Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.") Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world." From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...." Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms. "The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs." Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter. Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app. Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article. Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse. Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution. "If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

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"Dell's strict new RTO mandate excludes fully remote workers from promotion," reports Business Insider. The site calls it "one of the most abrupt changes to remote work policies," noting that Dell "has had a hybrid working culture in place for more than a decade — long before the pandemic struck." "Dell cared about the work, not the location," a senior employee at Dell who's worked remotely for more than a decade, told Business Insider last month. "I would say 10% to 15% of every team was remote." That flexibility has enabled staff to sustain their careers in the face of major life changes, several employees told BI. It has also helped Dell to be placed on the "Best Place to Work for Disability Equality Index" since 2018. But in February Dell introduced a strict return-to-office mandate, with punitive measures for those who want to stay at home. Under the new policy, staff were told that from May almost all will be classified as either "hybrid," or "remote." Hybrid workers will be required to come into an "approved" office at least 39 days a quarter — the equivalent of about three days a week, internal documents seen by BI show. If they want to keep working from home, staff can opt to go fully remote. But that option has a downside: fully remote workers will not be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles. Workers have said Dell's approach might be intended to lower headcount without having to pay severance by inducing some employees to quit. But reached by Business Insider for a comment, Dell defended their approach as instead "critical to drive innovation and value differentiation." But Professor Cary Cooper, an organizational psychologist and cofounder of the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at work, tells the site Dell could be following a "pack mentality" among tech companies — or reacting to a sluggish world economy. "Senior execs somehow think that people in the office are more productive than at home, even though there's no evidence to back that up." Business Insider added that Dell's approach "differs from founder and CEO Michael Dell's previous support for remote workers," who famously said "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you're doing it wrong."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: AT&T says a massive trove of data impacting 71 million people did not originate from its systems after a hacker leaked it on a cybercrime forum and claimed it was stolen in a 2021 breach of the company. While BleepingComputer has not been able to confirm the legitimacy of all the data in the database, we have confirmed some of the entries are accurate, including those whose data is not publicly accessible for scraping. The data is from an alleged 2021 AT&T data breach that a threat actor known as ShinyHunters attempted to sell on the RaidForums data theft forum for a starting price of $200,000 and incremental offers of $30,000. The hacker stated they would sell it immediately for $1 million. AT&T told BleepingComputer then that the data did not originate from them and that its systems were not breached. "Based on our investigation today, the information that appeared in an internet chat room does not appear to have come from our systems," AT&T told BleepingComputer in 2021. When we told ShinyHunters that AT&T said the data did not originate from them, they replied, "I don't care if they don't admit. I'm just selling." AT&T continues to tell BleepingComputer today that they still see no evidence of a breach in their systems and still believe that this data did not originate from them. Today, another threat actor known as MajorNelson leaked data from this alleged 2021 data breach for free on a hacking forum, claiming it was the data ShinyHunters attempted to sell in 2021. This data includes names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, encrypted date of birth, encrypted social security numbers, and other internal information. However, the threat actors have decrypted the birth dates and social security numbers and added them to another file in the leak, making those also accessible. BleepingComputer has reviewed the data, and while we cannot confirm that all 73 million lines are accurate, we verified some of the data contains correct information, including social security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers. Furthermore, other cybersecurity researchers, such as Dark Web Informer, who first told BleepingComputer about the leaked data, and VX-Underground have also confirmed some of the data to be accurate. Despite AT&T's statement, BleepingComputer says if you were an AT&T customer before and through 2021, it's "[safe] to assume that your data was exposed and can be used in targeted attacks." Have I Been Pwned's Troy Hunt writes: "I have proven, with sufficient confidence, that the data is real and the impact is significant."

