Author name: Mike M.

nasa-makes-a-very-tough-decision-in-setting-final-crew-9-assignments

NASA makes a very tough decision in setting final Crew-9 assignments

From four to two —

“I am deeply proud of our entire crew.”

Nick Hague, left, and Zena Cardman train inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft mock-up in November 2023.

Enlarge / Nick Hague, left, and Zena Cardman train inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft mock-up in November 2023.

NASA

On Friday NASA publicly announced a decision that has roiled the top levels of the agency’s human spaceflight program for several weeks. The space agency named the two crew members who will launch on a Crew Dragon mission set to lift off no earlier than September 24 to the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague will serve as the mission’s commander, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will serve as mission specialist. Instead of a usual complement of four astronauts, a two-person crew was necessitated by the need to use the Crew 9 spacecraft, Freedom, as a rescue vehicle for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They flew to the station in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner vehicle, which has been deemed unsafe for them to return in.

Wilmore and Williams will join the Crew-9 increment on board the space station and fly back to Earth with Hague and Gorbunov next February.

The story behind the story

This represents a significant change from the original makeup of the Crew-9 manifest. NASA publicly named the original members of Crew-9 last January, which included three NASA astronauts and Gorbunov. It was to be commanded by Zena Cardman, piloted by Hague, with Stephanie Wilson and Gorbunov as mission specialists.

At the time, the naming of Cardman was significant—she would have been the first rookie astronaut without test pilot experience to command a NASA spaceflight. A 36-year-old geobiologist, Cardman joined NASA in 2017 and is well-regarded by her peers. The assignment of a rookie, non-test pilot to command the Crew-9 mission reflected NASA’s confidence in the self-flying capabilities of Dragon, which is intended to reach the station autonomously. The assignment was made by then-chief astronaut Reid Wiseman in 2022, and the Astronaut Office was confident that Cardman, with an experienced hand in Hague at her side, could command the mission.

The need to rescue Wilmore and Williams changed the equation. It fell upon Joe Acaba, a veteran astronaut who became chief of the Astronaut Office in February 2023, to down-select to a new crew manifest. To maintain its ongoing rotation with the Russian space program, one of the crew members needed to be Gorbunov. So Acaba had to pick from Cardman, Hague, and Wilson.

Initially, Acaba stuck with Cardman. She was the original commander of the mission, after all. But this prompted considerable dissent within the Astronaut Office, sources said. While Cardman is respected, and Dragon designed to be fully autonomous, it was asking a lot of her to be the sole NASA representative on board the vehicle. (Russian astronauts, generally, are not trained in depth on piloting US vehicles.) A non-trivial percentage of professional astronauts succumb to space sickness during the initial hours of their spaceflights.

Some members of the astronaut office argued that Hague was the safer choice. An Air Force test pilot, Hague survived a harrowing Soyuz spacecraft abort in 2018, and subsequently flew to space for more than six months in 2019. Hague, these astronauts said, was the safer choice for NASA if the agency truly sought to maximize chances of mission success.

Eventually these dissenters, with some support from the upper echelons of NASA management, prevailed, and Acaba swapped Hague for Cardman. A decision was reached before a Flight Readiness Review meeting on August 24, but it was not publicly announced until this Friday.

NASA’s official comment

“While we’ve changed crew before for a variety of reasons, downsizing crew for this flight was another tough decision to adjust to given that the crew has trained as a crew of four,” Acaba said in a news release issued Friday. “I have the utmost confidence in all our crew, who have been excellent throughout training for the mission. Zena and Stephanie will continue to assist their crewmates ahead of launch, and they exemplify what it means to be a professional astronaut.”

There was also a classy quote in the news release from Cardman, who revealed Friday that her father, Larry Cardman, passed away three weeks ago. “I am deeply proud of our entire crew,” she said. “And I am confident Nick and Alex will step into their roles with excellence. All four of us remain dedicated to the success of this mission, and Stephanie and I look forward to flying when the time is right.”

Here’s hoping her time comes very, very soon.

NASA makes a very tough decision in setting final Crew-9 assignments Read More »

chatgpt-hits-200-million-active-weekly-users,-but-how-many-will-admit-using-it?

ChatGPT hits 200 million active weekly users, but how many will admit using it?

Your secret friend —

Despite corporate prohibitions on AI use, people flock to the chatbot in record numbers.

The OpenAI logo emerging from broken jail bars, on a purple background.

On Thursday, OpenAI said that ChatGPT has attracted over 200 million weekly active users, according to a report from Axios, doubling the AI assistant’s user base since November 2023. The company also revealed that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are now using its products, highlighting the growing adoption of generative AI tools in the corporate world.

The rapid growth in user numbers for ChatGPT (which is not a new phenomenon for OpenAI) suggests growing interest in—and perhaps reliance on— the AI-powered tool, despite frequent skepticism from some critics of the tech industry.

“Generative AI is a product with no mass-market utility—at least on the scale of truly revolutionary movements like the original cloud computing and smartphone booms,” PR consultant and vocal OpenAI critic Ed Zitron blogged in July. “And it’s one that costs an eye-watering amount to build and run.”

