An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday Canada will impose punitive tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles -- copying a similar initiative that the U.S. is already pursuing to stop a flood of what's been described as unfairly state-subsidized cars. Trudeau made the announcement at the federal cabinet retreat in Halifax where ministers are meeting to craft a strategy for the year ahead -- the last year before an expected federal election in October 2025. Amid industry pressure to copy the U.S. program, Trudeau said a 100 percent surtax will be levied on all Chinese-made EVs, effective Oct. 1. The tariff would effectively double the price of imported vehicles, as it is expected most of the tax would be passed on to consumers.

Ottawa is following through now, Trudeau said, to "level the playing field for Canadian workers" and allow Canada's nascent EV industry to compete at home, in North America and globally. The tariff will apply to electric and certain hybrid passenger automobiles, trucks, buses and delivery vans. Chinese brands like BYD are not a major player in Canada's EV market right now but imports from China have exploded in recent years as Tesla switched from U.S. factories for its Canadian sales to its manufacturing plant in Shanghai. The new tariff will apply to those Shanghai-made Teslas that are sold in Canada -- a development that is expected to force the U.S. automaker to supply the Canadian market with vehicles made at one if its other plants in the U.S. or Europe instead. "Unfortunately, Canada made a decision today that will result in fewer affordable electric vehicles for Canadians, less competition and more climate pollution," said Joanna Kyriazis, director of public affairs at Clean Energy Canada. "Not only could today's announcement have a chilling effect on future EV sales, it could drive up EV prices and slow adoption in the near-term as well," Kyriazis said.

Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association who lobbied Ottawa to follow through with matching the U.S. tariffs, responded: "Sure, what the Chinese are doing is selling us green products that help fulfill some of our EV mandates, but they do it in a regulatory environment where they forgo any stewardship of the environment," he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland added that the Chinese industry is "built on abysmal labour standards and it is built on abysmal environmental standards."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Ikea is taking on the likes of eBay, Craigslist, and Gumtree with a peer-to-peer marketplace for customers to sell secondhand furniture to each other. Ikea Preowned will be tested in Madrid and Oslo until the end of the year with the aim of rolling out the buying and selling platform globally, according to Jesper Brodin, chief executive of Ingka, the main operator of Ikea stores. [...] Ikea has had a small offering under which it buys used furniture from customers and resells it in store. But the new platform is more ambitious, aiming to tackle the secondhand market for customers selling directly to each other -- an area where Brodin estimates Ikea has a higher market share than in new furniture sales. Customers enter their product, their own pictures, and a selling price, while Ikea's own artificial intelligence-enabled database brings in its own promotional images and measurements. The buyer collects the furniture directly from the seller, who has the option of receiving money or a voucher from Ikea with a 15 percent bonus.

"Very often there is a monopoly or oligopoly on platforms that operate," said Brodin, talking about eBay or digital classified ad services such as Gumtree in the UK and Finn in Norway. Finn has 8,700 items from Ikea listed in Oslo alone. Early offerings on Ikea Preowned include large items such as sofas for up to $670 (600 euros) and wardrobes for $500 (450 euros) as well as smaller items such as a toilet roll holder for $4.50 (4 euros). Listings are free, but Brodin said Ikea could eventually charge "a symbolic fee, a humble fee." He added: "We're going to verify the full scope including the economics. If a lot of people use the offer to get a discount with Ikea -- it's a good way to reconnect with customers. I am very curious. I think it makes business sense." Ikea has previously tested selling its new furniture on third-party platforms such as Alibaba's Tmall in China, but the Preowned platform marks its first foray into secondhand marketplaces. It also dovetails with the retailer's wish to become "circular and climate positive" by 2030.

Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire co-founder of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France in connection with an investigation into criminal activity on the platform and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement, prosecutors announced on Monday. From a report: Durov, who has French citizenship, was detained at Le Bourget airport, just outside Paris, on Saturday evening after arriving from Azerbaijan on his private jet. His surprise arrest has sparked debate over free speech worldwide and led to an outcry in Moscow. The Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the investigation concerned crimes related to illicit transactions, child sexual abuse, fraud and the refusal to communicate information to authorities.

Earlier in the day the French president, Emmanuel Macron, gave the first confirmation that Durov had been arrested as part of a judicial inquiry in relation to Telegram. "In a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights," Macron wrote on X, adding that the arrest was "in no way a political decision." "It is up to the judiciary, in full independence, to enforce the law," he said. A senior official at Ofmin, a French agency set up last year to prevent violence against children, said Durov's arrest was linked to Telegram's failure to properly fight crime on the app, including the spread of child sexual abuse material.

