Technology

https://archive.ph/sIxUg

NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - U.S. TikTok users spent heavily to buy merchandise from a range of vendors on the e-commerce platform TikTok Shop so far this holiday shopping season, according to TikTok estimates and a Reuters analysis of spending patterns measured by data from Facteus.

When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy.

While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and an internal company email reviewed by The Intercept show the deal forged between Google and Israel doesn’t operate under the tech company’s general terms of service. Rather, Nimbus is subject to an “adjusted” policy drafted between Google and the Israeli government. It is unclear how this “Adjusted Terms of Service” policy differs from Google’s typical terms.

“The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract published to the Israeli government’s public contracting portal. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”

The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

I think Docker opens up a lot of ways to repurpose an old phone and turn it into a home server. The advantage over using something like RPi is that you have a touchscreen built in, making it much easier to troubleshoot without having to plug in a monitor and a keyboard.

Given how abundant old phones are, seems like it would be cool to have an Android distro specifically designed for this use case. Especially if you could plug in a USB hub for stuff like external storage.

It’s really important to point out that our own interaction with tech may have changed to be extremely controlled, and seem like we have a dependency on corporations… but the original underlying structure still exists. We have power to exist independently, and create our own alternatives too.

At the core of it, we can participate our own way, if we know where to look.
You can still create websites, your own tools, distribute your own software… and how to do that is a very important understanding to cultivate.

Tech literacy is an imperative, especially in the era that we are in right now.

Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.

She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.

Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.

A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.

Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.

She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.

Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible. "Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government...”

Dec 2 (Reuters) - Intel (INTC.O) Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger has stepped down less than four years after taking the helm of the company, handing control to two lieutenants as the faltering American chipmaking icon searches for a permanent replacement. Gelsinger, who resigned on Dec. 1, left the company before the completion of an ambitious and costly four-year plan to restore the company's lead in making the fastest and smallest computer chips, a crown it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) which makes chips for Intel rivals such as Nvidia (NVDA.O) While Gelsinger has assured both investors and U.S. officials, who are subsidizing Intel's turnaround, that his manufacturing plans remain on track, the full results will not be known until next year, when the company aims to bring a flagship laptop chip back into its own factories.

https://archive.is/aC1ym

https://www.researching.cn/articles/OJ97a9c4dcc97720f3

cross-posted from: https://futurology.today/post/2910566

Alibaba's Qwen team just released QwQ-32B-Preview, a powerful new open-source AI reasoning model that can reason step-by-step through challenging problems and directly competes with OpenAI's o1 series across benchmarks.

The details:

QwQ features a 32K context window, outperforming o1-mini and competing with o1-preview on key math and reasoning benchmarks.

The model was tested across several of the most challenging math and programming benchmarks, showing major advances in deep reasoning.

QwQ demonstrates ‘deep introspection,’ talking through problems step-by-step and questioning and examining its own answers to reason to a solution.

The Qwen team noted several issues in the Preview model, including getting stuck in reasoning loops, struggling with common sense, and language mixing.

Why it matters: Between QwQ and DeepSeek, open-source reasoning models are here — and Chinese firms are absolutely cooking with new models that nearly match the current top closed leaders. Has OpenAI’s moat dried up, or does the AI leader have something special up its sleeve before the end of the year?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/123708

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Meta is actively helping self-harm content to flourish on Instagram by failing to remove explicit images and encouraging those engaging with such content to befriend one another, according to a damning new study that found its moderation “extremely inadequate”.

Danish researchers created a private self-harm network on the social media platform, including fake profiles of people as young as 13 years old, in which they shared 85 pieces of self-harm-related content gradually increasing in severity, including blood, razor blades and encouragement of self-harm.

The aim of the study was to test Meta’s claim that it had significantly improved its processes for removing harmful content, which it says now uses artificial intelligence (AI). The tech company claims to remove about 99% of harmful content before it is reported.

But Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), an organisation that promotes responsible digital development, found that in the month-long experiment not a single image was removed.

When it created its own simple AI tool to analyse the content, it was able to automatically identify 38% of the self-harm images and 88% of the most severe. This, the company said, showed that Instagram had access to technology able to address the issue but “has chosen not to implement it effectively”.