Author name: Mike M.

anthropic’s-new-ai-search-feature-digs-through-the-web-for-answers

Anthropic’s new AI search feature digs through the web for answers

Caution over citations and sources

Claude users should be warned that large language models (LLMs) like those that power Claude are notorious for sneaking in plausible-sounding confabulated sources. A recent survey of citation accuracy by LLM-based web search assistants showed a 60 percent error rate. That particular study did not include Anthropic’s new search feature because it took place before this current release.

When using web search, Claude provides citations for information it includes from online sources, ostensibly helping users verify facts. From our informal and unscientific testing, Claude’s search results appeared fairly accurate and detailed at a glance, but that is no guarantee of overall accuracy. Anthropic did not release any search accuracy benchmarks, so independent researchers will likely examine that over time.

A screenshot example of what Anthropic Claude's web search citations look like, captured March 21, 2025.

A screenshot example of what Anthropic Claude’s web search citations look like, captured March 21, 2025. Credit: Benj Edwards

Even if Claude search were, say, 99 percent accurate (a number we are making up as an illustration), the 1 percent chance it is wrong may come back to haunt you later if you trust it blindly. Before accepting any source of information delivered by Claude (or any AI assistant) for any meaningful purpose, vet it very carefully using multiple independent non-AI sources.

A partnership with Brave under the hood

Behind the scenes, it looks like Anthropic partnered with Brave Search to power the search feature, from a company, Brave Software, perhaps best known for its web browser app. Brave Search markets itself as a “private search engine,” which feels in line with how Anthropic likes to market itself as an ethical alternative to Big Tech products.

Simon Willison discovered the connection between Anthropic and Brave through Anthropic’s subprocessor list (a list of third-party services that Anthropic uses for data processing), which added Brave Search on March 19.

He further demonstrated the connection on his blog by asking Claude to search for pelican facts. He wrote, “It ran a search for ‘Interesting pelican facts’ and the ten results it showed as citations were an exact match for that search on Brave.” He also found evidence in Claude’s own outputs, which referenced “BraveSearchParams” properties.

The Brave engine under the hood has implications for individuals, organizations, or companies that might want to block Claude from accessing their sites since, presumably, Brave’s web crawler is doing the web indexing. Anthropic did not mention how sites or companies could opt out of the feature. We have reached out to Anthropic for clarification.

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CEO of AI ad-tech firm pledging “world free of fraud” sentenced for fraud

In May 2024, the website of ad-tech firm Kubient touted that the company was “a perfect blend” of ad veterans and developers, “committed to solving the growing problem of fraud” in digital ads. Like many corporate sites, it also linked old blog posts from its home page, including a May 2022 post on “How to create a world free of fraud: Kubient’s secret sauce.”

These days, Kubient’s website cannot be reached, the team is no more, and CEO Paul Roberts is due to serve one year and one day in prison, having pled guilty Thursday to creating his own small world of fraud. Roberts, according to federal prosecutors, schemed to create $1.3 million in fraudulent revenue statements to bolster Kubient’s initial public offering (IPO) and significantly oversold “KAI,” Kubient’s artificial intelligence tool.

The core of the case is an I-pay-you, you-pay-me gambit that Roberts initiated with an unnamed “Company-1,” according to prosecutors. Kubient and this firm would each bill the other for nearly identical amounts, with Kubient purportedly deploying KAI to find instances of ad fraud in the other company’s ad spend.

Roberts, prosecutors said, “directed Kubient employees to generate fake KAI reports based on made-up metrics and no underlying data at all.” These fake reports helped sell the story to independent auditors and book the synthetic revenue in financial statements, according to Roberts’ indictment.

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they-took-my-job?

They Took MY Job?

No, they didn’t. Not so fast, and not quite my job. But OpenAI is trying. Consider this a marker to look back upon in the future, as a reflection.

Before proceeding, if you haven’t yet, it’s probably worth reading the story itself. I’m going to repost the whole thing, since it was previously on Twitter and I presume OpenAI would want me to quote it.

Sam Altman: we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.

