OpenAI has developed a sophisticated anticheating tool for detecting AI-generated content, particularly essays and research papers, but has refrained from releasing it due to internal debates and ethical considerations, according to WSJ.

This tool, which has been ready for deployment for approximately a year, utilizes a watermarking technique that subtly alters token selection in ChatGPT's output, creating an imperceptible pattern detectable only by OpenAI's technology. While boasting a 99.9% effectiveness rate for substantial AI-generated text, concerns persist regarding potential workarounds and the challenge of determining appropriate access to the detection tool, as well as its potential impact on non-native English speakers and the broader AI ecosystem.

A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette." [T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there.

Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...."

Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page.

In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit.
Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notes that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours...

"For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."

This week America's Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against the former CEO of the startup social media site "IRL"

The BBC reports: IRL — which was once considered a potential rival to Facebook — took its name from its intention to get its online users to meet up in real life. However, the initial optimism evaporated after it emerged most of IRL's users were bots, with the platform shutting in 2023...

The SEC says it believes [CEO Abraham] Shafi raised about $170m by portraying IRL as the new success story in the social media world. It alleges he told investors that IRL had attracted the vast majority its supposed 12 million users through organic growth. In reality, it argues, IRL was spending millions of dollars on advertisements which offered incentives to prospective users to download the IRL app. That expenditure, it is alleged, was subsequently hidden in the company's books.
IRL received multiple rounds of venture capital financing, eventually reaching "unicorn status" with a $1.17 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. But it shut down in 2023 "after an internal investigation by the company's board found that 95% of the app's users were 'automated or from bots'."

TechCrunch notes it's the second time in the same week — and at least the fourth time in the past several months — that the SEC has charged a venture-backed founder on allegations of fraud... Earlier this week, the SEC charged BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji with fraud and unregistered offering of securities, claiming he used his pseudonymous online identity "DiamondHands" to avoid regulatory scrutiny while he raised over $257 million in cryptocurrency. BitClout, a buzzy crypto startup, was backed by high-profile VCs such as a16z, Sequoia, Chamath Palihapitiya's Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital.

In June, the SEC charged Ilit Raz, CEO and founder of the now-shuttered AI recruitment startup Joonko, with defrauding investors of at least $21 million. The agency alleged Raz made false and misleading statements about the quantity and quality of Joonko's customers, the number of candidates on its platform and the startup's revenue.

The agency has also gone after venture firms in recent months. In May, the SEC charged Robert Scott Murray and his firm Trillium Capital LLC with a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the stock price of Getty Images Holdings Inc. by announcing a phony offer by Trillium to purchase Getty Images.

In 2006 MySpace reportedly became America's most-visited web site — passing both Google and Yahoo Mail.

So what happened? TribLive reports: The co-founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580 million in 2005, and that company sold it to the online advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake in 2011, which later became the ad tech firm Viant, according to SlashGear. Viant was bought by Time in 2016, which was acquired by Meredith Corporation at the end of 2017, according to The Guardian. Meredith then sold Myspace to Viant Technology LLC, which currently operates the platform, SlashGear said.

During its time under Timberlake, Myspace morphed from a social media platfrom and turned over a new leaf as a music discovery site, SlashGear reported. The once booming online atmosphere has turned into a ghost town, according to The Guardian. Despite the number of people on Myspace dwindling, a handful of devoted users remains.
The glory days of MySpace drew this bittersweet remembrance from TechRadar: Not everyone on the TechRadar team looks back on those early MySpace years fondly, with our US editor in chief Lance Ulanoff recalling that it "it was like peoples' brains had been turned inside out and whatever didn't stick, dropped onto the page and was represented as a GIF".

Many of us do, though, remember picking our Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix: The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July...

Notable new software work includes getting the Simple HTTP Server running as the first web (HTTP) server for the platform. Simple HTTP Server itself is written in Rust as well. There is also an ongoing effort to bring the Apache HTTP server to Redox OS too.

Another app milestone is the wget program now working on Redox OS. There's also been more work on getting the COSMIC desktop apps working on Redox OS, build system improvements, and other changes.

America's Senate "overwhelmingly passed major online safety reforms to protect children on social media," reports the Guardian.

"But with ongoing pushback from the tech industry and freedom of speech organizations, the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House." "It's a terrible idea to let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online," freedom of speech group the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of the Senate's passage of Kosa... Advocates of Kosa reject these critiques, noting the bill has been revised to address many of those concerns — including shifting enforcement from attorneys general to the federal trade commission and focusing the "duty of care" provisions on product design features of the site or app rather than content specifically. A number of major LGBTQ+ groups dropped their opposition to the legislation following these changes, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and the Trevor Project.

After passing the Senate this week, the bill has now moved onto the House, which is on a six-week summer recess until September. Proponents are now directing their efforts towards House legislators to turn the bill into law. Joe Biden has indicated he would sign it if it passes. In a statement Tuesday encouraging the House to pass the legislation, the US president said: "We need action by Congress to protect our kids online and hold big tech accountable for the national experiment they are running on our children for profit...."

House speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has expressed support for moving forward on Kosa and passing legislation this Congress, but it's unclear if he will bring the bill up in the House immediately. Some experts say the bill is unlikely to be passed in the House in the form passed by the Senate. "Given the concerns about potential censorship and the possibility of minors' lacking access to vital information, pausing KOSA makes eminent sense," said Gautam Hans, associate clinical professor of law and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell Law School. He added that the House may put forward its own similar legislation instead, or modify KOSA to further address some of these concerns.
The political news site Punchbowl News also noted this potentially significant quote: A House GOP leadership aide told us this about KOSA: "We've heard concerns across our Conference and the Senate bill cannot be brought up in its current form."
TechDirt argues that "Senator Rand Paul's really excellent letter laying out the reasons he couldn't support the bill may have had an impact."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the news.

Meta's Twitter rival, Threads, has reached a new milestone of 200 million active users, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. "I'm excited to share that we crossed the 200M milestone on @threads," Mosseri wrote. "My hope is that Threads can inspire ideas that bring people together and this amazing community continues to grow." TechCrunch reports: Growth for Threads has been strong. The text-focused social media platform, which launched in July 2023, reached 150 million users in April 2024 and 175 million users in July on its one-year anniversary, before another growth spurt led it to hit 200 million a month later. [...]

Last year, Zuckerberg suggested Threads has a "good chance" of becoming a platform with more than a billion users. On the latest earnings call, the Meta CEO also described the platform as being on a good growth trajectory. "We're making steady progress towards building what looks like it's going to be another major social app. And we are seeing deeper engagement," he said, adding: "I'm quite pleased with the trajectory here."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit Friday against TikTok and parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children's privacy on the social media app as the Biden administration continues its crackdown on the social media site. The government said TikTok violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that requires services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13. The suit (PDF), which was joined by the Federal Trade Commission, said it was aimed at putting an end "to TikTok's unlawful massive-scale invasions of children's privacy." Representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the suit "underscores the importance of divesting TikTok from Chinese Communist Party control. We simply cannot continue to allow our adversaries to harvest vast troves of Americans' sensitive data."

The DOJ said TikTok knowingly permitted children to create regular TikTok accounts, and then create and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on the regular TikTok platform. TikTok collected personal information from these children without obtaining consent from their parents. The U.S. alleges that for years millions of American children under 13 have been using TikTok and the site "has been collecting and retaining children's personal information." The FTC is seeking penalties of up to $51,744 per violation per day from TikTok for improperly collecting data, which could theoretically total billions of dollars if TikTok were found liable. TikTok said Friday it disagrees "with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed. We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform."

Google has pulled its "Dear Sydney" Olympics ad after it garnered significant backlash. (You can still watch the ad on YouTube, but comments have been turned off.) According to Ad Age, the ad was "meant to promote Google's Gemini AI platform, but viewers had a difficult time looking past its miscalculated storyline." From the report: In the ad, a father wants to help his daughter write a letter to her idol, Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. But instead of encouraging her to take part in such a personal moment, he delegates Gemini to write the letter for her. Viewers and ad leaders lambasted the spot on social media for being tone-deaf. Some were upset over Google evidently seeing no problem with an AI co-opting a formative childhood act, while others alluded to its reinforcing of a more existential fear, that AI is bound to replace meaningful work. The ad got significant airplay during NBCU's TV coverage of the Olympics this week, including on NBC in primetime, as well as on E!, CNBC and USA, according to iSpot.tv. It last ran on national TV around midnight of July 30 on USA, according to iSpot.TV. "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we've decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation," a Google spokesperson told Ad Age today.

The company earlier this week defended the ad in a statement: "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA. It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing."

After months of back and forth, Intel has finally agreed to extend the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs by an additional two years. This extension increases the warranty period for new boxed Intel CPUs from three to five years. For CPUs pre-installed in systems, Intel directs users to contact their PC's manufacturer for support, maintaining its established channels for warranty claims. The Verge adds: Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an "elevated operating voltage" and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won't fix any damage that's already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The technology flaws of the U.S. Secret Service helped the gunman who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month evade detection. An officer broadcast "long gun!" over the local law enforcement radio system, according to congressional testimony from the Secret Service this week, the New York Times reported. The radio message should have travelled to a command center shared between local police and the Secret Service, but the message was never received by the Secret Service. About 30 seconds later, the shooter, Thomas Crooks, fired his first shots.

It was one of several technology issues facing the Secret Service on 13 July due to either malfunction, improper deployment or the Secret Service opting not to utilize them. The Secret Service had also previously rejected requests from the Trump campaign for more resources over the past two years. The use of a surveillance drone was turned down by the Secret Service at the rally site and the agency also did not bring in a system to boost the signals of agents' devices as the area had poor cell service. And a system to detect drone use in the area by others did not work, according to the report in the New York Times, due to the communications network in the area being overwhelmed by the number of people gathered at the rally. The federal agency did not use technology it had to bolster their communications system. The shooter flew his own drone over the site for 11 minutes without being detected, about two hours before Trump appeared at the rally. Ronald Rowe Jr, the acting Secret Service director, said it never utilized the technological tools that could have spotted the shooter beforehand.

