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Sony Won't Phase Out Blu-ray Movie and Game Discs

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 05:26
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sony plans to eventually stop producing consumer-grade recordable Blu-ray discs, but commercial products such as game and film Blu-rays will still be produced. Sony Group will lay off 250 employees at a division that produces recordable media discs, and start winding down the production of specific Blu-ray products, sources have told Japanese newspaper Mainichi. However, contrary to recent reports, this decision will not affect Blu-ray discs that contain games, TV shows, or films. The staff reduction is happening to the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which produces recordable disc formats like CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R and archival discs for the Japanese region. Standard Blu-rays, 4K UHD discs, and PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Blu-ray discs--which are made at Sony's separate DADC (Digital Audio Disc Corporation) facility--will still be manufactured, shipped, and sold worldwide. In other words, physical media will not go anywhere anytime soon, despite the prevalence and growth of streaming and/or digital media.

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Nintendo Has No Plans to Use Generative AI in Its Games, Company President Says

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 04:44
Mario and Luigi aren't jumping on the AI train. From a report: In a recent Q&A with investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa addressed the issue. Though he said generative AI can be creative, Furukawa told his audience that the company isn't planning to use the technology in its games. "In the game industry, AI-like technology has long been used to control enemy character movements, so game development and AI technology have always been closely related," Furukawa said, according to TweakTown. "Generative AI, which has been a hot topic in recent years, can be more creative, but we also recognize that it has issues with intellectual property rights. "We have decades of know-how in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers, and while we remain flexible in responding to technological developments, we hope to continue to deliver value that is unique to us and cannot be achieved through technology alone."

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Twilio Says Hackers Identified Cell Phone Numbers of Two-Factor App Authy Users

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 04:01
Twilio, a major U.S. messaging company, has confirmed that unauthorized actors had identified phone numbers associated with users of its Authy two-factor authentication app. The disclosure comes after a hacker claimed last week to have obtained 33 million phone numbers from Twilio. A Twilio spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company had detected an unauthenticated endpoint allowing access to Authy account data, including phone numbers. The endpoint has since been secured.

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Amazon Discontinues Astro for Business Robot Security Guard To Focus on Astro Home Robot

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 03:22
Astro is leaving its job to spend more time with family. From a report: Amazon informed customers and employees Wednesday morning that it plans to discontinue its Astro for Business program, less than a year after launching the robot security guard for small- and medium-sized businesses. The decision will help the company focus on its home version of Astro, according to an internal email. Astro for Business robots will stop working Sept. 25, the company said in a separate email to customers, encouraging them to recycle the devices. Businesses will receive full refunds for the original cost of the device, plus a $300 credit "to help support a replacement solution for your workplace," the email said. They will also receive refunds for unused, pre-paid Astro Secure subscription fees. Announced in November 2023, the business version of Amazon's rolling robot used an HD periscope and night vision technology to autonomously patrol and map up to 5,000 square feet of space. It followed preprogrammed routes and routines, and could be controlled manually and remotely via the Amazon Astro app.

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Supreme Court Ruling Will Likely Cause Cyber Regulation Chaos

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 02:45
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US Supreme Court has issued a decision that could upend all federal cybersecurity regulations, moving ultimate regulatory approval to the courts and away from regulatory agencies. A host of likely lawsuits could gut the Biden administration's spate of cyber incident reporting requirements and other recent cyber regulatory actions. [...] While the Court's decision has the potential to weaken or substantially alter all federal agency cybersecurity requirements ever adopted, a series of cyber regulatory initiatives implemented over the past four years could become the particular focus of legal challenges. Parties who previously objected to these initiatives but were possibly reluctant to fight due to the Chevron deference will likely be encouraged to challenge these regulations. Although all existing regulations are still in effect, the upshot for CISOs is almost certainly some degree of uncertainty as the legal challenges get underway. A host of conflicting decisions across the various judicial circuits in the US could lead to confusion in compliance programs until the smoke clears. CISOs should expect some court cases to water down or eliminate many existing cybersecurity regulatory requirements. A host of recently adopted cyber regulations will likely be challenged following the Court's ruling, but some recent regulations stand out as leading candidates for litigation. Among these are:

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Japan Wins War On Floppy Disks

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 02:04
Speaking of Japan, joshuark shares a report: Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernise the bureaucracy. By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling. "We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" Digital Minister Taro Kono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.

