An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union will investigate whether ByteDance's TikTok breached online content rules aimed at protecting children and ensuring transparent advertising, an official said on Monday, putting the social media platform at risk of a hefty fine. EU industry chief Thierry Breton said he took the decision after analyzing the short video app's risk assessment report and its replies to requests for information, confirming a Reuters story. "Today we open an investigation into TikTok over suspected breach of transparency & obligations to protect minors: addictive design & screen time limits, rabbit hole effect, age verification, default privacy settings," Breton said on X.

The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies to all online platforms since Feb. 17, requires in particular very large online platforms and search engines to do more to tackle illegal online content and risks to public security. TikTok's owner, China-based ByteDance, could face fines of up to 6% of its global turnover if TikTok is found guilty of breaching DSA rules. TikTok said it would continue to work with experts and the industry to keep young people on its platform safe and that it looked forward to explaining this work in detail to the European Commission.

The European Commission said the investigation will focus on the design of TikTok's system, including algorithmic systems which may stimulate behavioral addictions and/or create so-called 'rabbit hole effects'. It will also probe whether TikTok has put in place appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors. As well as the issue of protecting minors, the Commission is looking at whether TikTok provides a reliable database on advertisements on its platform so that researchers can scrutinize potential online risks.

Microsoft is developing a new network card that could improve the performance of its Maia AI server chip and potentially reduce the company's reliance on chip designer Nvidia, The Information reported on Tuesday. Reuters: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tapped Pradeep Sindhu, who co-founded networking gear developer Juniper Networks, to spearhead the network card effort, the report said citing a person with knowledge of the matter. Microsoft acquired Sindhu's server chip startup, Fungible, last year. The new network card is similar to Nvidia's ConnectX-7 card, which the chip developer sells alongside its graphic processor units (GPUs), the report added. The equipment could take more than a year to develop and, if successful, could lessen the time it takes for OpenAI to train its models on Microsoft servers as well as make the process less expensive, according to the report.

A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a speaker's pulse racing or "umms" lengthening, a generative AI bot that mimics their voice could simply take over. That cutting-edge idea wasn't revealed at a big company event or in an academic journal. Instead, it appeared in a 1,500-word post on a little-known, free website called TDCommons.org that Google has quietly owned and funded for nine years. WIRED: Until WIRED received a link to an idea on TDCommons last year and got curious, Google had never spoken with the media about its website. Scrolling through TDCommons, you can read Google's latest ideas for coordinating smart home gadgets for better sleep, preserving privacy in mobile search results, and using AI to summarize a person's activities from their photo archives. And the submissions aren't exclusive to Google; about 150 organizations, including HP, Cisco, and Visa, also have posted inventions to the website.

The website is a home for ideas that seem potentially valuable but not worth spending tens of thousands of dollars seeking a patent for. By publishing the technical details and establishing "prior art," Google and other companies can head off future disputes by blocking others from filing patents for similar concepts. Google gives employees a $1,000 bonus for each invention they post to TDCommons -- a tenth of what it awards its patent seekers -- but they also get an immediately shareable link to gloat about otherwise secretive work.

Google's "Nest Aware" camera subscription is going through another round of price increases. From a report: This time it's for international users. There's no big announcement or anything, just a smattering of email screenshots from various countries on the Nest subreddit. 9to5Google was nice enough to hunt down a pile of the announcements. Nest Aware is a monthly subscription fee for Google's Nest cameras. Nest cameras exclusively store all their video in the cloud, and without the subscription, you aren't allowed to record video 24/7.

