos, you'll want to access that content specifically, as Google has a separate policy for that service. "If you’re inactive in Google Photos for two years or more, all of your content may be deleted," it states.
Google isn't alone with this policy, as since 2019, Microsoft has deleted Outlook (or related Hotmail) accounts that have been inactive for two years. In any case, it's always a good idea to backup your Google accounts using the company's Takeout feature and have a backup email for any important accounts.
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According to an experiment conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Instagram’s Reels video service would serve “risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos” to its test accounts that exclusively followed teen and preteen influencers, usually young gymnasts and cheerleaders.
While these tests don’t represent real user experiences (as tech companies tend to counter with), aggregating child sexualization content was apparently a known problem internally, according to current and former Meta employees interviewed by the WSJ.
Meta told its advertising clients it was investigating and that it “would pay for brand-safety auditing services to determine how often a company’s ads appear beside content it considers unacceptable.”
According to Reuters and Bloomberg, TikTok's parent company ByteDance is winding down its gaming arm, including the Nuverse brand, with “hundreds” of jobs likely to be affected. Nuverse, acquired by ByteDance in 2017, is the publisher of notable titles Marvel Snap, Ragnarok X: Next Generation and One Piece: Blood Routes. Despite the apparent success of these games, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo had reportedly criticized the gaming arm for a lack of focus.
A district court sided with the automaker in an interim decision.
Tesla sued Sweden’s transportation agency and postal service over a union strike blocking the company’s license plate deliveries in the country. The workers are striking to demand the non-unionized automaker sign a collective bargaining agreement, a standard practice mechanics’ union IF Metall describes as “the backbone of the Swedish model.” However, the Swedish Transport Agency says it already received an interim decision from a district court, ordering it to consent within seven days to Tesla’s request to collect license plates or face hefty fines.
There’s never been a better time to own a new camera, as the latest technology means better photos and video than ever. But with all the models out there, let alone the numerous accessories, like backpacks, memory cards, tripods and more, where do you start? Fortunately, we’ve done all the research and found cameras and peripherals at a wide range of prices.
Eduards Sizovs, founder of software developer conference DevTernity, has already been in the headlines for listing fake female speakers for a conference. Now, it has been revealed that Sizovs may also be behind is also behind Coding_Unicorn, a popular Instagram account supposedly run by a female coder, 404 Media reports.
Coding_Unicorn has 115,000 followers on Instagram and claims to be run by a professional software developer named Julia. The account features photos — many of which are glamour shots — of Julia at a MacBook alongside "no-BS coding, career, productivity tips."
404 Media has laid out a range of evidence that Sizovs is responsible for the account, such as a YouTube video showing Sizovs having previously logged into the account's email and photos of Julia's computer screen that show her logged in as Sizovs. Some of Julia's Instagram captions are also exact copies of Sizovs' LinkedIn posts.
Julia also lists herself as a DevTernity fan and links to the company's upcoming conferences. She was allegedly going to speak at a conference but "switched to helping with the organization." The event, which was set to start on December 7, has been canceled following the allegations that fake women were added to the lineup in an effort for it to look diverse. Two women — one listed as a staff engineer at Coinbase and another as a Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp senior engineer — were removed from DevTernity's website and have no online presence or, potentially, existence at all, according to The Register.
Sizovs responded to the conference allegations on X: "The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone. But I won't defend myself because I don't feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for." Sizovs did admit that one profile listed on the site was a "demo persona" that was "auto-generated, with a random title, random Twitter handle, random picture." However, skeptics claim removing the person should have been simple and that it didn't appear to be auto-generated at all, with the picture even changing early on.
Looking to the future, Sizovs said, "I’ll increase efforts 10x to make sure that next year, if one of our ladies drops out, we have a fallback plan." As for Unicorn_Coding, it's unclear who exactly the woman is in the photos or how she's connected to Sizovs. Read 404 Media's article to learn more about this wild case.
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Google Drive users have recently been reporting that files and folders have gone missing, with some saying that months worth of data has disappeared from their accounts. Now, Google has acknowledged the issue, saying that it appears to be caused by the Drive for Desktop app, 9to5Google has reported.
The issue is pretty alarming, obviously. One user on Google's support forums said that an expense spreadsheet they regularly updated has lost all data from nearly the last five years, with the version history showing the latest version as January 2019. "I'm really mad as this had all the important data which I do not have any local copy for. I need this data retrieved at any cost." Another poster said the drive reverted to May 2023, with all subsequent data disappearing, and others report similar issues.