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Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 01:26
Tech companies scouring the country for electricity supplies have zeroed in on a key target: America's nuclear-power plants. From a report: The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear-power plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity to new data centers needed to meet the demands of an artificial-intelligence boom. Among them, Amazon Web Services is nearing a deal for electricity supplied directly from a nuclear plant on the East Coast with Constellation Energy, the largest owner of U.S. nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the matter. In a separate deal in March, the Amazon subsidiary purchased a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania for $650 million. The discussions have the potential to remove stable power generation from the grid while reliability concerns are rising across much of the U.S. and new kinds of electricity users -- including AI, manufacturing and transportation -- are significantly increasing the demand for electricity in pockets of the country. Nuclear-powered data centers would match the grid's highest-reliability workhorse with a wealthy customer that wants 24-7 carbon-free power, likely speeding the addition of data centers needed in the global AI race. But instead of adding new green energy to meet their soaring power needs, tech companies would be effectively diverting existing electricity resources. That could raise prices for other customers and hold back emission-cutting goals.

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Proton Launches Privacy-Focused Alternative To Google Docs

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 00:40
Proton, the privacy-focused technology company, has launched Proton Docs, a new document editing tool that bears a striking resemblance to Google Docs. The service, launched as part of Proton Drive, offers features such as rich text editing, real-time collaboration, and multimedia support.

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High School AP CS A Exam Takers Struggled Again With Java Array Question

Slashdot - 4 July, 2024 - 00:00
theodp writes: As with last year," tweeted College Board's AP Program Chief Trevor Packer, "the most challenging free-response question on this year's AP Computer Science A exam was Q4 on 2D Array." While it takes six pages of the AP CS A exam document [PDF] to ask question 4 (of 4), the ask of students essentially boils down to using Java to move from the current location in a 2-D grid to either immediately below or to the right of that location based on which neighbor contains the lesser value, and adding the value at that location to a total (suggested Java solution, alternative Excel VBA solution). Much like rules of the children's game Pop-O-Matic Trouble, moves are subject to the constraint that you cannot move to the right or ahead if it takes you to an invalid position (beyond the grid dimensions). Ironically, many of the AP CS A students who struggled with the grid coding problem were likely exposed by their schools from kindergarten on to more than a decade's worth of annual Hour of Code tutorials that focused on the concepts of using code to move about in 2-D grids. The move-up-down-left-right tutorials promoted by schools came from tech-backed nonprofit Code.org and its tech giant partners and have been taught over the years by the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and President Obama, as well as characters from Star Wars, Disney Princess movies, and Microsoft Minecraft. The news of American high school students struggling again with fairly straightforward coding problems after a year-long course of instruction comes not only as tech companies and tech-tied nonprofits lobby state lawmakers to pass bills making CS a high school graduation requirement in the US, but also as a new report from King's College urges lawmakers and educators to address a stark decline in the number of UK students studying computing at secondary school, which is blamed on the replacement of more approachable ICT (Information and Communications Technology) courses with more rigorous computer science courses in 2013 (a switch pushed by Google and Microsoft), which it notes students have perceived as too difficult and avoided taking.

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Steve Ballmer Surpasses Bill Gates In Wealth

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 23:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, known for his enthusiastic energy and salesmanship, is now richer than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. This is the first time Ballmer has surpassed Bill Gates in wealth. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Steve Ballmer is now the sixth-richest person in the world with a $157.2 billion net worth. Steve Ballmer surpassed Bill Gates for two reasons: - Ninety percent of Steve Ballmer's wealth is in Microsoft stock. Ballmer remains the single largest individual shareholder of Microsoft stock. Microsoft's stock continues its strong growth momentum and is up 21% this year alone. - Bill Gates diversified his portfolio through Cascade Investment. Therefore, his other investments did not yield the returns that Microsoft stock would have provided. "[T]he Bloomberg Billionaires Index only considers an individual's current personal wealth," notes the report. It doesn't take into consideration each of the executives' various charitable donations, such as Gates' $60 billion donation to the Gates Foundation or Ballmer's million-dollar donations to major universities in the U.S.