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Microsoft today announced a preview release of Windows Notepad, with built-in spellchecking and an autocorrect feature. BleepingComputer reports: Microsoft says they are rolling out this preview to Insiders in the Windows 11 Canary and Dev channels, but it may take some time before it's available for everyone. "With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes," reads Microsoft's announcement. "We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typing mistakes as you type." Once installed, Notepad will now show a red squiggly line under misspelled words that, when clicked, shows suggestions on the correct spelling. It's also possible to ignore words in a single text document or add them to the global dictionary so they are not shown in the future. Microsoft says that this feature will be turned off for log and source code files. This is because it's common for non-standard words to be used in these files, triggering multiple spellcheck errors. Users can control this setting globally or for specific file types in the Notepad app's settings. The autocorrect feature is a bit more seamless, automatically making small changes to grammar and punctuation as you type.

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Search Engine Land: Google is now testing AI overviews in the main Google Search results, even if you have not opted into the Google Search Generative Experience labs feature. Google said this is an experience on a "subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the U.S.," a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.

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Elizabeth Rayne reports via Ars Technica: Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO2 ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller. "Sublimation of CO2 ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars," Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment. [...] To recreate a part of the red planet's landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO2 ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO2 ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized. For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO2 ice. No flows were produced by either. "For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO2 sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions," the researchers said in the study. Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs' findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.

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Privacy startup Proton already offers an email app, a VPN tool, cloud storage, a password manager, and a calendar app. In April 2022, Proton acquired SimpleLogin, an open-source product that generates email aliases to protect inboxes from spam and phishing. Today, Proton acquired Standard Notes, advancing its already strong commitment to the open-source community. From a report: Standard Notes is an open-source note-taking app, available on both mobile and desktop platforms, with a user base of over 300,000. [...] Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen makes a point of stating that Standard Notes will remain open-source, will continue to undergo independent audits, will continue to develop new features and updates, and that prices for the app/service will not change. Standard Notes has three tiers: Free, which includes 100MB of storage, offline access, and unlimited device sync; Productivity for $90 per year, which includes features like markdown, spreadsheets with advanced formulas, Daily Notebooks, and two-factor authentication; and Professional for $120 per year, which includes 100GB of cloud storage, sharing for up to five accounts, no file limit size, and more.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from ScienceAlert: The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the 'Great Filter.' The Great Filter is a hypothesized event or situation that prevents intelligent life from becoming interplanetary and interstellar and even leads to its demise.... [H]ow about the rapid development of AI? A new paper in Acta Astronautica explores the idea that Artificial Intelligence becomes Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and that ASI is the Great Filter. The paper's title is "Is Artificial Intelligence the Great Filter that makes advanced technical civilizations rare in the universe?" "Upon reaching a technological singularity, ASI systems will quickly surpass biological intelligence and evolve at a pace that completely outstrips traditional oversight mechanisms, leading to unforeseen and unintended consequences that are unlikely to be aligned with biological interests or ethics," the paper explains... The author says their projects "underscore the critical need to quickly establish regulatory frameworks for AI development on Earth and the advancement of a multiplanetary society to mitigate against such existential threats." "The persistence of intelligent and conscious life in the universe could hinge on the timely and effective implementation of such international regulatory measures and