In a post from yesterday, Google said that "we’re investigating reports of an issue impacting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users and will follow up with more updates." It noted the problem affects Drive for desktop v84.0.0.0 - 84.0.4.09. It advised users not to click "disconnect account" within Drive for desktop, and to not delete or move a specific app folder called DriveFS as detailed here. It even recommends making a copy of the app data folder if you have room on your hard drive.
Google offers several ways to recover (or at least check) deleted files. That includes checking the trash, which is now automatically emptied after 30 days. It's also a good idea to check the activity panel, which shows any files deleted or moved along with the relevant date. For this latest issue, however, the activity panel doesn't appear to show that the files have gone missing, according to Google's support forum users.
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Do black holes, like dying old soldiers, simply fade away? Do they pop like hyperdimensional balloons? Maybe they do, or maybe they pass through a cosmic rubicon, effectively reversing their natures and becoming inverse anomalies that cannot be entered through their event horizons but which continuously expel energy and matter back into the universe.
In his latest book, White Holes, physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovelli focuses his attention and considerable expertise on the mysterious space phenomena, diving past the event horizon to explore their theoretical inner workings and and posit what might be at the bottom of those infinitesimally tiny, infinitely fascinating gravitational points. In this week's Hitting the Books excerpt, Rovelli discusses a scientific schism splitting the astrophysics community as to where all of the information — which, from our current understanding of the rules of our universe, cannot be destroyed — goes once it is trapped within an inescapable black hole.
In 1974, Stephen Hawking made an unexpected theoretical discovery: black holes must emit heat. This, too, is a quantum tunnel effect, but a simpler one than the bounce of a Planck star: photons trapped inside the horizon escape thanks to the pass that quantum physics provides to everything. They “tunnel” beneath the horizon.
So black holes emit heat, like a stove, and Hawking computed their temperature. Radiated heat carries away energy. As it loses energy, the black hole gradually loses mass (mass is energy), becoming ever lighter and smaller. Its horizon shrinks. In the jargon we say that the black hole “evaporates.”
Heat emission is the most characteristic of the irreversible processes: the processes that occur in one time direction and cannot be reversed. A stove emits heat and warms a cold room. Have you ever seen the walls of a cold room emit heat and heat up a warm stove? When heat is produced, the process is irreversible. In fact, whenever the process is irreversible, heat is produced (or something analogous). Heat is the mark of irreversibility. Heat distinguishes past from future.
There is therefore at least one clearly irreversible aspect to the life of a black hole: the gradual shrinking of its horizon.
But, careful: the shrinking of the horizon does not mean that the interior of the black hole becomes smaller. The interior largely remains what it is, and the interior volume keeps growing. It is only the horizon that shrinks. This is a subtle point that confuses many. Hawking radiation is a phenomenon that regards mainly the horizon, not the deep interior of the hole. Therefore, a very old black hole turns out to have a peculiar geometry: an enormous interior (that continues to grow) and a minuscule (because it has evaporated) horizon that encloses it. An old black hole is like a glass bottle in the hands of a skillful Murano glassblower who succeeds in making the volume of the bottle increase as its neck becomes narrower.
At the moment of the leap from black to white, a black hole can therefore have an extremely small horizon and a vast interior. A tiny shell containing vast spaces, as in a fable.
In fables, we come across small huts that, when entered, turn out to contain hundreds of vast rooms. This seems impossible, the stuff of fairy tales. But it is not so. A vast space enclosed in a small sphere is concretely possible.
If this seems bizarre to us, it is only because we became habituated to the idea that the geometry of space is simple: it is the one we studied at school, the geometry of Euclid. But it is not so in the real world. The geometry of space is distorted by gravity. The distortion permits a gigantic volume to be enclosed within a tiny sphere. The gravity of a Planck star generates such a huge distortion.
An ant that has always lived on a large, flat plaza will be amazed when it discovers that through a small hole it has access to a large underground garage. Same for us with a black hole. What the amazement teaches is that we should not have blind confidence in habitual ideas: the world is stranger and more varied than we imagine.
The existence of large volumes within small horizons has also generated confusion in the world of science. The scientific community has split and is quarreling about the topic. In the rest of this section, I tell you about this dispute. It is more technical than the rest — skip it if you like — but it is a picture of a lively, ongoing scientific debate.
The disagreement concerns how much information you can cram into an entity with a large volume but a small surface. One part of the scientific community is convinced that a black hole with a small horizon can contain only a small amount of information. Another disagrees.