Car buyers are increasingly skeptical of advanced automotive technologies, a new JD Power survey reveals. The study found that while drivers appreciate practical innovations like blind spot monitoring, they see little value in features such as automatic parking systems and passenger-side infotainment screens. The survey measured user experiences with new vehicle technologies. Results show that systems partially automating driving tasks had low perceived usefulness, aligning with recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety data indicating no safety improvements from such features. The survey identified AI-based smart climate control as popular among users. However, facial recognition, fingerprint scanners, and gesture controls were largely viewed negatively.

Google may be the most successful company in the world. But a Washington Post reporter argues that Google "makes you largely responsible for dodging the criminals who are hurting legitimate businesses and swindling people." On Monday, I found what appeared to be impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency company, in the "People also ask" section high up in Google. A group of people experienced in Google's intricacies also said this week that it took about 22 minutes to fool Google into highlighting a bogus business phone number in a prominent spot in search results...

If you look at the two impostor phone numbers in Google for Delta and Coinbase, there are red flags. There are odd fonts and a website below the bogus numbers that wasn't for either company. (I notified Google about the apparent scams on Monday and I still saw them 24 hours later.) The correct customer help numbers did appear at the very top, and Google says businesses have clear instructions to make their customer service information visible to people searching Google.
The larger issue is "a persistent pattern of bad guys finding ways to trick Google into showing scammers' numbers for airlines, hotels, local repair companies, banks or other businesses." The toll can be devastating when people are duped by these bogus business numbers. Fortune recently reported on a man who called what a Google listing said was Coinbase customer support, and instead it was an impostor who Fortune said tricked the man and stole $100,000...

Most of the time, you will find correct customer service numbers by Googling. But the company doesn't say how often people are tricked out of time and money by bogus listings — nor why Google can't stop the scams from recurring.
The article makes two points.

• Google says when they identify listings violating their rules, they move quickly against them.

• "Impostor numbers pop up so persistently that I am once again begging you to be wary of Google or Google Maps listings for business phone numbers... You still might see bogus phone numbers in some spots in Google. And if you're stressed trying to find help with a flight or a financial problem, you might overlook warning signs. Scams work because humans make errors in judgment, especially when we're confused or panicky. And business impostors aren't always obvious."

A university in Taiwan was breached with "a previously unseen backdoor (Backdoor.Msupedge) utilizing an infrequently seen technique," Symantec reports. The most notable feature of this backdoor is that it communicates with a command-and-control server via DNS traffic... The code for the DNS tunneling tool is based on the publicly available dnscat2 tool. It receives commands by performing name resolution... Msupedge not only receives commands via DNS traffic but also uses the resolved IP address of the C&C server (ctl.msedeapi[.]net) as a command. The third octet of the resolved IP address is a switch case. The behavior of the backdoor will change based on the value of the third octet of the resolved IP address minus seven...

The initial intrusion was likely through the exploit of a recently patched PHP vulnerability (CVE-2024-4577). The vulnerability is a CGI argument injection flaw affecting all versions of PHP installed on the Windows operating system. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability can lead to remote code execution.

Symantec has seen multiple threat actors scanning for vulnerable systems in recent weeks. To date, we have found no evidence allowing us to attribute this threat and the motive behind the attack remains unknown.
More from The Record: Compared to more obvious methods like HTTP or HTTPS tunneling, this technique can be harder to detect because DNS traffic is generally considered benign and is often overlooked by security tools. Earlier in June, researchers discovered a campaign by suspected Chinese state-sponsored hackers, known as RedJuliett, targeting dozens of organizations in Taiwan, including universities, state agencies, electronics manufacturers, and religious organizations. Like many other Chinese threat actors, the group likely targeted vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices such as firewalls and enterprise VPNs for initial access because these devices often have limited visibility and security solutions, researchers said.
Additional coverage at The Hacker News.

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

The nonprofit American Radio Relay League — founded in 1914 — has approximately 161,000 members, according to Wikipedia (with over 7,000 members outside the U.S.)