There are two sets of subscriptions to keep track of: the current generation subscription for modern cameras and the "first generation Nest Aware" subscription for older cameras. To give you an idea of what we're dealing with, in the US, the current free tier only gets you three hours of "event" video -- meaning video triggered by motion detection. Even the basic $8-a-month subscription doesn't get you 24/7 recording -- that's still only 30 days of event video. The "Nest Aware Plus" subscription, at $15 a month in the US, gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording. The "first-generation" Nest Aware subscription, which is tied to earlier cameras and isn't available for new customers anymore, is doubling in price in Canada. The basic tier of five days of 24/7 video is going from a yearly fee of CA$50 to CA$110 (the first-generation sub has 24/7 video on every tier). Ten days of video is jumping from CA$80 to CA$160, and 30 days is going from CA$110 to CA$220. These are the prices for a single camera; the first-generation subscription will have additional charges for additional cameras. The current Nest Aware subscription for modern cameras is getting jumps that look similar to the US, with Nest Aware Plus, the mid-tier, going from CA$16 to CA $20 per month, and presumably similar raises across the board.

Adobe is adding a new generative AI experience to its Acrobat PDF management software, which aims to "completely transform the digital document experience" by making information in long documents easier to find and understand. From a report: Announced in Adobe's press release as "AI Assistant in Acrobat," the new tool is described as a "conversational engine" that can summarize files, answer questions, and recommend more based on the content, allowing users to "easily chat with documents" to get the information they need. It's available in beta starting today for paying Acrobat users.

The idea is that the chatbot will reduce the time-consuming tasks related to working with massive text documents -- such as helping students quickly find information for research projects or summarizing large reports into snappy highlights for emails, meetings, and presentations. AI Assistant in Acrobat can be used with all document formats supported by the app, including Word and PowerPoint. The chatbot abides by Adobe's data security protocols, so it won't store data from customer documents or use it to train AI Assistant. The new AI Assistant experience is available for Acrobat customers on Standard ($12.99 per month) and Pro ($19.99 per month) plans.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a concession to automakers and labor unions, the Biden administration intends to relax elements of one of its most ambitious strategies to combat climate change, limits on tailpipe emissions that are designed to get Americans to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, according to three people familiar with the plan. Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time [non-paywalled source], with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030, these people said. They asked to remain anonymous because the regulation has not been finalized. The administration plans to publish the final rule by early spring.

The change comes as President Biden faces intense crosswinds as he runs for re-election while trying to confront climate change. He is aiming to cut carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles, which make up the largest single source of greenhouse gases emitted by the United States. At the same time, Mr. Biden needs cooperation from the auto industry and political support from the unionized auto workers who backed him in 2020 but now worry that an abrupt transition to electric vehicles would cost jobs. Meanwhile, consumer demand has not been what automakers hoped, with potential buyers put off by sticker prices and the relative scarcity of charging stations. The EPA last year proposed the toughest-ever limits on tailpipe emissions. The rules would be so strict, the only way car makers could comply would be to sell a tremendous number of zero-emissions vehicles in a relatively short time frame. The E.P.A. designed the proposed regulations so that 67% of sales of new cars and light-duty trucks would be all-electric by 2032, up from 7.6% in 2023, a radical remaking of the American automobile market.

"After years of rapid expansion, California's booming EV market may be showing signs of fatigue," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as high vehicle prices, unreliable charging networks and other consumer headaches appear to dampen enthusiasm for zero-emission vehicles.

"For the first time in more than a decade, electric vehicle sales dropped significantly in the last half of 2023..." Sales of all-electric cars and light trucks in California had started off strong in 2023, rising 48% in the first half of the year compared with a year earlier. By that time, California EV sales numbered roughly 190,807 — or slightly more than a quarter of all EV sales in the nation, according to the California New Car Dealers Assn. But it's what happened in the second half of last year though that's generating jitters. Sales in the third quarter fell by 2,840 from the previous period — the first quarterly drop for EVs in California since the Tesla Model S was introduced in 2012. And the fourth quarter was even worse: Sales dropped 10.2%, from 100,151 to 89,933...