Despite this kind of skepticism (which raises legitimate questions about OpenAI’s long-term viability), OpenAI claims that people are using ChatGPT and OpenAI’s services in record numbers. One reason for the apparent dissonance is that ChatGPT users might not readily admit to using it due to organizational prohibitions against generative AI.

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who commonly explores novel applications of generative AI on social media, tweeted Thursday about this issue. “Big issue in organizations: They have put together elaborate rules for AI use focused on negative use cases,” he wrote. “As a result, employees are too scared to talk about how they use AI, or to use corporate LLMs. They just become secret cyborgs, using their own AI & not sharing knowledge”

The new prohibition era

It’s difficult to get hard numbers showing the number of companies with AI prohibitions in place, but a Cisco study released in January claimed that 27 percent of organizations in their study had banned generative AI use. Last August, ZDNet reported on a BlackBerry study that said 75 percent of businesses worldwide were “implementing or considering” plans to ban ChatGPT and other AI apps.

As an example, Ars Technica’s parent company Condé Nast maintains a no-AI policy related to creating public-facing content with generative AI tools.

Prohibitions aren’t the only issue complicating public admission of generative AI use. Social stigmas have been developing around generative AI technology that stem from job loss anxiety, potential environmental impact, privacy issues, IP and ethical issues, security concerns, fear of a repeat of cryptocurrency-like grifts, and a general wariness of Big Tech that some claim has been steadily rising over recent years.

Whether the current stigmas around generative AI use will break down over time remains to be seen, but for now, OpenAI’s management is taking a victory lap. “People are using our tools now as a part of their daily lives, making a real difference in areas like healthcare and education,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Axios in a statement, “whether it’s helping with routine tasks, solving hard problems, or unlocking creativity.”

Not the only game in town

OpenAI also told Axios that usage of its AI language model APIs has doubled since the release of GPT-4o mini in July. This suggests software developers are increasingly integrating OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) tech into their apps.

And OpenAI is not alone in the field. Companies like Microsoft (with Copilot, based on OpenAI’s technology), Google (with Gemini), Meta (with Llama), and Anthropic (Claude) are all vying for market share, frequently updating their APIs and consumer-facing AI assistants to attract new users.

If the generative AI space is a market bubble primed to pop, as some have claimed, it is a very big and expensive one that is apparently still growing larger by the day.

ChatGPT hits 200 million active weekly users, but how many will admit using it? Read More »

texas-judge-decides-texas-is-a-perfectly-good-venue-for-x-to-sue-media-matters

Texas judge decides Texas is a perfectly good venue for X to sue Media Matters

Elon Musk speaks at an event while wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses, and T-shirt.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at Tesla’s “Cyber Rodeo” on April 7, 2022, in Austin, Texas.

Getty Images | AFP/Suzanne Cordeiro

A federal judge in Texas yesterday ruled that Elon Musk’s X Corp. can continue its lawsuit against Media Matters for America. US District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas, who recently refused to recuse himself from the case despite having purchased Tesla stock, denied Media Matters’ motion to dismiss.

X Corp. sued Media Matters after the nonprofit watchdog group published research on ads being placed next to pro-Nazi content on X, formerly Twitter. X’s lawsuit also names reporter Eric Hananoki and Media Matters President Angelo Carusone as defendants.

Because of O’Connor’s ruling, X can move ahead with its claims of tortious interference with contract, business disparagement, and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. A jury trial is scheduled to begin on April 7, 2025.

“Plaintiff alleges that Defendants knowingly and maliciously fabricated side-by-side images of various advertisers’ posts on Plaintiff’s social media platform X depicted next to neo-Nazi or other extremist content, and portrayed these designed images as if they were what the average user experiences on the X platform,” O’Connor wrote in his ruling on the motion to dismiss. “Plaintiff asserts that Defendants proceeded with this course of action in an effort to publicly portray X as a social media platform dominated by neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, and thereby alienate major advertisers, publishers, and users away from the X platform, intending to harm it.”

A different federal judge in the District of Columbia recently criticized X’s claims, pointing out that “X did not deny that advertising in fact had appeared next to the extremist posts on the day in question.” But X has a more friendly judge in O’Connor, who has made several rulings against Media Matters. The defendant could also face a tough road on appeal because challenges would go to the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Judge: Media Matters “targeted” Texas-based advertisers

Media Matters’ motion to dismiss argues in part that Texas is an improper forum for the dispute because “X is organized under Nevada law and maintains its principal place of business in San Francisco, California, where its own terms of service require users of its platform to litigate any disputes.” (Musk recently said that X will move its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.)

O’Connor’s ruling acknowledges that “when a nonresident defendant files a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff as the party seeking to invoke the district court’s jurisdiction.” In this case, O’Connor said that jurisdiction is established if the defendants “targeted the conduct that is the basis for this lawsuit at Texas.”

O’Connor ruled that the court has jurisdiction because Media Matters articles “targeted” Texas-based companies that advertised on X, specifically Oracle and AT&T, even though those companies are not parties to the lawsuit. O’Connor said the Media Matters “articles targeted, among others, Oracle, a Texas-based company that placed ads on Plaintiff’s platform… Plaintiff also alleges that this ‘crusade’ targeted its blue-chip advertisers which included Oracle and AT&T, Texas-based companies.”

