Month: March 2023

Enlarge / The lettering "Hey Google" on the Google pavilion at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in 2018. These words activate Google Assistant, Google's virtual personal assistant. (credit: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance)

Is the Google Assistant doomed? The evidence is starting to pile up that the division is going down the tubes. The latest is news from CNBC's Jennifer Elias that says the Google Assistant division has been "reshuffled" to "heavily prioritize" Bard over the Google Assistant. It all sounds like the team is being reassigned.

We'll get into the report details in a minute, but first a quick recap of the past two years of what the assistant has gone through under Google:

• Google Assistant saw eight major speaker/smart display hardware releases in five years from 2016-2021, but the hardware releases seem to have stopped. The last hardware release was in March 2021. That was two full years ago.
• 2022 saw Google remove Assistant support from two in-house product lines: Nest Wi-Fi and Fitbit wearables.
• 2022 also saw a report from The Information that said Google wanted to "invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google."
• Google Assistant's driving mode was shut down in 2022.
• Google Assistant's "Duplex on the web" feature was also shut down in 2022.
• One of Google Assistant's core unique features, Reminders, is being shut down in favor of Google Task Reminders soon.
• Google Assistant has never made money. The hardware is sold at cost, it doesn't have ads, and nobody pays a monthly fee to use the Assistant. There's also the significant server cost to process all those voice commands, though some newer devices have moved to on-device processing in a stealthy cost-cutting move. The Assistant's biggest competitor, Amazon Alexa, is in the same boat and loses $10 billion a year.

Each one of those developments could maybe be dismissed individually, but together they start to paint the familiar picture of a looming Google shutdown.

On the morning of October 9, 2022, multiple space-based detectors picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) passing through our Solar System, sending astronomers around the world scrambling to train their telescopes on that part of the sky to collect vital data on the event and its aftermath. Dubbed GRB 221009A and deemed likely to be the "birth cry" of a new black hole, the gamma-ray burst is the most powerful yet recorded. That's why astronomers nicknamed it the BOAT, or Brightest Of All Time.

The event was promptly published in the Astronomer's Telegram, and we now have new data from follow-up observations in several new papers published in a special focus issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The findings confirmed that GRB 221009A was indeed the BOAT, appearing especially bright because its narrow jet was pointing directly at Earth. “It’s probably the brightest event to hit Earth since human civilization began,” Eric Burns, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, told New Scientist. “The energy of this thing is so extreme that if you took the entire sun and you converted all of it into pure energy, it still wouldn’t match this event. There’s just nothing comparable.”

But the various analyses also yielded several surprising results that puzzle astronomers and may lead to a significant overhaul of our current models of gamma-ray bursts. For instance, a supernova should have occurred a few weeks after the initial burst, but astronomers have yet to detect one. Radio data from observations of the afterglow didn't match predictions of existing models, and astronomers detected rare extended rings of X-ray light echoes from the initial blast in distant dust clouds.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | VCG)

A nonprofit AI research group wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI, Inc. and halt releases of GPT-4.

OpenAI "has released a product GPT-4 for the consumer market that is biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety. The outputs cannot be proven or replicated. No independent assessment was undertaken prior to deployment," said a complaint to the FTC submitted today by the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy (CAIDP).

Calling for "independent oversight and evaluation of commercial AI products offered in the United States," CAIDP asked the FTC to "open an investigation into OpenAI, enjoin further commercial releases of GPT-4, and ensure the establishment of necessary guardrails to protect consumers, businesses, and the commercial marketplace."

Enlarge / An electron micrograph of a number of Marburg virions responsible for causing Marburg virus disease. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Equatorial Guinea's first-ever outbreak of Marburg virus—a relative of Ebola virus that causes similarly deadly hemorrhagic fever—is continuing to grow, spreading over a wide geographic area with potentially undetected chains of transmission, officials for the World Health Organization said.

As of Wednesday morning, officials in Equatorial Guinea had reported nine confirmed cases, with seven confirmed deaths across three provinces since early February.

"However, these three provinces are 150 kilometers apart, suggesting wider transmission of the virus," WHO's Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference Wednesday.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Meta announced that starting next Wednesday, some Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union will for the first time be able to opt out of sharing first-party data used to serve highly personalized ads, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move marks a big change from Meta's current business model, where every video and piece of content clicked on its platforms provides a data point for its online advertisers.

People “familiar with the matter” told the Journal that Facebook and Instagram users will soon be able to access a form that can be submitted to Meta to object to sweeping data collection. If those requests are approved, those users will only allow Meta to target ads based on broader categories of data collection, like age range or general location.

This is different from efforts by other major tech companies like Apple and Google, which prompt users to opt in or out of highly personalized ads with the click of a button. Instead, Meta will review objection forms to evaluate reasons provided by individual users to end such data collection before it will approve any opt-outs. It's unclear what cause Meta may have to deny requests.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government have pulled off a massive supply chain attack on Windows and macOS users of 3CX, a widely used voice and video calling desktop client, researchers from multiple security firms said.

The attack compromised the software build system used to create and distribute Windows and macOS versions of the app, which provides both VoIP and PBX services to “600,000+ customers,” including American Express, Mercedes-Benz, and Price Waterhouse Cooper. Control of the software build system gave the attackers the ability to hide malware inside 3CX apps that were digitally signed using the company’s official signing key. The macOS version, according to macOS security expert Patrick Wardle, was also notarized by Apple, indicating that the company analyzed the app and detected no malicious functionality.

In the making since 2022

“This is a classic supply chain attack, designed to exploit trust relationships between an organization and external parties,” Lotem Finkelstein, Director of Threat Intelligence & Research at Check Point Software, said in an email. “This includes partnerships with vendors or the use of a third-party software which most businesses are reliant on in some way. This incident is a reminder of just how critical it is that we do our due diligence in terms of scrutinizing who we conduct business with.”

Enlarge / You've got the brains, I've got the looks... let's make lots of money. (credit: Apple TV+)

Henk Rogers, the man most directly responsible for bringing Tetris to the West, helped set expectations at an early press screening of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which premieres on the streaming service Friday. "It's not a documentary," Rogers said of a film that casts him as a fearless hero working to extract the game from the grip of a brutal, dying '80s Soviet bureaucracy. "Don't expect to see that this is exactly how it happened."

Instead, Rogers said, expect a movie that "got the feeling across, the feeling of being in Moscow for the first time, breaking the law."

All this is immediately apparent if you've read books like The Tetris Effect or Tetris: The Games People Play, which lay out the actual history of the game's long journey outside Russia with much more care and detail. Alternatively, you could hunt down a 2004 BBC documentary that also provides a more direct account of the real drama surrounding Tetris' complicated Soviet-era licensing drama.