What does it mean to “contain information”?
More or less this: Are there more things in a box containing five large and heavy balls, or in a box that contains twenty small marbles? The answer depends on what you mean by “more things.” The five balls are bigger and weigh more, so the first box contains more matter, more substance, more energy, more stuff. In this sense there are “more things” in the box of balls.
But the number of marbles is greater than the number of balls. In this sense, there are “more things,” more details, in the box of marbles. If we wanted to send signals, by giving a single color to each marble or each ball, we could send more signals, more colors, more information, with the marbles, because there are more of them. More precisely: it takes more information to describe the marbles than it does to describe the balls, because there are more of them. In technical terms, the box of balls contains more energy, whereas the box of marbles contains more information.
An old black hole, considerably evaporated, has little energy, because the energy has been carried away via the Hawking radiation. Can it still contain much information, after much of its energy is gone? Here is the brawl.
Some of my colleagues convinced themselves that it is not possible to cram a lot of information beneath a small surface. That is, they became convinced that when most energy has gone and the horizon has become minuscule, only little information can remain inside.
Another part of the scientific community (to which I belong) is convinced of the contrary. The information in a black hole—even a greatly evaporated one—can still be large. Each side is convinced that the other has gone astray.
Disagreements of this kind are common in the history of science; one may say that they are the salt of the discipline. They can last long. Scientists split, quarrel, scream, wrangle, scuffle, jump at each other’s throats. Then, gradually, clarity emerges. Some end up being right, others end up being wrong.
At the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, the world of physics was divided into two fierce factions. One of these followed Mach in thinking that atoms were just convenient mathematical fictions; the other followed Boltzmann in believing that atoms exist for real. The arguments were ferocious. Ernst Mach was a towering figure, but it was Boltzmann who turned out to be right. Today, we even see atoms through a microscope.
I think that my colleagues who are convinced that a small horizon can contain only a small amount of information have made a serious mistake, even if at first sight their arguments seem convincing. Let’s look at these.
The first argument is that it is possible to compute how many elementary components (how many molecules, for example) form an object, starting from the relation between its energy and its temperature. We know the energy of a black hole (it is its mass) and its temperature (computed by Hawking), so we can do the math. The result indicates that the smaller the horizon, the fewer its elementary components.
The second argument is that there are explicit calculations that allow us to count these elementary components directly, using both of the most studied theories of quantum gravity—string theory and loop theory. The two archrival theories completed this computation within months of each other in 1996. For both, the number of elementary components becomes small when the horizon is small.
These seem like strong arguments. On the basis of these arguments, many physicists have accepted a “dogma” (they call it so themselves): the number of elementary components contained in a small surface is necessarily small. Within a small horizon there can only be little information. If the evidence for this “dogma” is so strong, where does the error lie?
It lies in the fact that both arguments refer only to the components of the black hole that can be detected from the outside, as long as the black hole remains what it is. And these are only the components residing on the horizon. Both arguments, in other words, ignore that there can be components in the large interior volume. These arguments are formulated from the perspective of someone who remains far from the black hole, does not see the inside, and assumes that the black hole will remain as it is forever. If the black hole stays this way forever—remember—those who are far from it will see only what is outside or what is right on the horizon. It is as if for them the interior does not exist. For them.
But the interior does exist! And not only for those (like us) who dare to enter, but also for those who simply have the patience to wait for the black horizon to become white, allowing what was trapped inside to come out. In other words, to imagine that the calculations of the number of components of a black hole given by string theory or loop theory are complete is to have failed to take on board Finkelstein’s 1958 article. The description of a black hole from the outside is incomplete.
The loop quantum gravity calculation is revealing: the number of components is precisely computed by counting the number of quanta of space on the horizon. But the string theory calculation, on close inspection, does the same: it assumes that the black hole is stationary, and is based on what is seen from afar. It neglects, by hypothesis, what is inside and what will be seen from afar after the hole has finished evaporating — when it is no longer stationary.
I think that certain of my colleagues err out of impatience they want everything resolved before the end of evaporation, where quantum gravity becomes inevitable) and because they forget to take into account what is beyond that which can be immediately seen — two mistakes we all frequently make in life.
Adherents to the dogma find themselves with a problem. They call it “the black hole information paradox.” They are convinced that inside an evaporated black hole there is no longer any information. Now, everything that falls into a black hole carries information. So a large amount of information can enter the hole. Information cannot vanish. Where does it go?
