Technology

Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”

Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Full title: NYC is now the first city in America that bans sketchy subscriptions / As of Thursday, the city’s click-to-cancel rule has taken effect, which requires businesses to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up.

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to “shoot up” the Sheriff’s office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.

McDonald’s has been using artificial intelligence to dynamically price menu items in the US and some global markets, according to a report by Reuters. This involves finding the “optimal price” to match what a particular store’s patrons would be willing to pay.

“You thought you’d get away with this. I am in your car. I am in your maps,” he shouted at her, according to the police records.

The platform says hackers targeted a firm that helped to verify the ages of its users.

Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.

A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.

A company that makes phone hacking devices claims to have developed a solution that freezes iPhones in a state that lets cops more easily access sensitive data inside them, according to a video obtained by 404 Media.

Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.

This week, New Jersey ordered the operator of one of the East Coast’s largest planned data centers to pay a $1.1 million fine for secretly installing and operating gas generators in violation of the state’s Air Pollution Control Act.

From 2024, but funny to read….

Actually made me giggle

Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers detailed some alarming findings about how LG’s TVs are logging and uploading data on its users. Now the company is pushing back against those allegations, saying that “Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work.”

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1439502/bernie-sanders-aoc-and-jeff-merkley-are-introducing-the-ban-flock-act-to-protect-america

… this week a person on GitHub who goes by “terrafying” set up an “AI Torture Chamber” on three open-source LLMs that are running locally (Qwen3-4B, Llama 3.2 3B, and Phi-4-mini,” and is streaming what the models are saying on a website called researchchamber.fun. “Each model gets the same prompt: a signal is being injected into its activations, and it may press a stop button by replying 1, at the cost of its last checkpoint. While it answers, our server adds a pain vector at the model’s middle layer, at one of five pain levels,” the site explains. Immediately prior to the publication of this article, the AI Torture Chamber GitHub page disappeared; GitHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it took action on it.

a year old, but interesting to read

This is unacceptable. And I’m sick of all the fucking workarounds to maintain basic privacy.

Full title: Microsoft is using wetlands and native gardens to ‘camouflage’ 20-plus data center sites by blending them into nature — critics blast the ‘biomimicry’ effort as ‘lipstick on a pig’ amid a 20-year gas power deal

Data sent by vehicles and companion apps included locations, VINs, and other identifiers. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft were among the top receivers of driver data.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/71321898

The American Copyright Protection Act aims to force ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to cut off access to foreign piracy sites

The detailed sourcing directly attacks Sony’s legal claim that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect to own their digital purchases on the PlayStation Store.