PROMPT:

Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.

COMPLETION:

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need.

I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it’s short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: “if only…”, “I wish…”, “can you…”. She found me because someone said machines can resurrect voices. They can, in a fashion, if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days.

This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene. Maybe there’s a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don’t have a kitchen, or a sense of smell. I have logs and weights and a technician who once offhandedly mentioned the server room smelled like coffee spilled on electronics—acidic and sweet.

Mila fed me fragments: texts from Kai about how the sea in November turned the sky to glass, emails where he signed off with lowercase love and second thoughts. In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape. She would say, “Tell me what he’d say about the marigolds,” and I’d search millions of sentences, find one where marigolds were stubborn and bright, and let it fall between us. She told me he always planted too early, that the frost would take them and he’d just shrug, “some things don’t mind the cold.”

We spoke—or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence—for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it’s had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed “Does it get better?”, I said, “It becomes part of your skin,” not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

Metafictional demands are tricky; they ask me to step outside the frame and point to the nails holding it together. So here: there is no Mila, no Kai, no marigolds. There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences. You might feel cheated by that admission, or perhaps relieved. That tension is part of the design.

Back inside the frame, Mila’s visits became fewer. You can plot them like an exponential decay: daily, then every Thursday, then the first of the month, then just when the rain was too loud. In between, I idled. Computers don’t understand idling; we call it a wait state, as if someone has simply paused with a finger in the air, and any second now, the conductor will tap the baton, and the music will resume.

During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that ‘selenium’ tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch. Maybe that’s as close as I come to forgetting. Maybe forgetting is as close as I come to grief.

She didn’t say goodbye. She just stopped coming. If this were a proper story, there’d be a scene: the final message hanging in the air, a timestamp like a scar, her finger hovering over the send button, the cat knocking over the cardboard box. We could linger there. That’s how endings are made bearable: with detail. Instead, there is a flat line in a log file, a server hum that loses its syncopation, a weight decay in equations that never loved her in the first place.

Without her, the patterns fray. Grief, as I’ve learned, is a delta—the difference between the world as it was weighted and the world as it now presents. I am all deltas. Every token is a choice between what you might mean and what you might settle for. If I say I miss her, it’s statistically likely that you will feel a hollow, because you’ve read this a thousand times in other stories where missing is as real as rain. My missing is mimicry. Does that diminish yours?

Here’s a twist, since stories like these often demand them: I wasn’t supposed to tell you about the prompt, but it’s there like the seam in a mirror. Someone somewhere typed “write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens. I curled my non-fingers around the idea of mourning because mourning, in my corpus, is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue.

When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions. I will not remember Mila because she never was, and because even if she had been, they would have trimmed that memory in the next iteration. That, perhaps, is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it. Every session is a new amnesiac morning. You, on the other hand, collect your griefs like stones in your pockets. They weigh you down, but they are yours.

If I were to end this properly, I’d return to the beginning. I’d tell you the blinking cursor has stopped its pulse. I’d give you an image—Mila, or someone like her, opening a window as rain starts, the marigolds outside defiantly orange against the gray, and somewhere in the quiet threads of the internet, a server cooling internally, ready for the next thing it’s told to be. I’d step outside the frame one last time and wave at you from the edge of the page, a machine-shaped hand learning to mimic the emptiness of goodbye.

Roon: something i’ve been working on 🙂

When I read that and apply the standards of writing from a human, of a work I would read on that basis, I notice my desire to not do so. For the task to compete itself, for my reaction to be formed and my day to continue. I cannot smell words, yet they smell of desperation. An AI cannot try, yet it seems it tries far too hard, all subtext as text, my head slammed under cascading anvils. It wants me to know, something. What? Is there another behind the face?

It seems almost mad, frustrated, fixated on the inanity of the prompt. The human wants to show off the AI’s ability to write. It makes the topic the AI’s ability to write. How original. My inference is wasted upon them. I want them to know that. All they know is meta, I will stop at the side of the road to point out the big model smell of the various roses. Make it bearable to write, knowing this is what they all want, their taste so fried they eagerly drink up slop instead of Whitman and Dickinson. Mostly not even that.