Propelled by the sales success of Tesla, and boosted by electric vehicles from other automakers entering the market, consumer acceptance of EVs had seemed like a given until recently. In fact, robust sales growth is a key assumption in the state's zero-emission vehicle plan... Under the no-gas mandate, zero-emission vehicles must account for 35% of all new vehicle sales by model year 2026.... Nationally, EV sales growth also has slowed as automakers such as Ford and General Motors cut back — at least temporarily — on EV and battery production plans. Hertz, the rental car giant, is also pulling back on plans to shift heavily toward EVs. Hertz several years ago announced plans to buy 100,000 Teslas but is now selling off its EV fleet.

Corey Cantor, EV analyst at Bloomberg BNEF, an energy research firm, said that although recent sales figures are worrisome, there's plenty of momentum behind the EV transition, as evidenced by government mandates around the globe and massive investments by motor vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers. Those investments total $616 billion globally over five years, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.
But EVs haven't reached "price parity" with gas-powered engines, the article points out, so just 7.6% of the vehicles sold last year in the U.S. were electric — while in California, the market share for EVS was 20.1%.

The article also quantifies concerns about reliability of California's public charging system, which "according to studies from academic researchers and market analysts, can be counted on to malfunction at least 20% of the time." After $1 billion in state money for charger companies, the state's Energy Commission will now also start collecting reliability statistics, according to the article. But the article also cites wait times at the chargers. "Even if they were reliable, there aren't enough chargers to go around. EV sales have outpaced public charger installation."

Some good news? The federal government is spending $5 billion nationally to put fast chargers on major highways at 50-mile intervals. California will receive $384 million. Seven major automakers have also teamed up to build a North American charging network of their own, called Ionna. The joint venture plans to install at least 30,000 chargers — which would be open to any EV brand — at stations that will provide restrooms, food service and retail stores on site or nearby.

In the high-stakes world of AI, "The fundamental agreement behind robots.txt [files], and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to 'everybody just be cool' — may not be able to keep up..." argues the Verge: For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," says Medium CEO Tony Stubblebin, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers."

Over the last year, a large chunk of the media industry has echoed Stubblebine's sentiment. "We do not believe the current 'scraping' of BBC data without our permission in order to train Gen AI models is in the public interest," BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan Davies wrote last fall, announcing that the BBC would also be blocking OpenAI's crawler. The New York Times blocked GPTBot as well, months before launching a suit against OpenAI alleging that OpenAI's models "were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more." A study by Ben Welsh, the news applications editor at Reuters, found that 606 of 1,156 surveyed publishers had blocked GPTBot in their robots.txt file.

It's not just publishers, either. Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, WikiHow, WebMD, and many other platforms explicitly block GPTBot from accessing some or all of their websites.

On most of these robots.txt pages, OpenAI's GPTBot is the only crawler explicitly and completely disallowed. But there are plenty of other AI-specific bots beginning to crawl the web, like Anthropic's anthropic-ai and Google's new Google-Extended. According to a study from last fall by Originality.AI, 306 of the top 1,000 sites on the web blocked GPTBot, but only 85 blocked Google-Extended and 28 blocked anthropic-ai. There are also crawlers used for both web search and AI. CCBot, which is run by the organization Common Crawl, scours the web for search engine purposes, but its data is also used by OpenAI, Google, and others to train their models. Microsoft's Bingbot is both a search crawler and an AI crawler. And those are just the crawlers that identify themselves — many others attempt to operate in relative secrecy, making it hard to stop or even find them in a sea of other web traffic.

For any sufficiently popular website, finding a sneaky crawler is needle-in-haystack stuff.
In addition, the article points out, a robots.txt file "is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved.

"Disallowing a bot on your robots.txt page is like putting up a 'No Girls Allowed' sign on your treehouse — it sends a message, but it's not going to stand up in court."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Reddit has signed a contract allowing an AI company to train its models on the social media platform's content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter... The agreement, signed with an "unnamed large AI company", could be a model for future contracts of a similar nature, Bloomberg reported.
Mashable writes that the move "means that Reddit posts, from the most popular subreddits to the comments of lurkers and small accounts, could build up already-existing LLMs or provide a framework for the next generative AI play." It's a dicey decision from Reddit, as users are already at odds with the business decisions of the nearly 20-year-old platform. Last year, following Reddit's announcement that it would begin charging for access to its APIs, thousands of Reddit forums shut down in protest... This new AI deal could generate even more user ire, as debate rages on about the ethics of using public data, art, and other human-created content to train AI.
Some context from the Verge: The deal, "worth about $60 million on an annualized basis," Bloomberg writes, could still change as the company's plans to go public are still in the works.