A former Secret Service officer also told the New York Times he "resigned in 2017 over frustration with the agency's delays in evaluating new technology and getting clearance and funding to obtain it and then train officers on it," notes The Guardian. Furthermore, the Secret Service failed to record communications between federal and local law enforcement at the rally.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has agreed to pay a licensing fee [non-paywalled link] to chatbot maker Character.AI for its models and will hire its cofounders and many of its researchers, Character's leaders told staff on Friday. The leaders told Character staff that investors would be bought out at a valuation of about $88 per share, the leaders said in a meeting. That's about 2.5 times the value of shares in Character's 2023 Series A, which valued the company at $1 billion, they said.

The Character employees joining Google will work on its Gemini AI efforts, they said. Character will switch to open-source models such as Meta Platforms' Llama 3.1 to power its products, rather than its in-house models, they said. The deal follows a string of similar arrangements by other well-funded artificial intelligence startups. AI developers Adept and Inflection have both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in the last five months despite raising considerable capital.

schwit1 writes: A U.S. appeals court on Thursday blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge. The agency voted in April along party lines to reassume regulatory oversight of broadband internet and reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 that were rescinded under then-President Donald Trump.

The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which had temporarily delayed the rules, said on Thursday it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules. "The final rule implicates a major question, and the commission has failed to satisfy the high bar for imposing such regulations," the court wrote. "Net neutrality is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Payments infrastructure firm Infibeam Avenues has acquired a majority 54% stake in Rediff.com for up to $3 million, a dramatic twist of fate for the 28-year-old business that was the first Indian internet firm to list on Nasdaq back in the year 2000.

Founded in 1996, Rediff rode the initial dot-com wave to become one of India's leading web portals, offering email, news, and e-commerce services. At its peak, Rediff was valued at over $600 million on the Nasdaq stock exchange. It also drove some of the largest traffic in India, climbing at least up to the 12th spot, according to brokerage house Jefferies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google launched its latest artificial intelligence powerhouse, Gemini 1.5 Pro, today, making the experimental "version 0801" available for early testing and feedback through Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. This release marks a major leap forward in the company's AI capabilities and has already sent shockwaves through the tech community. The new model has quickly claimed the top spot on the prestigious LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard (built with Gradio), boasting an impressive ELO score of 1300.

This achievement puts Gemini 1.5 Pro ahead of formidable competitors like OpenAI's GPT-4o (ELO: 1286) and Anthropic's Claude-3.5 Sonnet (ELO: 1271), potentially signaling a shift in the AI landscape. Simon Tokumine, a key figure in the Gemini team, celebrated the release in a post on X.com, describing it as "the strongest, most intelligent Gemini we've ever made." Early user feedback supports this claim, with one Redditor calling the model "insanely good" and expressing hope that its capabilities won't be scaled back. "A standout feature of the 1.5 series is its expansive context window of up to two million tokens, far surpassing many competing models," adds VentureBeat. "This allows Gemini 1.5 Pro to process and reason about vast amounts of information, including lengthy documents, extensive code bases, and extended audio or video content."

Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from Jalopnik: YouTube's Rich Rebuilds has been taking electric vehicles apart to see what makes them tick for years, so when a bargain-priced Fisker Ocean came on his radar, he had to buy it. Even if it was totally bricked. This car was purchased new for over $70,000, had several thousand dollars of paint protection and tint applied, was driven for 300 miles, and traded in. It sat on the dealer lot for long enough for the battery to die, and the techs at the dealer couldn't figure it out. So they sold it to Rich for just 10 grand!

As Rich notes in the video, the car is worth way more than ten grand in parts alone, as current Fisker owners will be looking for ways to keep their cars on the road for years to come. The company has gone the way of the dodo, and parts supply and software updates are never going to come. What you see is what you get, and what you get is kind of shitty. In June, Fisker filed for bankruptcy, months after the electric-vehicle startup stopped production of its only model, the oft-malfunctioning Ocean SUV.

According to Statcounter, Linux use hit another all-time high in July. For July 2024, the statistics website is showing Linux at 4.45%, climbing almost a half a percentage point from June's 4.05% high.

Is 2024 truly the year of Linux on the desktop?

A U.S. judge has thrown out a Republican National Committee lawsuit accusing Alphabet's Google of intentionally misdirecting the political party's email messages to users' spam folders. From a report: U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, on Wednesday dismissed the RNC's lawsuit for a second time, and said the organization would not be allowed to refile it. While expressing some sympathy for the RNC's allegations, he said it had not made an adequate case that Google violated California's unfair competition law.

The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations. Google denied any wrongdoing.

Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page. From a report: The tool, which Google is calling "tab compare," will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view.

But while it's potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare product information -- which might be especially worrying for independent publishers that are already struggling to be seen on Google. I'm also skeptical that Google will correctly pull all of the finer details about various products into the tables it creates with tab compare. I don't always trust Google's accuracy right now! There are some limits on what tab compare can do. The tables it creates are limited to 10 items because "we've just found the column layout doesn't scale very well beyond that," Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz tells The Verge.

AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. From a report: In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music.

"Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.