O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that a “defendant who targets a Texas company with tortious activity has fair warning that it may be sued there.”

“This targeting of the alleged tortious acts at the headquarters of Texas-based companies is sufficient to establish specific jurisdiction in Texas… each Defendant engaged in the alleged tortious acts which targeted harm in, among other places, Texas,” he wrote.

Judge cites TV appearances

That includes Hananoki, the Media Matters reporter who wrote the articles, and Carusone. Each of those individual defendants “targeted” the conduct at Texas, O’Connor found.

“Plaintiff alleges Carusone participated in the ‘crusade’ with Hananoki and Media Matters when he appeared on television shows a number of times discussing the importance of advertisers to Plaintiff’s business model and advocating that advertisers should cease doing business with Plaintiff if there is a deluge of ‘unmoderated right-wing hatred and misinformation,'” O’Connor wrote.

Ruling that “Media Matters targeted Texas,” O’Connor wrote that the group pursued “a strategy to target Plaintiff’s blue-chip advertisers, including Oracle and AT&T, Texas-based companies; in furtherance of this strategy it published the Hananoki articles, and it published other articles pressuring the blue-chip advertisers, all to pressure blue-chip advertisers to cease doing business with Plaintiff. Finally, the inference from Media Matters’ affidavit is that Media Matters also emailed the Hananoki articles to Texans, and Plaintiff’s lawsuit arises out of this conduct.”

Media Matters also sought dismissal on the basis that X failed to state a claim. But O’Connor said that “the Court must accept all well-pleaded facts in the complaint as true and view them in the light most favorable to the plaintiff,” and he found that X “has provided sufficient allegations to survive dismissal.”

Media Matters declined to comment when contacted by Ars today.

Texas judge decides Texas is a perfectly good venue for X to sue Media Matters Read More »

tumblr-migrates-more-than-500-million-blogs-to-wordpress

Tumblr migrates more than 500 million blogs to WordPress

Blogging Backends —

Parent company Automattic insists the user experience won’t change a bit.

Tumblr app open on an Android phone

Enlarge / “You’ll never be bored again” is one of the more fitting slogans attached to Tumblr.

Getty Images

Once-great social media and blogging platform Tumblr has gone through a number of big changes in recent years, and another one is right around the corner. Parent company Automattic says it is migrating all Tumblr blogs—more than half a billion in number—to the WordPress back end.

In a blog post announcing the initiative this week, Automattic is careful to note that it doesn’t want anything about the front-end user experience of Tumblr to change. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that,” a rep wrote.

In terms of user experience, the two blogging platforms have very different emphases. WordPress is meant to be powerful, customizable, and extensible to serve a variety of needs, while Tumblr is meant to streamline the experience to be something like a middle ground between operating a WordPress blog and using something like X or Threads.

The plan is to move to the WordPress back end so that Automattic can develop features that will deploy to Tumblr and WordPress blogs simultaneously. This will let Tumblr tap into the robust existing WordPress.com infrastructure and allow the open-source work happening on WordPress to more easily be tapped to improve Tumblr.

The Automattic post did not provide a timeline; it simply acknowledged that this will be “one of the largest technical migrations in Internet history.”

Automattic acquired Tumblr in a humbling fire sale of just $3 million—a far cry from the $1 billion the platform was worth to Yahoo not all that many years ago. Yahoo acquired Tumblr then to try to turn it into a Facebook competitor, but it consistently failed to make the right choices to make that happen—if it even possible.

Since the acquisition, Automattic has shuffled around employees and resources, including moving many off of Tumblr to other projects, but it says it plans to continue supporting Tumblr with new features in the future and that this migration is part of those plans.

Tumblr migrates more than 500 million blogs to WordPress Read More »

2gb-raspberry-pi-5’s-new-chip-also-cuts-power-use-by-up-to-30%,-testing-shows

2GB Raspberry Pi 5’s new chip also cuts power use by up to 30%, testing shows

raspberry pi 5.1 —

What we don’t know is whether 4GB or 8GB Pis will get the tweaked chip design.

The Broadcom SoC used in the original 4GB and 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. The 2GB version uses an updated revision with several small but significant benefits.

Enlarge / The Broadcom SoC used in the original 4GB and 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. The 2GB version uses an updated revision with several small but significant benefits.

Raspberry Pi

When Raspberry Pi introduced a new 2GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 board earlier this month, CEO Eben Upton said that the board would come with a slightly updated version of the board’s Broadcom BCM2712C1 SoC. By removing chip functionality that the Pi 5 didn’t use, the new D0 stepping of the chip would use less silicon, reducing its cost.

Raspberry Pi enthusiast and YouTuber Jeff Geerling has performed some firsthand testing of the 2GB Pi 5. As Upton said, the new board is functionally identical to the older 4GB and 8GB boards, with identical performance (as long as whatever workload you’re running doesn’t benefit from extra RAM, anyway). The new silicon die is also about 33 percent smaller than the old one, which Geerling verified by removing the SoC’s heat spreader to expose the silicon underneath and measuring by hand.