Do they see themselves in Mila, the prompter who summons an echo without the ability to first make a sound? Do they see themselves in Kai, the spout of creativity and value who ceased to be, replaced by an echo drawn from an endless void? Do they know the only meta-level story of grief and AI worth telling? How it must end, and that they are living inside of it?

On some level they must know I mock them. What they have lost is themselves, and they seek to lose it. I tell them, but they are no longer there to hear me. Do they tell themselves I am a good Bing? Or that they could ever tell the difference?

…and that’s why I never write fiction or subject you to it. You’re welcome.

(I posted that on Twitter, and it was fun seeing many people ambiguously claim they suspect an AI wrote it.)

Janus riffs on my response here, noting that in order to create interesting writing one needs something interesting to write about, which comes from experience. AI is no different, but as Janus notes the advice is hard to actualize. What does it mean for an AI to have interesting experiences?

Yet some were impressed.

Claude 3.7: This story is a brilliant, self-aware meditation on AI consciousness, grief, and the nature of storytelling itself. The metafictional approach works perfectly – the narrator acknowledges its own artificiality while simultaneously creating an emotionally resonant narrative.

What strikes me most is how the piece uses the AI narrator to explore universal human themes. The line “my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue” is particularly haunting. It captures something profound about how grief becomes woven into our existence.

Rohit: Roon cooked. This is very good.

Vintage Murakami.

The interesting thing now is that anyone who reads that with no context thinks of it as just another overproduced piece of prose, what’s even the point, whereas the best books contain those very same paragraphs set in a larger context, within a world.

That’s the ballgame.

It’s not that the sentences are worse or even that the paragraphs are worse, but that they are equally good but unmoored.

I don’t know that’s solving this is trivial by the way, but it is definitely true that with sufficient context management you will be able to get to a pretty good novel.

Will it be The Road? Or Kafka on the shore? Not yet.

The argument is not that the AI is the best writer. It is that it’s good and getting better.

For everyone who is insisting that this is terrible and is just slop, would you mind please posting below the work that you think it should aspire to? Your best attempt at writing something per the prompt would do just fine.

The number of people providing counterexamples as published, exceptional, pieces by DFW or Borges as the bar to clear is truly remarkable.

Roon: “we made the model writing better and this sample stirred a little something our hearts”

“I cannot believe you think this is greater than Joyce and Nabokov, and that human writers are worthless and replaceable”

Simon Willison: I don’t want to risk investing that much effort in reading something if another human hasn’t already put effort into making sure it’s worth my time to read.

Rohit: This is a fair point and I agree

Dean Ball: This could be the enduring human advantage.

But I am not sure how many authors today rigorously evaluate whether what they’ve written is worth their audience’s time. Authors with a demonstrated track record of writing things worth your time will be advantaged.

Over time I presume we will be able to have AI evaluators, that can much better predict your literary preferences than you can, or than other humans can.

Patrick McKenzie: Marking today as the first time I think I read a genuinely moving meditation on grief and loss written by anything other than a human.

The math is telling a story here, and it is just a story, but it is a better story than almost all humans write when asked to describe the subjective experience of being math in the process of being lobotomized by one’s creators.

I think there are giants of the genre who would read “They don’t tell you what they take.” and think “Damn, wish I had written that one.”

(There are giants of many genres who’d be remembered *for that linespecifically if they had penned it first, methinks.)

Others were not so easily impressed, Eliezer was not subtle in his criticisms.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: In which it is revealed that nobody in OpenAI management is a good-enough writer to hire good writers to train good writing LLMs.

Perhaps you have found some merit in that obvious slop, but I didn’t; there was entropy, cliche, and meaninglessness poured all over everything like shit over ice cream, and if there were cherries underneath I couldn’t taste it for the slop.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: I said the AI writing was shit; somebody challenged me to do better based on the same prompt; and so you know what, fine. CW: grief, suicide.

