Cox Communications Wins Order Overturning $1 Billion US Copyright Verdict

Internet service provider Cox Communications has been cleared of a $1 billion jury verdict in favor of several major record labels that had accused it of failing to curb user piracy. “The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, ruled on Tuesday that the amount of damages was not justified and that a federal district court should hold a new trial to determine the appropriate amount,” reports Reuters. From the report: A Virginia jury in 2019 found Cox, the largest unit of privately-owned Cox Enterprises, liable for its customers’ violations of over 10,000 copyrights belonging to labels including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group. The labels’ attorney Matt Oppenheim said that the appeals court “affirmed the jury’s verdict that Cox is a willful infringer,” and that “the evidence of Cox’s complete disregard for copyright law and copyright owners has not changed.” “A second jury will get to hear that same compelling evidence, and we fully expect it will render a significant verdict,” Oppenheim said.

More than 50 labels teamed up to sue Cox in 2018, in what was seen as a test of the obligations of internet service providers (ISPs) to thwart piracy.
The labels accused Cox of failing to address thousands of infringement notices, cut off access for repeat infringers, or take reasonable measures to deter pirates. Atlanta-based Cox had told the 4th Circuit that upholding the verdict would force ISPs to boot households or businesses based on “isolated and potentially inaccurate allegations,” or require intrusive oversight of customers’ internet usage. Other ISPs, including Charter Communications, Frontier Communications and Astound Broadband, formerly RCN, have also been sued by the record labels.

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Zuckerberg: Neural Wristband For AR/VR Input Will Ship ‘In the Next Few Years’

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that it’s working on a finger tracking neural wristband that will be ready to ship “in the next few years.” UploadVR reports: Appearing on the Morning Brew Daily talk show on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg said “we’re actually kind of close to having something here that we’re going to have in a product in the next few years.” […] An entirely different approach to finger tracking is to sense the neural electrical signals passing through your wrist to your fingers from your brain, using a technique called electromyography (EMG). Theoretically this could have zero or even negative latency, perfect accuracy, work regardless of lighting conditions, and not be subject to occlusion. When discussing the technology in 2021 Reardon claimed that a recent breakthrough enabled decoding the activity of individual neurons for “almost infinite control over machines.” Occlusion-free finger tracking of this quality and reliability could enable precise control of complex interfaces with incredibly subtle movements of your hand resting on your lap, making it an ideal input method for headsets and AR glasses. […]

So how will this arrive in a Meta product? In early 2023 an internal Meta AR/VR hardware roadmap leaked to The Verge, revealing details about Quest 3, the existence of the headset now rumored to be called Quest 3 Lite, and the cancelation of the 2024 candidate for Quest Pro 2 in favor of a more ambitious but “way out” model. But this roadmap also mentioned that Meta was planning to release the neural wristband alongside the third generation Ray-Ban smartglasses in 2025 as the input method.

According to that roadmap, two models of the wristband will be offered at different price points – one with the neural input tech only and another that also has a display and camera to act as a smartwatch too. A second generation of the wristband will also apparently act as the input device for the true AR glasses Meta plans to launch in 2027. We should however note that this plan or the timeline may have changed in the year since.

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AI Not Hyped Enough, Says Microsoft Exec

Meizu Moves Away From Smartphone Business, Will Invest All in AI

Meizu is quitting the smartphone business. The company, owned by car maker Geely, said AI is the future and will invest “All in AI”. From a report: According to a post on Weibo, the FlymeOS team will be restructured into working on new AI terminal devices that will use globally available LLM (large language model) such as Open AI. Meizu already laid the cornerstones of its multi-terminal experience when it announced Flyme Auto — an infotainment system for Geely-made vehicles, including Polestar and Lotus, which connects seamlessly with FlymeOS 10 devices, such as the Meizu 20 and Meizu 21 flagships.

According to Shen Ziyu, Chairman and CEO of Xingji Meizu Group, smartphone users take longer to upgrade — an average of 51 months, which is more than 4 years. The added companies now offer comparable performance in smoothness, photography, and software features. That’s why there will be no Meizu 21 Pro, Meizu 22 and Meizu 23 series.

