Comcast’s New Higher Upload Speeds Require $25-Per-Month xFi Complete Add-On

The availability of Comcast’s promised internet speed boosts has a catch: users need to purchase a $25-per-month xFi Complete add-on. Ars Technica reports: “As markets launch, Xfinity Internet customers who subscribe to xFi Complete will have their upload speeds increased between 5 and 10 times faster,” an announcement last week said. “xFi Complete includes an xFi gateway, advanced cybersecurity protection at home and on the go, tech auto-upgrades for a new gateway after three years, and wall-to-wall Wi-Fi coverage with an xFi Pod [Wi-Fi extender] included if recommended. Now, another benefit of xFi Complete is faster upload speeds.”

Comcast is deploying the speed upgrade in the Northeast US over the next couple of months. Plans with 10Mbps upload speeds will get up to 100Mbps upload speeds once the new tiers roll out in your region — if you pay for xFi Complete. Comcast told Ars that faster upload speeds will come to customer-owned modems “later next year” but did not provide a more specific timeline. There is a cheaper way to get the same xFi Gateway with Wi-Fi 6E, as Comcast offers the option to rent that piece of hardware for $14 a month. But Comcast is only making the upload boost available to those who subscribe to the pricier xFi Complete service. While the standard monthly rate for xFi Complete is $25, new customers who sign up by December 31 can get it for $20 monthly during the first year of service.

We asked Comcast today if there’s any technical reason it can’t deliver the higher upload speeds on customer-owned equipment. A company spokesperson responded that Comcast is working on bringing faster uploads to non-Comcast modems. “We intend to extend the experience to customer-owned modems later next year and are working through the technical requirements as we learn,” Comcast said. “We started offering it with our own equipment first and now are working through how to extend to customer-owned equipment.” Comcast also said that giving the upload boost to xFi Complete customers first follows its “typical validate, test, and certification process for a new network innovation.” But if the reasons for limiting the upload boost to Comcast hardware initially are purely technical instead of revenue-based, it’s not clear why people who rent the gateway for $14 a month shouldn’t get the same benefit.

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Behind TikTok’s Boom: A Legion of Traumatized, $10-A-Day Content Moderators

Time magazine teamed up with a London based non-profit newsroom called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an investigation that reveals that “horrific” videos “are part and parcel of everyday work for TikTok moderators in Colombia.”

They told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about widespread occupational trauma and inadequate psychological support, demanding or impossible performance targets, punitive salary deductions and extensive surveillance. Their attempts to unionize to secure better conditions have been opposed repeatedly. TikTok’s rapid growth in Latin America — it has an estimated 100 million users in the region — has led to the hiring of hundreds of moderators in Colombia to fight a never-ending battle against disturbing content. They work six days a week on day and night shifts, with some paid as little as 1.2 million pesos ($254) a month, compared to around $2,900 for content moderators based in the U.S….

The nine moderators could only speak anonymously for fear they might lose their jobs, or undermine their future employment prospects…. The TikTok moderation system described by these moderators is built on exacting performance targets. If workers do not get through a huge number of videos, or return late from a break, they can lose out on a monthly bonus worth up to a quarter of their salary. It is easy to lose out on the much-needed extra cash. Ãlvaro, a current TikTok moderator, has a target of 900 videos per day, with about 15 seconds to view each video. He works from 6am to 3pm, with two hours of break time, and his base salary is 1.2m pesos ($254) a month, only slightly higher than Colombia’s minimum salary…. He once received a disciplinary notice known internally as an “action form” for only managing to watch 700 videos in a shift, which was considered “work avoidance”. Once a worker has an action form, he says, they cannot receive a bonus that month….

Outsourcing moderation to countries in the global south like Colombia works for businesses because it is cheap, and workers are poorly protected…. For now… TikTok’s low-paid moderators will keep working to their grueling targets, sifting through some of the internet’s most nightmarish content.
The moderators interviewed all had “contractor” status with Paris-based Teleperformance, which last year reported €557 million ($620m) in profit on €7.1 billion ($8.1 billion) in revenue. In fact, Teleperformance has more than 7,000 content moderators globally, according to stats from Market Research Future, and the moderators interviewed said that besides TikTok, Teleperformance also provided content moderators to Meta, Discord, and Microsoft.

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Gartner Predicts ‘Digital Immune Systems’ and Virtual Metaverse Workspaces

Gartner, the prestigious tech research and consulting firm, has released its annual predictions for “strategic tech trends” in the coming year.

