The New York Times tells the story of Simon Mackenzie, a security officer at a U.K. discount store uploading security camera footage of shoplifters into a facial recognition program called Facewatch. "The next time those people enter any shop within a few miles that uses Facewatch, store staff will receive an alert."

Facewatch — now in nearly 400 stores across Britain — licenses facial recognition software made by Real Networks and Amazon. Though it only sends alert about repeat offenders, "Once added, a person remains there for a year before being deleted." For as little as 250 pounds a month, or roughly $320, Facewatch offers access to a customized watchlist that stores near one another share. When Facewatch spots a flagged face, an alert is sent to a smartphone at the shop, where employees decide whether to keep a close eye on the person or ask the person to leave. Mr. Mackenzie adds one or two new faces every week, he said, mainly people who steal diapers, groceries, pet supplies and other low-cost goods. He said their economic hardship made him sympathetic, but that the number of thefts had gotten so out of hand that facial recognition was needed. Usually at least once a day, Facewatch alerts him that somebody on the watchlist has entered the store...

Among democratic nations, Britain is at the forefront of using live facial recognition, with courts and regulators signing off on its use. The police in London and Cardiff are experimenting with the technology to identify wanted criminals as they walk down the street. In May, it was used to scan the crowds at the coronation of King Charles III. But the use by retailers has drawn criticism as a disproportionate solution for minor crimes. Individuals have little way of knowing they are on the watchlist or how to appeal. In a legal complaint last year, Big Brother Watch, a civil society group, called it "Orwellian in the extreme...." Madeleine Stone, the legal and policy officer for Big Brother Watch, said Facewatch was "normalizing airport-style security checks for everyday activities like buying a pint of milk."
There is a human in the loop, the article points out. "Every time Facewatch's system identifies a shoplifter, a notification goes to a person who passed a test to be a 'super recognizer' — someone with a special talent for remembering faces. Within seconds, the super recognizer must confirm the match against the Facewatch database before an alert is sent."

The company's founder tells the Times that in general, "mistakes are rare but do happen... If this occurs, we acknowledge our mistake, apologize, delete any relevant data to prevent reoccurrence and offer proportionate compensation."

And the article adds this official response from the U.K. government: Fraser Sampson, Britain's biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, who advises the government on policy, said there was "a nervousness and a hesitancy" around facial recognition technology because of privacy concerns and poorly performing algorithms in the past. "But I think in terms of speed, scale, accuracy and cost, facial recognition technology can in some areas, you know, literally be a game changer," he said. "That means its arrival and deployment is probably inevitable. It's just a case of when."

In a landmark ruling (PDF) on Thursday, the New Jersey Supreme Court sided with Facebook in a major court decision that requires prosecutors to get a wiretap order if they want to eavesdrop on social media accounts without adequate evidence of a crime. New Jersey Monitor reports: In a reversal of lower court decisions, the high court ruled against authorities who argued a warrant is sufficient to obtain nearly real-time release of such communications. That argument is unsupported by federal or state statute, the court said, adding that allowing such releases would effectively neuter New Jersey's wiretap law.

In separate cases focused on two men under investigation for drug offenses, authorities obtained a communications data warrant to force Facebook to disclose social media postings -- within 15 minutes of their creation -- made by the pair over a 30-day span. The state contended such releases, which Facebook said were as close to real-time as technology allows, could be made without meeting the higher bar for a wiretap order because by the time Facebook provided them, they would already have been transmitted and electronically stored.

But Thursday's decision says allowing such releases would make the state's wiretap statute obsolete because "law enforcement today would never need to apply for a wiretap order to obtain future electronic communications from Facebook users' accounts on an ongoing basis." Authorities must show probable cause to obtain a warrant. To obtain a wiretap order, they must also demonstrate that other investigatory methods would fail -- because they are too dangerous, for example -- according to criminal defense lawyer Brian Neary. Neary argued on behalf of the New Jersey State Bar Association, which joined the case as a friend of the court. "It's great to see the New Jersey Supreme Court make clear that whenever the government seeks ongoing access to our private conversations, it must meet the heightened protections required under state law and the federal and state constitutions," said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Meta is planning to allow users in the EU to directly download apps through Facebook ads, aiming to compete with Google and Apple's app stores. The Verge's Alex Heath writes: The new type of ad is set to start as a pilot with a handful of Android app developers as soon as later this year, I've learned. Meta sees an opening to try this thanks to new regulation in the EU called the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that is expected to go into effect next spring. It deems Apple and Google as "gatekeepers" and requires that they open up their mobile platforms to alternative methods of downloading apps. Android technically allows sideloading already, though Google makes it difficult by coupling its in-app billing and licensing with the Play Store, along with the scary warnings it shows when someone tries to download an Android app from another source. Even still, Meta clearly thinks it's safer to try its test first on Android rather than Apple's iOS.