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Microsoft Fixes Edge Browser Bug That Was Stealing Chrome Tabs and Data

An anonymous reader shared an news report: Microsoft has fixed an issue where its Edge browser was again misbehaving, this time by automatically importing browsing data and tabs from Chrome without consent. I personally experienced the bug last month, after I rebooted my PC for a regular Windows update and Microsoft Edge automatically opened with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I asked Microsoft repeatedly to explain why this behavior had occurred for myself and many other Windows users, but the company refused to comment. Microsoft has now quietly issued a fix in the latest Microsoft Edge update.

Here’s how Microsoft describes the fix: “Edge has a feature that provides an option to import browser data on each launch from other browsers with user consent. This feature’s state might not have been syncing and displaying correctly across multiple devices. This is fixed.”

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Thanks to Machine Learning, Scientist Finally Recover Text From The Charred Scrolls of Vesuvius

The great libraries of the ancient classical world are “legendary… said to have contained stacks of texts,” writes ScienceAlert. But from Rome to Constantinople, Athens to Alexandria, only one collection survived to the present day.

And here in 2024, “we can now start reading its contents.”

A worldwide competition to decipher the charred texts of the Villa of Papyri — an ancient Roman mansion destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius — has revealed a timeless infatuation with the pleasures of music, the color purple, and, of course, the zingy taste of capers. The so-called Vesuvius challenge was launched a few years ago by computer scientist Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky with support from Silicon Valley investors. The ongoing ‘master plan’ is to build on Seales’ previous work and read all 1,800 or so charred papyri from the ancient Roman library, starting with scrolls labeled 1 to 4.

In 2023, the annual gold prize was awarded to a team of three students, who recovered four passages containing 140 characters — the longest extractions yet. The winners are Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger. “After 275 years, the ancient puzzle of the Herculaneum Papyri has been solved,” reads the Vesuvius Challenge Scroll Prize website. “But the quest to uncover the secrets of the scrolls is just beginning….” Only now, with the advent of X-ray tomography and machine learning, can their inky words be pulled from the darkness of carbon.
A few months ago students deciphered a single word — “purple,” according to the article. But “That winning code was then made available for all competitors to build upon.”
Within three months, passages in Latin and Greek were blooming from the blackness, almost as if by magic. The team with the most readable submission at the end of 2023 included both previous finders of the word ‘purple’. Their unfurling of scroll 1 is truly impressive and includes more than 11 columns of text. Experts are now rushing to translate what has been found. So far, about 5 percent of the scroll has been unrolled and read to date. It is not a duplicate of past work, scholars of the Vesuvius Challenge say, but a “never-before-seen text from antiquity.”
One line reads: “In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

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EU to Fine Apple $500M+ for Stifling Music Competitors Like Spotify

“Apple will reportedly have to pay around €500 million (about $539 million USD) in the EU,” reports the Verge, “for stifling competition against Apple Music on the iPhone.
Financial Times reported this morning that the fine comes after regulators in Brussels, Belgium investigated a Spotify complaint that Apple prevented apps from telling users about cheaper alternatives to Apple’s music service…. The EU whittled its objections down to oppose Apple’s refusal to let developers even link out to their own subscription sign-ups within their apps — a policy that Apple changed in 2022 following regulatory pressure in Japan.

$500 million may sound like a lot, but a much bigger fine of close to $40 billion (or 10 percent of Apple’s annual global turnover) was on the table when the EU updated its objections last year. Apple was charged over a billion dollars in 2020, but French authorities dropped that to about $366 million after the company appealed.
The Verge cites an Apple spokesperson who said a year ago that the EU case “has no merit.”

Reuters that the EU’s fine “is expected to be announced early next month, the Financial Times said.”

More from Politico

The fine would be the EU’s first ever against Apple and is expected to be announced early next month, according to the FT report. It is the result of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple’s “anti-steering” requirements breach the bloc’s abuse of dominance rules, harming music consumers “who may end up paying more” for apps… The Commission will rule that Apple’s actions are illegal and against EU competition rules, according to the report.
“The EU executive will ban Apple’s practice of barring music services from letting users know of cheaper alternatives outside the App Store, according to the newspaper.”

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MIT Researchers Build Tiny Tamper-Proof ID Tag Utilizing Terahertz Waves

A few years ago, MIT researchers invented a cryptographic ID tag — but like traditional RFID tags, “a counterfeiter could peel the tag off a genuine item and reattach it to a fake,” writes MIT News.

