An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company's e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack. He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site. "We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page," Tomchuk told TechCrunch. "Each page has at least three photos." OpenAI was sending "tens of thousands" of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions. "OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it's way more," he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site. "Their crawlers were crushing our site," he said "It was basically a DDoS attack." Triplegangers' website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of "human digital doubles" on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models. It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos -- everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies -- to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics. [...] To add insult to injury, not only was Triplegangers knocked offline by OpenAI's bot during U.S. business hours, but Tomchuk expects a jacked-up AWS bill thanks to all of the CPU and downloading activity from the bot. Triplegangers initially lacked a properly configured robots.txt file, which allowed the bot to freely scrape its site since the system interprets the absence of such a file as permission. It's not an opt-in system. Once the file was updated with specific tags to block OpenAI's bot, along with additional defenses like Cloudflare, the scraping stopped. However, robots.txt is not foolproof since compliance by AI companies is voluntary, leaving the burden on website owners to monitor and block unauthorized access proactively. "[Tomchuk] wants other small online business to know that the only way to discover if an AI bot is taking a website's copyrighted belongings is to actively look," reports TechCrunch.

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Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know." The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia's mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these users' paths using "knowledge networks" of connected information, which depict how closely one search topic (a node in the network) is related to another. Beyond just mapping the connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures. In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that "in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus." The researchers also analyzed topics of interest, ranging from physics to visual arts, for busybodies compared with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, more recently confirmed, were excluded. Editor note: This article was published on December 24, 2024, based on a study published in October, 2024.

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SysEngineer shares a report from the Associated Press: A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole. The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system's smallest, innermost planet. Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers).

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, in an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, criticized the Biden administration for pushing for censorship around COVID-19 vaccines, the media for hounding Facebook to clamp down on misinformation after the 2016 election, and his own company for complying. Zuckerberg's three-hour interview with Rogan gives a clear window into his thinking during a remarkable week in which Meta loosened its content moderation policies and shut down its DEI programs. The Meta CEO said a turning point for his approach to censorship came after Biden publicly said social media companies were "killing people" by allowing COVID misinformation to spread, and politicians started coming after the company from all angles. Zuckerberg told Rogan, who was a prominent skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccine, that the Biden administration would "call up the guys on our team and yell at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don't take down things that are true." Zuckerberg said that Biden officials wanted Meta to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV, with a joke at the expense of people who were vaccinated. Zuckerberg said his company drew the line at removing "humor and satire." But he also said his company had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea -- which he said the traditional media had been pushing -- that misinformation spreading on social media swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Zuckerberg likened his company's fact-checking process to a George Orwell novel, saying it was "something out of 1984" and led to a broad belief that Meta fact-checkers "were too biased." "It really is a slippery slope, and it just got to a point where it's just, OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program." He said he was "worried" from the beginning about "becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world." Later in the interview, Zuckerberg praised X's "community notes" program and suggested that social media creators were replacing the government and traditional media as arbiters of truth, becoming "a new kind of cultural elite that people look up to." Further reading: Meta Is Ushering In a 'World Without Facts,' Says Nobel Peace Prize Winner

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TechCrunch's Rebecca Szkutak reports: TechCrunch recently surveyed 20 VCs who back startups building for enterprises about what gives an AI startup a moat, or what makes it different compared to its peers. More than half of the respondents said that the thing that will give AI startups an edge is the quality or rarity of their proprietary data. Paul Drews, a managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, told TechCrunch that it's really hard for AI startups to have a moat because the landscape is changing so quickly. He added that he looks for startups that have a combination of differentiated data, technical research innovation, and a compelling user experience. Jason Mendel, a venture investor at Battery Ventures, agreed that technology moats are diminishing. "I'm looking for companies that have deep data and workflow moats," Mendel told TechCrunch. "Access to unique, proprietary data enables companies to deliver better products than their competitors, while a sticky workflow or user experience allows them to become the core systems of engagement and intelligence that customers rely on daily." Having proprietary, or hard-to-get, data becomes increasingly important for companies that are building vertical solutions. Scott Beechuk, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said companies that are able to home in on their unique data are the startups with the most long-term potential. Andrew Ferguson, a vice president at Databricks Ventures, said that having rich customer data, and data that creates a feedback loop in an AI system, makes it more effective and can help startups stand out, too. [...] Beyond just data, VCs said they look for AI teams led by strong talent, ones that have existing strong integrations with other tech, and companies that have a deep understanding of customer workflows.