To solve the paradox, the devotees of the dogma imagine that information escapes the hole in mysterious and baroque ways, perhaps in the folds of the Hawking radiation, like Ulysses and his companions escaping from the cave of the cyclops by hiding beneath sheep. Or they speculate that the interior of a black hole is connected to the outside by hypothetical invisible canals . . . Basically, they are clutching at straws—looking, like all dogmatists in difficulty, for abstruse ways of saving the dogma.
But the information that enters the horizon does not escape by some arcane, magical means. It simply comes out after the horizon has been transformed from a black horizon into a white horizon.
In his final years, Stephen Hawking used to remark that there is no need to be afraid of the black holes of life: sooner or later, there will be a way out of them. There is — via the child white hole.
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Instagram launched the ability to download publicly viewable Reels in June, but it limited the feature's availability to users on mobile in the US. Now, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has announced on his broadcast channel that the feature is rolling out to all users worldwide. Anybody on the app can now download public Reels to their devices and not just save them for viewing later. They simply have to tap on the Share button and start their download from there.
As TechCrunch reports, Mosseri explained during his broadcast that downloaded Reels will have the Instagram watermark with the account's username, similar to downloaded TikTok videos. In addition, Reels will only come with music if they're scored with original tracks. Instagram will strip their audio if they use licensed music as a background.
TikTok's video downloading feature helps attract more users to the app, since it gives creators (and reposters) an easy way to share clips across platforms. People who don't have TikTok may decide to sign up if they find creators they want to follow or if they want to see more similar types of content. Instagram could be looking to replicate that strategy, though users will have the ability to prevent their Reels from being download. To change their download options, they'll have to go to Reels and Remix under Privacy in Settings and toggle off "Allow people to download your Reels."
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OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit, accusing it of using other people's intellectual property without permission to train its generative AI technology. Only this time, the lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant. The complaint was filed by Julian Sancton on behalf of a group of non-fiction authors who said they were not compensated for the use of their books and academic journals in training the company's large language model.
In their lawsuit, the authors state how they spend years "conceiving, researching, and writing their creations." They accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of refusing to pay authors while building a business "valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission." The companies pretend copyright laws do not exist, the complaint reads, and have "enjoyed enormous financial gain from their exploitation of copyrighted material."
Sancton is the author behind Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic, which tells the true survival story of an 1897 polar expedition that got stuck in the ocean in the middle of a sunless Antarctic winter. Sancton spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars to research and write the book. "Such an investment of time and money is feasible for Plaintiff Sancton and other writers because, in exchange for their creative efforts, the Copyright Act grants them 'a bundle of exclusive rights' in their works, including 'the rights to reproduce the copyrighted work[s],'" according to the lawsuit.
As Forbes notes, OpenAI previously said that content generated by ChatGPT doesn't constitute "derivative work" and, hence, doesn't infringe on any copyright. Sancton's lawsuit is merely the latest complaint against the company over its use of copyrighted work to train its technology. Earlier this year, screenwriter and author also Michael Chabon sued OpenAI for the same thing, as did George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult. Comedian Sarah Silverman filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta, as well. Sancton is now seeking damages and injunctive relief for all the proposed class action's defendants.
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Starfield just received some key updates promised by Bethesda a couple of months ago, the developer announced. Version 1.8.86 comes with DLSS support that finally gives users with supported NVIDIA cards features including DLSS Super Resolution, Deep Learning Anti-aliasing (DLAA), Reflex Low Latency and DLSS frame generation. That should assuage numerous grumbling users, many of whom used a controversial DLSS mod to tide themselves over.
Along with DLSS, the update includes GPU performance optimizations that will help users with higher-end cards. Bethesda has also addressed memory leaks and other related issues, improved renderer threading and made a number of other stability and performance improvements. On the graphics side, it added brightness and contrast controls (!), while addressing issues around ambient occlusion, shader compilation, HDR brightness (Xbox and Windows 11 only), material issues, crowd character eyes and more.
Update 1.8.86 has landed! 🚀
💻 DLSS Support
🥘 Consume button for food
🔧 Numerous fixes and improvements
Gameplay also sees some welcome updates. You can now "eat the food placed in the world" via a "consume button" without having to add items to inventory, a nice quality-of-life fix. Bethesda also adjusted stealth to be more forgiving, resolved the problem of Andreja's head staying permanently cloaked, fixed an issue that could prevent players from firing weapons, resolved a problem with naked NPCs, fixed mouse issues and more. It also resolved quest problems that mostly revolve around inconsistent game play.