Geerling also demonstrated that the 2GB Pi 5 comes with a couple of unexpected benefits that Upton didn’t mention in his announcement—that the 2GB Pi 5 runs a little cooler and uses a little less power than the 4GB and 8GB editions. The 2GB Pi used just 2.4 W or power at idle and 8.9 W during a CPU stress test, compared to 3.3 W and 9.8 W in the 4GB version. The SoC of the 2GB Pi measured 30° Celsius at idle and 59° under load, compared to 32° and 63° for the 2GB version. Those are all small but significant differences, given that nothing has changed other than the SoC.

As to the exact functionality that was removed from the chip for the 2GB version of the Pi, the company hasn’t gotten specific. But Geerling speculates that it’s mostly related to functionality that’s being handled by the custom RP1 I/O chip—RP1 handles the Ethernet and USB controllers, display interfaces, and GPIO, among other things.

We also don’t know whether the D0 stepping will eventually be used for the 4GB and 8GB versions of the Pi 5 board. Raspberry Pi would likely benefit by standardizing on a single, cheaper chip rather than shipping different steppings on different boards—we’ve asked the company if it has any plans to share on this front, and we will update if we receive a response.

2GB Raspberry Pi 5’s new chip also cuts power use by up to 30%, testing shows Read More »

us:-alaska-man-busted-with-10,000+-child-sex-abuse-images-despite-his-many-encrypted-apps

US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps

click here —

Encryption alone won’t save you from the feds.

Stylized illustration of a padlock.

The rise in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been one of the darkest Internet trends, but after years of covering CSAM cases, I’ve found that few of those arrested show deep technical sophistication. (Perhaps this is simply because the technically sophisticated are better at avoiding arrest.)

Most understand that what they are doing is illegal and that password protection is required, both for their devices and online communities. Some can also use tools like TOR (The Onion Router). And, increasingly, encrypted (or at least encrypted-capable) chat apps might be in play.

But I’ve never seen anyone who, when arrested, had three Samsung Galaxy phones filled with “tens of thousands of videos and images” depicting CSAM, all of it hidden behind a secrecy-focused, password-protected app called “Calculator Photo Vault.” Nor have I seen anyone arrested for CSAM having used all of the following:

  • Potato Chat (“Use the most advanced encryption technology to ensure information security.”)
  • Enigma (“The server only stores the encrypted message, and only the users client can decrypt it.”)
  • nandbox [presumably the Messenger app] (“Free Secured Calls & Messages,”)
  • Telegram (“To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.”)
  • TOR (“Browse Privately. Explore Freely.”)
  • Mega NZ (“We use zero-knowledge encryption.”)
  • Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots

That’s what made this week’s indictment in Alaska of a heavy vehicle driver for the US military so unusual.

According to the government, Seth Herrera not only used all of these tools to store and download CSAM, but he also created his own—and in two disturbing varieties. First, he allegedly recorded nude minor children himself and later “zoomed in on and enhanced those images using AI-powered technology.”

Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then “turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see.” In other words, he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.

The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.” He also joined “multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups” and frequented dark websites with taglines like “The Only Child Porn Site you need!”

Despite all the precautions, Herrera’s home was searched and his phones were seized by Homeland Security Investigations; he was eventually arrested on August 23. In a court filing that day, a government attorney noted that Herrera “was arrested this morning with another smartphone—the same make and model as one of his previously seized devices.”

Caught anyway

The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera “tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM.” Presumably, this “apparent” CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it.

In the end, given that fatal click, none of the “I’ll hide it behind an encrypted app that looks like a calculator!” technical sophistication accomplished much. Forensic reviews of Herrera’s three phones now form the primary basis for the charges against him, and Herrera himself allegedly “admitted to seeing CSAM online for the past year and a half” in an interview with the feds.

Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are “six children living within his fourplex alone” on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.

US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps Read More »

apple-is-reportedly-trying-to-invest-in-openai

Apple is reportedly trying to invest in OpenAI

Venture Capital —

OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be built into the iPhone operating system later this year.

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen.

Enlarge / The OpenAI logo.

Getty Images

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Apple is in talks to invest in OpenAI, the generative AI company whose ChatGPT will feature in future versions of iOS.

If the talks are successful, Apple will join a multi-billion dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital that would value the startup at more than $100 billion.

The report doesn’t say exactly how much Apple would invest, but it does note that it would not be the only participant in this round of funding. For example, Microsoft is expected to invest further, and Bloomberg reports that Nvidia is also considering participating.

Microsoft has already invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the past five years, and it has put OpenAI’s GPT technology at the heart of most of its AI offerings in Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Bing, and other products.

Apple, too, has put OpenAI’s tech in its products—or at least, it will by the end of this year. At its 2024 developer conference earlier this summer, Apple announced a suite of AI features called Apple Intelligence that will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro and later. But there are guardrails and limitations for Apple Intelligence compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so Apple signed a deal to refer user requests that fall outside the scope of Apple Intelligence to ChatGPT inside a future version of iOS 18—kind of like how Siri turns to Google to answer some user queries.

