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An anonymous reader a report:Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it's become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn't about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it's a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine. From my experience, Google now seems to operate on a "default to not index" basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision appears to be based on various factors: Extreme content uniqueness: It's not enough to write about something that isn't extensively covered. Google seems to require content to be genuinely novel or fill a significant gap in its index. Perceived authority: Sites that Google considers highly authoritative in their niche may have more content indexed, but even then, it's not guaranteed. Brand recognition: Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity. Temporary indexing and de-indexing: In practice, Google often indexes new content quite quickly, likely to avoid missing out on breaking news or important updates. Soon after, Google may de-index the content, and it remains de-indexed thereafter. So getting initially indexed isn't necessarily a sign that Google considers your content valuable.

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A group calling itself "NullBulge" published a 1.1-TB trove of data late last week that it claims is a dump of Disney's internal Slack archive. From a report: The data allegedly includes every message and file from nearly 10,000 channels, including unreleased projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites and APIs. The hackers claim they got access to the data from a Disney insider and named the alleged collaborator. Whether the hackers actually had inside help remains unconfirmed; they could also have plausibly used info-stealing malware to compromise an employee's account. Disney did not confirm the breach or return multiple requests for comment about the legitimacy of the stolen data. A Disney spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that the company "is investigating this matter." The data, which appears to have been first published on Thursday, was posted on BreachForums and later taken down, but it is still live on mirror sites. The hacker said they breached Disney in protest against AI-generated artwork.

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Amazon is now monitoring the hours corporate employees spend in the office. From a report: This move is intended to crack down on people who are trying to skirt the company's return-to-office policy, Business Insider has learned. Several teams across Amazon, including the retail and cloud-computing units, were told in recent months that a minimum of two hours per visit is required to count as office attendance, according to multiple screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by BI and people familiar with the matter. Some teams have been told to stay at least six hours per visit. Amazon's goal is to ramp up scrutiny of "coffee badging," some of the Slack messages said. Coffee badging refers to employees who badge in, get coffee, and leave the office shortly to satisfy their return-to-office mandate. Amazon started requiring office attendance for most corporate staffers three times a week last year, but it didn't have a minimum-hour obligation for each visit.

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Speaking of crypto, BlackRock's co-founder and CEO Larry Fink is now embracing crypto more than ever. From a report: In an interview with CNBC on Monday, he mentioned that he had abandoned his initial skepticism of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. He now firmly believes that there is a place for crypto in the average investor's portfolio. "I believe Bitcoin is legitimate. I'm not saying there aren't misuses like everything else, but it is a legitimate financial instrument that allows you to have uncorrelated returns," Fink told CNBC host Jim Cramer. When asked whether the U.S. budget deficit makes a case for investing in crypto, Fink responded, "absolutely." He added that crypto can help buyers hedge against countries that are devaluing their currencies.

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A judge in the UK High Court has directed prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against computer scientist Craig Wright, after ruling that he lied "extensively and repeatedly" and committed forgery "on a grand scale" in service of his quest to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin. From a report: In a judgment published Tuesday, Justice James Mellor outlined various injunctions to be imposed upon Wright, after finding in May that he had "engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims [to be Satoshi] and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud." By order of the judge, Wright will be prevented from claiming publicly that he is Satoshi and from bringing or threatening legal action in any jurisdiction on that basis. He will be required to pin a notice to the front page of his personal website and X feed detailing the findings against him. The matter, Mellor writes, will also be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in the UK, "for consideration of whether a prosecution should be commenced against Dr Wright." It will be up to the CPS to decide whether the available evidence is sufficient to bring charges against Wright "for his wholescale perjury and forgery of documents" and "whether a warrant for his arrest should be issued."