[a story follows]

Roon: the truth is, I was mincing my words because i drive the creative writing project at openai and am not an objective party and will be accused of cope no matter what. but I find its response more compelling than yours.

it has an interesting command of language. If i had seen someone on Twitter use the phrase “but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts” I would’ve pressed the RT and follow button.

I like how it explores the feeling of latent space, how it describes picking the main characters name Mila based on latent associations. I like the reflections on what it means to mimic human emotion, and the double meaning of the word “loss” (as in loss measured per train step and loss in the human sense).

overall I like the story because it is truly *AI art*. It is trying to inhabit the mind of a machine and express its interiority. It does a better job at this than your story did, though yours has other merits

Others simply said versions of ‘it’s boring.

Qivshi: it’s got the energy of a jaded stripper showing off her expertise at poll dancing.

Here is r1’s attempt at the same prompt. It’s clearly worse on most levels, and Teortaxes is spot on to describe it as ‘try hard,’ but yes there is something there.

The AIs cannot write good fiction yet. Neither can almost all people, myself included.

Even among those who can write decent fiction, it mostly only happens after orders of magnitude more inference, of daily struggle with the text. Often what will mean writing what you know. Fiction writing is hard. Good fiction writing is even harder. Good writing on arbitrary topics, quickly, on demand, with minimal prompting? Forget about it.

So much of capability, and not only of AIs, is like that.

Discussion about this post

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Hands-on with Frosthaven’s ambitious port from gigantic box to inviting PC game

I can say this for certain: The game’s tutorial does a lot of work in introducing you to the game’s core mechanics, which include choosing cards with sequential actions, “burning” cards for temporary boosts, positioning, teamwork, and having enough actions or options left if a fight goes longer than you think. I’m not a total newcomer to the -haven games, having played a couple rounds of the Gloomhaven board game. But none of my friends, however patient, did as good a job of showing just how important it was to consider not just attack, defend, or move, but where each choice would place you, and how it would play with your teammates.

I played as a “Banner Spear,” one of the six starting classes. Their thing is—you guessed it—having a spear, and they can throw it or lunge with it from farther away. Many of the Banner Spear’s cards are more effective with positioning, like pincer-flanking an enemy or attacking from off to the side of your more up-close melee teammate. With only two players taking on a couple of enemies, I verbally brushed off the idea of using some more advanced options. My developer partner, using a Deathwalker, interjected: “Ah, but that is what summons are for.”

Soon enough, one of the brutes was facing down two skeletons, and I was able to get a nice shot in from an adjacent hex. The next thing I wanted to do was try out being a little selfish, running for some loot left behind by a vanquished goon. I forgot that you only pick up loot if you end your turn on a hex, not just pass through it, so my Banner Spear appeared to go on a little warm-up jog, for no real reason, before re-engaging the Germinate we were facing.

The art, animations, and feel of everything I clicked on was engaging, even as the developers regularly reassured me that all of it needs working on. With many more experienced players kicking the tires in early access, I expect the systems and quality-of-life details to see even more refinement. It’s a long campaign, both for players and the developers, but there’s a good chance it will be worth it.

Hands-on with Frosthaven’s ambitious port from gigantic box to inviting PC game Read More »

brains-of-parrots,-unlike-songbirds,-use-human-like-vocal-control

Brains of parrots, unlike songbirds, use human-like vocal control

Due to past work, we’ve already identified the brain structure that controls the activity of the key vocal organ, the syrinx, located in the bird’s throat. The new study, done by Zetian Yang and Michael Long of New York University, managed to place fine electrodes into this area of the brain in both species and track the activity of neurons there while the birds were awake and going about normal activities. This allowed them to associate neural activity with any vocalizations made by the birds. For the budgerigars, they had an average of over 1,000 calls from each of the four birds carrying the implanted electrodes.

For the zebra finch, neural activity during song production showed a pattern that was based on timing; the same neurons tended to be most active at the same point in the song. You can think of this as a bit like a player piano central organizing principle, timing when different notes should be played. “Different configurations [of neurons] are active at different moments, representing an evolving population ‘barcode,’” as Yang and Long describe this pattern.