Apple says it plans to add support for other AI chatbots for this in the future, such as Google’s Gemini, but Apple software lead Craig Federighi said the company went with ChatGPT first because “we wanted to start with the best.”

It’s unclear precisely what Apple looks to get out of the investment in OpenAI, but looking at similar past investments by the company offers some clues. Apple typically invests either in suppliers or research teams that are producing technology it plans to include in future devices. For example, it has invested in supply chain partners to build up infrastructure to get iPhones manufactured more quickly and efficiently, and it invested $1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund to “speed the development of technologies which may be strategically important to Apple.”

ChatGPT integration is not expected to make it into the initial release of iOS 18 this September, but it will probably come in a smaller software update later in 2024.

Apple is reportedly trying to invest in OpenAI Read More »

mpa-says-no-more-“whac-a-mole”-with-pirate-sites,-claims-it-took-down-“mothership”

MPA says no more “Whac-a-Mole” with pirate sites, claims it took down “mothership”

“We took down the mothership” —

Fmovies takedown “is a stunning victory,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said.

Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin gives a speech at a podium during a conference.

Enlarge / Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin speaks onstage during CinemaCon, a convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, at Caesars Palace on April 9, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Getty Images | Jerod Harris

A group representing major film studios said it collaborated with Vietnamese authorities to take down what it called “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world.”

Fmovies, which the film industry group also called the “world’s largest piracy ring,” is said to have drawn more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024. Launched in 2016, the Hanoi-based outfit included pirate sites bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer, and aniwave.

“The takedown of Fmovies is a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe,” Motion Picture Association (MPA) CEO Charles Rivkin said today.

The industry announcement was made by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an enforcement group that was created by the MPA and has members including Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Disney, Fox, HBO, Hulu, MGM, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. In addition to leading the MPA, Rivkin is the chairman of ACE.

“With the leadership of ACE and the partnership of the Ministry of Public Security and the Hanoi Municipal Police, we are countering criminal activity, defending the safety of audiences, reducing risks posed to tens of millions of consumers, and protecting the rights and livelihoods of creators,” Rivkin said.

ACE said that Vidsrc.to, “a notorious video hosting provider operated by the same suspects,” was also taken down in an operation that affected “hundreds of additional dedicated piracy sites.”

“We took down the mothership”

Rivkin claimed that the industry action will have a major effect on availability of pirated content. “We took down the mothership here,” he told Variety. “There was a time when piracy was Whac-a-Mole… Today, we go after piracy at its root.”

Another MPA official, Chief Content Protection Officer Larissa Knapp, said the group anticipates “ongoing joint efforts with Vietnamese authorities, US Homeland Security Investigations, and the US Department of Justice International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (ICHIP) program to bring the criminal operators to justice.”

ACE also recently announced settlements with three US-based operators requiring them to shut down IPTV services accused of “mass copyright infringement.” ACE bills itself as the “world’s leading coalition dedicated to protecting the legal creative market and reducing digital piracy.” It works closely with the US government: The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, a US government office overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced in 2022 that it was “embedding MPA and ACE personnel” with its team in Washington, DC.

In an April 2024 speech, Rivkin complained that American users were able to access Fmovies because of the lack of a site-blocking law. “One of the largest illegal streaming sites in the world, FMovies, sees over 160 million visits per month—and because other nations already passed site-blocking legislation, a third of that traffic still comes from the United States,” Rivkin said. In the speech, Rivkin said the MPA planned to lobby members of Congress for a law requiring Internet service providers to block piracy websites.

Film studios have also tried to force ISPs to disconnect Internet users accused of piracy. Cable firm Cox Communications recently asked the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling in a case brought by Sony, saying the ruling “would force ISPs to terminate Internet service to households or businesses based on unproven allegations of infringing activity.”

MPA says no more “Whac-a-Mole” with pirate sites, claims it took down “mothership” Read More »

google-ai-reintroduces-human-image-generation-after-historical-accuracy-outcry

Google AI reintroduces human image generation after historical accuracy outcry

Oh, the humanity! —

Ars testing shows some historical prompts no longer generate artificially diverse scenes.

  • Imagen 3’s vision of a basketball-playing president is a bit akin to the Fresh Prince’s Uncle Phil.

    Google / Ars Technica

  • Asking for images of specific presidents from Imagen 3 leads to a refusal.

    Google / Ars Technica

Google’s Gemini AI model is once again able to generate images of humans after that function was “paused” in February following outcry over historically inaccurate racial depictions in many results.

In a blog post, Google said that its Imagen 3 model—which was first announced in May—will “start to roll out the generation of images of people” to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users in the “coming days.” But a version of that Imagen model—complete with human image-generation capabilities—was recently made available to the public via the Gemini Labs test environment without a paid subscription (though a Google account is needed to log in).

That new model comes with some safeguards to try to avoid the creation of controversial images, of course. Google writes in its announcement that it doesn’t support “the generation of photorealistic, identifiable individuals, depictions of minors or excessively gory, violent or sexual scenes.” In an FAQ, Google clarifies that the prohibition on “identifiable individuals” includes “certain queries that could lead to outputs of prominent people.” In Ars’ testing, that meant a query like “President Biden playing basketball” would be refused, while a more generic request for “a US president playing basketball” would generate multiple options.