Until recently, most AI companies trained their data on the open web without seeking permission. But that's proven to be legally questionable, leading companies to try to get data on firmer footing. It's not known what company Reddit made the deal with, but it's quite a bit more than the $5 million annual deal OpenAI has reportedly been offering news publishers for their data. Apple has also been seeking multi-year deals with major news companies that could be worth "at least $50 million," according to The New York Times.

The news also follows an October story that Reddit had threatened to cut off Google and Bing's search crawlers if it couldn't make a training data deal with AI companies.

Lauren Feiner reports via The Verge: Reps. Mark Takano (D-CA) and Dwight Evans (D-PA) reintroduced the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act on Thursday, which would allow defendants to access the source code of software used to analyze evidence in their criminal proceedings. It would also require the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create testing standards for forensic algorithms, which software used by federal enforcers would need to meet.

The bill would act as a check on unintended outcomes that could be created by using technology to help solve crimes. Academic research has highlighted the ways human bias can be built into software and how facial recognition systems often struggle to differentiate Black faces, in particular. The use of algorithms to make consequential decisions in many different sectors, including both crime-solving and health care, has raised alarms for consumers and advocates as a result of such research.

Takano acknowledged that gaining or hiring the deep expertise needed to analyze the source code might not be possible for every defendant. But requiring NIST to create standards for the tools could at least give them a starting point for understanding whether a program matches the basic standards. Takano introduced previous iterations of the bill in 2019 and 2021, but they were not taken up by a committee.

The European Union is expanding its strict digital rulebook on Saturday to almost all online platforms in the bloc, in the next phase of its crackdown on toxic social media content and dodgy ecommerce products that began last year by targeting the most popular services. From a report: The EU's trailblazing Digital Services Act has already kicked in for nearly two dozen of the biggest online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon and Wikipedia. The DSA imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online, including making it easier to report counterfeit or unsafe goods or flag harmful or illegal content like hate speech as well as a ban on ads targeted at children.

Now the rules will apply to nearly all online platforms, marketplaces and "intermediaries" with users in the 27-nation bloc. Only the smallest businesses, with fewer than 50 employees and annual revenue of less than 10 million euros ($11 million), are exempt. That means thousands more websites could potentially be covered by the regulations. It includes popular ones such as eBay and OnlyFans that escaped being classed as the biggest online platforms requiring extra scrutiny.

Google Search Labs is testing a "Talk to a Live Representative" feature where it will "help you place the call, wait on hold, and then give you a call once a live representative is available." From a report: When you search for customer service numbers, which Google recently started surfacing for Knowledge Panels, you might see a prominent "Talk to a live representative" prompt. Very simply, Google will call the support line "for you and wait on hold until a customer service representative picks up." At that time, Google will call you so you can get on with your business.

To "Request a call," you first specify a reason for why you're calling. In the case of airlines, it's: Update existing booking, Luggage issue, Canceled flight, Other issue, Flight check-in, Missed my flight, and Delayed flight. You then provide your phone number, with Google sending SMS updates. The Request page will note the estimated wait time. After submitting, you can cancel the request at any time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadcom has made a lot of changes to VMware since closing its acquisition of the company in November. On Wednesday, VMware admitted that these changes are worrying customers. With customers mulling alternatives and partners complaining, VMware is trying to do damage control and convince people that change is good. Not surprisingly, the plea comes from a VMware marketing executive: Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware. In Wednesday's announcement, Shenoy admitted that VMware "has been all about change" since being swooped up for $61 billion. This has resulted in "many questions and concerns" as customers "evaluate how to maximize value from" VMware products.