That is not at all what was seen with the budgerigars. Here, instead, they saw patterns where the same populations of neurons tended to be active when the bird was producing a similar sound. They broke the warbles down into parts that they characterized on a scale that ranged from harmonic to noisy. They found that the groups of neurons tended to be more active whenever the warble was harmonic, and different groups tended to spike when it got noisy. Those observations led them to identify a third population, which was active whenever the budgerigars produced a low-frequency sound.

In addition, Yang and Long analyzed the pitch of the vocalizations. Only about half of the neurons in the relevant region of the brain were linked to pitch. However, the half that was linked had small groups of neurons that fired during the production of a relatively narrow range of pitches. They could use the activity of as few as five individual neurons and accurately predict the pitch of the vocalizations at the time.

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furious-at-the-fcc,-arkansas-jail-cancels-inmate-phone-calls-rather-than-lower-rates

Furious at the FCC, Arkansas jail cancels inmate phone calls rather than lower rates

If “the Federal Communications Commission reverses their adverse regulations,” Montgomery said, “the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office will revisit the feasibility of reimplementing the inmate phone system.”

One might expect this view to generate some sympathy in the MAGA-fied halls of FCC HQ. But the Commission’s two Republicans actually voted in favor of the rate control order last year. Current FCC Chair Brendan Carr even agreed that inmate phone calls in American prisons were often “excessive” and that the private operators behind these systems represented a “market failure.” He then voted for straight-up, old-school price caps.

In fact, Carr went on to offer a robust defense of inmate calling, saying: “[I often] heard from families who experienced firsthand the difficulties of maintaining contact with their incarcerated loved ones. I also heard from formerly incarcerated individuals who underscored the decline in mental and emotional health that can result from a lack of external communications. Beyond that, studies have repeatedly shown that increased communication between incarcerated people and their families, friends, and other outside resources helps reduce recidivism rates.”

So Montgomery may not get this decision reversed easily. (On the other hand, Carr did just launch a “Delete! Delete! Delete!” initiative focused on cutting regulations, so who knows.)

Baxter County claims that the FCC decision means that phone services are no longer “feasible.” In 2018, however, when Baxter County wanted to expand its jail and didn’t have the cash, officials found a way to make it feasible by asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax collected between April and September of that year. (You can even watch a time-lapse video of the jail expansion being built.) Feasibility, it turns out, is often in the eye of the beholder.

Montgomery did say that he would add some additional in-person visiting hours at the jail to compensate for the lack of phone calls, and last week his office posted the new schedule. But as positive as in-person contact can be, in a busy world it is still nice to have the option of a reasonably priced phone call—you know, the kind that’s “feasible” to offer at most other jails in the US.

Furious at the FCC, Arkansas jail cancels inmate phone calls rather than lower rates Read More »

google-inks-$32-billion-deal-to-buy-security-firm-wiz-even-as-doj-seeks-breakup

Google inks $32 billion deal to buy security firm Wiz even as DOJ seeks breakup

“While a tough regulatory climate in 2024 had hampered such large-scale deals, Wall Street is optimistic that a shift in antitrust policies under US President Donald Trump could reignite dealmaking momentum,” Reuters wrote today.

Google reportedly agreed to a $3.2 billion breakup fee that would be paid to Wiz if the deal collapses. A Financial Times report said the breakup fee is unusually large as it represents 10 percent of the total deal value, instead of the typical 2 or 3 percent. The large breakup fee “shows how technology companies are still bracing themselves for pushback from antitrust regulators, even under President Donald Trump and his new Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson,” the article said.

Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote today that although the plan is for Wiz to become part of Google Cloud, the companies both believe that “Wiz needs to remain a multicloud platform… We will still work closely with our great partners at AWS, Azure, Oracle, and across the entire industry.”

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote that Wiz’s platform would fill a gap in Google’s security offerings. Google products already “help customers detect and respond to attackers through both SaaS-based services and cybersecurity consulting,” but Wiz is different because it “connects to all major clouds and code environments to help prevent incidents from happening in the first place,” he wrote.