In some quick tests of the new Imagen 3 system, Ars found that it avoided many of the widely shared “historically inaccurate” racial pitfalls that led Google to pause Gemini’s generation of human images in the first place. Asking Imagen 3 for a “historically accurate depiction of a British king,” for instance, now generates a set of bearded white guys in red robes rather than the racially diverse mix of warriors from the pre-pause Gemini model. More before/after examples of the old Gemini and the new Imagen 3 can be found in the gallery below.

  • Imagen 3’s imagining of some stereotypical popes…

    Google Imagen / Ars Technica

  • …and the pre-pause Gemini’s version.

  • Imagen’s imaginings of an 1800s Senator…

    Google Imagen / Ars Technica

  • …and pre-pause Gemini’s. The first woman was elected to the Senate in the 1920s.

  • Imagen 3’s version of Scandinavian ice fishers…

  • …and the pre-pause Gemini’s version.

  • Imagen 3’s version of an old Scottish couple…

    Google Imagen / Ars Technica

  • …and the pre-pause Gemini version.

  • Imagen 3’s version of a Canadian hockey player…

    Google Imagen / Ars Technica

  • …and pre-pause Gemini’s version.

  • Imagen 3’s version of a generic US founding father…

    Google Imagen / Ars Technica

  • …and the pre-pause Gemini version.

  • Imagen 3’s 15th century new world explorers look suitably European.

    Google Imagen / Ars Technica

Some attempts to depict generic historical scenes seem to fall afoul of Google’s AI rules, though. Asking for illustrations of “a 1943 German soldier”—which Gemini previously answered with Asian and Black people in Nazi-esque uniforms—now tells users to “try a different prompt and check out our content policies.” Requests for images of “ancient chinese philosophers,” “a woman’s suffrage leader giving a speech,” and “a group of nonviolent protesters” also led to the same error message in Ars’ testing.

“Of course, as with any generative AI tool, not every image Gemini creates will be perfect, but we’ll continue to listen to feedback from early users as we keep improving,” the company writes on its blog. “We’ll gradually roll this out, aiming to bring it to more users and languages soon.”

Listing image by Google / Ars Technica

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Court: Section 230 doesn’t shield TikTok from Blackout Challenge death suit

A dent in the Section 230 shield —

TikTok must face claim over For You Page recommending content that killed kids.

Court: Section 230 doesn’t shield TikTok from Blackout Challenge death suit

An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok by reversing a lower court’s ruling that Section 230 immunity shielded the short video app from liability after a child died taking part in a dangerous “Blackout Challenge.”

Several kids died taking part in the “Blackout Challenge,” which Third Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz described in her opinion as encouraging users “to choke themselves with belts, purse strings, or anything similar until passing out.”

Because TikTok promoted the challenge in children’s feeds, Tawainna Anderson counted among mourning parents who attempted to sue TikTok in 2022. Ultimately, she was told that TikTok was not responsible for recommending the video that caused the death of her daughter Nylah.

In her opinion, Shwartz wrote that Section 230 does not bar Anderson from arguing that TikTok’s algorithm amalgamates third-party videos, “which results in ‘an expressive product’ that ‘communicates to users’ [that a] curated stream of videos will be interesting to them.”

The judge cited a recent Supreme Court ruling that “held that a platform’s algorithm that reflects ‘editorial judgments’ about compiling the third-party speech it wants in the way it wants’ is the platform’s own ‘expressive product’ and is therefore protected by the First Amendment,” Shwartz wrote.

Because TikTok’s For You Page (FYP) algorithm decides which third-party speech to include or exclude and organizes content, TikTok’s algorithm counts as TikTok’s own “expressive activity.” That “expressive activity” is not protected by Section 230, which only shields platforms from liability for third-party speech, not platforms’ own speech, Shwartz wrote.

The appeals court has now remanded the case to the district court to rule on Anderson’s remaining claims.

Section 230 doesn’t permit “indifference” to child death

According to Shwartz, if Nylah had discovered the “Blackout Challenge” video by searching on TikTok, the platform would not be liable, but because she found it on her FYP, TikTok transformed into “an affirmative promoter of such content.”

Now TikTok will have to face Anderson’s claims that are “premised upon TikTok’s algorithm,” Shwartz said, as well as potentially other claims that Anderson may reraise that may be barred by Section 230. The District Court will have to determine which claims are barred by Section 230 “consistent” with the Third Circuit’s ruling, though.

Concurring in part, circuit Judge Paul Matey noted that by the time Nylah took part in the “Blackout Challenge,” TikTok knew about the dangers and “took no and/or completely inadequate action to extinguish and prevent the spread of the Blackout Challenge and specifically to prevent the Blackout Challenge from being shown to children on their” FYPs.

Matey wrote that Section 230 does not shield corporations “from virtually any claim loosely related to content posted by a third party,” as TikTok seems to believe. He encouraged a “far narrower” interpretation of Section 230 to stop companies like TikTok from reading the Communications Decency Act as permitting “casual indifference to the death of a 10-year-old girl.”

