There are many lessons to be learned from the beeper and radio explosions in Lebanon. One of them is that it is possible – probable – that hostile foreign actors are willing and able to infiltrate tech on a widescale basis for evil intent.
The US is planning to ban certain hardware and software made in China and Russia from cars, trucks and buses in the US due to security risks.
Officials said they were worried that the technology in question, used for autonomous driving and to connect cars to other networks, could allow enemies to “remotely manipulate cars on American roads”.
There is currently minimal use of Chinese or Russia-made software in American cars.
Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.
It’s possible, thanks to surviving fragments of papyrus, mosaics and wax tablets, to learn what Pompeiians ate for breakfast 2,000 years ago. Understand enough Medieval Latin, and you can learn how many livestock were reared at farms in Northumberland in 11th Century England – thanks to the Domesday Book, the oldest document held in the UK National Archives. Through letters and novels, the social lives of the Victorian era – and who they loved and hated – come into view.
But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That’s because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world’s information as it’s produced these days.
It’s not just what gets lost. It’s how things get changed. We have already seen media outlets and others go back years to change the wording or content of old writings. Unless someone printed it out, there is no contemporary record to challenge it.
People who are writing wonderful things with great insight; technical documents that explain how things work; court records; etc… if they are exclusively in a digital format, they are subject to be lost or altered in an instant.
That’s not to say that physical writings can’t be lost too. They can, and have been, for millennia. But while they can be lost, it is not easy to change them.
All that to say, buy books. Print out your important stuff. The digital world is fragile.
Iran was behind the recent hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, US intelligence officials have confirmed.
The FBI and other federal agencies said in a joint statement that Iran had chosen to interfere in the US election “to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions”.
The Trump campaign pointed the finger at Iran on 10 August for hacking its internal messages. Iranian officials denied it.
Sources familiar with the investigation told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they suspect Iranian hackers also targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris.
Notice how the story is written… we confirm that Iran hacked Trump, but to give the appearance that Iran hates Harris just as much, we get unnamed “sources familiar with the investigation” saying that they “suspect” that Iran “targeted” Harris too. There is no evidence or named sources to back it up, but the FBI and media have to run cover for Harris.
This is the way. I hope that it leads to some real nuclear power development.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday plans to announce new measures to support the development of new U.S. nuclear power plants, a large potential source of carbon-free electricity the government says is needed to combat climate change.
The suite of actions, which weren’t previously reported, are aimed at helping the nuclear power industry combat rising security costs and competition from cheaper plants powered by natural gas, wind and solar.
Nuclear proponents say the technology is critical to providing large, uninterrupted supplies of emissions-free power to serve soaring electricity demand from data centers and electric vehicles and still meet President Joe Biden‘s goal of decarbonizing the U.S. economy by 2050.
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is announcing the formation of a new partnership to help provide internet access to 80% of Africa by 2030, up from roughly 40% now.
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Harris, the first female U.S. vice president, is also announcing that the Women in the Digital Economy efforts to address the gender divide in technology access have now generated more than $1 billion in public and private commitments, with some U.S. commitments pending congressional approval.
Walmart is continuing to remove self-checkout machines from its stores in what it claims is an effort to improve the ‘in-store experience’ for customers.
In two stores – in Shrewsbury, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio – the retailer said it would replace kiosks with staffed checkout lanes which will ‘give our associates the chance to provide more personalized and efficient service.’
Although the company is ditching the cashier-less checkout system at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, it plans to sell the technology to more than 120 third-party businesses by the end of the year. Reaching that goal would double the number of non-Amazon enterprises that use Just Walk Out compared to last year.
The cashier-less system is the perfect antidote to the theft problem of self-checkout. I used the automated system in the San Francisco airport a while ago. It’s really simple. You scan your card when walking into the store. You can’t get into the store without scanning your card. When you have what you want, you just leave. The products all have RFID chips and are scanned on the way out with no effort. Theft is near impossible without an RFID blocker big enough for the products. I suppose you could bring in a lead-lined tote, but that’s a lot of effort for your average shoplifter.
The problem is cultural. I don’t want to scan my card before I know if I’m going to actually buy anything. Also, there is no “appeal process” if the price is wrong or it scanned wrong or whatever. I don’t want to have to call some number to resolve a $2 mistake.
With labor rates continuing to rise, retailers will continue to seek ways to reduce labor spend and expensive automated technologies will continue to evolve.
Google terminated 28 employees Wednesday, according to an internal memo viewed by CNBC, after a series of protests against labor conditions and the company’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
The news comes one day after nine Google workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest in Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office.
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The New York sit-in started at noon ET and ended around 9:30 p.m. ET. Security asked workers to remove their banner, which spanned two floors, about an hour into the protest, according to Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer based in New York City and one of the arrested workers.
“I realized, ‘Oh, the place that I work at is very complicit and aiding in this genocide — I have a responsibility to act against it,’” Ibraheem told CNBC earlier Wednesday. Ibraheem added, “The fact that I am receiving money from Google and Israel is paying Google — I am receiving part of that money, and that weighed very heavily on me.”
