Microsoft Won’t Label Fake News As False In An Attempt To Avoid ‘Censorship’ Cries

In an interview with Bloomberg, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company won’t label social media posts that appear to be false in order to avoid the appearance that the company is trying to censor speech online. From the report: “I don’t think that people want governments to tell them what’s true or false,” Smith said when asked about Microsoft’s role in defining disinformation. “And I don’t think they’re really interested in having tech companies tell them either.” The comments are Smith’s strongest indication yet that Microsoft is taking a unique path to tracking and disrupting digital propaganda efforts.

Smith said Microsoft wanted to provide the public with more information about who is speaking, what they are saying and allow them to come to their own judgment about whether content was true. “We have to be very thoughtful and careful because — and this is also true of every democratic government — fundamentally, people quite rightly want to make up their own mind and they should,” he said. “Our whole approach needs to be to provide people with more information, not less and we cannot trip over and use what others might consider censorship as a tactic.”

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Charter Must Pay $1.1 Billion After Cable Technician Murdered Customer

Charter Communications must pay over $1.1 billion to the estate and family of an 83-year-old woman murdered in her home by a Spectrum cable technician, a Dallas County Court judge ruled yesterday. Ars Technica reports: A jury in the same court previously ordered Charter to pay $7 billion in punitive damages and $337.5 million in compensatory damages. Judge Juan Renteria lowered the award in a ruling issued yesterday. The damages are split among the estate and four adult children of murder victim Betty Thomas. Renteria did not change the compensatory damages but lowered the punitive damages awarded to the family to $750 million. Pre-judgment interest on the damages pushes Charter’s total liability to over $1.1 billion.

It isn’t surprising that the judge lowered the payout, in which the jury decided punitive damages should be over 20 times higher than what Charter is liable for in compensatory damages. A nine-to-one ratio is often used as a maximum because of a 2003 US Supreme Court ruling that said: “In practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process.” Former Spectrum technician Roy Holden pleaded guilty to the 2019 murder of customer Betty Thomas and was sentenced to life in prison in April 2021. Charter was accused of hiring Holden without verifying his employment history and ignoring a series of red flags about his behavior, which included stealing credit cards and checks from elderly female customers.

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Shutterstock Is Removing AI-Generated Images

Shutterstock appears to be removing images generated by AI systems like DALL-E and Midjourney. Motherboard reports: On Shutterstock, searches for images tagged “Midjourney” yielded several photos with the AI tool’s unmistakable aesthetic, with many having high popularity scores and marked as “frequently used.” But late Monday, the results for “Midjourney” seem to have been reduced, leaving mainly stock photos of the tool’s logo. Other images use tags like “AI generated” — one image, for example, is an illustration of a futuristic building with an image description reading “Ai generated illustration of futuristic Art Deco city, vintage image, retro poster.” The image is part of a collection the artist titled “Midjourney,” which has since been removed from the site. Other images marked “AI generated,” like this burning medieval castle, seem to remain up on the site.

As Ars Technica notes, neither Shutterstock nor Getty Images explicitly prohibits AI-generated images in their terms of service, and Shutterstock users typically make around 15 to 40 percent of what the company makes when it sells an image. Some creators have not taken kindly to this trend, pointing out that these systems use massive datasets of images scraped from the web. […] In other words, the generated works are the result of an algorithmic process which mines original art from the internet without credit or compensation to the original artists. Others have worried about the impacts on independent artists who work for commissions, since the ability for anyone to create custom generated artwork potentially means lost revenue.

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Denmark and Germany Now Building the World’s Longest Immersed Tunnel

Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, the world’s longest immersed tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times between the two countries when it opens in 2029. CNN Travel reports: After more than a decade of planning, construction started on the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel in 2020 and in the months since a temporary harbor has been completed on the Danish side. It will host the factory that will soon build the 89 massive concrete sections that will make up the tunnel. “The expectation is that the first production line will be ready around the end of the year, or beginning of next year,” said Henrik Vincentsen, CEO of Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. “By the beginning of 2024 we have to be ready to immerse the first tunnel element.”

The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers (11.1 miles) long, is one of Europe’s largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over 7 billion euros ($7.1 billion). […] It will be built across the Fehmarn Belt, a strait between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Rodby and Puttgarden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just seven minutes by train and 10 minutes by car. The tunnel, whose official name is Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, will also be the longest combined road and rail tunnel anywhere in the world. It will comprise two double-lane motorways — separated by a service passageway — and two electrified rail tracks. “Today, if you were to take a train trip from Copenhagen to Hamburg, it would take you around four and a half hours,” says Jens Ole Kaslund, technical director at Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. “When the tunnel will be completed, the same journey will take two and a half hours.”

“Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, but in the future it will be better to just take the train,” he adds. The same trip by car will be around an hour faster than today, taking into account time saved by not lining up for the ferry.

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NYC to Offer Free Broadband to 300,000 Public Housing Residents

New York City is partnering with Charter and Altice to provide free high-speed internet and basic cable TV service to about 300,000 residents of public housing. Bloomberg reports: Called “Big Apple Connect,” the program aims to bridge the digital divide between wealthier residents and lower-income people who lack the tools necessary for remote learning, access to health care and job opportunities, city officials said. An estimated 30% to 40% of people who live in buildings run by the New York City Housing Authority lack broadband, according to the cable providers. The city plans to have the service available in more than 200 NYCHA buildings by the end of 2023.

The program differs from a previous short-term promotion by Altice’s Optimum and Charter’s Spectrum that gave New York City students free internet service after the pandemic hit. Some parents said they were duped into signing up for paid subscriptions after the promotion ended. Under a three-year agreement with the providers, New York will pick up the cost at about $30 per household. The city is in talks with a third major cable TV carrier in the city, Verizon, to join the program. NYCHA residents enrolled in Big Apple Connect will still be able to use the federal Affordable Connectivity Program benefit to save money on their cell phone bills and provide discount of up to $30 per month toward internet and cellular data service, city officials said.

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Children May Be Losing the Equivalent of One Night’s Sleep a Week From Social Media Use, Study Suggests

Children under 12 may be losing the equivalent of one night’s sleep every week due to excessive social media use, a new study suggests. Insider reports: Almost 70% of the 60 children under 12 surveyed by De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, said they used social media for four hours a day or more. Two thirds said they used social media apps in the two hours before going to bed. The study also found that 12.5% of the children surveyed were waking up in the night to check their notifications.

Psychology lecturer John Shaw, who headed up the study, said children were supposed to sleep for between nine to 11 hours a night, per NHS guidelines, but those surveyed reported sleeping an average of 8.7 hours nightly. He said: “The fear of missing out, which is driven by social media, is directly affecting their sleep. They want to know what their friends are doing, and if you’re not online when something is happening, it means you’re not taking part in it. “And it can be a feedback loop. If you are anxious you are more likely to be on social media, you are more anxious as a result of that. And you’re looking at something, that’s stimulating and delaying sleep.” “TikTok had the most engagement from the children, with 90% of those surveyed saying they used the app,” notes Insider. “Snapchat was used by 84%, while just over half those surveyed said they used Instagram.”

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When AI Asks Dumb Questions, It Gets Smart Fast

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh — and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design programs that do everything from diagnose disease to direct robots or other devices around homes on their own.

It’s important to think about how AI presents itself, says Kurt Gray, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied human-AI interaction but was not involved in the work. “In this case, you want it to be kind of like a kid, right?” he says. Otherwise, people might think you’re a troll for asking seemingly ridiculous questions. The team “rewarded” its AI for writing intelligible questions: When people actually responded to a query, the system received feedback telling it to adjust its inner workings so as to behave similarly in the future. Over time, the AI implicitly picked up lessons in language and social norms, honing its ability to ask questions that were sensical and easily answerable.

The new AI has several components, some of them neural networks, complex mathematical functions inspired by the brain’s architecture. “There are many moving pieces […] that all need to play together,” Krishna says. One component selected an image on Instagram — say a sunset — and a second asked a question about that image — for example, “Is this photo taken at night?” Additional components extracted facts from reader responses and learned about images from them. Across 8 months and more than 200,000 questions on Instagram, the system’s accuracy at answering questions similar to those it had posed increased 118%, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A comparison system that posted questions on Instagram but was not explicitly trained to maximize response rates improved its accuracy only 72%, in part because people more frequently ignored it. The main innovation, Jaques says, was rewarding the system for getting humans to respond, “which is not that crazy from a technical perspective, but very important from a research-direction perspective.” She’s also impressed by the large-scale, real-world deployment on Instagram.