Bethesda beta tested the new features earlier this month on Steam before deeming them fit for release. In September, it said that it's "working closely" with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel on driver support, possibly in response to a Digital Foundry technical report saying the game had "disproportionately poor NVIDIA and Intel performance." Starfield is among the best-selling games of 2023 (thanks in part to being free on Game Pass), with the company having reported 10 million players as of the end of September.
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Nothing has pulled the beta for its new messaging app, Nothing Chats, from the Play Store just a day after its release, and says it’s delaying the launch “until further notice” as it works through its many issues. The company touted the Sunbird-based Nothing Chats as the answer to the longstanding “Android versus Apple” texting woes, with support for both RCS and iMessage to bridge the gap. But since its announcement, a growing number of critics have voiced concerns over the risks that workarounds like this bring, arguing that Nothing Chats is an inherently less secure messaging option.
We've removed the Nothing Chats beta from the Play Store and will be delaying the launch until further notice to work with Sunbird to fix several bugs.
We apologise for the delay and will do right by our users.
In a teardown of the app, 9to5google pointed out that Nothing Chats does not have end-to-end encryption, and found that attachments sent by other users could easily be accessed in plain text. The findings added support to concerns voiced by others on X that Sunbird uses HTTP instead of HTTPS. Kishan Bagaria, founder of Texts.com, called it out as “extremely insecure” and said further investigation from his team showed “all outgoing texts are being leaked to a sentry server in plaintext.”
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SpaceX's second test flight of its Starship spacecraft — which it hopes will one day ferry humans to the moon and Mars — ended in an explosion Saturday morning minutes after taking off from the company's spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
The booster experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly shortly after stage separation while Starship's engines fired for several minutes on its way to space
At 8AM ET today, SpaceX will open a 20-minute launch window for Starship's second-ever fully integrated test flight. If everything goes well during the pre-flight procedures, and if the weather cooperates, then we'll see the company's spacecraft make another attempt to reach space. SpaceX completed Starship's first fully integrated launch in April. While it was considered a success, the company wasn't able to meet all its objectives and had to intentionally blow up the spacecraft after its two stages failed to separate.
As a result of that incident, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had grounded Starship while authorities conducted an investigation. They found that the explosion scattered debris across 385 acres of land, caused pulverized concrete to rain down on areas up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site, and started a wildfire at Boca Chica State Park. The FAA required SpaceX to make 63 corrective actions before it could give the company clearance to fly its reusable spacecraft again.
SpaceX said that this flight will debut several changes it implemented due to what happened during Starship's first test flight. They include a new hot-stage separation system, a new electronic Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system for Super Heavy Raptor engines, reinforcements to the pad foundation and a water-cooled steel flame deflector.
The company's live broadcast of the launch starts at 7:24AM ET on its website and on X. If the Starship's stages can successfully separate this time around, its upper stage will fly across the planet before splashing down off a Hawaiian coast.
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Apple has announced it will begin supporting the RCS messaging standard at some point next year. RCS, or Rich Communication Services, was developed by the mobile industry as an upgrade on SMS and MMS. But Apple has been resistant to adopt it both because it prefers its home-grown iMessage platform, and because it’s not secure by default. It doesn’t help that Google has used RCS as a cudgel in its own text-message–bubble-color culture war with the iPhone maker.
In a statement, presumably typed through gritted teeth, Apple said RCS would offer better interoperability compared to SMS and MMS. But added that iMessage, which, unlike RCS, is end-to-end encrypted by default, remains the “best and most secure messaging experience.” It’s likely the change was, in part, motivated by the European Union, which has been turning its attention to the ways the technology industry makes life harder for consumers.
— Dan Cooper
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It’s hard to tell if there’s magic in buying a car, or if the dealership just puts on a show to make you think there is. We’ll find out for ourselves next year when Amazon enables direct car sales on its platform. The first automaker to sign up is Hyundai, who is, in return, adding Alexa to its 2025-era vehicles.
Unity is now making its suite of AI-enhanced game development tools available to everyone for $30 a month. It’s designed to take a lot of the hard work out of making a new title, by automating the coding process. In the future, you can expect to see tools to create game graphics, set NPC behaviors and animate characters, which could be a very big deal indeed.
In May 2022, just months before Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hit the platform with a $150 million fine and consent decree that imposed stipulations for safeguarding users' personal data. The ruling was imposed after the FTC found that Twitter had violated a previous consent decree by inappropriately sharing user phone numbers and email addresses with advertisers.