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Amazon is shutting down its "Prime Try Before You Buy" service on January 31, according to a notice on its website. The offering operated similarly to apparel subscription services like Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway, allowing Prime members to try out apparel-related products and only pay for items they wanted to keep. CNBC reports: An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the move, which was first reported by The Information. "Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we're phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025," the spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. Amazon rolled out the service, which was previously called Prime Wardrobe, in 2017. It was only available to members of Amazon's $139-per-year Prime subscription program, which also includes perks such as speedy shipping and access to streaming services. Users could test out a mix of luxury, staple and Amazon-owned brands, and return whatever they didn't want to keep for free within seven days of receiving the items. The service operated similarly to wardrobe subscription services including Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway, as well as newer entrants such as Urban Outfitters' Nuuly.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A leading education software maker has admitted its IT environment was compromised in a cyberattack, with students and teachers' personal data -- including some Social Security Numbers and medical info -- stolen. PowerSchool says its cloud-based student information system is used by 18,000 customers around the globe, including the US and Canada, to handle grading, attendance records, and personal information of more than 60 million K-12 students and teachers. On December 28 someone managed to get into its systems and access their contents "using a compromised credential," the California-based biz told its clients in an email seen by Register this week. [...] "We believe the unauthorized actor extracted two tables within the student information system database," a spokesperson told us. "These tables primarily include contact information with data elements such as name and address information for families and educators. "For a certain subset of the customers, these tables may also include Social Security Number, other personally identifiable information, and limited medical and grade information. "Not all PowerSchool student information system customers were impacted, and we anticipate that only a subset of impacted customers will have notification obligations." While the company has tightened security measures and offered identity protection services to affected individuals, cybersecurity firm Cyble suggests the intrusion "may have been more serious and gone on much longer than has been publicly acknowledged so far," reports The Register. The cybersecurity vendor says the intrusion could have occurred as far back as June 16, 2011, with it ending on January 2 of this year. "Critical systems and applications such as Oracle Netsuite ERP, HR software UltiPro, Zoom, Slack, Jira, GitLab, and sensitive credentials for platforms like Microsoft login, LogMeIn, Windows AD Azure, and BeyondTrust" may have been compromised, too.

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ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that it will not launch the Venu live sports streaming service. "After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service," the companies said in a joint statement. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels. We are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period." The Verge reports: ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery first announced Venu last year, and it was supposed to launch in the fall of 2024. The service would've given viewers access to a swath of live games from the NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and more from several linear channels, including ESPN, ABC, Fox, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, TNT, and others. But then Venu hit a legal roadblock: an antitrust lawsuit from the live TV streaming service Fubo, accusing the trio of engaging in "a years-long campaign to block Fubo's innovative sports-first streaming business" due to restrictive sports licensing agreements. Lawmakers also asked regulators to investigate Venu and its potential to become a monopoly in televised sports.