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GPS Jammers Are Being Used to Hijack Trucks and Down Drones

The world’s freight-carrying trucks and ships use GPS-based satellite tracking and navigation systems, reports ZDNet. But “Criminals are turning to cheap GPS jamming devices to ransack the cargo on roads and at sea, a problem that’s getting worse….”
Jammers work by overpowering GPS signals by emitting a signal at the same frequency, just a bit more powerful than the original. The typical jammers used for cargo hijackings are able to jam frequencies from up to 5 miles away rendering GPS tracking and security apparatuses, such as those used by trucking syndicates, totally useless. In Mexico, jammers are used in some 85% of cargo truck thefts. Statistics are harder to come by in the United States, but there can be little doubt the devices are prevalent and widely used. Russia is currently availing itself of the technology to jam commercial planes in Ukraine.

As we’ve covered, the proliferating commercial drone sector is also prey to attack…. During a light show in Hong Kong in 2018, a jamming device caused 46 drones to fall out of the sky, raising public awareness of the issue.
While the problem is getting worse, the article also notes that companies are developing anti-jamming solutions for drone receivers, “providing protection and increasing the resiliency of GPS devices against jamming attacks.

“By identifying and preventing instances of jamming, fleet operators are able to prevent cargo theft.”

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Refreezing Earth’s Poles: Feasible and Cheap, New Study Finds

“The poles are warming several times faster than the global average,” Phys.org reminds us, “causing record smashing heatwaves that were reported earlier this year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Melting ice and collapsing glaciers at high latitudes would accelerate sea level rise around the planet.

“Fortunately, refreezing the poles by reducing incoming sunlight would be both feasible and remarkably cheap, according to new research published Friday in Environmental Research Communications.”

Scientists laid out a possible future program whereby high-flying jets would spray microscopic aerosol particles into the atmosphere at latitudes of 60 degrees north and south — roughly Anchorage and the southern tip of Patagonia. If injected at a height of 43,000 feet (above airliner cruising altitudes), these aerosols would slowly drift poleward, slightly shading the surface beneath. “There is widespread and sensible trepidation about deploying aerosols to cool the planet,” notes lead author Wake Smith, “but if the risk/benefit equation were to pay off anywhere, it would be at the poles.”

Particle injections would be performed seasonally in the long days of the local spring and early summer. The same fleet of jets could service both hemispheres, ferrying to the opposite pole with the change of seasons.
newly designed high-altitude tankers would prove much more efficient. A fleet of roughly 125 such tankers could loft a payload sufficient to cool the regions poleward of 60 degreesN/S by 2 degreesC per year, which would return them close to their pre-industrial average temperatures. Costs are estimated at $11 billion annually — less than one-third the cost of cooling the entire planet by the same 2 degreesC magnitude and a tiny fraction of the cost of reaching net zero emissions.
Smith calls the idea “game-changing” (while also warning it’s “not a substitute for decarbonization”).

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Do America’s Free-Speech Protections Protect Code – and Prevent Cryptocurrency Regulation?

The short answers are “yes” and “no.” America’s Constitution prohibits government intervention into public expression, reports the business-news radio show Marketplace, “protecting free speech and expression “through, for example…. writing, protesting and coding languages like JavaScript, HTML, Python and Perl.”

Specifically protecting code started with the 1995 case of cryptographer Daniel Bernstein, who challenged America’s “export controls” on encryption (which regulated it like a weapon). But they also spoke to technology lawyer Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, about the specific parameters of how America protects code as a form of expression:
Albert: I think that the reality was that the position that code was a form of expression is in fact supported by a long history of First Amendment law. And that it, you know, is very consistent with how we see the First Amendment interpreted across a variety of contexts…. [O]ne of the questions courts ask is whether a regulation or legislation or a government action is specifically targeting speech, or whether the restrictions on speech are incidental, but not the overall intention. And that’s actually one of the places you see kind of a lot of these difficulties around code as speech. The nature of many kinds of regulation may mean that they restrict code because of the things that particular forms of software code do in the world. But they weren’t specifically meant to restrict the expressive conduct. And courts end up then having to sort of go through a test that was originally developed in the context of someone burning a draft card to figure out — OK, is this regulation, is the burden that it has on this form of expressive speech so significant that we can’t regulate in this way? Or is this just not the focus, and the fact that there are some restrictions on speech as a result of the government attempting to regulate something else should not be the focus of the analysis?
Q: Congress and federal agencies as well as some states are looking to tighten regulations around cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. What role do you think the idea of code as speech will play in this environment moving forward?

Albert: The reality is that the First Amendment is not a total bar to regulation of speech. It requires the government meet a higher standard for regulating certain kinds of speech. That runs, to some extent, in conflict with how people imagine what “code is speech” does as sort of a total restriction on the regulation of software, of code, because it has expressive content. It just means that we treat code similarly to how we treat other forms of expression, and that the government can regulate them under certain circumstances.

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