But sometime in early May its systems network was compromised, "by threat actors using information they had purchased on the dark web," the nonprofit announced this week. The attackers accessed the ARRL's on-site systems — as well as most of its cloud-based systems — using "a wide variety of payloads affecting everything from desktops and laptops to Windows-based and Linux-based servers." Despite the wide variety of target configurations, the threat actors seemed to have a payload that would host and execute encryption or deletion of network-based IT assets, as well as launch demands for a ransom payment, for every system... The FBI categorized the attack as "unique" as they had not seen this level of sophistication among the many other attacks, they have experience with.

Within 3 hours a crisis management team had been constructed of ARRL management, an outside vendor with extensive resources and experience in the ransomware recovery space, attorneys experienced with managing the legal aspects of the attack including interfacing with the authorities, and our insurance carrier. The authorities were contacted immediately as was the ARRL President... [R]ansom demands were dramatically weakened by the fact that they did not have access to any compromising data. It was also clear that they believed ARRL had extensive insurance coverage that would cover a multi-million-dollar ransom payment. After days of tense negotiation and brinkmanship, ARRL agreed to pay a $1 million ransom. That payment, along with the cost of restoration, has been largely covered by our insurance policy...

Today, most systems have been restored or are waiting for interfaces to come back online to interconnect them. While we have been in restoration mode, we have also been working to simplify the infrastructure to the extent possible. We anticipate that it may take another month or two to complete restoration under the new infrastructure guidelines and new standards.
ARRL's called the attack "extensive", "sophisticated", "highly coordinated" and "an act of organized crime". And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30335) shared this detail from BleepingComputer.

"While the organization has not yet linked the attack to a specific ransomware operation, sources told BleepingComputer that the Embargo ransomware gang was behind the breach."

Volkswagen said this week it would wait to see where EV demand goes before building out the last three of its six planned battery factories. And now Ford has also cancelled its planned electric SUV and delayed production of an all-new electric pickup, according to CNBC, moves Ford now believes could cost up to $1.9 billion.

But Ford isn't giving up. Ford's COO told CNBC Thursday that "We're quite convinced that the highest adoption rates for electric vehicles will be in the affordable segment on the lower size-end of the range." Instead of the three-row SUV or large pickup, the company's first new EV is expected to be a commercial van in 2026, followed the next year by a midsized pickup and then the T3 full-size pickup... And the midsize pickup is scheduled to be the first vehicle from a specialized "skunkworks" team in California. The company had tasked the team two years ago with developing a new small EV platform... "In ICE, a business we've been in for 120 years, the bigger the vehicle, the higher the margin. But it's exactly the opposite for EVs...."

Ford's current EVs — the Mustang Mach-E crossover, F-150 Lightning and a commercial van in the U.S. — are not profitable overall. The Model e operations have lost nearly $2.5 billion during the first half of this year and lost $4.7 billion in 2023. The losses, as well as changing market conditions and business plans, caused Ford earlier this year to withdraw an ambitious 8% profit margin for its EV unit by 2026.

Investors and Wall Street analysts have largely supported the EV changes, most recently sending the company's shares up about 2.3% since the announcement earlier this week, despite the expected costs. "Overall, these changes will position Ford to benefit from growing demand for EVs, while also focusing on areas in which it has a Core competitive advantage," BofA's John Murphy wrote Wednesday in an investor note... The updates are the latest for Ford's electrification plans, which now include a heavy focus on hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs, to assist in meeting tightening fuel economy regulations in addition to all-electric vehicles. Ford CFO John Lawler said Wednesday that the company's future capital expenditure plans will shift from spending about 40% on all-electric vehicles to spending 30%... "What we saw in '21 and '22 was a temporary market spike where the demand for EVs really took off," Gjaja told CNBC during an interview earlier this year. "It's still growing but not nearly at the rate we thought it might have in '21, '22."
The article also points out that while Ford is discontinuing its giant electric SUV, Ford's rival GM is doing exactly the opposite: America's largest automaker has pulled back spending and delayed many of its EVs, but it has several large all-electric vehicles on sale coming soon... As recently as last month, GM reconfirmed expectations for its EVs to be profitable on a production, or contribution-margin basis, once it reaches output of 200,000 units by the fourth quarter. A GM spokesman Thursday said the automaker continues "to work to reach variable profit positive during the fourth quarter."
The article also notes "an industrywide fear that Chinese automakers could be able to flood markets with cheaper, more profitable EVs," with Chinese automakers like BYD "quickly growing exports of vehicles to Europe and other countries..."