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Two of the German Military's New Spy Satellites Appear To Have Failed In Orbit

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 20:00
Ars Technica's Eric Berger writes: On the day before Christmas last year, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from California and put two spy satellites into low-Earth orbit for the armed forces of Germany, which are collectively called the Bundeswehr. Initially, the mission appeared successful. The German satellite manufacturer, OHB, declared that the two satellites were "safely in orbit." The addition of the two SARah satellites completed a next-generation constellation of three reconnaissance satellites, the company said. However, six months later, the two satellites have yet to become operational. According to the German publication Der Spiegel, the antennas on the satellites cannot be unfolded. Engineers with OHB have tried to resolve the issue by resetting the flight software, performing maneuvers to vibrate or shake the antennas loose, and more to no avail. As a result, last week, German lawmakers were informed that the two new satellites will probably not go into operation as planned. The three-satellite constellation known as SARah -- the SAR is a reference to the synthetic aperture radar capability of the satellites -- was ordered in 2013 at a cost of $800 million. The first of the three satellites, SARah 1, launched in June 2022 on a Falcon 9 rocket. This satellite was built by Airbus in southern Germany, and it has since gone into operation without any problems. The two smaller satellites built by OHB, flying with passive synthetic aperture radar reflectors, were intended to complement the SARah 1 satellite, which carries an active phased-array radar antenna. [...] According to the Der Spiegel report, the Bundeswehr says the two SARah satellites built by OHB remain the property of the German company and would only be turned over to the military once they were operational. As a result, the military says OHB will be responsible for building two replacement satellites. Shockingly, the German publication says that its sources indicated OBH did not fully test the functionality and deployment of the satellite antennas on the ground. This could not be confirmed.

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Scientists Find Desert Moss 'That Can Survive On Mars'

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 17:00
Scientists in China have found a species of moss that is able to withstand Mars-like conditions. The species is called Syntrichia caninervis and it's found in regions including Antarctica and the Mojave desert. The Guardian reports: "The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonization using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions," the team write. [...] Writing in the journal The Innovation, researchers in China describe how the desert moss not only survived but rapidly recovered from almost complete dehydration. It was also able to regenerate under normal growth conditions after spending up to five years at -80C and up to 30 days at -196C, and after exposure to gamma rays, with doses of around 500Gy even promoting new growth. The team then created a set-up that had similar pressures, temperatures, gases and UV radiation to Mars. It found the moss survived in this Mars-like environment, and was able to regenerate under normal growth conditions, even after seven days of exposure. The team also noted plants that were dried before such exposure faired better. "Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space," the researchers write.

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Over 14 Million Servers May Be Vulnerable To OpenSSH's 'RegreSSHion' RCE Flaw

