Author: Robin Edgar
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Windows 11 Sends Tremendous Amount of User Data to Third Parties – pretty much spyware for loads of people!
Many programs collect user data and send it back to their developers to improve software or provide more targeted services. But according to the PC Security Channel (via Neowin (opens in new tab)) Microsoft’s Windows 11 sends data not only to the Redmond, Washington-based software giant, but also to multiple third parties. To analyze DNS traffic generated by…
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Amazon Is Pocketing Half of Retailers’ Sales
Merchants on Amazon Marketplace are paying the company a commission fee of more than 50% of each sale. A new report by Marketplace Pulse revealed Amazon raised the total cost sellers are required to pay out toward storage fees at company warehouses, packaging and delivery, and advertising on the site. The commission fee has gradually…
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Core-js maintainer complains open source is broken
Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the core-js library used by millions of websites, says he’s ready to give up open source development because so few people pay for the software upon which they depend. “Free open source software is fundamentally broken,” he wrote in a note on the core-js repository. “I could stop working on this…
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Jeremy Clarkson Meghan Markle Column to be Investigated by Regulator after tweeting self righteous idiots decide to cancel him
The U.K. press watchdog has launched an investigation into a British tabloid column by former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson that attracted around 25,100 complaints. On Thursday, the Independent Press Standards Organization confirmed it will probe the Dec. 17, 2022 article in The Sun where Clarkson wrote that Prince Harry was being “controlled” by Meghan Markle, and…
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Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills
Vestas, the world’s largest producer of wind turbines, says it has developed a chemical solution that allows the blades — made with durable epoxy resin — to be broken down and recycled. Bloomberg reports: “This signals a new era for the wind industry,” Vestas said in a statement. If it’s implemented at scale, the technology…
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It Took Months For Anker To Finally Admit Its Eufy Cameras Weren’t Really Secure
Last November, The Verge discovered that Anker, the maker of popular USB chargers and the Eufy line of “smart” cameras, had a bit of a security issue. Despite the fact the company advertised its Eufy cameras as having “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi found it was pretty easy to intercept…
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Chinese balloon part of worldwide fleet, US officials say
The US believes a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down over its territory is part of a wider fleet that has spanned five continents. “The United States was not the only target of this broader programme,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. […] Citing unnamed officials, the Washington Post reported that the US…
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Hogwarts Legacy Is Twitch’s Most Popular Game Right Now – woke loud minority haters don’t actually have any influence at all
According to the data analytics site TwitchTracker, Hogwarts Legacy had a peak concurrent viewership of over 1.2 million between February 6 and 7. The game’s ranked sixth overall on the site, with more than 16 million hours watched in the last few days. Looking at Twitch right now, Hogwarts Legacy is the most popular game…
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Among ESXiArgs’ ransomware victims? FBI, CISA here to help
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a recovery script to help companies whose servers were scrambled in the recent ESXiArgs ransomware outbreak. The malware attack hit thousands of servers over the globe but there’s no need to enrich criminals any more. In addition to the script, CISA and the FBI today…
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Alphabet stock price drops $120b / 10% after Google Bard launch blunder
About 10 percent of Alphabet’s market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft’s next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question. In a promotional video to show off Bard, a web search assistant to compete against Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enhanced Bing, the…
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Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Endure Outages
Did someone actually break the internet? It sorta seems like it. Users of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, some of the web’s biggest platforms, reported experiencing major issues on Wednesday, with many losing access to basic features and functions. Reports first poured in concerning Twitter, where users reported being met with a message telling them…
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With ChatGPT, Game NPCs Get A Lot More Interesting
Not only is AI-driven natural language processing a thing now, but you can even select from a number of different offerings, each optimized for different tasks. It took very little time for [Bloc] to mod a computer game to allow the player to converse naturally with non-player characters (NPCs) by hooking it into ChatGPT, a…