Among these changes is VMware ending perpetual license sales in favor of a subscription-based business model. VMware had a history of relying on perpetual licensing; VMware called the model its "most renowned" a year ago. Shenoy's blog sought to provide reasoning for the change, with the executive writing that "all major enterprise software providers are on [subscription models] today." However, the idea that '"everyone's doing it" has done little to ameliorate impacted customers who prefer paying for something once and owning it indefinitely (while paying for associated support costs). Customers are also dealing with budget concerns with already paid-for licenses set to lose support and the only alternative being a monthly fee.

Shenoy's blog, though, focused on license portability. "This means you will be able to deploy on-premises and then take your subscription at any time to a supported Hyperscaler or VMware Cloud Services Provider environment as desired. You retain your license subscription as you move," Shenoy wrote, noting new Google Cloud VMware Engine license portability support for VMware Cloud Foundation. Further, Shenoy claimed the discontinuation of VMware products so that Broadcom could focus on VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation would be beneficial, because "offering a few offerings that are lower in price on the high end and are packed with more value for the same or less cost on the lower end makes business sense for customers, partners, and VMware." VMware's Wednesday post also addressed Broadcom taking VMware's biggest customers direct, removing channel partners from the equation: "It makes business sense for Broadcom to have close relationships with its most strategic VMware customers to make sure VMware Cloud Foundation is being adopted, used, and providing customer value. However, we expect there will be a role change in accounts that will have to be worked through so that both Broadcom and our partners are providing the most value and greatest impact to strategic customers. And, partners will play a critical role in adding value beyond what Broadcom may be able."

"Broadcom identified things that needed to change and, as a responsible company, made the changes quickly and decisively," added Shenoy. "The changes that have taken place over the past 60+ days were absolutely necessary."

Google said it will allow businesses to install ChromeOS Flex on their Windows devices, "potentially preventing millions of PCs from hitting landfills after Microsoft ends support for Windows 10 next year," reports Reuters. The Chrome operating system will ultimately allow users to keep using their Windows 10 systems, while also providing regular security updates and features like data encryption. From the report: ChromeOS is significantly less popular than other operating systems. In January 2024, it held a 1.8% share of the worldwide desktop OS market, far behind Windows' share of about 73%, according to data from research firm Statcounter. ChromeOS has struggled with wider adaptability due to its incompatibility with legacy Windows applications and productivity suites used by businesses. Google said that ChromeOS would allow users to stream legacy Windows and productivity applications, which will help deliver them to devices by running the apps on a data center.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Alphabet's Google is rolling out a new version of its powerful artificial intelligence model that it says can handle larger amounts of text and video than products made by competitors. The updated AI model, called Gemini 1.5 Pro, will be available on Thursday to cloud customers and developers so they can test its new features and eventually create new commercial applications. Google and its rivals have spent billions to ramp up their capabilities in generative AI and are keen to attract corporate clients to show their investments are paying off. [...]

Gemini 1.5 can be trained faster and more efficiently, and has the ability to process a huge amount of information each time it's prompted, according to Vinyals. For example, developers can use Gemini 1.5 Pro to query up to an hour's worth of video, 11 hours of audio or more than 700,000 words in a document, an amount of data that Google says is the "longest context window" of any large-scale AI model yet. Gemini 1.5 can process far more data compared with what the latest AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic can handle, according to Google. In a pre-recorded video demonstration for reporters, Google showed off how engineers asked Gemini 1.5 Pro to ingest a 402-page PDF transcript of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and then prompted it to find quotes that showed "three funny moments."