Forbes offers a summary. Some highlights:

Digital Immune Systems. [A]ntiquated development and testing approaches are no longer sufficient for delivering robust and resilient business-critical solutions that also provide a superior user experience. A Digital Immune System combines several software engineering strategies such as observability, automation, and extreme testing to enhance the customer experience by protecting against operational and security risks. By 2025, Gartner predicts that organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase end-user satisfaction through applications that achieve greater uptime and deliver a stronger user experience.

Applied Observability. The path to data-driven decision making includes a shift from monitoring and reacting to data to proactively applying that data in an orchestrated and integrated way across the enterprise. Doing so can shorten the time it takes to reach critical decisions while also facilitating faster, more accurate planning. Gartner notes observable data as an organization’s “most precious monetizable asset” and encourages leaders to seek use cases and business capabilities in which this data can deliver competitive advantage.

“By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization,” Forbes writes. But they also note that Gartner is predicting platform engineering — “a curated set of reusable self-service tools, capabilities, and processes” to speed up and optimize development. “Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams.”

They’re also predicting “adaptive” AI that can change after being deployed. But Forbes summarizes Gartner’s related prediction, that AI leaders “increasingly must bake governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, efficacy and privacy into AI operations” to improve adoption and user acceptance. This will include tools that “make AI models easier to interpret and explain while improving overall privacy and security.”

PC Magazine offers this summary of a related prediction from Gartner: “By 2025, without sustainable AI practices, AI will consume more energy than the average European country, offsetting any environmental gains that AI creates by 25%.”

Gartner also predicts a phasing out of marketing that uses social media sites’ data about individuals — and that fully virtual workspaces “will account for 30% of the investment growth in metaverse technologies and will ‘reimagine’ the office experience through 2027,” writes PC Magazine:

[Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer] said people need to reimagine how work will be done. He said that few people want to go back to the office full-time, but that virtual participants in calls often feel like second-class citizens. A fully immersive world is an answer to this, he said, with the interactive experience more important than information exchange. He believes metaverse experiences will be where people collaborate in ways they couldn’t do in the office, blurring the line between home and work.

By 2025, “labor volatility” will cause 40% of organizations to report a material business loss, forcing a shift in talent strategy from acquisition to resilience. Plummer talked about revamping the way talent is valued. He said people don’t want to do just one thing, but want to be “versatilists,” which makes them more valuable to the company and less likely to leave.

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Facebook Warns It Could Block News in Canada Over Proposed Legislation

The Verge says Facebook “might ban news sharing in Canada if the country passes legislation forcing the company to pay news outlets for their content.” They cite a post Friday from Facebook’s parent company Meta, and a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.

If this type of law sounds familiar, it’s because Australia introduced a similar one last year, called the News Media Bargaining Code, which also requires Facebook and Google to pay for news included on the platforms. Although Australia eventually passed the law, it wasn’t without significant pushback from Facebook and Google. Facebook switched off news sharing in the country in response, and Google threatened to pull its search engine from the country.

While Google later walked back on its plans after striking deals with media organizations, Facebook reversed its news ban only after Australia amended its legislation. Facebook’s temporary ban not only affected news outlets but also ripped down posts from government agencies, like local fire and health departments. Earlier this year, a group of Facebook whistleblowers claimed the move was a negotiation tactic, alleging Facebook used an overly broad definition of what’s considered a news publisher to cause chaos in the country. The company maintains the disorder was “inadvertent.”

Now Facebook’s prepared to put a block on news in Canada if the country doesn’t change its legislation….
“If this draft legislation becomes law, creating globally unprecedented forms of financial liability for news links or content, we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content on Facebook in Canada as defined under the Online News Act,” Meta states.

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JavaScript Still Tops Python and Java in RedMonk’s Latest Rankings, While Go and TypeScript Rise

RedMonk has released its latest quarterly rankings of popular programming languages, arguing that “The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.”

Their methodology? “We extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction.” Below are this quarter’s results:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. CSS
7. C++
7. TypeScript
9. Ruby
10. C
11. Swift
12. R
12. Objective-C
14. Shell
15. Scala
15. Go
17. PowerShell
17. Kotlin
19. Rust
19. Dart

Their analysis of the latest rankings note “movement is increasingly rare…. the top 20 has been stable for multiple runs. As has been speculated about in this space previously, it seems increasingly clear that the hypothesis of a temporary equilibrium of programming language usage is supported by the evidence…. [W]e may have hit a point of relative — if temporary — contentment with the wide variety of languages available for developers’ usage.”

And yet this quarter TypeScript has risen from #8 to #7, now tied with C++, benefiting from attributes like its interoperability with an existing popular language with an increased availability of security-related features. “There is little suggestion at present that the language is headed anywhere but up. The only real question is on what timeframe.”