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The latest release of MySQL has underwhelmed some commentators who fear Oracle -- the custodian of the open source database -- may have other priorities. From a report: Earlier this month, Oracle -- which has long marketed its range of proprietary database systems -- published the 9.0 version as an "Innovation Release" of MySQL. MySQL 9.0 is now among the three iterations Oracle supports. The others include 8.0 (8.0.38) and the first update of the 8.4 LTS (8.4.1). [...] In June, Peter Zaitsev, an early MySQL engineer and founder of open source consultancy Percona, said he feared the lack of features in MySQL was a result of Oracle's focus on Heatwave, a proprietary analytics database built on MySQL. He had previously defended Oracle's stewardship of the open source database. The release of MySQL 9.0 has not assuaged those concerns, said colleague Dave Stokes, Percona technology evangelist. It had not lived up to the previous 8.0 release, which arrived with many new features. "MySQL 9.0 is supposed to be an 'innovation release' where [Oracle offers] access to the latest features and improvements and [users] enjoy staying on top of the latest technologies," he said. However, he pointed out most more innovative features, such as vector support and embedded JavaScript store procedures, were not in the free MySQL Community Edition and were only available on the paid-for HeatWave edition. "The ability to store the output of an EXPLAIN command to a variable is not the level of new feature hoped for," he said.

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NASA: The stars above and on Earth aligned as an inspirational message and lyrics from the song "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" by hip-hop artist Missy Elliott were beamed to Venus via NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network). The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California sent the transmission at 10:05 a.m. PDT on Friday, July 12. As the largest and most sensitive telecommunication service of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, the DSN has an array of giant radio antennas that allow missions to track, send commands, and receive scientific data from spacecraft venturing to the Moon and beyond. To date, the system has transmitted only one other song into space, making the transmission of Elliott's song a first for hip-hop and NASA. "Both space exploration and Missy Elliott's art have been about pushing boundaries," said Brittany Brown, director, Digital and Technology Division, Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington, who initially pitched ideas to Missy's team to collaborate with the agency. "Missy has a track record of infusing space-centric storytelling and futuristic visuals in her music videos, so the opportunity to collaborate on something out of this world is truly fitting." The song traveled about 158 million miles (254 million kilometers) from Earth to Venus -- the artist's favorite planet. Transmitted at the speed of light, the radio frequency signal took nearly 14 minutes to reach the planet. The transmission was made by the 34-meter (112-foot) wide Deep Space Station 13 (DSS-13) radio dish antenna, located at the DSN's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, near Barstow in California. Coincidentally, the DSS-13 also is nicknamed Venus.

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AI companies are generally secretive about their sources of training data, but an investigation by Proof News found some of the wealthiest AI companies in the world have used material from thousands of YouTube videos to train AI. Companies did so despite YouTube's rules against harvesting materials from the platform without permission. From a report: Our investigation found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce. The dataset, called YouTube Subtitles, contains video transcripts from educational and online learning channels like Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Proof News also found material from YouTube megastars, including MrBeast (289 million subscribers, two videos taken for training), Marques Brownlee (19 million subscribers, seven videos taken), Jacksepticeye (nearly 31 million subscribers, 377 videos taken), and PewDiePie (111 million subscribers, 337 videos taken). Some of the material used to train AI also promoted conspiracies such as the "flat-earth theory." Further reading: YouTube Says OpenAI Training Sora With Its Videos Would Break Rules.

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The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. From a report: The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity's actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping. The length of the Earth's day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet's oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world's oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate -- or fatter -- slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further. The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth's axis of rotation -- the north and south poles -- to move. Other work has revealed that humanity's carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

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Microsoft's investment into Inflection AI will get a full-blown UK antitrust probe, after the watchdog said it needed to take a closer look at the hiring of former employees from the artificial intelligence startup. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday it was opening the formal phase one merger probe into the partnership, setting a Sept. 11 deadline on whether to escalate it to an in-depth investigation. The agency has been swift to act against big tech's AI startup investments after it found a pattern of large tech firms piling money into start ups.

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Last week, the U.S. Senate introduced a new bill to outlaw the unethical use of AI-generated content and deepfake technology. Called the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act), the bill would "set new federal transparency guidelines for marking, authenticating and detecting AI-generated content, protect journalists, actors and artists against AI-driven theft, and hold violators accountable for abuses." TechSpot reports: Proposed and sponsored by Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, along with Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the aims to establish enforceable transparency standards in AI development [such a through watermarking]. The legislation also wants to curb unauthorized data use in training models. The senators intend to task the National Institutes of Standards and Technology with developing sensible transparency guidelines should the bill pass. [...] The senators feel that clarifying and defining what is okay and what is not regarding AI development is vital in protecting citizens, artists, and public figures from the harm that misuse of the technology could cause, particularly in creating deepfakes. The text of the bill can be read here.

