Month: December 2022

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a person leaving a building, thus opting out of the vertical blinds convention. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Wednesday, Stability AI announced it would allow artists to remove their work from the training dataset for an upcoming Stable Diffusion 3.0 release. The move comes as an artist advocacy group called Spawning tweeted that Stability AI would honor opt-out requests collected on its Have I Been Trained website. The details of how the plan will be implemented remain incomplete and unclear, however.

As a brief recap, Stable Diffusion, an AI image synthesis model, gained its ability to generate images by "learning" from a large dataset of images scraped from the Internet without consulting any rights holders for permission. Some artists are upset about it because Stable Diffusion generates images that can potentially rival human artists in an unlimited quantity. We've been following the ethical debate since Stable Diffusion's public launch in August 2022.

To understand how the Stable Diffusion 3 opt-out system is supposed to work, we created an account on Have I Been Trained and uploaded an image of the Atari Pong arcade flyer (which we do not own). After the site's search engine found matches in the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) image database, we right-clicked several thumbnails individually and selected "Opt-Out This Image" in a pop-up menu.

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  The Oppo Find N2. [credit: Oppo ]

Oppo has a new set of foldables with some interesting designs: Meet the Oppo Find N2 and the Oppo Find N2 Flip. Just like Samsung's lineup, these are big and small foldable phones, but both offer something unique.

First up, the Oppo Find N2 is the company's flagship foldable. It's a phone that opens up into a tablet for 7,999 yuan (about $1,147). This one is a China-only release for now, but there's always a chance Oppo's sister company, OnePlus, makes good on all its teasing and jumps into the foldables market with a similar design.

We should talk about the dimensions of this phone first because they are very different. When folded up, the phone is 132.2 mm×72.6 mm×14.6 mm. That's a normal width, but the phone is extremely short. The 132 mm height makes the Find N2 as tall as an iPhone 13 Mini. The short height explains the 120Hz, 5.54-inch front OLED display. I don't know if it's right to call this "small" since at 72.6 mm wide, it's still as wide as a normal smartphone, but it's a unique form factor.

Enlarge / An iPhone 13 Pro stuck to Belkin's MagSafe camera mount for laptops. The desktop version works similarly, just with a different design for thicker screens. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The Continuity Camera feature was one of the headliners in the macOS Ventura update: Any Mac can now use any compatible iPhone as a webcam via a Lightning cable or a wireless connection. And any iPhone camera is a significant upgrade over the 720p and 1080p webcams that ship with iMacs and most of the 1080p desktop webcams from the likes of Logitech, Microsoft, and Razer (for Mac mini and Pro owners with no built-in webcam).

The problem is finding a place to put your iPhone while you try to use it as a camera. Belkin made a MagSafe mount that could quickly clip an iPhone to the top edge of a MacBook, but the retention clip is too narrow to use with most desktop monitors. A new version of the mount, announced today, has been created with a wider base and a sort of kickstand to help it fit on top of most desktop monitors.

Belkin's MagSafe iPhone mount for desktops has a thicker base that sits on top of monitors, plus a kickstand that braces it against the back of your screen. (credit: Belkin)

As of this writing, the Belkin iPhone Mount (Magsafe Compatible) for Mac Desktops is listed on Apple's site for $29.95, though a Belkin representative informed us that the correct price is $39.95. The product photos show it sitting astride a Studio Display, which includes a front-facing camera similar to the one Apple includes in iPads, but image quality has been a mixed bag.

Enlarge / A screenshot from the most recent main-series Tomb Raider title, 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Amazon's games division will publish the next big Tomb Raider sequel, a press release revealed today.

The game will be developed by Crystal Dynamics—the same studio that made the reboot trilogy that included 2013's Tomb Raider, 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider, and 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Crystal Dynamics used to live under the umbrella of large, Japan-based international publisher Square-Enix, but the parent company sold Crystal Dynamics and the Tomb Raider intellectual property to Swedish holding company Embracer Group earlier this year. That sale also included the Deus Ex, Thief, and Legacy of Kain franchises and associated studios—in other words, most of Square-Enix's Western studios and properties.

Enlarge (credit: Image taken by Mayte Torres | Moment)

In the last half of 2022 alone, many services—from game platforms designed with kids in mind to popular apps like TikTok or Twitter catering to all ages—were accused of endangering young users, exposing minors to self-harm and financial and sexual exploitation. Some kids died, their parents sued, and some tech companies were shielded from their legal challenges by Section 230. As regulators and parents alike continue scrutinizing how kids become hooked on visiting favorite web destinations that could put them at risk of serious harms, pressure that's increasingly harder to escape has mounted on tech companies to take more responsibility for protecting child safety online.

In the United States, shielding kids from online dangers is still a duty largely left up to parents, and some tech companies would prefer to keep it that way. But by 2024, a first-of-its-kind California online child-safety law is supposed to take effect, designed to shift some of that responsibility onto tech companies. California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AB 2273) will force tech companies to design products and services with child safety in mind, requiring age verification and limiting features like auto-play or minor account discoverability via friend-finding tools. That won’t happen, however, if NetChoice gets its way.

The tech industry trade association—with members including Meta, TikTok, and Google—this week sued to block the law, arguing in a complaint that the law is not only potentially unconstitutional but also poses allegedly overlooked harms to minors.

Enlarge (credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak)

Two planets that were originally discovered by the Kepler mission may not be what we thought they were. Based on an initial characterization, it was thought these planets were rocky bodies a bit larger than Earth. But continued observation has produced data that indicates the planets are much less dense than we originally thought. And the only realistic way to get the sort of densities they now seem to have is for a substantial amount of their volume to be occupied by water or a similar fluid.

We do have bodies like this in our Solar System—most notably the moon Europa, which has a rocky core surrounded by a watery shell capped by ice. But these new planets are much closer to their host star, which means their surfaces are probably a blurry boundary between a vast ocean and a steam-filled atmosphere.

Let’s revisit that

There are two main methods for finding an exoplanet. One is to watch for dips in the light from their star, caused by planets with an orbit that takes them between the star and Earth. The second is to track whether the star's light periodically shifts to redder or bluer wavelengths, caused by the star moving due to the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.