Unlike TypeScript, Go’s trajectory has been anything but clear. While it grew steadily and reasonably swiftly as languages go, it has appeared to be stalled, never placing higher than 14th and having dropped into 16 for the last three runs. This quarter, however, Go rose one spot in the rankings back up to 15. In and of itself, this is a move of limited significance, as the further one goes down the rankings the less significant the differences between them are, ranking-wise. But it has been over a year since we’ve seen movement from Go, which raises the question of whether there is any room for further upward ascent or whether it will remain hovering in the slot one would expect from a technically well regarded but not particularly versatile (from a use case standpoint) language.

Like Go, Kotlin had spent the last three runs in the same position. It and Rust had been moving in lockstep in recent quarters, but while Rust enters its fourth consecutive run in 19th place, Kotlin managed to achieve some separation this quarter jumping one spot up from 18 to 17.

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How GitHub Copilot Could Steer Microsoft Into a Copyright Storm

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot — a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet — has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people’s copyrighted work — pulled from the training data — to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that “any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations,” and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot’s capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there’s been a strong response to news of his investigation. “Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source,” he wrote. “We’re hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found — that it’s not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. “But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author’s copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We’re looking at all these issues.” GitHub’s documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain “undesirable patterns” and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. “What Microsoft’s GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable,” he said. “Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses.”

Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, “AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve.” He added: “An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms — or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?”

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France Becomes Latest Country To Leave Controversial Energy Charter Treaty

France has become the latest country to pull out of the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT), which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits. The Guardian reports: Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “France has decided to withdraw from the energy charter treaty.” Quitting the ECT was “coherent” with the Paris climate deal, he added. Macron’s statement follows a recent vote by the Polish parliament to leave the 52-nation treaty and announcements by Spain and the Netherlands that they too wanted out of the scheme.

The European Commission has proposed a “modernization” of the agreement, which would end the writ of the treaty’s secret investor-state courts between EU members. That plan is expected to be discussed at a meeting in Mongolia next month. A French government official said Paris would not try to block the modernization blueprint within the EU or at the meeting in Mongolia. “But whatever happens, France is leaving,” the official said. While France was “willing to coordinate a withdrawal with others, we don’t see that there is a critical mass ready to engage with that in the EU bloc as a whole,” the official added.

The French withdrawal will take about a year to be completed, and in that time, discussion in Paris will likely move on to ways of neutralizing or reducing the duration of a “sunset clause” in the ECT that allows retrospective lawsuits. Progress on that issue is thought possible by sources close to ongoing legal negotiations on the issue.

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Interpol Launches ‘First-Ever Metaverse’ Designed For Global Law Enforcement

The International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) has announced the launch of its fully operational metaverse, initially designed for activities such as immersive training courses for forensic investigations. Decrypt reports: Unveiled at the 90th Interpol General Assembly in New Delhi, the INTERPOL Metaverse is described as the “first-ever Metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide.” Among other things, the platform will also help law enforcement across the globe to interact with each other via avatars. “For many, the Metaverse seems to herald an abstract future, but the issues it raises are those that have always motivated INTERPOL — supporting our member countries to fight crime and making the world, virtual or not, safer for those who inhabit it,” Jurgen Stock, Interpol’s secretary general said in a statement.

One of the challenges identified by organizations is that something that is considered a crime in the physical world may not necessarily be the same in the virtual world. “By identifying these risks from the outset, we can work with stakeholders to shape the necessary governance frameworks and cut off future criminal markets before they are fully formed,” said Madan Oberoi, Interpol’s executive director of Technology and Innovation. “Only by having these conversations now can we build an effective response.”

In a live demonstration at the event, Interpol experts took to a Metaverse classroom to deliver a training course on travel document verification and passenger screening using the capabilities of the newly-launched platform. Students were then teleported to an airport where they were able to apply their newly-acquired skills at a virtual border point. Additionally, Interpol has created an expert group that will be tasked with ensuring new virtual worlds are “secure by design.” The report notes that Interpol has also joined “Defining and Building the Metaverse,” a World Economic Forum initiative around metaverse governance.

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Microsoft’s PC Manager Is Like CCleaner For Your Computer

Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that’s designed to boost your computer’s performance. The Verge reports: Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft’s PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows. Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There’s even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now.

The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there’s also a full cleanup scan available or a scan to find large files on your drives. The process management feature is a more simplified version of the Task Manager so you can quickly kill processes that might be eating up RAM. Hitting the main “boost” button will clear temporary files and free up memory, which could be useful on older PCs.

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