“The researchers have now surmounted this security vulnerability by leveraging terahertz waves to develop an antitampering ID tag that still offers the benefits of being tiny, cheap, and secure.”

They mix microscopic metal particles into the glue that sticks the tag to an object, and then use terahertz waves to detect the unique pattern those particles form on the item’s surface. Akin to a fingerprint, this random glue pattern is used to authenticate the item, explains Eunseok Lee, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on the antitampering tag. “These metal particles are essentially like mirrors for terahertz waves. If I spread a bunch of mirror pieces onto a surface and then shine light on that, depending on the orientation, size, and location of those mirrors, I would get a different reflected pattern. But if you peel the chip off and reattach it, you destroy that pattern,” adds Ruonan Han, an associate professor in EECS, who leads the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

The researchers produced a light-powered antitampering tag that is about 4 square millimeters in size. They also demonstrated a machine-learning model that helps detect tampering by identifying similar glue pattern fingerprints with more than 99 percent accuracy. Because the terahertz tag is so cheap to produce, it could be implemented throughout a massive supply chain. And its tiny size enables the tag to attach to items too small for traditional RFIDs, such as certain medical devices…

“These responses are impossible to duplicate, as long as the glue interface is destroyed by a counterfeiter,” Han says. A vendor would take an initial reading of the antitampering tag once it was stuck onto an item, and then store those data in the cloud, using them later for verification.”
Seems like the only way to thwart that would be carving out the part of the surface where the tag was affixed — and then pasting the tag, glue, and what it adheres to all together onto some other surface. But more importantly, Han says they’d wanted to demonstrate “that the application of the terahertz spectrum can go well beyond broadband wireless.”

In this case, you can use terahertz for ID, security, and authentication. There are a lot of possibilities out there.”

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Microsoft President: ‘You Can’t Believe Every Video You See or Audio You Hear’

“We’re currently witnessing a rapid expansion in the abuse of these new AI tools by bad actors,” writes Microsoft VP Brad Smith, “including through deepfakes based on AI-generated video, audio, and images.

“This trend poses new threats for elections, financial fraud, harassment through nonconsensual pornography, and the next generation of cyber bullying.” Microsoft found its own tools being used in a recently-publicized episode, and the VP writes that “We need to act with urgency to combat all these problems.”

Microsoft’s blog post says they’re “committed as a company to a robust and comprehensive approach,” citing six different areas of focus:

A strong safety architecture. This includes “ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system… based on strong and broad-based data analysis.”
Durable media provenance and watermarking. (“Last year at our Build 2023 conference, we announced media provenance capabilities that use cryptographic methods to mark and sign AI-generated content with metadata about its source and history.”)
Safeguarding our services from abusive content and conduct. (“We are committed to identifying and removing deceptive and abusive content” hosted on services including LinkedIn and Microsoft’s Gaming network.)
Robust collaboration across industry and with governments and civil society. This includes “others in the tech sector” and “proactive efforts” with both civil society groups and “appropriate collaboration with governments.”
Modernized legislation to protect people from the abuse of technology. “We look forward to contributing ideas and supporting new initiatives by governments around the world.”
Public awareness and education. “We need to help people learn how to spot the differences between legitimate and fake content, including with watermarking. This will require new public education tools and programs, including in close collaboration with civil society and leaders across society.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article

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Despite Initial Claims, AMD Confirms Ryzen 8000G APUs Don’t Support ECC RAM

Slashdot reader ffkom shared this report from Tom’s Hardware:

When AMD formally introduced its Ryzen 8000G-series accelerated processing units for desktops in early January, the company mentioned that they supported ECC memory capability. Since then, the company has quietly removed mention of the technology from its website, as noted by Reddit users.

We asked AMD to clarify the situation and were told that the company has indeed removed mentions of ECC technology from the specifications of its Ryzen 3 8300G, Ryzen 5 8500G, Ryzen 5 8600G, and Ryzen 5 8700G. The technology also cannot be enabled on motherboards, so it looks like these processors indeed do not support ECC technology at all.

While it would be nice to have ECC support on AMD’s latest consumer Ryzen 8000G APUs, this is a technology typically reserved for AMD’s Ryzen Pro processors.

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