Zoom Will Soon Integrate Anthropic’s Chatbot Across Its Platform
Additionally, Zoom Ventures, a Zoom offshoot that invests in startups, also announced that it has made an investment in the Google-backed Anthropic. Zoom says working with both Anthropic and OpenAI helps bolster its “federated approach” to AI.
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Re-Victimization From Police-Auctioned Cell Phones
Researchers at the University of Maryland last year purchased 228 smartphones sold “as-is” from PropertyRoom.com, which bills itself as the largest auction house for police departments in the United States. Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns. Phones may end up in police custody for any number of reasons — such as its owner was involved in identity theft — and in these cases the phone itself was used as a tool to commit the crime. “We initially expected that police would never auction these phones, as they would enable the buyer to recommit the same crimes as the previous owner,” the researchers explained in a paper released this month. “Unfortunately, that expectation has proven false in practice.”
Beyond what you would expect from unwiped second hand phones — every text message, picture, email, browser history, location history, etc. — the 61 phones they were able to access also contained significant amounts of data pertaining to crime — including victims’ data — the researchers found. […] Also, the researchers found that many of the phones clearly had personal information on them regarding previous or intended targets of crime: A dozen of the phones had photographs of government-issued IDs. Three of those were on phones that apparently belonged to sex workers; their phones contained communications with clients. “We informed [PropertyRoom] of our research in October 2022, and they responded that they would review our findings internally,” said Dave Levin, an assistant professor of computer science at University of Maryland. “They stopped selling them for a while, but then it slowly came back, and then we made sure we won every auction. And all of the ones we got from that were indeed wiped, except there were four devices that had external SD [storage] cards in them that weren’t wiped.”
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Gas-Powered Cars Won’t Die Off Any Time Soon
It’ll likely take until at least 2050 — and possibly longer — before most gas-powered cars are off the road, Campau says.
Of note: EV longevity is going in the opposite direction. Their average age fell from 3.7 years in 2022 to 3.6 years in 2023, in part due to an upswing in new purchases.
By the numbers: About 6.6% of battery-powered EVs bought between 2013-2022 have left the passenger fleet, compared with 5.2% of non-EVs — but […] it’s too early to know why. EVs generally come with an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty — but early evidence suggests they last longer than that, according to an analysis by Recurrent, which tracks battery data. Carmakers say electric cars should last 15 to 20 years, but modern EVs haven’t been around long enough to validate that claim. The report projects that there will be fewer than 100 million passenger cars on the road within the next 18-24 months — a low not seen since 1978. By 2028, at least 7 in 10 vehicles on the road will be pickups, SUVs or crossovers.
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WHO Warns Against Using Artificial Sweeteners
The recommendation does not apply to personal care and hygiene products containing NSS, such as toothpaste, skin cream, and medications, or to low-calorie sugars and sugar alcohols (polyols), which are sugars or sugar derivatives containing calories and are therefore not considered NSS. “Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control in the long term. People need to consider other ways to reduce free sugars intake, such as consuming food with naturally occurring sugars, like fruit, or unsweetened food and beverages,” says Francesco Branca, WHO Director for Nutrition and Food Safety. “NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health.”
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OpenAI’s Sam Altman Set To Raise $100 Million For Worldcoin
Worldcoin pulled in $100 million from investors last year through a token sale that valued the company at around $3 billion, according to a report by The Information from March 2022. That fundraising effort came before a bruising period for crypto in which flagship tokens like bitcoin and ether cratered in price and high-profile companies including Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapsed. “It’s a bear market, a crypto winter. It’s remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment,” one of the FT’s sources told the publication.
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Hasselblad Is Reportedly the Latest Camera Maker To Bail On DSLRs
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Somehow Amazon’s Open Source Fork of ElasticSearch Has Succeeded
OpenSearch shouldn’t exist. The open source alternative to Elasticsearch started off as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) answer to getting outflanked by Elastic’s change in Elasticsearch’s license, which was in turn sparked by AWS building a successful Elasticsearch service but contributing little back. In 2019 when AWS launched its then Open Distro for Elasticsearch, I thought its reasons rang hollow and, frankly, sounded sanctimonious. This was, after all, a company that used more open source than it contributed. Two years later, AWS opted to fork Elasticsearch to create OpenSearch, committing to a “long-term investment” in OpenSearch.
I worked at AWS at the time. Privately, I didn’t think it would work.
Rather, I didn’t feel that AWS really understood just how much work was involved in running a successful open source project, and the company would fail to invest the time and resources necessary to make OpenSearch a viable competitor to Elasticsearch. I was wrong. Although OpenSearch has a long way to go before it can credibly claim to have replaced Elasticsearch in the minds and workloads of developers, it has rocketed up the search engine popularity charts, with an increasingly diverse contributor population. In turn, the OpenSearch experience is adding a new tool to AWS’ arsenal of open source strengths….
As part of the AWS OpenSearch team, David Tippett and Eli Fisher laid out a few key indicators of OpenSearch’s success as they gave their 2022 year in review. They topped more than 100 million downloads and gathered 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors, a number of whom don’t work for AWS. Not stated were other success factors, such as Adobe’s earlier decision to replace Elasticsearch with OpenSearch in its Adobe Commerce suite, or its increasingly open governance with third-party maintainers for the project. Nor did they tout its lightning-fast ascent up the DB-Engines database popularity rankings, hitting the Top 50 databases for the first time.
OpenSearch, in short, is a bonafide open source success story. More surprisingly, it’s an AWS open source success story. For many who have been committed to the “AWS strip mines open source” narrative, such success stories aren’t supposed to exist. Reality bites.
The article notes that OpenSearch’s success “doesn’t seem to be blunting Elastic’s income statement.” But it also points out that Amazon now has many employees actively contributing to open source projects, including PostgreSQL and MariaDB. (Although “If AWS were to turn forking projects into standard operating procedure, that might get uncomfortable.”)
“Fortunately, not only has AWS learned how to build more open source, it has also learned how to partner with open source companies.”
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