Author, journalist, and long-time Internet freedom advocate Doc Searls wants us to stop asking for privacy from websites, services, and AI and start telling these things what we will and will not accept. Draft standard IEEE P7012, which Searls has nicknamed “MyTerms” (akin to “Wi-Fi”), is a Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Searls writes on his blog that MyTerms has been in the works since 2017, and…

On Sunday, the genetic testing and heritage company 23andMe announced that it had entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was asking a court to arrange its sale. The company has been losing money for years, and a conflict between its board and CEO about future directions led to the entire board resigning back in September. Said CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has now resigned and will be pursuing an attempt to purchase the…

On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots. The tool will attempt to thwart AI companies that crawl websites without permission to collect training data for large language models that power AI assistants like ChatGPT. Cloudflare, founded in 2009, is probably best known as a company that provides infrastructure and…

Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers. This is just the latest phase of a campaign that has also targeted Italian ISPs and other international firms like Cloudflare. The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams, but the effort has already caused collateral damage. Regardless, Italy’s communication regulator praises the…

On Thursday, Anthropic introduced web search capabilities for its AI assistant Claude, enabling the assistant to access current information online. Previously, the latest AI model that powers Claude could only rely on data absorbed during its neural network training process, having a “knowledge cutoff” of October 2024. Claude’s web search is currently available in feature preview for paid users in the United States, with plans to expand to free users…

In May 2024, the website of ad-tech firm Kubient touted that the company was “a perfect blend” of ad veterans and developers, “committed to solving the growing problem of fraud” in digital ads. Like many corporate sites, it also linked old blog posts from its home page, including a May 2022 post on “How to create a world free of fraud: Kubient’s secret sauce.” These days, Kubient’s website cannot be…

The Apple TV+ streaming service “is losing more than $1 billion annually,” according to The Information today. The report also claimed that Apple TV+’s subscriber count reached “around 45 million” in 2024, citing the two anonymous sources. Ars reached out to Apple for comment on the accuracy of The Information’s report and will update you if we hear back. Read full article Comments Powered by WPeMatico

It’s a widely known problem with roots in urban legend: Devices with motherboards failing in the early 2000s with a sudden pop, a gruesome spill, or sometimes a burst of flames. And it was allegedly all due to one guy who didn’t copy a stolen formula correctly. The “capacitor plague” of the early 2000s was real and fairly widespread among devices, even if the majority of those devices didn’t go…

A new study examining meme creation found that AI-generated meme captions on existing famous meme images scored higher on average for humor, creativity, and “shareability” than those made by people. Even so, people still created the most exceptional individual examples. The research, which will be presented at the 2025 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, reveals a nuanced picture of how AI and humans perform differently in humor creation tasks….

A United States District Court for the Northern District of California judge has signed off on a settlement agreement between HP and its customers who sued the company for issuing firmware updates that prevented their printers from working with non-HP ink and toner. In December 2020, Mobile Emergency Housing Corp. and a company called Performance Automotive & Tire Center filed a class-action complaint against HP [PDF], alleging that the company…