Category: Tech

An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.

Enforcement of a first-of-its-kind United Kingdom law that Elon Musk wants Tweety McTreason to gut kicked in today, with potentially huge penalties possibly imminent for any Big Tech companies deemed non-compliant. UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) forces tech companies to detect and remove dangerous online content, threatening fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. In extreme cases, widely used platforms like Musk’s X could be shut down or executives even jailed if UK online safety regulator Ofcom determines there has been a particularly egregious violation. Critics call it a censorship bill, listing over 130 “priority” offenses across 17 categories detailing what content platforms must remove. The list includes illegal content connected to terrorism, child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, illegal drugs, animal welfare, and other crimes. But it also broadly restricts content in legally gray areas, like posts considered “extreme pornography,” harassment, or controlling behavior. Read full article Comments

Chatbots should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations, researchers said.

Pavel Durov said that the investigation into illicit activity on the messaging app he runs is ongoing, but that he had returned home to Dubai.

Open-source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open-source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet. The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files, is part of tj-actions, a collection of files that’s used by more than 23,000 organizations. Tj-actions is one of many Github Actions, a form of platform for streamlining software available on the open-source developer platform. Actions are a core means of implementing what’s known as CI/CD, short for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous Delivery). Scraping server memory at scale On Friday or earlier, the source code for all versions of tj-actions/changed-files received unauthorized updates that changed the “tags” developers use to reference specific code versions. The tags pointed to a publicly available file that copies the internal memory of severs running it, searches for credentials, and writes them to a log. In the aftermath, many publicly accessible repositories running tj-actions ended up displaying their most sensitive credentials in logs anyone could view. Read full article Comments

Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Tweety McTreason’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy. In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports. “Tesla supports a robust and thorough process” to “address unfair trade practices,” but only those “which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies,” the letter said. Read full article Comments

One of the best mostly invisible updates in iOS 18 was Apple’s decision to finally implement the Rich Communications Services (RCS) communication protocol, something that is slowly helping to fix the generally miserable experience of texting non-iPhone users with an iPhone. The initial iOS 18 update brought RCS support to most major carriers in the US, and the upcoming iOS 18.4 update is turning it on for a bunch of smaller prepaid carriers like Google Fi and Mint Mobile. Now that Apple is on board, iPhones and their users can also benefit from continued improvements to the RCS standard. And one major update was announced today: RCS will now support end-to-end encryption using the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a standard finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2023. “RCS will be the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable E2EE between client implementations from different providers,” writes GSMA Technical Director Tom Van Pelt in the post announcing the updates. “Together with other unique security features such as SIM-based authentication, E2EE will provide RCS users with the highest level of privacy and security for stronger protection from scams, fraud and other security and privacy threats. ” Read full article Comments

We know Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago and that the first single cell lifeforms were present roughly 1 billion years after that. What we don’t know is what triggered the process that turned our planet from a barren ball of rock into a world hosting amazing abundance of lifeforms. “We’re trying to understand how do you go from non-life to life. Now I think we have made a real contribution to solving this mystery,” says Richard Zare, a Stanford University chemistry professor. Zare is the senior author of the recent study into a previously unknown electrochemical process that might have helped supply the raw materials needed for life. Zare’s team demonstrated the existence of micro-lightning, very small electricity discharges that occur between tiny droplets of water spray. When triggered in a mixture of gases made to replicate the atmosphere on early Earth, these micro-lightnings produced chemical compounds used by present-day life, like glycine, uracil, and urea, along with chemical precursors like cyanoacetylene, and hydrogen cyanide. “I’m not saying it’s the only way this could happen—I wasn’t there,” Zare acknowledged. “But it’s a new plausible mechanism that gives us building blocks of life.” Lightning in the bulb Scientific research into the beginnings of life on Earth started in the 1920s with Aleksander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, scientists who independently proposed that life on Earth could have arisen through a process of gradual chemical evolution. In their view, inorganic molecules might have reacted due to energy from the Sun or lightning strikes to form life’s building blocks, like amino acids. Those building blocks, Oparin and Haldane argued, could have accumulated in the oceans, making a “primordial soup.” Read full article Comments

Pour one out for Google Assistant, the sometimes helpful but often frustrating digital assistant Google launched in 2016. In its place, users will encounter Gemini, the generative AI Google has been integrating into every product in its portfolio. Later this year, Google will make Gemini its only supported assistant, forcing most of its users to abandon Assistant once and for all. The Gemini brand is barely a year old, but Google has moved aggressively to increase usage. When it released the Gemini app on Android, Google forced anyone who installed it to disable Assistant and switch to Gemini. It did this despite a plethora of missing features and the omnipresent issues of AI hallucinations. The company has forged ahead with Gemini’s expansion in the intervening months, making Assistant’s demise rather unsurprising. Since Gemini’s debut, users have had the option of sticking with the legacy assistant, but that’s not going to be an option soon. On mobile devices, the upgrade path (if you want to call it that) is clear. Most newly released phones already ship with Gemini as the default, and Google will prompt any remaining Assistant users to get the Gemini app. When Assistant is put out to pasture later in 2025, Google will remove the app from app stores and direct users to Gemini instead. Read full article Comments

We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We’ve collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon’s Audible) and from older physical “books on tape” (most of which are actually on CDs). I don’t mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible’s app to play things directly—it’s (sometimes) quick, it’s (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works. But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app’s “Library” button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon. So, having put in the effort to do things the “right” way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf. Read full article Comments

Tweety McTreason rallied support for Elon Musk’s car company, but there may not be enough conservatives willing to buy electric cars to make up for the Democrats who now shun Teslas.

Ideally, you’d expect any Super NES console—if properly maintained—to operate identically to any other Super NES unit ever made (in the same region, at least). Given the same base ROM file and the same set of precisely timed inputs, all those consoles should hopefully give the same gameplay output across individual hardware and across time. The TASBot community relies on this kind of solid-state predictability when creating tool-assisted speedruns that can be executed with robotic precision on actual console hardware. But on the SNES in particular, the team has largely struggled to get emulated speedruns to sync up with demonstrated results on real consoles. After significant research and testing on dozens of actual SNES units, the TASBot team now thinks that a cheap ceramic resonator used in the system’s Audio Processing Unit (APU) is to blame for much of this inconsistency. While Nintendo’s own documentation says the APU should run at a consistent rate of 24.576 Mhz (and the associated Digital Signal Processor sample rate at a flat 32,000 Hz), in practice, that rate can vary just a bit based on heat, system age, and minor physical variations that develop in different console units over time. Read full article Comments

In a new paper published Thursday titled “Auditing language models for hidden objectives,” Anthropic researchers described how custom AI models trained to deliberately conceal certain “motivations” from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, due to their ability to adopt different contextual roles they call “personas.” The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden training objectives, although the methods are still under research. While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal information from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where AI systems might deceive or manipulate human users. While training a language model using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reward models are typically tuned to score AI responses according to how well they align with human preferences. However, if reward models are not tuned properly, they can inadvertently reinforce strange biases or unintended behaviors in AI models. Read full article Comments

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon’s WoT TV series. Now we’re back in the saddle for season three—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We’ll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there’s always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you. New episodes of The Wheel of Time season three will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers the entire three-episode season premiere, which was released on March 13. Read full article Comments