The laser was originally expected to be operational by 2032, but new reforms intended to speed up government procurement of weapons mean that it will now be ready five years earlier.
DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford Motor is lowering the starting prices of some all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup trucks as it prepares to resume shipping the vehicles after quality issues.
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The cost reductions are the latest electric vehicle price changes for the broader automotive industry amid slower-than-expected consumer adoption. Ford’s cuts come three months after it adjusted Lightning prices, including increasing some model prices.
Yes. This has been obvious for a while, but what is different here is that there is a major energy company CEO saying it so forcefully. Major energy companies have been unwilling to voice these views for fear of regulatory punishment and because they wanted a slice of the taxpayer pie being doled out for alternative energy schemes. Nasser’s comments mark a break in the SOP.
HOUSTON — Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
“In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts as it collides with five hard realities,” Nasser said during a panel interview at the CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, Texas.
“A transition strategy reset is urgently needed and my proposal is this: We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” the CEO said to applause from the audience.
[…]
Nasser said the world should focus more on reducing emissions from oil and gas in addition to renewables. The CEO said efficiency improvements alone over the past 15 years have reduced global energy demand by almost 90 million barrels per day oil equivalent. Wind and solar, meanwhile, have substituted only 15 million barrels over the same period, he said.
“We should phase in new energy sources and technologies when they are genuinely ready, economically competitive and with the right infrastructure,” Nasser said.
Interesting research from the Badger Institute about EV buying behavior. Short version… EV sales are growing, but are still a tiny percentage of overall vehicle purchases. King Oil is still the most affordable, environmentally friendly, and reliable fuel type for vehicles in most situations.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app TikTok if its China-based owner doesn’t sell, as lawmakers acted on concerns that the company’s current ownership structure is a national security threat.
The bill, passed by a vote of 352-65, now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are unclear.
The lawmakers contend that ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. any time it wants. The worry stems from a set of Chinese national security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering.
“We have given TikTok a clear choice,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. “Separate from your parent company ByteDance, which is beholden to the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), and remain operational in the United States, or side with the CCP and face the consequences. The choice is TikTok’s.”
Not a bad statement. I hope the reality matches the sentiment. I’m pessimistic that it will.
In a memo Tuesday evening, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s artificial intelligence mistakes, which led to Google taking its Gemini image-generation feature offline for further testing.
“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”
“Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”
“Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.”
“We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.”
“Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.”
“We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”
After pulling its artificial intelligence image generation tool on Thursday due to a string of controversies, Google plans to relaunch the product soon, according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Google introduced the image generator earlier this month through Gemini, the company’s main suite of AI models. The tool allows users to enter prompts to create an image. Over the past week, users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses, which have circulated widely on social media.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that,” Hassabis said Monday during a panel at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. “We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks.” He added that the product was not “working the way we intended.”
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When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots show. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.
Ford’s overall 2023 sales are lower than the industry’s sales growth, which auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports topped 15.6 million last year — marking a 12.3% increase from 2022 and the segment’s best performance since more than 17 million vehicles in 2019.
“In a year of challenges, from a labor strike to supply issues, our amazing lineup of gas, electric and hybrid vehicles and our fantastic dealers delivered solid growth and momentum. We have the products that customers want,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a release.
Electric vehicle sales came in at 72,608 for the year, up 18% from 2022 and boosted by nearly 26,000 EVs sold during the fourth quarter.
EV sales are increasing at a faster rate than overall sales, but percentages are deceptive when being based on such a small number. Overall, EV sales were still only about 3.6% of Ford’s sales despite them pushing it hard. It’s telling that the quote from Ford’s CEO leads with “GAS, electric and hybrid…”
Innovation is hard and expensive. This is the trial and error of capitalism. When government decides to weigh in and force something that is economically unviable, it retards the system’s ability to innovate.
But there’s growing concern across the industry, not just with GM and Cruise, about the viability of autonomous vehicles, or AVs, as a business instead of as a niche science project.
“AV technology, while they’ve made a lot of progress with it, is unlikely to be profitable anytime in the foreseeable future, certainly not this decade,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Guidehouse Insights. “If they need to make cuts, robotaxis seem like the obvious place to do that.”
Some Wall Street analysts are holding out hope that GM and Barra can turn Cruise around and eventually refocus on growing the business, as the Detroit automaker takes a more hands-on approach with the company. Several are expecting updates at an investor event in March.
“The plan to pause Cruise operations and reduce spending on Cruise in 2024 are only first steps. Once again, we expect these concerns to be addressed and cured at the capital markets day in early 2024 but expect skepticism to remain in the interim,” Morgan Stanley analyst John Murphy said in a Nov. 29 investor note.
If GM can’t turn the operations around, Cruise would join a list of its past defunct growth businesses, partnerships and investments since 2016.
DETROIT (AP) — One of the biggest reasons people cite when saying they won’t buy an electric vehicle is range anxiety, the fear of running out of juice on the road with nowhere to recharge.