After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk went to court in an attempt to overturn that consent decree, arguing that the FTC had increased scrutiny on X and pressured a third-party assessor to find fault with its security practices. In a post on X at the time, Musk called the FTC's actions "a shameful case of weaponization of a government agency for political purposes and suppression of the truth."
However, a federal judge just rejected that motion, ruling that his court lacked the authority to block the FTC's court order, while also blocking Musk's request to avoid a deposition that's part of a separate investigation, The Washington Post reported. In other words, X must still adhere to the strict privacy reporting standards imposed by the FTC last year.
The judge listed other issues with X's argument, noting that the FTC had good reason to increase scrutiny on X after Musk took over. "The government says this increase in investigative activity should not be surprising because Musk directed at least five rounds of terminations, layoffs or other reductions in X Corp.’s workforce, which affected the security, governance, risk and compliance team," he wrote in the ruling.
He added that the third-party assessor said he faced steady delays due to executive turnover at X. Finally, the judge ruled that Musk can't avoid being deposed by the FTC, as "the government argues that the major changes to the company appear to have been initiated by Musk himself."
Musk's FTC problems started shortly after his acquisition of X, when key executives on Twitter's privacy and security teams departed. Still, Musk seemed willing to comply with the rules, telling employees at the time that "Twitter will do whatever it takes to adhere to both the letter and spirit of the FTC consent decree."
Back in March, though, the FTC stepped up its probe into Musk's actions in an effort to get more information about the company’s handling of layoffs, X Premium subscriptions, the "Twitter Files" and other issues.
Meanwhile, the platform can't seem to stay out of the news, as IBM recently said it would pull advertising on X after discovering its ads were being placed next to pro-Nazi content. Musk himself faced criticism after he appeared to endorse an antisemitic post on the platform.
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Even though Facebook has been moving away from providing its users with easy access to news over the past year, it apparently still remains a go-to source for current affairs in the US. According to Pew Research, three out of ten adults in the country still regularly get their news from Facebook, which has outpaced all the other social media websites in the center's study. YouTube comes next in the list, with 26 percent of US adults getting news from the video hosting website, while Instagram takes third place with 16 percent. While apparently not as popular as the first three when it comes to news, TikTok (14 percent), X (12 percent) and Reddit (8 percent) also serve as news sources for the US populace.
When it was reported a year ago that Meta will no longer be paying publishers to run their content on Facebook's News Tab, a spokesperson said "[m]ost people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that don't align with user preferences." But according to the study, 43 percent of users still get their news regularly from the platform. That is, however, admittedly smaller than the 54 percent of users who used to go to the social network to keep themselves updated and read about the latest events back in 2020. Meanwhile, 43 percent of TikTok users say they're getting news from the app now, compared to 22 percent three years ago. Out of all the social networks in the study, though, X (formerly known as Twitter) has the highest percentage of users (53 percent) who go to the website for news.
Based on the study's responders, men mostly rely on Reddit to keep them abreast of current events, followed by Twitter and YouTube. Meanwhile, women consume news from Nextdoor the most, followed by Facebook and Instagram. In addition, most of the people who get their news from social media are Democrats or lean Democratic, though "there is no significant partisan difference among news consumers on Facebook, X or Nextdoor." Bottom line is, a lot of people still look to social media websites to read about the latest happenings and new information as they come out. These companies will have to continue keeping a close eye on the spread of misinformation on their platforms, even if they do decide not to focus on news anymore.
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Tags are a key way to seek out content on social media, but so far they've been missing on Meta's fledgling Threads platform. That's changing soon, however, as the feature is now in testing on Threads in Australia "with more countries coming soon," Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a new thread.
You create a tag in the usual way by placing a hash before a word, which then displays in blue text without the hash — much as mentions work in Facebook. To seek out topics, type a hash plus a keyword into the search field to see a list of relevant posts, as one does on Instagram. So far, it's limited to a single tag per post, likely to discourage hashtag spamming — though that may change, as Meta said the feature is still a work in progress.
Despite still not being in Europe, Threads has shown consistent growth and now counts nearly 100 million monthly active users, Zuckerberg wrote last month. The app recently gained a few key features like the ability to delete your threads profile without killing your Instagram account and avoid automatically sharing Threads posts with Facebook and Instagram. It also added pinned posts, and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri hinted that DMs may (or may not) be done via Instagram's inbox.