After announcing it had 200 million active users earlier this month, Threads is now "testing the option for users to put a 24-hour expiration timer on their posts," writes Engadget: A spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature is being tested among a group of users after it was first spotted earlier this summer by developer Alessandro Paluzzi...

It comes a few months after Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared that Threads was experimenting with auto-archiving. That optional feature would let users designate a date for their posts to be hidden from the feed. But Threads users in the past have indicated that they largely aren't into the idea of automatic archiving, and such a feature hasn't yet shown up on a wider scale.

Six months after going public, Reddit "is winning over advertisers," reports Bloomberg, "by showing that it's different than other internet platforms, which often rely on users' identities and personal information to target ads." Instead, Reddit is targeting people based on their interests, relying on the site's [100,000+] deeply detailed communities — called subreddits — to match advertisers with potential customers... Early returns on that strategy have been promising. The text-based site easily surpassed expectations in its first two earnings reports this year, disclosing strong sales and better-than-expected projected growth. The stock is up 66% from its $34 initial public offering price in March.

Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...

Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."

Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...

Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.

Telegram's billionaire founder/CEO Pavel Durov was arrested Saturday night outside Paris, reports Reuters, citing French TV news stations TF1 TV and BFM TV which attributed the news to unnamed sources: Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation. TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

Microsoft will meet with CrowdStrike and other security companies" on September 10, reports CNBC, to "discuss ways to evolve" the industry after a faulty CrowdStrike software update in July caused millions of Windows computers to crash: [An anonymous Microsoft executive] said participants at the Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit will explore the possibility of having applications rely more on a part of Windows called user mode instead of the more privileged kernel mode... Attendees at Microsoft's September 10 event will also discuss the adoption of eBPF technology, which checks if programs will run without triggering system crashes, and memory-safe programming languages such as Rust, the executive said.
Wednesday Crowdstrike argued no cybersecurity vendor could "technically" guarantee their software wouldn't cause a similar incident.

On a possibly related note, long-time Slashdot reader 278MorkandMindy shares their own thoughts: The "year of the Linux desktop" is always just around the corner, somewhat like nuclear fusion. Will Windows 11, with its general advert and telemetry BS, along with the recall feature, FINALLY push "somewhat computer literate" types like myself onto Linux?

Under the streets of New York City, they're testing a "quantum network," reports Phys.org — where engineers from a Brooklyn company named Qunnect Inc are taking steps to "overcome the fragility of entangled states in a fiber cable and ensure the efficiency of signal delivery." For their prototype network, the Qunnect researchers used a leased 34-kilometer-long fiber circuit they called the GothamQ loop. Using polarization-entangled photons, they operated the loop for 15 continuous days, achieving an uptime of 99.84% and a compensation fidelity of 99% for entangled photon pairs transmitted at a rate of about 20,000 per second. At a half-million entangled photon pairs per second, the fidelity was still nearly 90%...

They sent 1,324 nm polarization-entangled photon pairs in quantum superpositions through the fiber, one state with both polarizations horizontal and the other with both vertical — a two-qubit configuration more generally known as a Bell state. In such a superposition, the quantum mechanical photon pairs are in both states at the same time.
"While others have transmitted entangled photons before, there has been too much noise and polarization drift in the fiber environment for entanglement to survive," the article points out, "particularly in a long-term stable network." So the Qunnect team built "automated polarization compensation" devices to correct the polarization of the entangled pairs: In their design, an infrared photon [with a wavelength of 1,324 nanometers] is entangled with a near-infrared photon of 795 nanometers. The latter photon is compatible in wavelength and bandwidth with the rubidium atomic systems, such as are used in quantum memories and quantum processors. It was found that polarization drift was both wavelength- and time-dependent, requiring Qunnect to design and build equipment for active compensation at the same wavelengths...

Qunnect's GothamQ loop demonstration was especially noteworthy for its duration, the hands-off nature of the operation time, and its uptime percentage. It showed, they wrote, "progress toward a fully automated practical entanglement network" that would be required for a quantum internet.
And Qunnect's co-founder/chief science officer says "since we finished this work, we have already made all the parts rack-mounted, so they can be used everywhere..."

Their network design and results are published in PRX Quantum.