Stellantis’ Ram brand may have an answer for that, especially for people who need a truck to haul or tow things. It’s called the Ramcharger, a pickup that can travel 145 miles (235 kilometers) on electricity, with a 3.6-liter V6 gas-powered engine linked to a generator that can recharge the battery while the truck is moving.
A sleepy town in southern Spain is in shock after it emerged that AI-generated naked images of young local girls had been circulating on social media without their knowledge.
The pictures were created using photos of the targeted girls fully clothed, many of them taken from their own social media accounts.
These were then processed by an application that generates an imagined image of the person without clothes on.
So far more than 20 girls, aged between 11 and 17, have come forward as victims of the app’s use in or near Almendralejo, in the south-western province of Badajoz.
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The suspects in the case are aged between 12 and 14. Spanish law does not specifically cover the generation of images of a sexual nature when it involves adults, although the creation of such material using minors could be deemed child pornography.
Another possible charge would be for breaching privacy laws. In Spain, minors can only face criminal charges from the age of 14 upwards.
Some good questions. Clearly, the girls are victims. But is it child porn if the images are fake? What is the appropriate legal sanction, if any, for taking a public image of someone and manipulating it? If the boys had done this by drawing or painting, is it morally different than using AI to create the images? Is it a crime to draw an imagined image of a naked person – adult or child? Our legal infrastructure in the age of AI is woefully behind. The action is clearly disgusting and morally reprehensible, but how should the law deal with it?
No. It strikes me that people would be far better off working through their grief than pretending that their loved one is alive through a bot. Death is the natural end of us all and it is unhealthy to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
What does the future of grief and loss look like? An AI company called You, Only Virtual is creating chatbots modeled after deceased loved ones, with its founder, Justin Harrison, telling “Good Morning America” that he hopes people won’t have to feel grief at all.
You, Only Virtual scans text messages, emails and phone calls shared between an individual and the deceased person to create a chatbot that composes original written or audio responses mimicking the deceased person’s voice and modeling the relationship and rapport that the two shared in life.
The company, founded in 2020, hopes to offer a video-chat option later this year, “and ultimately provide augmented-reality that allows for interaction with a three-dimensional projection,” GMA reported.
However experts are warning that it takes an average of six years to break even on a purchase – and it can take up to a decade for the premium to pay off.
Customers are also taking to social media to express their regret at their EV purchase, with difficulties tracking down charging spots and unexpected costs. So how long does it really take to save money on an electric car – and is it worth the price?
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When it comes to fuel, electricity is generally cheaper than gas. On July 7, the average cost of gas in the US was $3.53 a gallon.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the cost of charging an EV is equivalent to filling up a gas tank at roughly $1 per gallon.
Gas prices also tend to be more volatile than electricity prices, which have historically been more stable.
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The calculator estimates that the electric car owner will save $1,404 a year charging their vehicle rather than filling up on gas.
By dividing the price premium on the EV by the estimated annual savings on fuel, it would take over eight years to break even on the purchase.
The article shares stories from EV buyers who have buyer’s remorse. I say shame on them for not doing more homework before buying their cars. I’ll say the same thing I’ve said for years… EVs can be an excellent option for some people and a terrible option for others.
EV discussions have become common with people I know. I’ll give two examples of people who have Teslas and love them. Both are high-income people where the purchase price was not much of a factor. It’s more about the experience.
The first person lives in the Bay Area. He rarely drives for more than a couple of hours a day and has a charger in his garage. He commented that he can’t remember the last time that he charged in public. When he travels, he will generally fly if it is more than a 3 or 4 hour drive. He loves his Tesla and raves about the lack of maintenance required (oil changes, etc.) The Tesla simply has fewer moving parts to maintain. He did comment that it burns through tires rather quickly, but that’s a minor inconvenience.
The other person lives in Colorado. The person is single and travels a lot. The person likes his Tesla, but is annoyed by a few of the aesthetic features like the gull wing doors and the long windshield. This person works from home and doesn’t drive much, but occasionally goes on a long trip. In a recent example, the person drove from Colorado to Tulsa to Austin and back home. The travel time took twice as long as it would have in a gasoline car because of the time needed to charge. And in one example riding through the panhandle of Texas, the car almost ran out of charge before sliding into a station. To compensate, the person slowed way down. Overall, the person was annoyed with the travel time, but as a single person without a pressing reason to get back home, the extra time of travel was just that – an annoyance.
In both circumstances, the people like their EVs and are willing to put up with the inconveniences, and, more importantly, can afford to put up with the inconveniences.
In my own case, we do not own a garage or driveway in which to charge an EV. We would have to rely on public chargers. Also, we regularly take cross-country road trips (4 to 6 times a year) where we need to make the transit in a day or two to work around my work schedule. Owning an EV would be incompatible with our lifestyle.
This is where I would like the national conversation to progress. EVs are not morally or economically superior to gasoline vehicles (GVs). They are simply a different technology designed to complete the same task of personal transportation. The choice should center around lifestyle and preference instead of being some political or ethical talisman.