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Movie exhibitors still face "serious risks," the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday: Attendance was on the decline even before the pandemic shuttered theaters, thanks to changing consumer habits and competition for people's time and money from other entertainment options. The industry has demonstrated an over-reliance on Imax-friendly studio action tent poles, when theater chains need a deep and diverse roster of movies in order to thrive... It remains to be seen whether the global box office will ever get back to the $40 billion-plus days of 2019 and earlier years. A clearer picture will emerge in 2025 when the writers' and actors' strikes are further in the past. But overall, there's a strong case that moviegoing has proved to be relatively sturdy despite persistent difficulties. Which brings us to this year's CinemaCon convention, where multiplex operators heard from Hollywood studios teasing upcoming blockbusters like Joker: Folie à Deux, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Transformers One, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Exhibitors pleaded with the major studios to release more films of varying budgets on the big screen, while studios made the case that their upcoming slates are robust enough to keep them in business... Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada is expected to total about $8.5 billion, which is down from $9 billion in 2023 and a far cry from the pre-pandemic yearly tallies that nearly reached $12 billion... Though a fuller release schedule is expected for 2025, talk of budget cuts, greater industry consolidation and corporate mergers has forced exhibitors to prepare for the possibility of a near future with fewer studios making fewer movies.... As the domestic film business has been thrown into turmoil in recent years, Japanese cinema and faith-based content have been two of movie theaters' saving graces. Industry leaders kicked off CinemaCon on Tuesday by singing the praises of Sony-owned anime distributor Crunchyroll's hits — including the latest "Demon Slayer" installment. Mitchel Berger, senior vice president of global commerce at Crunchyroll, said Tuesday that the global anime business generated $14 billion a decade ago and is projected to generate $37 billion next year. "Anime is red hot right now," Berger said. "Fans have known about it for years, but now everyone else is catching up and recognizing that it's a cultural, economic force to be reckoned with.... " Another type of product buoying the exhibition industry right now is faith-based programming, shepherded in large part by "Sound of Freedom" distributor Angel Studios... Theater owners urged studio executives at CinemaCon to put more films in theaters — and not just big-budget tent poles timed for summer movie season and holiday weekends... "Whenever we have a [blockbuster] film — whether it be 'Barbie' or 'Super Mario' ... records are set," added Bill Barstow, co-founder of ACX Cinemas in Nebraska. "But we just don't have enough of them."

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Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format. Due to a patch having been queued last week to replace a tab with a space character in the kernel tracing Kconfig file, Linus Torvalds decided to take matters into his own hand for Kconfig parsers that can't deal with tabs... Torvalds authored a patch to intentionally add some tabs of his own into Kconfig for throwing off any out-of-tree/third-party parsers that can't correctly handle them. Torvalds added these intentional hidden tabs to the common Kconfig file for handling page sizes for the kernel. Thus sure to cause dramatic and noticeable breakage for any parsers not having tabs correctly.

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According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's initial set of AI-related features in iOS 18 "will work entirely on device," and won't connect to cloud services. AppleInsider reports: In practice, these AI features would be able to function without an internet connection or any form of cloud-based processing. AppleInsider has received information from individuals familiar with the matter that suggest the report's claims are accurate. Apple is working on an in-house large language model, or LLM, known internally as "Ajax." While more advanced features will ultimately require an internet connection, basic text analysis and response generation features should be available offline. [...] Apple will reveal its AI plans during WWDC, which starts on June 10.

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TikTok has started testing its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, in Canada and Australia. TechCrunch reports: The company said on X that it is in the "early stage" of the app's rollout and that the app is "a dedicated space for photo and text content." "We hope that the TikTok community will use TikTok Notes to continue sharing their moments through photo posts. Whether documenting adventures, expressing creativity, or simply sharing snapshots of one's day, the TikTok Notes experience is designed for those who would like to share and engage through photo content," it said. The company didn't say much about the app's features and functionality apart from the fact that users can log in with their existing TikTok account. Even the app's description in the app stores is pretty light on details. The screenshots on the App Store listing suggest that the posts will appear in two-column grids on the home page. The screenshots also indicate that you can post multiple photos through a carousel post.

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788€ - Cdiscount Voyages

Un excellent prix en last minute pour ce séjour tout inclus en Turquie !

➥ Code promo DM50 à indiquer au panier

Le prix inclut :

• L'hébergement à l'hôtel Mondi Club Notion Kesre Beach 4*
• La formule tout inclus
• Les vols A/R au départ de Paris (ORY)
• Le transfert collectif aller-retour aéroport/hôtel
• Les taxes aéroport obligatoires
• Les frais de dossier

Les vols sont effectués par la compagnie Transavia :

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L'hébergement : Mondi Club Notion Kesre Beach 4*

---

L'hôtel est noté 4/5 sur Tripadvisor et 4,2/5 sur Google Reviews.