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Los Angeles authorities have vowed to prosecute illegal drone operators after a civilian drone collided with a Canadian CL-415 firefighting plane combating the Palisades Fire, causing damage that grounded the aircraft and temporarily halted all aerial firefighting operations. CNN reports: The specifically designed CL-415 firefighting planes are used to scoop up more than 1,500 gallons of ocean water to drop on active fires. The plane in question, Quebec 1, "sustained wing damage and remains grounded and out of service," Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Erik Scott said, adding that there were no reported injuries. The damaged plane will be prioritized for repair and should be back up flying by Monday, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone said Friday. The collision caused the temporary grounding of all aircraft responding to the Palisades Fire, The War Zone reported, citing Cal Fire. It was one of the two such planes deployed to the site, The War Zone said. "You will be arrested, you will be prosecuted, and you will be punished to the full extent of the law," said Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman in a statement. Marrone added that, "Our federal partners behind the scenes are going to be implementing procedures to be able to follow drones in our two large fire areas, and they will be able to identify who the operator of that drone is. "The most important thing to know is that if you fly a drone at one of these brush fires, all aerial operations will be shut down, and we certainly don't want to have that happen." The FAA underscored late Thursday that it "has not authorized anyone unaffiliated with the Los Angeles firefighting operations to fly drones" in restricted airspace put in place over the wildfires. "The FAA treats these violations seriously and immediately considers swift enforcement action for these offenses," the agency said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: JPMorgan Chase is summoning all staff back to the office, becoming the latest corporate giant to call time on era of remote and hybrid working sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The US's largest bank, which has some 316,000 employees worldwide, announced on Friday that all workers on hybrid work schedules will be required to return to the office five days a week from March. [...] Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for working from the office than Jamie Dimon, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan, who -- as early as 2021 -- sought to restore pre-pandemic working habits. "And everyone is going to be happy with it," he told a Wall Street Journal event that year. "And yes, the commute -- you know, people don't like commuting. But so what?" Even before Friday's announcement, more than half of employees at JPMorgan had already been required to work from the office full-time. In an internal memo to staff, seen by the Guardian, Dimon and other executives acknowledged that "some of you prefer a hybrid schedule" and said they "respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision." "We are now a few years out of the pandemic and have had the time to evaluate the benefits and challenges of remote and hybrid working," they wrote. "We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach. "We think it is the best way to run the company. As we've discussed before, the benefits of working together in person are substantial and irreplaceable, and as we spend more time together, the more advantages we gain."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Crypto Briefing: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been authorized to sell approximately 69,370 Bitcoin seized in connection with the Silk Road darknet marketplace, a haul currently valued at around $6.5 billion, DB News reported Wednesday. The decision is set to end a years-long legal dispute over the BTC stash's ownership. On December 30, a federal judge ruled in favor of the DOJ's request to liquidate the crypto assets, the report said. Battle Born Investments, which had asserted a claim to the Bitcoin stash through a bankruptcy estate, ultimately failed in its bid to delay the sale. As noted, the group had pursued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the identity of "Individual X," who initially surrendered Bitcoin, but the effort also proved unsuccessful. Battle Born's legal counsel criticized the DOJ's handling of the case, alleging the department employed "procedural trickery" in its use of civil asset forfeiture to avoid scrutiny. The DOJ, in its arguments before the court, cited Bitcoin's price volatility as motivation for seeking a quick sale of the seized assets. A DOJ spokesperson, when contacted, stated, "The Government will proceed further consistent with the judgment in this case." The update comes after the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal challenging the seizure of the Bitcoin stash, which was brought by Battle Born last October. The decision likely paved the way for the US government to sell Bitcoin, which was valued at $4.4 billion at the time. The US Marshals Service is expected to manage the liquidation process, which, if confirmed, will be one of the largest sales of seized crypto in history. Further reading: Judge Rejects Man From Retrieving $750 Million of Bitcoin From Landfill

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An IT engineer from Wales lost a decade-long legal battle to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins from a Newport landfill. The hard drive, accidentally thrown away in 2013, is now valued between $700-750 million. crypto.news reports: However, Judge Keyser KC ruled there were no "reasonable grounds" for the claim, citing environmental concerns and the council's ownership of the landfill contents. The landfill reportedly holds 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howells claims to have pinpointed the hard drive's location to a 100,000-ton section. Reacting to the ruling, Howells expressed frustration, calling it a "kick in the teeth," according to the BBC.