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Google Will Blur Explicit Images Even When SafeSearch Is Turned Off, US mollycoddling Morals at work here
Google’s search engine is getting an upgrade—yes with AI, but also with a blur filter. In a bid to shield its user’s eyes, Google announced yesterday that it will blur explicit images in search results, even when SafeSearch isn’t turned on. The news comes in a blog post published by Google Senior Vice President of…
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Microsoft’s next-gen Bing uses a ‘much more powerful’ language model – Prometheus – than ChatGPT, previews started
Microsoft’s oft-forgotten search engine is about to get a new lease on life. As expected, the tech giant announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with OpenAI to enhance Bing with the company’s AI technology. However, Microsoft also had a surprise up its sleeve: the next release of Bing will feature a new next-generation large…
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Microsoft will wipe free Teams business users’ data if they don’t upgrade to a paid tier
Now that Microsoft has launched its Teams Premium service, it’s shaking up the free offering for work — and not everyone will be happy. The company is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won’t carry over. Your office will…
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Microsoft Edge puts an AI ‘copilot’, Prometheus, in your browser
Microsoft’s use of AI on the web will extend beyond smarter Bing searches. The company is updating its Edge browser with an “AI-powered copilot” that assists with everyday tasks. Integration with the new Bing can help you get the key takeaways from a document, compare content and even draft posts (such as on LinkedIn) with…
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Outlook, Teams, Calendar down for >5 hours
[…] According to outage tracker DownDetector, reports began coming in of users facing a 500 error and being unable to send, receive or search email through Outlook.com from about 4am UTC, peaking at 8 and 9am as Europeans reached their desks. Microsoft confirmed the outage on its service health website, saying: “We’re applying targeted mitigations…
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GitHub CEO: EU AI Act shouldn’t apply to open source devs
The EU’s upcoming artificial intelligence legislation will define how the world regulates AI, warned GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who thinks open source developers should be exempted from the AI Act. Speaking at the Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels (at 04:05:00), the day before FOSDEM in the Belgian city, Dohmke noted that open source powers…
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Google unleashes fightback to ChatGPT: Bard
[…] “Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short),” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post. “We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard.” Pichai said Bard processes information from the internet…
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China’s Baidu reveals its own bilingual generative AI chat / imagebot with 85 billion more parameters than ChatGPT (which has 175b)
Chinese web giant Baidu, which has “AI” in its name and has made AI the focus of its hyperscale cloud, has revealed it will launch a generative AI chatbot later this year. Chinese media reported the launch and Baidu confirmed it to The Register. “The company plans to complete internal testing in March before making…
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Amazing “Jailbreak” Bypasses ChatGPT’s Ethics Safeguards
OpenAI has been scrambling to enact new rules that prevent its wildly popular ChatGPT from generating text from being generally horrible — like by promoting things that are unethical, illegal, or just plain controversial. Back in the day, you could ask the red-hot AI system to whip up instructions on everything from shoplifting to committing…
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Researchers can now pull hydrogen directly from seawater, no filtering required
Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could…
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Air pollution causes chess players to make more mistakes, study finds
Chess experts make more mistakes when air pollution is high, a study has found. Experts used computer models to analyse the quality of games played and found that with a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players would make an error increased by 2.1 percentage points, and the magnitude of those…
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Prilex POS malware can block contactless payments, force PIN use
[…] Kaspersky discovered two new Prilex variants in early 2022 and found a third in November that can target NFC-enabled credit cards and block contactless transactions, forcing payers over to the less-secure PIN machines. “The goal here is to force the victim to use their physical card by inserting it into the PIN pad reader,…
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Microsoft won’t access private data in Office version scan installed as OS update they say
Microsoft wants everyone to know that it isn’t looking to invade their privacy while looking through their Windows PCs to find out-of-date versions of Office software. In its KB5021751 update last month, Microsoft included a plan to scan Windows systems to smoke out those Office versions that are no longer supported or nearing the end…
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