Techmeme
August 20, 2023, 11:30 AM

Top News

Matt Novak / Forbes:
X appears to have deleted all images posted directly on the website between 2011 and 2014; links that used Twitter's native shortening service are also broken  —  Twitter, the social media platform officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and 2014.
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic:
Analysis: Books3, a dataset used to train Meta's Llama, BloombergGPT, and EleutherAI's GPT-J, contains 170K+ books from Stephen King and other authors  —  One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It's being made in secret.  To produce humanlike answers to questions …
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Cruise complies with California DMV's request to halve its fleet, as the regulator probes “recent concerning incidents” involving its robotaxis in San Francisco  —  Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, has been asked to reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco following …
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Windows file archiver utility maker WinRAR fixes a vulnerability that could let an attacker remotely execute arbitrary code, after a researcher flagged the flaw  —  A high-severity vulnerability has been fixed in WinRAR, the popular file archiver utility for Windows used by millions …
Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter:
A judge upholds a US Copyright Office finding that artwork created by AI isn't eligible for copyright protection as “human authorship is a bedrock requirement”  —  A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection.
Julian E. Barnes / New York Times:
US intelligence agencies warn US space companies that China and Russia are targeting them and preparing cyberattacks that could disable satellites in a conflict  —  U.S. officials say Chinese and Russian spy agencies are trying to steal technology from private American space companies …
Amanda Hoover / Wired:
How Science, Nature, and other peer-reviewed journals are grappling with outlines, drafts, or papers that authors wrote using generative AI, without disclosure  —  Ethics watchdogs are looking out for potentially undisclosed use of generative AI in scientific writing.  But there's no foolproof way to catch it all yet.
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
As Big Tech companies compel employees back to the office, some companies, like Atlassian, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twilio, remain steadfast backers of remote work  —  - Some tech companies still see benefit of work-from-home policy  — Move runs counter to effort to revive US office comeback
More: InsiderThreads: @carnage4lifeX: @news_by_nick and @business
Pete Evans / CBC News:
Evacuees from the wildfires threatening Yellowknife say that Meta's news fight with Canada's government makes it harder for them to share lifesaving information  —  Meta notes government sources not blocked as northerners duck ban by sharing screenshots of information
David Ljunggren / Reuters:
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Western Digital refuses to answer questions about how its portable SanDisk Extreme SSDs may lose users' data; the company is being sued for fraud and data loss  —  Eleven days ago, we sent these questions to Western Digital's head of PR and published them publicly on The Verge:
Reuters:
Nestlé, Unilever, and other big advertisers are experimenting with using generative AI ads, but many remain wary of the security, copyright, and data bias risks  —  Some of the world's biggest advertisers, from food giant Nestle (NESN.S) to consumer goods multinational Unilever (ULVR.L) …

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