Google was forced to turn off the image-generation capabilities of its latest AI model, Gemini, last week after complaints that it defaulted to depicting women and people of color when asked to create images of historical figures that were generally white and male, including vikings, popes, and German soldiers. The company publicly apologized and said… Continue reading The AI Culture Wars Are Just Getting Started
Author: Wired Magazine
Here Are the Google and Microsoft Security Updates You Need Right Now
CVE-2024-1553 and CVE-2024-1557 are memory-safety bugs rated as having a high severity. “Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code,” Mozilla researchers said. Zoom Video conferencing giant Zoom has issued fixes for seven flaws in its… Continue reading Here Are the Google and Microsoft Security Updates You Need Right Now
Lots of People Make Money on Fanfic. Just Not the Authors
Fanbinding has exploded in popularity in the past few years. Many fanbinders do adhere to a strict gift-economy stance in line with the writers whose work they’re binding, often limiting the money they collect, if any, to covering material costs. But the people selling bound versions of popular fics for profit are cut from a… Continue reading Lots of People Make Money on Fanfic. Just Not the Authors
Biden Executive Order Bans Sale of US Data to China, Russia. Good Luck
US president Joe Biden will sign an executive order on Wednesday aimed at preventing a handful of countries, including China, North Korea, and Russia, from purchasing sensitive information about Americans through commercial data brokers in the United States. Administration officials say categories of sensitive data, including personal identifiers, precise location information, and biometrics—vital tools for… Continue reading Biden Executive Order Bans Sale of US Data to China, Russia. Good Luck
Amazon Just Got Banned From the EU Parliament
Amazon has become the second company ever to have its lobbyists banned from the European Parliament, amid accusations the company does not take the institution seriously. The ban, which means the 14 Amazon employees who had access to the European Parliament can no longer enter the building without an invitation, follows the company’s decision not… Continue reading Amazon Just Got Banned From the EU Parliament
Emergency Planners Are Having a Moment
Also, in a disaster, there are no good decisions, there are only least-worse decisions. Every decision will come with a set of consequences. What the government really struggled to do was mitigate the consequences of decisions they felt that they had to take. My personal view is that what the UK’s going through at the… Continue reading Emergency Planners Are Having a Moment
Dictators Used Sandvine Tech to Censor the Internet. The US Finally Did Something About It
When the Egyptian government shut down the internet in 2011 to give itself cover to crush a popular protest movement, it was Nora Younis who got the word out. Younis, then a journalist with daily newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, found a working internet connection at the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis Hotel that overlooked Tahrir Square, the heart… Continue reading Dictators Used Sandvine Tech to Censor the Internet. The US Finally Did Something About It
Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack: BlackCat Hackers Quickly Returned After FBI Bust
Six days before Christmas, the US Department of Justice loudly announced a win in the ongoing fight against the scourge of ransomware: An FBI-led, international operation had targeted the notorious hacking group known as BlackCat or AlphV, releasing decryption keys to foil its ransom attempts against hundreds of victims and seizing the dark web sites… Continue reading Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack: BlackCat Hackers Quickly Returned After FBI Bust
The Weird, Wacky Gizmos and Gadgets We Saw at MWC 2024
The camera can recognize objects and read out text, so imagine if you’re in a grocery store in a foreign country—you can show the camera an item, ask what it is, and ask it to translate the text. The company says it’s working on adding voice recognition so you can command the camera with your… Continue reading The Weird, Wacky Gizmos and Gadgets We Saw at MWC 2024
Alabama IVF Patients Are Running Out of Time
In October, Melissa began an in vitro fertilization cycle. A resident of Birmingham, Alabama, her fertility journey to that point had been not just difficult, but harrowing—earlier that year, she had nearly bled to death during a procedure to resolve a second-trimester miscarriage. When the IVF process yielded just a single viable embryo, she had… Continue reading Alabama IVF Patients Are Running Out of Time