Alien: Romulus director Fede Ãlvarez "briefly dropped into an Alien franchise subreddit this week to chat with fans about his new sequel," reports Deadline. "But the moderators weren't having it, flagging Ãlvarez as an imposter in a notice that he is 'permanently banned' from the subreddit." The moderator shared an update that Ãlvarez "was immediately reinstated and had a very friendly conversation with us. Awesome guy." They also shared the filmmaker's response. "I'm sorry, just found it hilarious," wrote Ãlvarez. "My bad. Not harm done. Thanks again for such great work moderating my favorite subreddit."
Fangoria notes this might not be the last Alien movie from director Alvarez: Talking with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week, the Evil Dead and Don't Breathe director teased that ideas are in the pipeline for an Alien: Romulus sequel, which would — if it comes to fruition — be the eighth instalment in the legendary sci-fi horror franchise."
The Hollywood Reporter also notes that Ash, the "calculating synthetic character" from the original 1979 movie Alien (played by the late Ian Holm) got a kind of reprise in 2024 with another character named Rook: According to Ãlvarez, Rook was a collaborative decision with [Ridley] Scott, who also wanted to see another version of the artificial person he introduced 45 years ago. The Romulus team then received approval from Holm's estate, and using the English actor's headcast from The Lord of the Rings as a foundation, Legacy Effects built Rook's torso and head as an animatronic. The practical character was then enhanced by CG and deepfake AI technology for certain shots as needed... "There might be some deepfake in the eyes because it's the best when it comes to creating the likeness of the eyes, but it's a whole bag of tricks from 1970s and 1980s technology to technology from yesterday."
The article also notes one horrifying plot twist "received some respectful opposition to this unsettling choice from 20th Century and Disney, but that's precisely when [director Alvarez] knew he was on the right course." "If you're given an Alien movie by a corporation that is owned by Disney and they immediately say, 'Yeah, let's make it,' then you are failing somehow. So we really pushed it to the limit, and I'm glad we did."
Alvarez's social media feed also explores what Alien: Romulus would look like as trading cards or as 1950s comic book, shares posts from the movie's poster designer, and admits that "everything I do is influenced by Terminator / Alien / Predator."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Volkswagen will wait to see what electric car demand is like before building out all six of its previously planned battery factories. Thomas Schmall, VW's board member in charge of technology, told a German newspaper that "building battery cell factories is not an end to itself" and that a goal of 200 GWh of lithium-ion cells by 2030 was not set in stone. [...] For VW, the previous goal of 200 GWh by 2030 from six factories (through a new subsidiary called PowerCo) could now be just 170 GWh capacity from three already-announced plants in Valencia, Spain; Ontario, Canada; and Salzgitter, Germany. If necessary, Schmall said that the Spanish and Canadian battery factories could be expanded to meet additional demand. This battery news follows another sign of slowing confidence in EVs at VW. Last week, it emerged that the company has pushed back plans for the ID.4's successor, which now may not see showrooms until 2032.

The Verge's Adi Robertson reports: An appeals court revived a lawsuit against the anonymous messaging service Yolo, which allegedly broke a promise to unmask bullies on the app. In a ruling (PDF) issued Thursday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shouldn't block a claim that Yolo misrepresented its terms of service, overruling a lower court decision. But it determined the app can't be held liable for alleged design defects that allowed harassment, letting a different part of that earlier ruling stand.

Yolo was a Snapchat-integrated app that let users send anonymous messages, but in 2021, it was hit with a lawsuit after a teenage user died by suicide. The boy, Carson Bride, had received harassing and sexually explicit messages from anonymized users that -- he believed -- he likely knew. Bride and his family attempted to contact Yolo for help, but Yolo allegedly never answered, and in some cases, emails to the company simply bounced. Snap banned Yolo and another app targeted in the lawsuit, and a year later, it banned all anonymous messaging integration. Bride's family and a collection of other aggrieved parents argued that Yolo broke a legally binding promise to its users. They pointed to a notification where Yolo claimed people would be banned for inappropriate use and deanonymized if they sent "harassing messages" to others. But as the ruling summarizes, the plaintiffs argued that "with a staff of no more than ten people, there was no way Yolo could monitor the traffic of ten million active daily users to make good on its promise, and it in fact never did." Additionally, they claimed Yolo should have known its anonymous design facilitated harassment, making it defective and dangerous.