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 13:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Hold onto your SSH keys, folks! A critical vulnerability has just rocked OpenSSH, Linux's secure remote access foundation, causing seasoned sysadmins to break out in a cold sweat. Dubbed "regreSSHion" and tagged as CVE-2024-6387, this nasty bug allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on OpenSSH servers running on glibc-based Linux systems. We're not talking about some minor privilege escalation here -- this flaw hands over full root access on a silver platter. For those who've been around the Linux block a few times, this feels like deja vu. The vulnerability is a regression of CVE-2006-5051, a bug patched back in 2006. This old foe somehow snuck back into the code in October 2020 with OpenSSH 8.5p1. Thankfully, the Qualys Threat Research Unit uncovered this digital skeleton in OpenSSH's closet. Unfortunately, this vulnerability affects the default configuration and doesn't need any user interaction to exploit. In other words, it's a vulnerability that keeps security professionals up at night. It's hard to overstate the potential impact of this flaw. OpenSSH is the de facto standard for secure remote access and file transfer in Unix-like systems, including Linux and macOS. It's the Swiss Army knife of secure communication for sysadmins and developers worldwide. The good news is that not all Linux distributions have the vulnerable code. Old OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1 are vulnerable to this signal handler race condition unless they are patched for CVE-2006-5051 and CVE-2008-4109. Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable. The bad news is that the vulnerability resurfaced in OpenSSH 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1 due to the accidental removal of a critical component. Qualys has found over 14 million potentially vulnerable OpenSSH server internet instances. The company believes that approximately 700,000 of these external internet-facing instances are definitely vulnerable. A patch, OpenSSH 9.8/9.8p1 is now available. Many, but not all, Linux distributions have made it available. If you can get it, install it as soon as possible. If for whatever reason you're not able to install a patch, Vaughan-Nichols recommends you set LoginGraceTime to 0 in the sshd configuration file and use network-based controls to restrict SSH access, while also configuring firewalls and monitoring tools to detect and block exploit attempts.

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British Startup Nyobolt Demos 4-Minute Battery Charging For EVs

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 10:30
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN, written by Olesya Dmitracova: Nyobolt, based in Cambridge, has developed a new 35kWh lithium-ion battery that was charged from 10% to 80% in just over four and a half minutes in its first live demonstration last week. [...] Nyobolt's technology builds on a decade of research led by University of Cambridge battery scientist Clare Grey and Cambridge-educated Shivareddy, the company said. Key to its batteries' ability to be charged super-fast without a big impact on their longevity is a design that means they generate less heat. It also makes them safer as overheating can cause a lithium-ion battery to catch fire and explode. In addition, the materials used to make the batteries' anodes allow for a faster transfer of electrons. Nyobolt is currently in talks to sell its batteries to eight electric car manufacturers. At 35 kWh, the battery is much smaller than the 85 kWh in a more typical American electric vehicle (EV). Yet the technology may be used in larger battery packs in the future. Independent testing of Nyobolt's batteries by what it called a leading global manufacturer found that they can achieve over 4,000 fast-charge cycles, equivalent to 600,000 miles (965,600 kilometers), while retaining more than 80% of capacity, Nyobolt said in its Friday statement. William Kephart, an e-mobility specialist at consultancy P3 Group and a former engineer, said EV batteries of the kind Nyobolt has developed could "theoretically" be charged as fast as the firm is promising, but the challenge was manufacturing such batteries on an industrial scale. A crucial chemical element in Nyobolt's batteries is niobium but, as Kephart pointed out, last year only an estimated 83,000 tons (94,500 tons) was mined worldwide. Compare that with graphite, commonly used as anode material in lithium-ion batteries: an estimated 1.6 million tons (1.8 million tons) was produced in 2023. In addition, there are currently "a lot of unknowns" with the niobium battery technology, he told CNN. "The industry will work it out (but) it's not seen by the industry as a scalable technology just yet," he added.

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Brazil Data Regulator Bans Meta From Mining Data To Train AI Models

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 09:50
Brazil's national data protection authority ruled on Tuesday that Meta must stop using data originating in the country to train its artificial intelligence models. The Associated Press reports: Meta's updated privacy policy enables the company to feed people's public posts into its AI systems. That practice will not be permitted in Brazil, however. The decision stems from "the imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects," the agency said in the nation's official gazette. [...] Hye Jung Han, a Brazil-based researcher for the rights group, said in an email Tuesday that the regulator's action "helps to protect children from worrying that their personal data, shared with friends and family on Meta's platforms, might be used to inflict harm back on them in ways that are impossible to anticipate or guard against." But the decision regarding Meta will "very likely" encourage other companies to refrain from being transparent in the use of data in the future, said Ronaldo Lemos, of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro, a think-tank. "Meta was severely punished for being the only one among the Big Tech companies to clearly and in advance notify in its privacy policy that it would use data from its platforms to train artificial intelligence," he said. Compliance must be demonstrated by the company within five working days from the notification of the decision, and the agency established a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,820) for failure to do so. In a statement, Meta said the company is "disappointed" by the decision and insists its method "complies with privacy laws and regulations in Brazil." "This is a step backwards for innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Brazil," a spokesperson for the company added.