Meta's pitch to developers participating in the pilot is that, by hosting their Android apps and letting Facebook users download them directly without being kicked out to the Play Store, they'll see higher conversion rates for their app install ads. At least initially, Meta doesn't plan to take a cut of in-app revenue from participating apps, so developers in the pilot could still use whatever billing systems they want.

Google said Thursday it will remove Canadian news content from its search, news and discover products after a new law meant to compensate media outlets comes into force. CBC.ca reports: "We're disappointed it has come to this. We don't take this decision or its impacts lightly and believe it's important to be transparent with Canadian publishers and our users as early as possible," said Kent Walker, the president of global affairs at Google and Alphabet. "The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called 'link tax') creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians' access to news from Canadian publishers."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government was confident Google would come around on the legislation. "I will say the conversations with Google are ongoing. It is important that we find a way to ensure that Canadians can continue to access content in all sorts of ways but also that we protect rigorous independent journalism that has a foundational role in our democracies," he said. "We know that democracies only work with a strong independent diverse media and we will continue to work for that."

The bill has been pitched as a way to keep news outlets solvent after advertising moved en masse to digital platforms, virtually wiping out a major revenue stream for journalism. [...] In an attempt to reverse the revenue decline, the government's new regulatory regime will require companies like Google and the Meta-owned Facebook -- and other major online platforms that reproduce or facilitate access to news content -- to either pay to post content or go through a binding arbitration process led by an arms-length regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). An outlet will be considered an eligible news business if it regularly employs two or more journalists in Canada, operates largely within Canada and produces content that is edited and designed in this country. Google and Meta have signaled they'd rather get out of the news-posting business altogether rather than deal with this process. Meta also announced last week that would be removing all news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada. You can read more about the Online News Act here.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that in order to find someone guilty of making a "true threat" courts must first determine that the person recklessly disregarded the fact that their words might be perceived as threats. From a report: Experts fear the decision will create new hurdles for victims of cyberstalking by requiring them to first prove that their stalkers understand the consequences of their actions. "The Supreme Court has just decreed that stalking is free speech protected by the First Amendment if the stalker genuinely believes his actions are non-threatening," tweeted Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington Law School and president of the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. "That is, the more deluded the stalker, the more protected the stalking."

The case, Counterman v. Colorado, concerns a man named Billy Raymond Counterman, who was convicted under a Colorado anti-stalking law, after he sent a barrage of threatening Facebook messages to a woman he'd never met. The Colorado law didn't require the court to consider Counterman's mental state when he sent the messages. It only had to consider his behavior and how it was objectively received, that is, whether he repeatedly contacted, followed, or surveilled his target in a way that would cause a "reasonable person" distress. Counterman was found guilty under that statute, but he appealed his conviction, arguing that his statements were protected by the First Amendment and did not constitute "true threats," a category of speech that falls outside the bounds of the First Amendment, because it wasn't his intention to threaten his target. In its decision, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly sided with Counterman.

Meta plans to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada once a parliament-approved legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers comes into effect, the company said on Thursday. From a report: The legislation, known as the Online News Act, was approved by the Senate upper chamber earlier on Thursday and will become law after receiving royal assent from the governor general, a formality. The legislation was proposed after complaints from Canada's media industry, which wants tighter regulation of tech companies to prevent them from elbowing news businesses out of the online advertising market.

"Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act taking effect," Meta said in a statement. Facebook had telegraphed such a move for weeks, saying news has no economic value to the company and that its users do not use the platform for news. The act outlines rules to force platforms such as Facebook and Alphabet's Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content, a step similar to a groundbreaking law passed in Australia in 2021.

Meta has confirmed that it will remove all news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada, following the passing of the Online News Act by the Canadian Parliament. Engadget reports: "Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act (Bill C-18) taking effect," the company posted. "We have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada."

