Mark Zuckerberg, in a (much) longer version of an essay originally published last month in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal: The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will […]
Vass Bednar, the Walrus: […] the point has been made: looking after the information economy can no longer be a side project for underfunded institutions. Wikipedia is as miraculous as the Wayback Machine is indispensable. Still, we need to stop pretending volunteerism alone can hold up the public internet. We understand this duty more clearly […] ⌥ Permalink
Sarah Perez, in a TechCrunch story about monthly active user numbers for Bluesky, Threads, and X, using data provided by Similarweb: Instead, the data shows that X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down around 3% year-over-year in June, and X’s mobile daily active users dropped 7% in July to 123.7 million. (Of course, […] ⌥ Permalink
Katie Baker, the Ringer: Look, there’s maybe nothing less cool than waxing nostalgic about Google of all things. It’s like mourning the Astor Place Starbucks (or getting sentimental about any Blockbuster Video — although most people aren’t ready for that conversation). But I don’t think I’m really missing Google Search as much as I’m missing […] ⌥ Permalink
Phaedra Haywood, the Santa Fe New Mexican: A state district judge in Santa Fe on Thursday ordered social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $567 million into an abatement fund to address public harm to New Mexico children and teens. Judge Bryan Biedscheid’s ruling resolves the second of a two-part civil proceeding in a […] ⌥ Permalink
Mia Sato, the Verge: When web traffic is funneled through LLMs instead of a traditional search results page, as Google has been doing, being cited by a chatbot becomes ever more important. Now, a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they […] ⌥ Permalink
Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries: Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial […]…
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: Under current U.S. hacking laws, a human can face criminal charges for breaking into someone else’s computer without permission. But when an AI agent autonomously hacks into a company’s computers, determining who is liable is much murkier. The surprise admissions by OpenAI and Anthropic that their unreleased AI models […] ⌥ Permalink
Robb Knight: I’m shutting down EchoFeed within the next 12 months when the final subscriptions expire. It will continue to run as it is until then so if you’ve already paid you have access until the end of your subscription. EchoFeed was launched just a couple of years ago and I have been using it […] ⌥ Permalink
Emily Steel, New York Times (gift link): More than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed, so many that thousands were combined to streamline procedural matters. Most remain in the early stages. The New York Times reviewed documents from the three cases that reached trial and about a dozen others that have advanced to the stage when […] ⌥ Permalink
In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek asked TikTok for comment as it reported out a story about users who were recommended videos about self-harm and suicide, particularly teenagers like Chase Nasca. It is a difficult read. As a result of this press outreach, TikTok analyzed Nasca’s account and why he was given so much of this material […] ⌥ Permalink
Ethan Gach, Kotaku: It’s been almost a month since Sony announced the end of PlayStation discs for new games starting in 2028, and a loud contingent of angry fans has continued to criticize the company for going all-digital. Asked about the ongoing backlash during its latest earnings call, Sony said it understands why people have […] ⌥ Permalink
Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order after a row with Washington. As a reminder, this is different from the order made in February last […] ⌥ Permalink
Deepa Seetharaman and Raphael Satter, Reuters: OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. Not satisfied with just a couple of […] ⌥ Permalink
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: According to [Judge] Engelmayer, it would be impractical to expect partners to update licensing deals every time a company rolls out new security methods. Additionally, Engelmayer found that “the Google Decision is not to the contrary” of Reddit’s case because, unlike Google, Reddit went “beyond the bare allegation” that Google used […] ⌥ Permalink
Anthropic’s “Frontier Red Team”: After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three […] ⌥…
Google Earth project manager Bryan Horowitz: For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world. Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web, tap “create image,” and type whatever you want to see. […] ⌥ Permalink
Emily Bass: A senior US State Department official displayed a map of Africa that was completely wrong before high-level officials from African nations, including some whose countries had been mislabelled. The map mishap occurred during a presentation at “Transforming health assistance: Implementing U.S. government MOUs for sustainable HIV programs,” a pre-conference event at the largest […] ⌥…
OpenAI last week: Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of […] ⌥ Permalink
If you have read Byron Tau’s reporting, including his book “Means of Control”, you might be familiar with Mike Yeagley. He was the one who made the U.S. military and intelligence community aware of the surveillance they could conduct through digital advertising placements and the open data market. Joseph Cox of 404 Media recently interviewed […] ⌥ Permalink