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Phil Schiller To Join OpenAI Board In 'Observer' Role Following Apple's ChatGPT Deal

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 09:10
As reported by Bloomberg, Apple will get an "observer role" on OpenAI's board of directors as part of its partnership to integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18. That role will reportedly be filled by Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller. 9to5Mac reports: Apple having an "observer role" on the OpenAI board matches the role of Microsoft. Schiller will be able to observe and attend board meetings, but will not have any voting power: "The board observer role will put Apple on par with Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer and its main AI technology provider. The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote or exercise other director powers. Observers, however, do gain insights into how decisions are made at the company." The arrangement will take effect later this year, according to Bloomberg. Schiller "hasn't yet attended any meetings" of the OpenAI board and "details of the situation could still change." Schiller served as Apple's long-time marketing chief before transitioning to an Apple Fellow role in 2020. In this role, Schiller continues to lead the App Store and Apple events and reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Schiller is also leading Apple's efforts to defend the App Store against antitrust allegations around the world.

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Google Emissions Jump Nearly 50% Over Five Years As AI Use Surges

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 08:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Google's greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to "net zero" by 2030 in doubt. The Silicon Valley company's pollution amounted to 14.3 million tons of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday. Google said the jump highlighted "the challenge of reducing emissions" at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that "the future environmental impact of AI" was "complex and difficult to predict." Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the "extremely ambitious" nature of the goal. "We do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal," said Brandt. She added that Google was "working very hard" on reducing its emissions, including by signing deals for clean energy. There was also a "tremendous opportunity for climate solutions that are enabled by AI," said Brandt. [...] In Tuesday's report, Google said its 2023 energy-related emissions -- which come primarily from data center electricity consumption -- rose 37 percent year on year, and overall represented a quarter of its total greenhouse gas emissions. Google's supply chain emissions -- its largest chunk, representing 75 percent of its total emissions -- also rose 8 percent. Google said they would "continue to rise in the near term" as a result in part of the build-out of the infrastructure needed to run AI systems. Google has pledged to achieve net zero across its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to run on carbon-free energy during every hour of every day within each grid it operates by the same date. However, the company warned in Tuesday's report that the "termination" of some clean energy projects during 2023 had pushed down the amount of renewables it had access to. Meanwhile, the company's data centre electricity consumption had "outpaced" Google's ability to bring more clean power projects online in the US and Asia-Pacific regions. Google's data centre electricity consumption increased 17 percent in 2023, and amounted to approximately 7-10 percent of global data center electricity consumption, the company estimated.Its data centers also consumed 17 percent more water in 2023 than during the previous year, Google said.

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Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect Co-Creator, Dies At 76

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 07:50
Longtime Slashdot reader regoli shares an obituary from the Wall Street Journal: When Alan Ashton was a computer-science professor at Brigham Young University in the mid-1970s, the director of the school's marching band knocked on his door and said he wanted to use a computer to choreograph the band's halftime shows. Ashton was easily persuaded; he was a trumpet player whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Utah was "Electronics, music and computers." Bruce Bastian, the graduate student who was working as BYU's marching-band director, turned out to be a quick learner. "He was very conscientious, very thorough," Ashton said in an interview, "and just absolutely brilliant." Within a few years, the two were at work on a program that would turn them into two of the richest people in the nation, founders of the company that made WordPerfect, the dominant word-processing software in the 1980s and early '90s and one of the first pieces of software many Americans bought when they brought home their first PCs. But behind the hundreds of millions of dollars and blockbuster success, Bastian's personal life, he later said, was in "free fall." Between the time he and Ashton released what would later be known as WordPerfect to the public in 1980 and when they sold the company for $1.4 billion in 1994, Bastian told his wife, four sons and his Mormon community that he was gay and leaving both his marriage and the church. When he died, June 16, at the age of 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis, he had been living a different life: A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Bastian was married to a man, and had found a way to maintain relationships with his family, who remained dedicated members of the church that rejected his sexual orientation. "I kind of have three parts of my life," he said in 2010 during one of several extensive interviews he gave to the Mormon Stories podcast, "the pre-WordPerfect life, the WordPerfect years, and now the LGBT years." Other publications remembering Bruce Bastian include: The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, University of Utah, and Human Rights Campaign.