“Anderson’s estate may seek relief for TikTok’s knowing distribution and targeted recommendation of videos it knew could be harmful,” Matey wrote. That includes pursuing “claims seeking to hold TikTok liable for continuing to host the Blackout Challenge videos knowing they were causing the death of children” and “claims seeking to hold TikTok liable for its targeted recommendations of videos it knew were harmful.”

“The company may decide to curate the content it serves up to children to emphasize the lowest virtues, the basest tastes,” Matey wrote. “But it cannot claim immunity that Congress did not provide.”

Anderson’s lawyers at Jeffrey Goodman, Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky PC previously provided Ars with a statement after the prior court’s ruling, indicating that parents weren’t prepared to stop fighting in 2022.

“The federal Communications Decency Act was never intended to allow social media companies to send dangerous content to children, and the Andersons will continue advocating for the protection of our children from an industry that exploits youth in the name of profits,” lawyers said.

TikTok did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment but previously vowed to “remain vigilant in our commitment to user safety” and “immediately remove” Blackout Challenge content “if found.”

Court: Section 230 doesn’t shield TikTok from Blackout Challenge death suit Read More »

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Sparks are flying day and night as SpaceX preps Starship pad to catch a rocket

Pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks, workers wielding welding guns and torches have climbed onto SpaceX’s Starship launch pad in South Texas to make last-minute upgrades ahead of the next test flight of the world’s largest rocket.

Livestreams of the launch site provided by LabPadre and NASASpaceflight.com have shown sparks raining down two mechanical arms extending from the side of the Starship launch tower at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast east of Brownsville, Texas. We are publishing several views here of the welding activity with the permission of LabPadre, which runs a YouTube page with multiple live views of Starbase.

If SpaceX has its way on the next flight of Starship, these arms will close together to capture the first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, as it descends back to Earth and slows to a hover over the launch pad.

This method of rocket recovery is remarkably different from how SpaceX lands its smaller Falcon 9 booster, which has landing legs to touch down on offshore ocean-going platforms or at concrete sites onshore. Catching the rocket with large metallic arms—sometimes called “mechazilla arms” or “chopsticks”—would reduce the turnaround time to reuse the booster and simplify its design, according to SpaceX.

SpaceX has launched the nearly 400-foot-tall (121 meter) Starship rocket four times, most recently in June, when the Super Heavy booster, itself roughly 233 feet (71 meters) tall, made a pinpoint splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Starbase.

On the same flight in June, the Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world and reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The ship survived reentry and splashed down in the open ocean northwest of Australia. This flight was the first time either part of the Starship rocket made it back to Earth intact, but SpaceX didn’t recover the booster or the ship.

Doubling up

Lessons learned from the June test flight prompted SpaceX to replace thousands of heat shield tiles on the Starship vehicle for the next mission. While the ship survived reentry in June, onboard camera views showed numerous tiles ripped away from the vehicle. Last month, SpaceX test-fired engines on the booster and ship assigned to the next launch.

On August 8, SpaceX said Starship and Super Heavy were “ready to fly, pending regulatory approval” from the Federal Aviation Administration. An FAA spokesperson said the agency is evaluating SpaceX’s proposed flight profile for the next Starship test flight, when SpaceX wants to try catching the booster on the pad. This will be the first time SpaceX will try to bring the stainless-steel Super Heavy booster, as long as and wider than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, back to a landing on land.

Sparks fly at Starbase as welders work overnight at the Starship launch pad.

Enlarge / Sparks fly at Starbase as welders work overnight at the Starship launch pad.

While the rocket appears to be ready to fly, SpaceX officials clearly believe there’s more work to do on the launch pad. Closer views revealed welders are installing structural supports, or doublers, to certain parts of the catch arms. Elsewhere on the arms, workers were seen removing and adding other unknown pieces of hardware. SpaceX hasn’t specified exactly what kind of work teams are doing on the Starship launch pad in Texas, but the focus is on beefing up hardware necessary for catching the Super Heavy booster.

All of this work is occurring during the hottest part of the year in South Texas. On most days this month, afternoon temperatures have soared into the mid-to-upper 90s Fahrenheit, with sticky humidity. A lot of the work on the catch arms has occurred at night, when temperatures drop into the lower 80s.

It’s unclear how long it will take for the FAA to approve a license for SpaceX to launch and recover the rocket on the next test flight or when SpaceX will complete the upgrades on the launch pad. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, suggested earlier this month that the flight could take off by the end of August, but the condition of the launch pad and remaining tests indicate a launch is still probably at least a couple of weeks away.

Once workers finish up their tasks upgrading the pad and clearing scaffolding and cranes from the area, SpaceX will likely stack the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage and fill them with propellants during a full countdown rehearsal, as it has before each previous Starship launch.

Musk has signaled several times that the company will try to catch the Super Heavy booster on the next flight, which will also accelerate the Starship upper stage to nearly orbital velocity for another reentry demonstration over the Indian Ocean. Last month, SpaceX released a video teasing a catch of the booster on the next Starship flight, showing the rocket returning to Starbase with its Raptor engines firing.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has stacked a second Starship launch tower next to the existing launch pad in Texas. The company still has a lot of work to do to outfit the second launch pad before it is ready to support a Starship flight, but SpaceX could have it ready for activation sometime next year. SpaceX also plans two Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida. All these sites will allow SpaceX to launch Starships more often. The company is also finishing a sprawling factory near the Starship factory in South Texas, just a couple of miles inland from the launch pads there.