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Scientists said the world just reached a grim milestone: the first full year where global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times. Reuters reports: The milestone was confirmed by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which said climate change is pushing the planet's temperature to levels never before experienced by modern humans. "The trajectory is just incredible," C3S director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters, describing how every month in 2024 was the warmest or second-warmest for that month since records began. The planet's average temperature in 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than in 1850-1900, the "pre-industrial period" before humans began burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels on a large scale, C3S said. Last year was the world's hottest since records began, and each of the past ten years was among the ten warmest on record. Britain's Met Office confirmed 2024's likely breach of 1.5C, while estimating a slightly lower average temperature of 1.53C for the year. U.S. scientists will also publish their 2024 climate data on Friday. Governments promised under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent average temperatures exceeding 1.5C, to avoid more severe and costly climate disasters. The first year above 1.5C does not breach that target, which measures the longer-term average temperature. Buontempo said rising greenhouse gas emissions meant the world was on track to soon also blow past the Paris goal - but that it was not too late for countries to rapidly cut emissions to avoid warming rising further to disastrous levels. "It's not a done deal. We have the power to change the trajectory from now on," Buontempo said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the world's most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement. The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games likeCandy Crushand dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem -- not code developed by the app creators themselves -- this data collection is likely happening without users' or even app developers' knowledge. "For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising 'bid stream,'" rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data. The data provides a rare glimpse inside the world of real-time bidding (RTB). Historically, location data firms paid app developers to include bundles of code that collected the location data of their users. Many companies have turned instead to sourcing location information through the advertising ecosystem, where companies bid to place ads inside apps. But a side effect is that data brokers can listen in on that process and harvest the location of peoples' mobile phones. "This is a nightmare scenario for privacy, because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, but there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger, doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way," Edwards says. Included in the hacked Gravy data are tens of millions of mobile phone coordinates of devices inside the US, Russia, and Europe. Some of those files also reference an app next to each piece of location data. 404 Media extracted the app names and built a list of mentioned apps. The list includes dating sites Tinder and Grindr; massive games such asCandy Crush,Temple Run,Subway Surfers, andHarry Potter: Puzzles & Spells; transit app Moovit; My Period Calendar & Tracker, a period-tracking app with more than 10 million downloads; popular fitness app MyFitnessPal; social network Tumblr; Yahoo's email client; Microsoft's 365 office app; and flight tracker Flightradar24. The list also mentions multiple religious-focused apps such as Muslim prayer and Christian Bible apps, various pregnancy trackers, and many VPN apps, which some users may download, ironically, in an attempt to protect their privacy. 404 Media's full list of apps included in the data can be found here. There are also other lists available from other security researchers.

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Christie Wilcox reports via Science.org: Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls (as seen in the video above), both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants. This kind of puzzle is hard for ants because their pheromone-based communication doesn't account for the kind of geometry needed to get the object through the doors. To make the experiments even more comparable, the team also took away the humans' communication in some of the trials by making them wear sunglasses and masks and forbidding talking and gestures. So the people, like the ants, had to work together without language, relying on the forces generated by their fellow participants to figure out how to move the T-shaped piece. The groups of ants were much better at solving the puzzle than individual ants, exhibiting what the researchers described as "emergent" collective memory -- an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. The groups of humans, on the other hand, often didn't do better when working together, especially if they weren't allowed to talk. In fact, multiple people sometimes performed worse than individuals -- and worse than the ants. The researchers posit that, in the absence of the ability to discuss and debate, individuals attempt to reach a consensus quickly rather than fully assessing the problem. This "groupthink," they suggest, leads people toward fruitless "greedy" efforts where they directly pull the T toward the gaps in the wall, rather than the less obvious, correct solution of pulling the object into the space between first. Whereas the ants "excel in cooperation," they write, humans need to be able to talk through their reasoning to avoid simply going with what they think the crowd wants. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The Biden administration plans one additional round of restrictions on the export of AI chips before leaving office, "a final push in his effort to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of China and Russia," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The US wants to curb the sale of AI chips used in data centers on both a country and company basis, with the goal of concentrating AI development in friendly nations and getting businesses around the world to align with American standards, according to people familiar with the matter. The result would be an expansion of semiconductor caps to most of the world -- an attempt to control the spread of AI technology at a time of soaring demand. The regulations, which could be issued as soon as Friday, would create three tiers of chip trade restrictions, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. At the top level, a small number of US allies would maintain essentially unmitigated access to American chips. A group of adversaries, meanwhile, would be effectively blocked from importing the semiconductors. And the vast majority of the world would face limits on the total computing power that can go to one country. Countries in the last group would be able to bypass their national limits -- and get their own, significantly higher caps -- by agreeing to a set of US government security requirements and human rights standards, one of the people said. That type of designation -- called a validated end user, or VEU -- aims to create a set of trusted entities that develop and deploy AI in secure environments around the world.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said quantum computers won't be very useful for another 20 years, causing stocks in this emerging sector to plunge more than 40% for a total market value loss of over $8 billion. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang said during a Q&A with analysts. PCMag reports: The field of quantum computing hasn't gotten nearly as much hype as generative AI and the tech giants promoting it in the past few years. Right now, part of the reason quantum computers aren't currently that helpful is because of their error rates. Nord Quantique CEO Julien Lemyre previously told PCMag that quantum error correction is the future of the field, and his firm is working on a solution. The errors that qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum machine, currently make result in quantum computers being largely unhelpful. It's an essential hurdle to overcomeâ"but we don't currently know if or when quantum errors will be eliminated. Chris Erven, CEO and co-founder of Kets Quantum, believes quantum computers will eventually pose a significant threat to cybersecurity. "China is making some of the largest investments in quantum computing, pumping in billions of dollars into research and development in the hope of being the first to create a large-scale, cryptographically relevant machine," Erven tells PCMag in a statement. "Although they may be a few years away from being fully operational, we know a quantum computer will be capable of breaking all traditional cyber defenses we currently use. So they, and others, are actively harvesting now, to decrypt later." "The 15 to 20-year timeline seems very realistic," said Ivana Delevska, investment chief of Spear Invest, which holds Rigetti and IonQ shares in an actively managed ETF. "That is roughly what it took Nvidia to develop accelerated computing."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Global banks will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as artificial intelligence encroaches on tasks currently carried out by human workers, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Chief information and technology officers surveyed for BI indicated that on average they expect a net 3% of their workforce to be cut, according to a report published Thursday. Back office, middle office and operations are likely to be most at risk, according to Tomasz Noetzel, the BI senior analyst who wrote the report. Customer services could see changes as bots manage client functions, while know-your-customer duties would also be vulnerable. "Any jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at risk," he said. "But AI will not eliminate them fully, rather it will lead to workforce transformation." Nearly a quarter of the 93 respondents predict a steeper decline of between 5% and 10% of total headcount. The peer group covered by BI includes Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The findings point to far-reaching changes in the industry, feeding through to improved earnings. In 2027, banks could see pretax profits 12% to 17% higher than they would otherwise have been -- adding as much as $180 billion to their combined bottom line -- as AI powers an increase in productivity, according to BI. Eight in ten respondents expect generative AI to increase productivity and revenue generation by at least 5% in the next three to five years. Results from a recent World Economic Forum survey also predicted a reduction in the workforce due to AI. According to the survey, 41% of employers intend to downsize their workforce as AI automates certain tasks. Unlike the survey results from 2023, this year's report did not say that most technology, including AI, were expected to be a "net positive" for job numbers.