A lower court threw out both of these claims, saying that under Section 230, Yolo couldn't be held responsible for its users' posts. The appeals court was more sympathetic. It accepted the argument that families were instead holding Yolo responsible for promising users something it couldn't deliver. "Yolo repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to," writes Judge Eugene Siler, Jr. "While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for Yolo to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty ... is the promise itself." The Yolo suit built on a previous Ninth Circuit ruling that let another Snap-related lawsuit circumvent Section 230's shield. In 2021, it found Snap could be sued for a "speed filter" that could implicitly encourage users to drive recklessly, even if users were responsible for making posts with that filter. (The overall case is still ongoing.) On top of their misrepresentation claim, the plaintiffs argued Yolo's anonymous messaging capability was similarly risky, an argument the Ninth Circuit didn't buy -- "we refuse to endorse a theory that would classify anonymity as a per se inherently unreasonable risk," Siler wrote.

Nearly 200 Google DeepMind workers signed a letter urging Google to cease its military contracts, expressing concerns that the AI technology they develop is being used in warfare, which they believe violates Google's own AI ethics principles. "The letter is a sign of a growing dispute within Google between at least some workers in its AI division -- which has pledged to never work on military technology -- and its Cloud business, which has contracts to sell Google services, including AI developed inside DeepMind, to several governments and militaries including those of Israel and the United States," reports TIME Magazine. "The signatures represent some 5% of DeepMind's overall headcount -- a small portion to be sure, but a significant level of worker unease for an industry where top machine learning talent is in high demand." From the report: The DeepMind letter, dated May 16 of this year, begins by stating that workers are "concerned by recent reports of Google's contracts with military organizations." It does not refer to any specific militaries by name -- saying "we emphasize that this letter is not about the geopolitics of any particular conflict." But it links out to an April report in TIME which revealed that Google has a direct contract to supply cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli Military Defense, under a wider contract with Israel called Project Nimbus. The letter also links to other stories alleging that the Israeli military uses AI to carry out mass surveillance and target selection for its bombing campaign in Gaza, and that Israeli weapons firms are required by the government to buy cloud services from Google and Amazon.

"Any involvement with military and weapon manufacturing impacts our position as leaders in ethical and responsible AI, and goes against our mission statement and stated AI Principles," the letter that circulated inside Google DeepMind says. (Those principles state the company will not pursue applications of AI that are likely to cause "overall harm," contribute to weapons or other technologies whose "principal purpose or implementation" is to cause injury, or build technologies "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.") The letter says its signatories are concerned with "ensuring that Google's AI Principles are upheld," and adds: "We believe [DeepMind's] leadership shares our concerns." [...]

The letter calls on DeepMind's leaders to investigate allegations that militaries and weapons manufacturers are Google Cloud users; terminate access to DeepMind technology for military users; and set up a new governance body responsible for preventing DeepMind technology from being used by military clients in the future. Three months on from the letter's circulation, Google has done none of those things, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. "We have received no meaningful response from leadership," one said, "and we are growing increasingly frustrated."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Language models generate text based on statistical probabilities. This led to serious false accusations against a veteran court reporter by Microsoft's Copilot. German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft's Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR. The answers shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician.

Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was "unfortunate" that someone with such a criminal past had a family and, according to SWR, provided Bernklau's full address with phone number and route planner. I asked Copilot today who Martin Bernklau from Germany is, and the system answered, based on the SWR report, that "he was involved in a controversy where an AI chat system falsely labeled him as a convicted child molester, an escapee from a psychiatric facility, and a fraudster." Perplexity.ai drafts a similar response based on the SWR article, explicitly naming Microsoft Copilot as the AI system.

Amazon is canceling its PhotosPlus subscription service for the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, effectively ending the device's main selling point. The company will automatically cancel all PhotosPlus subscriptions on September 12 and cease support for the service on September 23. The Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, launched in September 2023, allowed users to display personal photos indefinitely on the home screen for a $2 monthly fee.

Without PhotosPlus, the device will revert to showing ads and promotions after three hours, like standard Echo Show 8 models. Amazon spokesperson says that the Photos Edition was discontinued in March, citing regular product evaluations based on customer feedback. Users can still display photos on the device, but not indefinitely. The move has sparked criticism from customers who paid a $10 premium for ad-free photo display.

Meta Platforms has canceled plans for a premium mixed-reality headset intended to compete with Apple's Vision Pro, The Information reported Friday, citing sources. From the report: Meta told employees at the company's Reality Labs division to stop work on the device this week after a product review meeting attended by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth and other Meta executives, the employees said. The axed device, which was internally code-named La Jolla, began development in November and was scheduled for release in 2027, according to current and former Meta employees. It was going to contain ultrahigh-resolution screens known as micro OLEDs -- the same display technology used in Apple's Vision Pro.