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In the US, Apple’s iMessage is so popular that the fact it shows texts from non-iOS handsets in a different color is a big deal. This status anxiety is so great, the Android world has begged regulators to force Apple to… change the color of a text bubble. Now, Nothing is taking matters into its own hands, partnering with unified messaging platform Sunbird to hide that shame. Sunbird uses your Apple ID to route comms between your Nothing phone and your friends’ iPhones through a server farm of Mac Minis. If it works as well as promised, it means your friends won’t know you own an Android handset… until the next time you see them in person.
Of course, none of this is happening with Apple’s blessing, so it needs a workaround. You need to hand over your credentials to a third party and risk the fallout should Apple decide to intervene. Nothing CEO Carl Pei believes Apple can’t risk the bad PR if it shuts Sunbird down, but that’s not a bet I’d like to take. It’s worth saying this is almost unique to the US — most of the world just uses third-party platforms like WhatsApp. Not to mention if your friends give you grief because of the phone you own, they aren’t your friends.
— Dan Cooper
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Opal makes ultra-premium webcams in surprisingly small bodies. Its latest, the Tadpole, is absolutely for laptop users. James Trew put the dinky device through its paces, and he thinks it might be a winner. Picture quality is pretty good, but the directional audio helps screen out enough unwanted audio that it deserved extra praise.
It’s to prevent drivers being blamed for things out of their control.
Uber says it wants to make the platform better for riders and drivers alike and will now clamp down on users who give bad reviews just to score a refund. The company is targeting those negative nellies and will discard or downrank their complaints to protect the ratings of otherwise good drivers.
Pokémon Concierge, a stop-motion animation show from Japan's Dwarf Studio, will be available for streaming on Netflix starting on December 28. The streaming service has announced the show's arrival nine months after revealing the project, which it says is the "first-ever collaborative production between Netflix and The Pokémon Company." Pokémon Concierge has a totally different feel from the games, the anime series and the movies that came after it. There are no battles in the new show, no trainers fighting for dominance and no monsters pulling off their special moves.
Instead, we get Pokémon chilling in pools and living their best lives as they go on a vacation. The series follows a new concierge working at the Pokémon Resort named Haru, along with her companion Psyduck, as they learn how to serve and make their Pokémon guests happy. Based on the trailer shared by Netflix, viewers will also see a number of other popular monsters, including Pikachu, Eevee and Magikarp, as they visit the resort.
Haru will be voiced by Karen Fukuhara (The Boy and the Heron) in the English language version of the show. The Pokémon company and Netflix also signed up Mariya Takeuchi to sing a warm and relaxing theme song for the series that goes perfectly with its vibe. Takeuchi, who rose to fame in the 80's for the City Pop genre, has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years after her song Plastic Love went viral on YouTube.
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It was almost exactly three years ago that we were celebrating the relatively quick arrival of Ableton Live 11. Today, the company is unveiling Live 12, the next version of its popular digital audio workstation (DAW). In terms of release cycles, this is the shortest time between versions in recent memory, and it brings with it some exciting new features. The less fun news is that you won’t actually be able to get your hands on Live 12 until early next year, but there’s plenty to get excited about in the meantime.
Usually, the first thing people want to know is if there are any new instruments, and the answer is yes. Live 12 Suite comes with “Meld” which the company describes as a macro oscillator synth, and there’s also a new distortion effect called Roar. Other updates include a feature where Live 12 will create MIDI arrangements or transform existing ones via new tools in Live’s Clip view. There’s also an option to track the scale and key of what you’re working on so that any effects or edits will automatically be in that key (if you wish). On the other hand, if you want to create music in non-western tones and scales, there’s full support for a wide range of musical tunings now baked right into Live. Most of the above is also MPE ready where applicable. There’s a lot more, which we’ll go through below but those are the headline features.
Meld synthesizer
Ableton
The newest instrument to join the Ableton Live family is going to be a lot of fun. At first glance, the two oscillator setup seems pretty straightforward. But this “macro oscillator” synth has a lot of interesting waveforms to play with. Everything from classic sine/saw/square shapes through to more noise type formations like “rain” and “bubble” mean Meld can really create some unique textures. If you’re a fan of moog-style big pulsing sounds, the “swarm” waveforms are for you. Both oscillators have a modulation matrix that makes it super easy to bend and shape the sound to your liking. From some quick experimentation, Meld looks perfect for sound design and creating big, gritty leads as well as abstract pads and real-word sounding textures.