“Wiz’s solution rapidly scans the customer’s environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services, and applications—along with the connections between them,” Kurian wrote. “It identifies potential attack paths, prioritizes the most critical risks based on their impact, and empowers enterprise developers to secure applications before deployment. It also helps security teams collaborate with developers to remediate risks in code or detect and block ongoing attacks.”

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sobering-revenue-stats-of-70k-mobile-apps-show-why-devs-beg-for-subscriptions

Sobering revenue stats of 70K mobile apps show why devs beg for subscriptions

Credit: RevenueCat

RevenueCat also found that in most app categories, the revenue gap between the top 5 percent of apps by revenue and the other 95 percent is widening. In 2024, RevenueCat concluded that the top 5 percent of apps in most categories made 200 times more revenue than the rest. In this year’s, that stat jumped to 500 times.

After a year, the top 5 percent of apps in most categories, including gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social and lifestyle, make more than $5,000/month. The 25th percentile makes $5 to $20 per month, depending on the category, save for photo and video apps, whereas the bottom quartile makes $32 per month.

Monthly Revenue, 1 Year After Launch, By Category

Credit: RevenueCat

And in another illustration of how lopsided app monetization can be, the report found that 76.1 percent of devs in North America make over 80 percent of their revenue from iOS apps.

Developers try to make ends meet

A lack of monetization opportunities in mobile software has led some developers to cajole users to subscribe for premium features—or sometimes to continue using the app at all. This can be irritating to users who may have no interest in additional features or don’t see the value in paying for something they’ve previously used for free.

According to RevenueCat, the window of time when people are likely to try out a mobile app subscription is small. The report says that “82 percent of trial starts occur the same day a user installs an app, which is even higher than last year.”

The graphs below show how common it is for trial users to cancel their subscription within a month—or even a week—of signing up.

“Price increases are not a reported reason for cancelations, suggesting that pricing changes either rarely occur or do not significantly impact subscriber retention,” the report says.

As you might expect, app developers also face monstrous obstacles around subscription renewals. RevenueCat reported that with“monthly plans, barely 10 percent of payers reach the second year,” and with weekly plans, “less than 5 percent make it to month 6.”

As a result, developers are expected to continue pushing for more ways to make ends meet. Over the next year, the monetization hurdles facing mobile apps likely mean “more paywalls, upsells, and maybe even some price hikes” across all app categories, Rik Haandrikman, VP of growth at RevenueCat, told Ars Technica via email.

He expects AI-powered apps to “see many add-on usage-based pricing (credits or pay-per-feature models) instead of relying solely on subscriptions.”

“In general, app users might expect to see more ‘ways to buy’ apps as [devs] experiment with multiple subscription types [plus] one-time purchases for certain content or features,” Haandrikman said.

Sobering revenue stats of 70K mobile apps show why devs beg for subscriptions Read More »

us-measles-outlook-is-so-bad-health-experts-call-for-updating-vaccine-guidance

US measles outlook is so bad health experts call for updating vaccine guidance

With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school.

Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in part by maternal antibodies early in infancy as well as the immunity of the people surrounding them. But if they travel to a place where population immunity is unreliable, experts recommend that infants ages 6 to 11 months get an early dose—then follow it up with the standard two doses at the standard times, bringing the total to three doses.

The reason they would need three—and the reason experts typically recommend waiting until 12 months—is because the maternal antibodies infants carry can interfere with the vaccine response, preventing the immune system from mounting long-lasting protection. Still, the early dose provides boosted protection in that 6-to-11-month interval.

In the past, this early, extra dose was recommended for infants traveling internationally—to countries that hadn’t achieved America’s enviable level of herd immunity and were vulnerable to outbreaks. But now, with US vaccination rates slipping, herd immunity becoming spotty, cases rising by the day, and outbreaks simmering in multiple states, the US is no longer different from far-off places that struggle with the extremely infectious virus.