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Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: A team of researchers think they've discovered a cave on the Moon in radar images of the lunar surface, which they posit could be a future site for an established human presence on our rocky satellite. The tunnel is in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) pit, the deepest known pit on the Moon. (If the name is familiar to you, the Sea of Tranquility is where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969.) The pit formed due to a lava tube's roof collapse or a collapse of a void structure created by tectonic processes. To look for potential cave structures within the pit, the researchers studied side-looking radar images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Mini-RF instrument between 2009 and 2011. The team then conducted 3D radar simulations of potential geometries of the pit and its cave, to determine that the brightness they saw in radar images could be due to subsurface features. Ultimately, the team determined there is a tunnel in the pit that is between 98 feet (30 meters) long and 262ft (80m) long. The tunnel is roughly 148ft (45m) wide and is either flat or inclined with a maximum steepness of 45 degrees. "The exploration of lunar caves through future robotic missions could provide a fresh perspective on the lunar subsurface and yield new insights into the evolution of lunar volcanism," the team wrote in the paper. "Furthermore, direct exploration could confirm the presence of stable subsurface environments shielded from radiation and with optimal temperature conditions for future human utilization." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Just before the weekend, dozens of record labels including UMG, Warner, and Sony, filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon at a New York federal court. In common with previous lawsuits that accused rivals of similar inaction, Verizon Communications Inc., Verizon Services Corp., and Cellco Partnership (dba Verizon Wireless), stand accused of assisting subscribers to download and share pirated music, by not doing enough to stop them. The labels' complaint introduces Verizon as one of the largest ISPs in the country, one that "knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates." Knowledge of infringement, the labels say, was established at Verizon over a period of several years during which it received "hundreds of thousands" of copyright notices, referencing instances of infringement allegedly carried out by its subscribers. The complaint cites Verizon subscribers' persistent use of BitTorrent networks to download and share pirated music, with Verizon allegedly failing to curtail their activity. "While Verizon is famous for its 'Can you hear me now?' advertising campaign, it has intentionally chosen not to listen to complaints from copyright owners. Instead of taking action in response to those infringement notices as the law requires, Verizon ignored Plaintiffs' notices and buried its head in the sand," the labels write. "Undeterred, infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiffs' notices continued to use Verizon's services to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights with impunity. Meanwhile, Verizon continued to provide its high-speed service to thousands of known repeat infringers so it could continue to collect millions of dollars from them." Through this lawsuit, which references piracy of songs recorded by artists including The Rolling Stones, Ariana Grande, Bob Dylan, Bruno Mars, Elvis Presley, Dua Lipa, Drake, and others, the labels suggest that Verizon will have no choice but to hear them now. [...] Attached to the complaint, Exhibit A contains a non-exhaustive list of the plaintiffs' copyright works allegedly infringed by Verizon's subscribers. The document is over 400 pages long, with each track listed representing potential liability for Verizon as a willful, intentional, and purposeful contributory infringer, the complaint notes. This inevitably leads to claims based on maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per copyrighted work infringed on Count I (contributory infringement). The statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work is also applied to Count II (vicarious infringement), based on the labels' claim that Verizon derived a direct financial benefit from the direct infringements of its subscribers. The labels' complaint can be found here (PDF).