Roar distortion effect
Live already has a decent selection of distortion effects, but Roar is possibly the most comprehensive yet. The range of tone shapes available range from light, pedal-style crunchiness through to aggressive hard digital clipping and everything in between. The power with Roar lies in the amount of controls you have throughout the chain. Right from dialing in the perfect amount of distortion through the filter to the modulation options, again, controlled by a matrix setup. It’s perhaps not quite as comprehensive as Arturia’s ColdFire, but it’s close. Live’s primary distortion tools, Saturator and Overdrive, often worked best together. Meld offers the power of both of those tools and adds complex signal bending tools for good measure.
Generative MIDI tools
When it comes to songwriting, Live 12 offers some exciting tools to get you started or to help push you through a creative block. Specifically, Live 12 will generate random MIDI clips for you according to certain parameters (length, note density and so on). Alternatively, if you already have a clip with a MIDI sequence that you like, the “transform” tab in the Clip view will create endless variations on it depending on your requirements.
On the generative side of things, there are options for more rhythmic patterns, melodic arrangements or even chords. The created MIDI can be almost any length, but shorter clips tend to have more success. Every time you change a parameter — length, pitch and so on — Live will create a new pattern and you can keep cycling through variations until you find one you like. Here is where Live 12’s new “scale aware” feature really shines, as when activated, this will ensure any generated MIDI matches the key and scale of what you are working on.
Ableton
The transform tool is ideal for when you have a progression you already like but want to create some variations on it. This could be something simple like arpeggiation or velocity adjustments through to more detail-oriented tweaks such as how the notes flow into each other or creating a humanized “strum” effect on chords. Despite their power, both the transform and generate tools are neatly tucked away as tabs in the Clip view and mostly have straightforward controls, though some experimentation is encouraged. It’s pretty easy to get lost in a rabbit hole, testing out different settings and parameters until you end up with something barely recognizable. Which, to be fair, is sometimes exactly what you want.
Tunings
An addition to the main library in Live 12 is the Tunings tab. Simply put, here you’ll find a collection of tunings outside of the conventional western 12 note scale. So if Turkish Makam is your thing or you’re a fan of Just Intonation, there are several options here that can be activated and adapted as you prefer. The scales library consists of .ascl files meaning you can add to your library of scales from third-party or user-created files also.
UI improvements
If you’ve used Live for any amount of time, you likely have Tab and Shift+Tab muscle memory so deeply ingrained you can switch views blindfolded. In this update, you’ll no longer have to jump over to Session view to access the mixer as finally it’s available in Arrangement view also. The same is true for the Device and Clip view windows, meaning you can see the MIDI/audio at the same time as the synth/effects chain without having to jump between them constantly. Things can get a bit busy if you have all three panels open at the same time, but this is a solid quality of life enhancement that’s long overdue.
Library management
Organizing and navigating your sample library in Live 12 comes with a number of improvements. Notably, the ability to tag MIDI clips, plugins and audio at a granular level. Tag categories include everything from Type (Loop/MIDI clip and so on) to musical key, groove and many other categories. You can, of course, also add your own custom tags.
Ableton
If your library is quite large and disorganized, the initial tagging might take a while, but you can select multiple items at once and tag them at the same time. Right now, it doesn’t appear that you can tag at the folder level, which would be handy for large sample collections but it’s a useful tool nonetheless.
A much neater trick is Live 12’s ability to find “similar” sounds. For example, if you have a kick drum sample and know you have others like it in other sample packs/folders, but don’t remember where, clicking the new “Show Similar Files” radio button will pull up all the samples you have that Live has deemed to be, well, similar. In testing, it does a good job for percussive sounds matching length, sound style and so on. Searching on melodies, leads and even vocals also does a decent job of bringing up related samples, but it’s perhaps more open to interpretation here as the timbre can be quite different with the length, shape and gain of the sound seeming to have more weight on what’s a match. Either way, both new features will be a boost to those of us that only got as far as organizing their library alphabetically.
There are other enhancements to the general user experience that go far beyond creative functionality. For one, Live 12 is optimized for screen readers and almost everything can be controlled with the keyboard which is a big plus for accessibility. As always there are updates across the board including the included core library of sounds and modulation parameters. Likewise, some Live 11 sounds and instruments — such as Analog and Tension synths — are available in the Standard edition of 12 whereas before they were exclusive to the more expensive Suite edition.
As for availability, Ableton hasn’t confirmed a date, but you should expect Live 12 to launch around late February or March next year. The Standard edition will cost $439 (€279) which features most of the above minus Meld and Roar. Live 12 Suite edition, which features all the above plus the Operator synth and Granulator effect among other perks will retail for $749 (€599).
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