Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Stable Diffusion)

Earlier this month, Twitter quietly removed transgender-specific protections from its hateful conduct policy, drawing criticism from advocates who say there has been a spike in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric since Twitter CEO Elon Musk took over the platform last year.

An archived version of Twitter’s prior policy, dated April 7, clearly stated that Twitter prohibited “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” ("Deadnaming" refers to calling a trans person by their former name.)

But on April 8, the policy language changed to strike that last line. That edit effectively removed transgender-specific protections that were first implemented in 2018 to address a disproportionate amount of hate speech targeting transgender users, The Verge reported that year.

Enlarge / Google Fi's new brand and logo. (credit: Google)

Google Fi, Google's cellular service, is getting its third rebrand in eight years. First it was Project Fi, then Google Fi, and now it's "Google Fi Wireless."  It also has its third logo, and this one's kind of clever: It's an "F" styled to look like sideways signal bars and in Google's trademark rainbow colors.

There is also now a free trial mode. Google is harnessing the power of remotely configurable eSIMs to give anyone with an eSIM-compatible phone a seven-day/10GB free trial of Google Fi. That makes it easy to run around and test coverage. Google Fi is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO)—a cellular reseller—of T-Mobile's network, so whatever your T-Mobile coverage is like, that's what Fi is like. Google says that during the trial, "We'll give you a new Fi number to try out on your phone, but your current number will still work. During the trial, you can choose between Fi or your current network whenever you're calling, texting, or using mobile data." You'll need to enter a credit card for the trial, and after seven days, you'll be automatically billed on a $50 "Simply Unlimited" plan. Google notes you can cancel immediately (this is just one or two taps inside the app) and will still get the seven-day trial.

The new Fi app has family members right at the top. (credit: Google)

The Fi app is getting a "new family-centric experience" in the form of a big horizontal list of family members across the top. Clicking on a person will show you that person's data usage and a bunch of parental controls. Parents can limit devices to only contacting people in the contact list (Android only), remotely turn on location sharing, or manage data limits.

Enlarge / Google Fi's new brand and logo. (credit: Google)

Google Fi, Google's cellular service, is getting its third rebrand in eight years. First it was Project Fi, then Google Fi, and now it's "Google Fi Wireless."  It also has its third logo, and this one's kind of clever: It's an "F" styled to look like sideways signal bars and in Google's trademark rainbow colors.

There is also now a free trial mode. Google is harnessing the power of remotely configurable eSIMs to give anyone with an eSIM-compatible phone a seven-day/10GB free trial of Google Fi. That makes it easy to run around and test coverage. Google Fi is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO)—a cellular reseller—of T-Mobile's network, so whatever your T-Mobile coverage is like, that's what Fi is like. Google says that during the trial, "We'll give you a new Fi number to try out on your phone, but your current number will still work. During the trial, you can choose between Fi or your current network whenever you're calling, texting, or using mobile data." You'll need to enter a credit card for the trial, and after seven days, you'll be automatically billed on a $50 "Simply Unlimited" plan. Google notes you can cancel immediately (this is just one or two taps inside the app) and will still get the seven-day trial.

The new Fi app has family members right at the top. (credit: Google)

The Fi app is getting a "new family-centric experience" in the form of a big horizontal list of family members across the top. Clicking on a person will show you that person's data usage and a bunch of parental controls. Parents can limit devices to only contacting people in the contact list (Android only), remotely turn on location sharing, or manage data limits.

Enlarge / Reddit, a site that is chock-full of humans being every kind of human possible, will start charging larger businesses that want to train their Large Language Model AIs on its data. (credit: Getty Images)

If you're a business training a large language model (LLM) AI and want it to learn from the u/420NarutoConspiracy subreddit, you'll soon have to pay for that.

Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of social news and discussion aggregator Reddit, told The New York Times recently that it planned to charge companies accessing its API for the purpose of pulling its 18 years' worth of content generated mostly by humans. Details on the new terms are available in a subsequent announcement post on Reddit.

The API would still be free to developers working on bots and other Reddit tools, and researchers working on academic or non-commercial projects. But simply mainlining Reddit's conversations for AI training purposes will come with a price, the exact amounts of which should arrive in the coming weeks.

Along with the animated Lower Decks, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds represents the best of the new crop of Trek series, receiving much praise upon its debut for its return to classic Star Trek episodic storytelling. Even the opening credits are a tribute to the iconic opening credits sequence for The Original Series (TOS), showing the USS Enterprise soaring through space, past asteroid belts and clouds of interstellar dust as it searches for the titular new worlds. We're about to get even more of that classic Trek goodness, judging by the first extended teaser.

(Spoilers for the first season below.)

The series features classic TOS characters Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). Babs Olusanmokun plays Dr. M'Benga; Celia Rose Gooding has the unenviable task of filling Nichelle Nichols' shoes as Cadet Nyota Uhura; Jess Bush plays Nurse Christine Chapel; Melissa Navia plays Lt. Erica Ortegas; and Christina Chong plays La'An Noonien-Singh (a relation of the classic revenge-obsessed Star Trek villain Khan).

Enlarge / The D-Wave hardware is, quite literally, a black box. (credit: D-Wave)

Before we had developed the first qubit, theoreticians had done the work that showed that a sufficiently powerful gate-based quantum computer would be able to perform calculations that could not realistically be done on traditional computing hardware. All that is needed is to build hardware capable of implementing the theorists' work.

The situation was essentially reversed when it came to quantum annealing. D-Wave started building hardware that could perform quantum annealing without a strong theoretical understanding of how its performance would compare to standard computing hardware. And, for practical calculations, the hardware has sometimes been outperformed by more traditional algorithms.

On Wednesday, however, a team of researchers, some at D-Wave, others at academic institutions, is releasing a paper comparing its quantum annealer with different methods of simulating its behavior. The results show that actual hardware has a clear advantage over simulations, though there are two caveats: errors start to cause the hardware to deviate from ideal performance, and it's not clear how well this performance edge translates to practical calculations.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Olemedia)

The long-running battle over encryption between tech companies and law enforcement continues, with law enforcement agencies around the world calling on Meta to cancel plans for end-to-end encryption of Facebook and Instagram messages.

End-to-end encryption (often called "E2EE") boosts security and privacy for all users, whether law-abiding or not. But government officials have long opposed plans to make the technology more widely available, citing the risk that terrorists, sex traffickers, child abusers, and other criminals will use encrypted messages to evade law enforcement.

The latest call to abandon encryption plans was made today by the Virtual Global Taskforce, a consortium of 15 law enforcement agencies including two from the US: the FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations. The task force focuses specifically on child sexual abuse; other members include Europol and agencies from the UK, Canada, Colombia, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, and South Korea.