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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni plans to revive Italy's nuclear energy sector, focusing on small modular reactors to be operational within a decade. He said that nuclear energy could constitute at least 11% of the country's electricity mix by 2050. Semafor reports: Italy's energy minister told the Financial Times that the government would introduce legislation to support investment in small modular reactors, which could be operational within 10 years. [...] In Italy, concerns about energy security since Russia's invasion of Ukraine have pushed the government to reconsider nuclear power, Bloomberg wrote. Energy minister Pichetto Fratin told the Financial Times he was confident that Italians' historic "aversion" could be overcome, as nuclear technology now has "different levels of safety and benefits families and businesses." In Italy, safety is also top of mind: The Chernobyl tragedy of 1986 was the trigger for it to cease nuclear production in the first place, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster reignited those concerns. As of April, only 51% of Italians approved of nuclear power, according to polls shared by Il Sole 24 Ore. The plan to introduce small modular reactors in Italy could add to the country's history of failure in nuclear energy, a former Italian lawmaker and researcher argued in Italian outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, writing that these reactors are expensive and produce too little energy to justify an investment in them.They could also become obsolete within the next decade, the timeline for the government to introduce them, Italian outlet Domani added, and be overtaken by nuclear fusion reactors, which are more efficient and have "virtually no environmental impact." Italy's main oil company, Eni, has signed a deal with MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion System, with the goal of providing the first operational nuclear fusion plant by 2030.

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Microsoft has quietly announced the first details of its new "SpreadsheetLLM," claiming it has the "potential to transform spreadsheet data management and analysis, paving the way for more intelligent and efficient user interactions." You can read more details about the model in a pre-print paper available here. Jasper Hamill reports via The Stack: One of the problems with using LLMs in spreadsheets is that they get bogged down by too many tokens (basic units of information the model processes). To tackle this, Microsoft developed SheetCompressor, an "innovative encoding framework that compresses spreadsheets effectively for LLMs." "It significantly improves performance in spreadsheet table detection tasks, outperforming the vanilla approach by 25.6% in GPT4's in-context learning setting," Microsoft added. The model is made of three modules: structural-anchor-based compression, inverse index translation, and data-format-aware aggregation. The first of these modules involves placing "structural anchors" throughout the spreadsheet to help the LLM understand what's going on better. It then removes "distant, homogeneous rows and columns" to produce a condensed "skeleton" version of the table. Index translation addresses the challenge caused by spreadsheets with numerous empty cells and repetitive values, which use up too many tokens. "To improve efficiency, we depart from traditional row-by-row and column-by-column serialization and employ a lossless inverted index translation in JSON format," Microsoft wrote. "This method creates a dictionary that indexes non-empty cell texts and merges addresses with identical text, optimizing token usage while preserving data integrity." [...] After conducting a "comprehensive evaluation of our method on a variety of LLMs" Microsoft found that SheetCompressor significantly reduces token usage for spreadsheet encoding by 96%. Moreover, SpreadsheetLLM shows "exceptional performance in spreadsheet table detection," which is the "foundational task of spreadsheet understanding." The new LLM builds on the Chain of Thought methodology to introduce a framework called "Chain of Spreadsheet" (CoS), which can "decompose" spreadsheet reasoning into a table detection-match-reasoning pipeline.

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OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans. OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopardizing Europe's position in the global digital landscape. The letter reads, in part: NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations. Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to: - "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe"; - "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life"; - "A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons." In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: During an interview with Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his belief that so-called large language model (LLM) "scaling laws" will continue to drive AI progress, despite some skepticism in the field that progress has leveled out. Scott played a key role in forging a $13 billion technology-sharing deal between Microsoft and OpenAI. "Despite what other people think, we're not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up," Scott said. "And I try to help people understand there is an exponential here, and the unfortunate thing is you only get to sample it every couple of years because it just takes a while to build supercomputers and then train models on top of them." LLM scaling laws refer to patterns explored by OpenAI researchers in 2020 showing that the performance of language models tends to improve predictably as the models get larger (more parameters), are trained on more data, and have access to more computational power (compute). The laws suggest that simply scaling up model size and training data can lead to significant improvements in AI capabilities without necessarily requiring fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs. Since then, other researchers have challenged the idea of persisting scaling laws over time, but the concept is still a cornerstone of OpenAI's AI development philosophy. Scott's comments can be found around the 46-minute mark.