The Online News Act is designed to address the precipitous drop in advertising revenue Canadian news organizations have experienced over the past two decades. It does so by requiring big tech companies like Google and Meta to negotiate reimbursement plans with those outlets for running said stories on their respective platforms. Earlier in June, Meta announced that it was working to develop a software-based solution to its C-18 issue. As of Thursday, those efforts remain ongoing "and currently impact a small percentage of users in Canada." Aside from the loss of news functionality, Meta assures its users that no other aspects of the Facebook experience will be impacted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Meta says its new speech-generating AI model is too dangerous for public release. Meta announced a new AI model called Voicebox yesterday, one it says is the most versatile yet for speech generation, but it's not releasing it yet: "There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time."

The model is still only a research project, but Meta says can generate speech in six languages from samples as short as two seconds and could be used for "natural, authentic" translation in the future, among other things.

The Associated Press reports: A project using artificial intelligence to track social media abuse aimed at players at the 2022 World Cup identified more than 300 people whose details are being given to law enforcement, FIFA said Sunday.

The people made "abusive, discriminatory, or threatening posts [or] comments" on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, soccer's governing body said in a report detailing efforts to protect players and officials during the tournament played in Qatar. The biggest spike in abuse was during the France-England quarterfinals game, said the report from a project created jointly by FIFA and the players' global union FIFPRO. It used AI to help identify and hide offensive social media posts... About 20 million posts and comments were scanned and more than 19,000 were flagged as abusive...

The identities of the more than 300 people identified for posting abuse "will be shared with the relevant member associations and jurisdictional law authorities to facilitate real-world action being taken against offenders," FIFA said. "Discrimination is a criminal act. With the help of this tool, we are identifying the perpetrators and we are reporting them to the authorities so that they are punished for their actions," FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement. "We also expect the social media platforms to accept their responsibilities and to support us in the fight against all forms of discrimination."

FIFA and FIFPRO have extended the system for use at the Women's World Cup that starts next month in Australia and New Zealand.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: Ask Amazon's digital assistant, "Hey, Alexa, is Amazon a monopoly?" and it will profess ignorance.

"Hmm, I don't know that one," it answers.

But ask about any of the other tech giants' business practices, and it's ready to critique them. Surfacing answers from across the internet, Alexa describes Apple as an "oligopoly" and cites Alphabet's Google as violating privacy rights, according to Bloomberg News tests of the software on three devices.... [Alexa] won't label Amazon a monopoly, but it tends to respond in the affirmative when asked the same question about Google, Meta's Facebook, Microsoft and Walmart. When Alexa is asked if Amazon has broken antitrust law, it says, "I don't have an answer to the question I just heard."

Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri, Alexa's two closest competitors, each cite news stories on government antitrust lawsuits against their companies. Siri, for the most part, offers up criticisms of the iPhone maker. But it evades at least one question about Apple's power. When asked whether Apple is a monopoly, Siri often replies, "I can't answer that, but Apple.com should be able to...."

Alexa also cites alleged privacy lapses by its rivals, bringing up a Facebook privacy settlement with the FTC and allegations that Apple's finger-scanning technology violates constitutional rights. When users ask whether Amazon violates users' privacy, Alexa sticks up for its safeguards: "Amazon builds multiple layers of privacy protections into your Alexa experience." It also links to an Amazon website with more information about Alexa's privacy settings.

Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who leaked what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, died on Friday at the age of 92. The cause was pancreatic cancer. The New York Times reports: The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers -- 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people -- plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy. It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information and attack perceived political enemies, forming a constellation of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.

Mr. Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy and other crimes and tried in federal court in Los Angeles. But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg's former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun," Mr. Ellsberg said after being released. "It's like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz." The story of Daniel Ellsberg in many ways mirrored the American experience in Vietnam, which began in the 1950s as a struggle to contain communism in Indochina and ended in 1975 with humiliating defeat in a corrosive war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. [...] Over the years, Ellsberg was mentioned on Slashdot several times. In late 2000, Ellsberg was mentioned in a story about Clinton's veto of what would have been a new law to prevent leaks of classified information.

Ellsberg also expressed his support for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2010 and called Edward Snowden the "greatest patriot whistleblower of our time."