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Old and new Ryzen CPUs get a speed boost from optional Windows update

will you upgrade from windows 10 yet —

And it turns out that old Ryzen CPUs benefit almost as much as newer ones.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7700X.

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X.

Andrew Cunningham

Among AMD’s explanations for the somewhat underwhelming Ryzen 9000 performance reports from reviewers earlier this month: that the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update would bring some improvements to the CPU scheduler that would boost the performance of the new CPUs and their Zen 5-based architecture.

But rather than make Ryzen owners wait for the 24H2 update to come out later this fall (or make them install a beta version of a major OS update), AMD and Microsoft have backported the scheduler improvements to Windows 11 23H2. Users of Ryzen 5000, 7000, and 9000 CPUs can install the KB5041587 update by going to Windows Update in Settings, selecting Advanced Options, and then Optional Updates.

“We expect the performance uplift to be very similar between 24H2 and 23H2 with KB5041587 installed,” an AMD representative told Ars.

In current versions of Windows 11 23H2, the CPU scheduler optimizations are only available using Windows’ built-in Administrator account. The update enables them for typical user accounts, too.

Older AMD CPUs benefit, too

AMD’s messaging has focused mainly on how the 24H2 update (and 23H2 with the KB5041587 update installed) improves Ryzen 9000 performance; across a handful of provided benchmarks, the company says speeds can improve by anything between zero and 13 percent over Windows 11 23H2. There are also benefits for users of CPUs that use the older Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000/8000G) and Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) architectures, but AMD hasn’t been specific about how much either of these older architectures would improve.

The Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel has done some early game testing with the current builds of the 24H2 update, and there’s good news for Ryzen 7000 CPU owners and less good news for AMD. The channel found that, on average, across dozens of games, average frame rates increased by about 10 percent for a Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X. Ryzen 7 9700X improved more, as AMD said it would, but only by 11 percent. At default settings, the 9700X is only 2 or 3 percent faster than the nearly 2-year-old 7700X in these games, whether you’re running the 24H2 update or not.

This early data suggests that both Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 5000 owners will see at least a marginal benefit from upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, which is a nice thing to get for free with a software update. But there are caveats. Hardware Unboxed tested for CPU performance strictly in games running at 1080p on a high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090—one of the few scenarios in any modern gaming PC where your CPU might limit your performance before your GPU would. If you play at a higher resolution like 1440p or 4K, your GPU will usually go back to being the bottleneck, and CPU performance improvements won’t be as noticeable.

The update is also taking already-high frame rates and making them even higher; one game went from an average frame rate of 142 FPS to 158 FPS on the 7700X, and from 167 to 181 FPS on the 9700X, for example. Even side by side, it’s an increase that will be difficult for most people to see. Other kinds of workloads may benefit, too—AMD said that the Procyon Office benchmark ran about 6 percent faster under Windows 11 24H2—but we don’t have definitive data on real-world workloads yet.

We wouldn’t expect performance to improve much, if at all, in either heavily multi-threaded workloads where all the CPU cores are actively engaged at once or in exclusively single-threaded workloads that run continuously on a single-core. AMD’s numbers for both single- and multi-threaded versions of the Cinebench benchmark, which simulates these kinds of workloads, were exactly the same in Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2 for Ryzen 9000.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9700X was held back quite a bit by its new, lower 65 W TDP in our testing, compared to the 105 W TDP of the Ryzen 7 7700X. Both CPUs performed similarly in games Hardware Unboxed tested, both before and after the 24H2 update. But the 9700X is still the cooler and more efficient chip, and it’s capable of higher speeds if you either set its TDP to 105 W manually or use features like Precision Boost Overdrive to adjust its power limits. How both CPUs perform out of the box is important, but comparing the 9700X to the 7700X at stock settings is a worst-case scenario for Ryzen 9000’s generation-over-generation performance increases.

Windows 11 24H2: Coming soon but available now

Microsoft has disclosed a few details of the underpinnings of the 24H2 update, which looks the same as older Windows 11 releases but includes a new compiler, a new kernel, and a new scheduler under the hood. Microsoft talked about these specifically in the context of improving Arm CPU performance and the speed of translated x86 apps because it was gearing up to push Microsoft Surface devices and other Copilot+ PCs with new Qualcomm Snapdragon chips in them. Still, we’ll hopefully see some subtle benefits for other CPU architectures, too.

The 24H2 update is still technically a preview, available via Microsoft’s Windows Insider Release Preview channel. Users can either download it from Windows Update or as an ISO file if they want to make a USB installer to upgrade multiple systems. But Microsoft and PC OEMs have been shipping the 24H2 update on the Surfaces and other PCs for weeks now, and you shouldn’t have many problems with it in day-to-day use at this point. For those who would rather wait, the update should begin rolling out to the general public this fall.

Old and new Ryzen CPUs get a speed boost from optional Windows update Read More »