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UPDATE 7/15/24 3:05 p.m. EDT: In a press release published this afternoon, the FBI said they "successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks' phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices." The bureau added that it has completed its search of the subject's residence and vehicle, and "conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses." Original Story: July 15, 16:45 UTC: Investigators are working to break into the phone of the man who shot at former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday. The Verge: The FBI said in a statement that it had obtained the shooter's phone "for examination." Officials told reporters in a conference call on Sunday, as reported by The New York Times, that agents in Pennsylvania were unable to break into the phone. It's been shipped to the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI hopes to get past the phone's password protection, the Times reported. Investigators are still looking for insight into the motives of Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who they identified as the gunman. Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, told the Times and other outlets that the agency has access to some of Crooks' text messages, but they haven't shed much light on his beliefs.

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On July 12, 1999, the last Morse code message was sent from a Bay Area radio station, marking the end of an era. Every July 12, the Historic KPH Maritime Radio Receiving Station in Point Reyes revives the golden age of maritime radio, with volunteers exchanging Morse code messages worldwide. The Mercury News reports: Friday's "Night of Nights" event, which commemorates the long-gone stations and the skilled radiotelegraph operators who linked ships to shore, starts at 5:01 p.m. -- precisely one minute after the 1999 message ended. Operators will keep working until 11 p.m. "We're carrying on," said historical society president Richard Dillman, 80, who learned Morse code as a boy. "Morse code is not dead." The event, based at KPH's stations that are now part of the wild and windswept Point Reyes National Seashore, northwest of San Francisco, is not open to the public. But amateur radio operators around the world can participate by sending messages and exchanging greetings. The operating frequencies of the historical society's amateur station, under the call sign K6KPH, are 3550, 7050, 14050, 18097.5 and 21050. Radiogrammed messages arrive from as far away as New Zealand and Europe, rich with memories of rewarding careers or poignant tributes to lost loved ones. "Dear dad, we love you and we miss you so much," said one. The station uses the original historic KPH transmitters, receivers, antennas and other equipment, carefully repaired and restored by the society's experts. [...] All over the Pacific coast, stations closed. KPH's receiving headquarters -- an Art Deco cube built between 1929 and 1931, its entrance framed by a tunnel of cypress trees -- was acquired by the National Park Service in 1999. Its transmission station is located on a windswept bluff in Bolinas. [Historical society president Richard Dillman] and friend Tom Horsfall resolved to repair, restore and operate KPH as a way to honor the men and women who for 100 years had served ships in the North Pacific and Indian Ocean. "It was a brotherhood," said Dillman. "There was camaraderie -- a love of Morse code and the ability to do a job well." [...] They pitched their ambitious plan to the National Park Service. "At first, I was skeptical about their proposal," said Don Neubacher, the Seashore's former Superintendent. "But over time, I realized the Maritime Radio Historical Society, led by Richard Dillman, was a gift for the National Park Service." "I was impressed by the overwhelming knowledge of early wireless and ship-to-shore communication," he said, "and their lifelong commitment to saving this critical piece of Point Reyes history." With a dozen society volunteers from all over the Bay Area -- all over the age of 60, self-described "radio squirrels" -- they went to work. They meet on Saturday mornings over coffee and breakfast "services" dubbed "The Church of the Continuous Wave," sometimes ogling over radio schematics. Then, for a few hours, they broadcast news and weather.

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Last week, Senior Advisor on AI Governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, Kevin Bankston, took to X to report that Google's Gemini AI was caught summarizing his private tax return on Google Drive without his permission. "Despite attempts to disable the feature, Bankston found that Gemini's continued to operate in Google Drive, raising questions about Google's handling of user data and privacy settings," writes TechRadar's Craig Hale. From the report: After failing to find the right controls to disable Gemini's integration, the Advisor asked Google's ChatGPT-rivalling AI chatbot on two occasions to pinpoint the settings. A second, more detailed response still brought no joy: "Gemini is *not* in Apps and services on my dashboard (1st option), and I didn't have a profile pic in the upper right of the Gemini page (2nd)." With help from another X user, Bankston found the control, which was already disabled, highlighting either a malfunctioning control or indicating that further settings are hidden elsewhere. However, previous Google documentation has confirmed that the company will not use Google Workspace data to train or improve its generative AI services or to feed targeted ads. Bankston theorizes that his previous participation in Google Workspace Labs might have influenced Gemini's behavior. The Gemini side panel in Google Drive for PDFs can be closed if a user no longer wishes to access generative AI summaries.

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