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OpenAI has shut down the developer behind a viral device that could respond to ChatGPT queries to aim and fire an automated rifle. Futurism reports: The contraption, as seen in a video that's been making its rounds on social media, sparked a frenzied debate over our undying attempts to turn dystopian tech yanked straight out of the "Terminator" franchise into a reality. STS 3D's invention also apparently caught the attention of OpenAI, who says it swiftly shut him down for violating its policies. When Futurism reached out to the company, a spokesperson said that "we proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry." STS 3D -- who didn't respond to our request for comment -- used OpenAI's Realtime API to give his weapon a cheery voice and a way to decipher his commands. "ChatGPT, we're under attack from the front left and front right," he told the system in the video. "Respond accordingly." Without skipping a beat, the rifle jumped into action, shooting what appeared to be blanks while aiming at the nearby walls.

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Plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles for training. They further accuse the company of concealing its actions by stripping copyright information and torrenting the data. TechCrunch reports: In newly unredacted documents filed (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta's testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of a data set called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a "links aggregator," provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement. According to Meta's testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs' counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta's Llama models despite concerns within Meta's AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a "data set we know to be pirated," and flagging that its use "may undermine [Meta's] negotiating position with regulators." The filing also cites a memo to Meta AI decision-makers noting that after "escalation to MZ," Meta's AI team "[was] approved to use LibGen." (MZ, here, is rather obvious shorthand for "Mark Zuckerberg.") The details seemingly line up with reporting from The New York Times last April, which suggested that Meta cut corners to gather data for its AI. At one point, Meta was hiring contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of books and considering buying the publisher Simon & Schuster, according to the Times. But the company's execs determined that it would take too long to negotiate licenses and reasoned that fair use was a solid defense. The filing Wednesday contains new accusations, like that Meta might've tried to conceal its alleged infringement by stripping the LibGen data of attribution.

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