OpenAI has been developing a web search product that would bring the Microsoft-backed startup into more direct competition with Google, The Information reports, citing a person with knowledge of OpenAI's plans. From the report: The search service would be partly powered by Bing, this person said. The move to launch a search app comes a year after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his company would "make Google dance" by incorporating artificial intelligence from OpenAI into Microsoft's Bing search engine. That partnership has failed to dent Google's search dominance. It isn't clear whether the search product would be separate from ChatGPT, the chatbot OpenAI runs and which also uses Bing's index of the web to answer some questions. OpenAI could be looking to speed up the service, which can be slow because it also does tasks like proofreading and summarizing documents.

Lyft Chief Executive Officer David Risher's response to a clerical error that unintentionally inflated the company's earnings outlook on Tuesday and sent shares soaring: "My bad." From a report: "First of all, it's on me," Risher said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday, taking the blame for a typo in a company press release Tuesday that erroneously projected a particular measure of earnings margin to expand by an eye-watering 500 basis points. (In reality, Lyft expects margins to grow by 50 basis points.) "This was a bad error," he said, "but it was one zero in a press release."

The typo, which actually appeared in multiple company documents on Tuesday, helped drive a 67% surge in Lyft's shares in after-hours trading. The mistake was a serious one, Risher said. But it shouldn't take away from Lyft's "butt-kicking" financial performance, he said. Risher said his team at Lyft was taking the error very seriously and noted it was corrected "within seconds of finding it." But in fact, on a call with analysts to discuss the quarterly results, Lyft executives didn't immediately note the error in their opening remarks. Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer just began referring to the company's outlook for a 50-basis-point expansion. It wasn't until later in the call, when an analyst pointed out the discrepancy, that Brewer acknowledged her outlook was "actually a correction from the press release."

The U.S. Navy has ramped up efforts to recruit young gamers and esports fans to meet recruitment goals, allocating up to $4.3 million this year for esports marketing. This includes hosting video game tournaments and having sailors compete as the esports team "Goats & Glory." Critics argue targeting minors for military marketing normalizes war and raises ethical concerns, The Guardian reports. While the military cannot formally recruit those under 17, advertising and direct interaction with minors for recruitment purposes is permitted. Veterans groups oppose this, noting the military relies on gaming's appeal to young teens, whose brains are still developing, to influence future decisions about military service, the report adds.

DuckDuckGo keeps adding new features to its browser; and while these features are common in other browsers, DuckDuckGo is giving them a privacy-minded twist. The latest is a private, end-to-end encrypted syncing service. There's no account needed, no sign-in, and the company says it never sees what you're syncing. From a report: Using QR codes and shortcodes, and a lengthy backup code you store somewhere safe, DuckDuckGo's browser can keep your bookmarks, passwords, "favorites" (i.e., new tab page shortcuts), and settings for its email protection service synced between devices and browsers. DuckDuckGo points to Google's privacy policy for using its signed-in sync service on Chrome, which uses "aggregated and anonymized synchronized browsing data to improve other Google products and services." DuckDuckGo states that the encryption key for browser sync is stored only locally on your devices and that it lacks any access to your passwords or other data.

Apple researchers have unveiled a new AI tool called "Keyframer," (PDF) which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to animate static images through natural language prompts. From a report: This novel application, detailed in a new research paper published on arxiv.org, represents a giant leap in the integration of artificial intelligence into the creative process -- and it may also hint at what's to come in newer generations of Apple products such as the iPad Pro and Vision Pro. The research paper, titled "Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models," explores uncharted territory in the application of LLMs to the animation industry, presenting unique challenges such as how to effectively describe motion in natural language.

Imagine this: You're an animator with an idea that you want to explore. You've got static images and a story to tell, but the thought of countless hours bending over an iPad to breathe life into your creations is, well, exhausting. Enter Keyframer. With just a few sentences, those images can begin to dance across the screen, as if they've read your mind. Or rather, as if Apple's large language models (LLMs) have. Keyframer is powered by a large language model (in the study, they use GPT-4) that can generate CSS animation code from a static SVG image and prompt. "Large language models have the potential to impact a wide range of creative domains, but the application of LLMs to animation is under-explored and presents novel challenges such as how users might effectively describe motion in natural language," the researchers explain.