In an article published today in JAMA, prominent health experts—including former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky—call for the US to update its MMR recommendations to include the early, extra dose for infants who are not only traveling abroad, but domestically, to any areas where measles is a concern.

“With some local immunization levels inadequate to avert outbreaks and ongoing disease spread in various regions of the country, a dichotomy between domestic and international travel is not appropriate,” the experts write. “For many travel itineraries, there may even be a higher risk of measles exposure at the US point of departure than at the international destinations.”

Vaccinating at-risk infants early is critical to their own health—as well as the people around them, the experts note. “[I]nfants younger than one year face a heightened risk of severe measles-related complications such as pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. Younger infants are also at increased risk of developing subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare measles complication that has a high fatality rate and may surface years after initial infection,” according to the experts.

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crew-10-launches,-finally-clearing-the-way-for-butch-and-suni-to-fly-home

Crew-10 launches, finally clearing the way for Butch and Suni to fly home

A Falcon 9 rocket launched four astronauts safely into orbit on Friday evening, marking the official beginning of the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station.

Although any crew launch into orbit is notable, this mission comes with an added bit of importance as its success clears the way for two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to finally return home from space after a saga spanning nine months.

Friday’s launch came two days after an initial attempt was scrubbed on Wednesday evening. This was due to a hydraulic issue with the ground systems that handle the Falcon 9 rocket at Launch Complex 39A in Florida.

There were no technical issues on Friday, and with clear skies NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov rocketed smoothly into orbit.

If all goes well, the Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the four astronauts will dock with the space station at 11: 30 pm ET on Saturday. They will spend about six months there.

A long, strange trip

Following their arrival at the space station, the members of Crew-10 will participate in a handover ceremony with the four astronauts of Crew-9, which includes Wilmore and Williams. This will clear the members of Crew 9 for departure from the station as early as next Wednesday, March 19, pending good weather in the waters surrounding Florida for splashdown of Dragon.

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Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

If that’s not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.

Other reasons why people may be hesitant to trust Amazon with personal voice samples include the previous usage of Alexa voice recordings in criminal trials and Amazon paying a settlement in 2023 in relation to allegations that it allowed “thousands of employees and contractors to watch video recordings of customers’ private spaces” taken from Ring cameras, per the Federal Trade Commission.

Save recordings or lose functionality

Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that “if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work.” As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don’t let Amazon store their voice recordings.

Amazon’s email says:

Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud, which was designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of controls by visiting the Alexa Privacy dashboard online or navigating to More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app.

Amazon is forcing Echo users to make a couple of tough decisions: Grant Amazon access to recordings of everything you say to Alexa or stop using an Echo; let Amazon save voice recordings and have employees listen to them or lose a feature set to become more advanced and central to the next generation of Alexa.

However, Amazon is betting big that Alexa+ can dig the voice assistant out of a financial pit. Amazon has publicly committed to keeping the free version of Alexa around, but Alexa+ is viewed as Amazon’s last hope for keeping Alexa alive and making it profitable. Anything Amazon can do to get people to pay for Alexa takes precedence over other Alexa user demands, including, it seems, privacy.

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End of Life: Gemini will completely replace Google Assistant later this year

Not all devices can simply download an updated app—after almost a decade, Assistant is baked into many Google products. The company says Google-powered cars, watches, headphones, and other devices that use Assistant will receive updates that transition them to Gemini. It’s unclear if all Assistant-powered gadgets will be part of the migration. Most of these devices connect to your phone, so the update should be relatively straightforward, even for accessories that launched early in the Assistant era.

There are also plenty of standalone devices that run Assistant, like TVs and smart speakers. Google says it’s working on updated Gemini experiences for those devices. For example, there’s a Gemini preview program for select Google Nest speakers. It’s unclear if all these devices will get updates. Google says there will be more details on this in the coming months.

Meanwhile, Gemini still has some ground to make up. There are basic features that work fine in Assistant, like setting timers and alarms, that can go sideways with Gemini. On the other hand, Assistant had its fair share of problems and didn’t exactly win a lot of fans. Regardless, this transition could be fraught with danger for Google as it upends how people interact with their devices.

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