Month: May 2023

Enlarge / A cocoa pod, this one grown in Asia. (credit: Tan Dao Duy)

Cocoa farmers in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire make less than a dollar a day. And there are almost 2 million of them; the two countries are the world’s largest cocoa producers, supplying two-thirds of the global supply. Cocoa is the primary perennial crop in both places.

However, there are no up-to-date, accurate maps of their cocoa plantations. This is a problem since cocoa is known to be a primary driver of deforestation in the region. Besides decimating biodiversity that may never recover, clear-cutting forests to plant cocoa (or for any other reason) makes it hotter and makes storms stronger, both locally in Africa and across the planet.

So a team of European researchers made a deep neural network to collate publicly available satellite images of both countries with georeferenced cocoa farms, identified by their regular polygons. They then had a team in Côte d'Ivoire trekking around for three months to visit the farms and verify their results.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alan Schein)

The Biden administration urged Europe to reject the telecom industry plan to make Big Tech companies pay for Internet service providers' network expansions and upgrades. In comments submitted to the European Commission last week, the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said that mandating payments from online platforms to ISPs would "distort competition" and undermine net neutrality.

"Mandating direct payments to telecom operators in the EU absent assurances on spending could reinforce the dominant market position of the largest operators," the US submission said. "It could give operators a new bottleneck over customers, raise costs for end users, and alter incentives for CAPs/LTGs [content and application providers and large traffic generators] to make efficient decisions regarding network investment and interconnection. It is difficult to understand how a system of mandatory payments imposed on only a subset of content providers could be enforced without undermining net neutrality."

European broadband providers said in their comments that they should be allowed to demand new fees from online companies that account for over 5 percent of a telco's average peak traffic. Telco lobby groups claimed that Europe needs "a fair contribution based on a framework that allows balanced negotiations between telcos and large traffic generators who obtain the most benefit from telecom investment, while creating a high-cost burden with their traffic and exerting disproportionate power across markets."

Enlarge (credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff | Getty Images North America)

Days after Minnesota Uber and Lyft drivers celebrated the passing of ridesharing legislation that would have increased their pay and protections, the state's governor, Tim Walz, vetoed the bill. Now Minnesota drivers are outraged, claiming that the governor bowed to "scare tactics." They vowed to keep fighting against alleged abuse to create better worker conditions in the state.

Walz's veto is his first in five sessions as Minnesota's governor and came hours after Uber threatened to pull out of nearly all Minnesota markets and only offer premium products in areas where services remained, The Star Tribune reported. Lyft had also threatened to create "transportation deserts" if the bill became law.

Authored by Minnesota Senator Omar Fateh, the ridesharing legislation would have kicked in July 1, 2024, and forced Uber and Lyft to pay drivers $1.45 per mile and 34 cents per minute in the state's busiest counties. Outside that area, drivers would have received minimum compensation of $1.25 per mile and 34 cents per minute. It also guaranteed a minimum fee of $5 for any transportation provided.

Enlarge (credit: Parradee Kietsirikul)

Anyone who has had to go back and retype a word on their smartphone because autocorrect chose the wrong one has had some kind of experience writing with AI. Failure to make these corrections can allow AI to say things we didn’t intend. But is it also possible for AI writing assistants to change what we want to say?

This is what Maurice Jakesch, a doctoral student of information science at Cornell, wanted to find out. He created his own AI writing assistant based on GPT-3, one that would automatically come up with suggestions for filling in sentences—but there was a catch. Subjects using the assistant were supposed to answer the question “Is social media good for society?” The assistant, however, was programmed to offer biased suggestions for how to answer that question.

Assisting with bias

AI can be biased despite not being alive. Though these programs can only “think” to the degree that human brains figure out how to program them to, their creators may end up embedding personal biases in the software. Alternatively, if trained on a dataset that has a limited or biased representation, the final product may display biases.

Enlarge / Finally, Link has enough diamonds to bling out every single one of his teeth. (credit: Nintendo)

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

For a few weeks now, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players have been able to use a surprising number of glitches to endlessly duplicate items, materials, weapons, and more to their heart's content. But the endless item party officially comes to an end today, with data miners reporting that the new ver. 1.1.2 game update fixes these unintended endless item glitches (you can still stock up your inventory before installing the update, by all accounts).

While Nintendo lumps this fix under "several issues [that] have been addressed to improve the gameplay experience," I'm reluctant to call this an improvement at all. On the contrary, I think Nintendo should embrace this "glitch" and make secret codes for infinite items (and money and health, etc.) an integral, intentional option for players who just want to tinker with the game's amazing creation engine.

Enlarge / With this background, potentially the most viewed photograph in human history, Windows XP always signaled that it was prepared for a peaceful retirement. Yet some would have us disturb it. (credit: Charles O'Rear/Microsoft)

It has never been too hard for someone with the right amount of time, desperation, or flexible scruples to get around Windows XP's activation scheme. And yet XP activation, the actual encrypted algorithm, loathed since before it started, has never been truly broken, at least entirely offline. Now, far past the logical end of all things XP, the solution exists, floating around the web's forum-based backchannels for months now.

On the blog of tinyapps.org (first spotted by The Register), which provides micro-scale, minimalist utilities for constrained Windows installations, a blog post appropriately titled "Windows XP Activation: GAME OVER" runs down the semi-recent history of folks looking to activate Windows XP more than 20 years after it debuted, nine years after its end of life, and, crucially, some years after Microsoft turned off its online activation servers (or maybe they just swapped certificates).

xp_activate32.exe, a 18,432-byte program (hash listed on tinyapps' blog post), takes the code generated by Windows XP's phone activation option and processes it into a proper activation key (Confirmation ID), entirely offline. It's persistent across system wipes and re-installs. It is, seemingly, the same key Microsoft would provide for your computer.