He was also featured in a Slashdot story for his view on the growing role of internet companies in the public sphere. In 2011, Ellsberg said companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter need to take a stand and push back on excessive requests for personal data.

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his deputies want other companies to freely use and profit from new artificial intelligence software Meta is developing, a decision that could have big implications for other AI developers and businesses that are increasingly adopting it. The Information: Meta is working on ways to make the next version of its open-source large-language model -- technology that can power chatbots like ChatGPT -- available for commercial use, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation and a person who was briefed about it. The move could prompt a feeding frenzy among AI developers eager for alternatives to proprietary software sold by rivals Google and OpenAI. It would also indirectly benefit Meta's own AI development.

[...] Meta stands to gain from releasing open-source AI models. As developers adopt and improve those models or patch their security holes, Meta will be able to incorporate those improvements in AI models for its own consumer and advertising products, Zuckerberg said in an April call with stock analysts. For instance, Zuckerberg has said he wants small businesses and content creators that use Facebook's apps to have access to "AI agents" who can act on their behalf by automatically communicating with fans or customers. "LLaMA or the language model underlying this is basically going to be the engine that powers that," he said in an interview last week with podcaster Lex Fridman.

TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers writes: Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator -- and, unlike Google, open-sourced it. Called MusicGen, Meta's music-generating tool, a demo of which can be found here, can turn a text description (e.g. "An '80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background") into about 12 seconds of audio, give or take. MusicGen can optionally be "steered" with reference audio, like an existing song, in which case it'll try to follow both the description and melody.

Meta says that MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 "high-quality" licensed music tracks and 390,000 instrument-only tracks from ShutterStock and Pond5, a large stock media library. The company hasn't provided the code it used to train the model, but it has made available pre-trained models that anyone with the right hardware -- chiefly a GPU with around 16GB of memory -- can run.

So how does MusicGen perform? Well, I'd say -- though certainly not well enough to put human musicians out of a job. Its songs are reasonably melodic, at least for basic prompts like "ambient chiptunes music," and -- to my ears -- on par (if not slightly better) with the results from Google's AI music generator, MusicLM. But they won't win any awards.

Meta said on Tuesday that it would provide researchers with access to components of a new "human-like" artificial intelligence model that it said can analyze and complete unfinished images more accurately than existing models. From a report: The model, I-JEPA, uses background knowledge about the world to fill in missing pieces of images, rather than looking only at nearby pixels like other generative AI models, the company said. That approach incorporates the kind of human-like reasoning advocated by Meta's top AI scientist Yann LeCun and helps the technology to avoid errors that are common to AI-generated images, like hands with extra fingers, it said.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is a prolific publisher of open-sourced AI research via its in-house research lab. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that sharing models developed by Meta's researchers can help the company by spurring innovation, spotting safety gaps and lowering costs. "For us, it's way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we're using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make," he told investors in April.

A French start-up founded four weeks ago by a trio of former Meta and Google artificial intelligence researchers has raised $113.3 million in Europe's largest-ever seed round. From a report: Mistral AI's first round of financing values the Paris-based concern at $259 million, including the funds raised, according to people close to the company. The record amount raised highlights the growing frenzy surrounding AI and Europe's desire to create a viable alternative to Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.

"There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor," said Arthur Mensch, Mistral's chief executive. The former DeepMind researcher founded the start-up with Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who both recently left Meta after working at Facebook's parent company for the past few years. [...] Mistral has yet to develop its first product, and its first few employees started work only days ago. It plans to launch early next year a new "large language model," similar to the "generative AI" system that powers OpenAI's breakout ChatGPT app.

20 miles west of Portland, engineers at an Intel lab are dunking expensive racks of servers "in a clear bath" made of motor oil-like petrochemicals, reports the Oregonian, where the servers "give off a greenish glow as they silently labor away on ordinary computing tasks." Intel's submerged computers operate just as they would on a dry server rack because they're not bathing in water, even though it looks just like it. They're soaking in a synthetic oil that doesn't conduct electricity. So the computers don't short out.

They thrive, in fact, because the fluid absorbs the heat from the hardworking computers much better than air does. It's the same reason a hot pan cools off a lot more quickly if you soak it in water than if you leave it on the stove.