Situation
Le Mondi Club Notion Kesre Beach 4* est situé à 5 km du centre de Ozdere et à 40 km de l'aéroport d'Izmir. Kusadasi se situe à 30 km environ.

Votre Mondi Club
Le Mondi Club Notion Kesre Beach 4* dispose de 164 chambres et de plusieurs piscines pour vous permettre de faire de joyeuses baignades en famille. Profitez d'un cadre exceptionnel à proximité de la plage privée. Vous aurez à votre disposition : boutique*, pharmacie*, blanchisserie*, coin TV, spa, coiffeur*, médecin*, salle de conférence, parasols, chaises longues et serviettes (avec caution), wifi.
*Avec supplément

Votre chambre
Durant votre séjour, vous serez logé en chambre double standard de 23m² joliment décorée dans des tons bleu clair. Cette chambre peut accueillir jusqu'à 3 adultes, ou 2 adultes et 1 enfant. Toutes les chambres sont équipées de : salle de bains avec douche, WC et sèche-cheveux, téléphone, minibar* (1 bouteille d'eau offerte chaque jour), balcon, climatisation, coffre-fort, TV par satellite, wifi.
*Avec supplément

Restaurants et bars
Pendant toute la durée de votre séjour, vous bénéficierez de la formule tout inclus, qui comprend aussi bien les repas, boissons locales alcoolisées ou non et les snacks. Les repas sont servis sous forme de buffet au restaurant principal de l'hôtel.

Vos activités et loisirs
Les animateurs francophones Mondi Club, parfaitement intégrés à l'équipe d'animation internationale de l'hôtel, vous proposeront des activités sportives et ludiques en journée ainsi que des animations nocturnes. À votre disposition : piscine extérieure et piscine pour enfant avec toboggans (ouvert de 8h00 à 19h00), tennis (éclairage et équipement avec supplément), basketball, volleyball.
Un centre de spa proposant les prestations suivantes est à votre disposition : sauna, bain turc, hammam, coiffeur*, massages*.
Pour les enfants : Un mini club est disponible pour les enfants âgées de 4 à 12 ans. Ouvert du 20/04 au 19/10, de 10h00 à 12h00 et de 14h30 à 17h00.
*Avec supplément

An anonymous reader shares a report: iPerf is a fairly popular cross-platform tool that is used by many to measure network performance and diagnose any potential issues in this area. The open-source utility is maintained by an organization called Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and officially supports Linux, Unix, and Windows. However, Microsoft has now published a detailed blog post explaining why you should not use the latest version, iPerf3, on Windows installations. Microsoft has highlighted three key reasons to discourage the use of iPerf3 on Windows. The first is that ESnet does not support this version on Windows, and recommends iPerf2 instead. On its website, ESnet has emphasized that CentOS 7 Linux, FreeBSD 11, and macOS 10.12 are the only supported platforms. Another very important reason not to use iPerf3 on Windows is that it does not make native OS calls. Instead, it leverages Cygwin as an emulation layer, which obviously comes with a performance penalty. This alone means that iPerf3 on Windows isn't really an ideal candidate for benchmarking your network. While Microsoft has praised the maintainers who are trying to get iPerf3 to run on Windows via emulation, another flaw with this approach is that some advanced networking options simply aren't available on Windows or may behave in unexpected ways.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Today Meta unleashed its ChatGPT competitor, Meta AI, across its apps and as a standalone. The company boasts that it is running on its latest, greatest AI model, Llama 3, which was trained on "data of the highest quality"! A dataset seven times larger than Llama2! And includes 4 times more code! What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious. Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from "publicly available sources." Which sources? Meta told The Verge that it didn't include Meta user data, but didn't give much more in the way of specifics. It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: "we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3." There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it's liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

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