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Supreme Court to Hear Case on Texas Law Restricting Access to Porn

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 07:10
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to a Texas law requiring age verification to access online pornography, which opponents argue violates the First Amendment by discouraging adults from viewing such material due to privacy concerns. A federal judge blocked the law citing its chilling effect on free speech, but a divided appeals court upheld it, emphasizing the government's interest in protecting minors; the case will now be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The Texas bill in question, HB 1181, was passed into law last June. The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear a challenge to a Texas law that seeks to limit minors' access to pornography on the internet by requiring age verification measures like the submission of government-issued IDs. A trade group, companies that produce sexual materials and a performer challenged the law, saying that it violates the First Amendment right of adults. The law does not allow companies to retain information their users submit. But the challengers said adults would be wary of supplying personal information for fear of identity theft, tracking and extortion. [...] In urging the Supreme Court to leave the law in place while it considers whether to hear the case, Ken Paxton, Texas' attorney general, said pornography available on the internet is "orders of magnitude more graphic, violent and degrading than any so-called 'girlie' magazine of yesteryear." He added: "This statute does not prohibit the performance, production or even sale of pornography but, more modestly, simply requires the pornography industry that make billions of dollars from peddling smut to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that those who access the material are adults. There is nothing unconstitutional about it."

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AI Trains On Kids' Photos Even When Parents Use Strict Privacy Settings

Slashdot - 3 July, 2024 - 06:33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators -- even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings. Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia's states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms. These photos are linked in the dataset "without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families." They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han's report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information about children, including their names and locations where photos were shot, making it easy to track down children whose images might not otherwise be discoverable online. That puts children in danger of privacy and safety risks, Han said, and some parents thinking they've protected their kids' privacy online may not realize that these risks exist. From a single link to one photo that showed "two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural," Han could trace "both children's full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia." And perhaps most disturbingly, "information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet" -- suggesting that families were particularly cautious in shielding these boys' identities online. Stricter privacy settings were used in another image that Han found linked in the dataset. The photo showed "a close-up of two boys making funny faces, captured from a video posted on YouTube of teenagers celebrating" during the week after their final exams, Han reported. Whoever posted that YouTube video adjusted privacy settings so that it would be "unlisted" and would not appear in searches. Only someone with a link to the video was supposed to have access, but that didn't stop Common Crawl from archiving the image, nor did YouTube policies prohibiting AI scraping or harvesting of identifying information. Reached for comment, YouTube's spokesperson, Jack Malon, told Ars that YouTube has "been clear that the unauthorized scraping of YouTube content is a violation of our Terms of Service, and we continue to take action against this type of abuse." But Han worries that even if YouTube did join efforts to remove images of children from the dataset, the damage has been done, since AI tools have already trained on them. That's why -- even more than parents need tech companies to up their game blocking AI training -- kids need regulators to intervene and stop training before it happens, Han's report said. Han's report comes a month before Australia is expected to release a reformed draft of the country's Privacy Act. Those reforms include a draft of Australia's first child data protection law, known as the Children's Online Privacy Code, but Han told Ars that even people involved in long-running discussions about reforms aren't "actually sure how much the government is going to announce in August." "Children in Australia are waiting with bated breath to see if the government will adopt protections for them," Han said, emphasizing in her report that "children should not have to live in fear that their photos might be stolen and weaponized against them."

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