As data centers grow increasingly powerful, the computers are generating so much heat that cooling them uses exorbitant amounts of energy. The cooling systems can use as much electricity as the computers themselves. So Intel and other big tech companies are designing liquid cooling systems that could use far less electricity, hoping to lower data centers' energy costs by as much as a third — and reducing the facilities' climate impact. It's a wholesale change in thinking for data centers, which already account for 2% of all the electricity consumption in the U.S... Skeptics caution that it may be difficult or prohibitively expensive to overhaul existing data centers to adapt to liquid cooling. Advocates of the shift, including Intel, say a transition is imperative to accommodate data centers' growing thirst for power. "It's really starting to come to a head as we're hitting the energy crisis and the need for climate action globally," said Jen Huffstetler, Intel's chief product sustainability officer...

Cooler computers can be packed more tightly together in data centers, since they don't need space for airflow. Computer manufacturers can pack chips together more tightly on the motherboard, enabling more computing power in the same space. And liquid cooling could significantly reduce data centers' environmental and economic costs. Conventional data centers' evaporative cooling systems require tremendous volumes of water and huge amounts of electricity...

Many other tech companies are backing immersion cooling, too. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all helping fund immersion cooling research at Oregon State... [T]he timing may finally be right for data centers operators to make the shift away from air cooling to something far more efficient. Intel's Huffstetler said she expects to see liquid cooling become widespread in the next three to five years.
The article notes other challenges:

• liquid adds more weight than some buildings' upper floors can support
• Some metals degrade faster in liquid than they do in air.
• And the engineers had to modify the servers by removing their fans — "because they serve no purpose while immersed."

During a companywide meeting, Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, revealed a preview of the company's upcoming Twitter competitor, a standalone app based on Instagram that will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol, ActivityPub. "That will theoretically allow users of the new app to take their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support ActivityPub, including Mastodon," reports The Verge. From the report: The forthcoming app, which, in the meeting today, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox called "our response to Twitter," will use Instagram's account system to automatically populate a user's information. The internal codename for the app is "Project 92," and its public name could be Threads, based on internal documents also seen by The Verge.

"We've been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution," Cox said, throwing direct shade at Elon Musk's handling of Twitter, to cheers from the audience. He said the company's goal for the app was "safety, ease of use, reliability" and making sure that creators have a "stable place to build and grow their audiences."

Cox said the company already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime, and was in discussions with other big names, including Oprah and the Dalai Lama. He said "coding began" for the app in January and that Meta will be making the app available "as soon as we can."

Meta is planning to introduce AI-generated stickers on Messenger, allowing users to create stickers based on text prompts. The Verge reports: During a companywide meeting today that The Verge listened to, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's vice president of AI, told employees that the company will leverage its image generation model to let users create stickers based on text prompts. Employees will begin testing the feature internally before it's made available to the public. "With AI-generated stickers, our users can have infinitely more options for self-expression, cultural representations, and even trend relevance," Al-Dahle says. "Of course, stickers are just the tip of the iceberg."

Al-Dahle adds that the company is also "working on AI models that are going to transform any image you want in any way you want." That includes doing things like "changing the aspect ratio of your picture" or turning a picture of a corgi "into a painting."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem fazed by Apple's introduction of the Vision Pro. In a companywide meeting with Meta employees today that The Verge watched, the CEO said Apple's device didn't present any major breakthroughs in technology that Meta hadn't "already explored" and that its vision for how people will use the device is "not the one that I want." He also pointed to the fact that Meta's upcoming Quest 3 headset will be much cheaper, at $499 compared to the Vision Pro's $3,499 price tag, giving Meta the opening to reach a wider user base.

"I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important," Zuckerberg told employees, who were gathered at the company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters for its first all-hands meeting since 2020. Zuckerberg said that the Quest is about "people interacting in new ways and feeling closer" while also "about being active and doing things." "By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself," he said of Apple's WWDC keynote earlier this week. "I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to employees on Thursday that will see it put generative AI text, image and video generators into its flagship products, such as Facebook and Instagram. From a report: At an all-hands meeting with workers on Thursday, Zuckerberg announced a range of technologies at various stages of development, with some for internal use but many designed directly for consumers. One, for example, will allow customers to use a text prompt to modify their own photos and share them in Instagram Stories.

Another will bring AI agents with different personalities and capabilities to help or entertain. That's focused initially for use in Messenger and WhatsApp. The company is also hosting an internal hackathon in July focused on generative AI.