Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Four nonprofit groups seeking to protect kids' privacy online asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate YouTube today, after back-to-back reports allegedly showed that YouTube is still targeting personalized ads on videos "made for kids."

Now it has become urgent that the FTC probe YouTube's data and advertising practices, the groups' letter said, and potentially intervene. Otherwise, it's possible that YouTube could continue to allegedly harvest data on millions of kids, seemingly in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC Act.

The first report alleging YouTube's noncompliance with federal laws came last week from Adalytics and was quickly corroborated by research from Fairplay, one of the groups behind the FTC letter, The New York Times reported. Both groups ran ad campaigns to test if YouTube was really blocking all personalized ads from appearing in children's channels, as YouTube said it was. Both found that "Google and YouTube permit and report on behavioral ad targeting on 'made-for-kids' videos, even though neither should be possible under COPPA."

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Four nonprofit groups seeking to protect kids' privacy online asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate YouTube today, after back-to-back reports allegedly showed that YouTube is still targeting personalized ads on videos "made for kids."

Now it has become urgent that the FTC probe YouTube's data and advertising practices, the groups' letter said, and potentially intervene. Otherwise, it's possible that YouTube could continue to allegedly harvest data on millions of kids, seemingly in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC Act.

The first report alleging YouTube's noncompliance with federal laws came last week from Adalytics and was quickly corroborated by research from Fairplay, one of the groups behind the FTC letter, The New York Times reported. Both groups ran ad campaigns to test if YouTube was really blocking all personalized ads from appearing in children's channels, as YouTube said it was. Both found that "Google and YouTube permit and report on behavioral ad targeting on 'made-for-kids' videos, even though neither should be possible under COPPA."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo—the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT—through its API. It allows training the model with custom data, such as company documents or project documentation. OpenAI claims that a fine-tuned model can perform as well as GPT-4 with lower cost in certain scenarios.

In AI, fine-tuning refers to the process of taking a pretrained neural network (like GPT-3.5 Turbo) and further training it on a different dataset (like your custom data), which is typically smaller and possibly related to a specific task. This process builds off of knowledge the model gained during its initial training phase and refines it for a specific application.

So basically, fine-tuning teaches GPT-3.5 Turbo about custom content, such as project documentation or any other written reference. That can come in handy if you want to build an AI assistant based on GPT-3.5 that is intimately familiar with your product or service but lacks knowledge of it in its training data (which, as a reminder, was scraped off the web before September 2021).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo—the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT—through its API. It allows training the model with custom data, such as company documents or project documentation. OpenAI claims that a fine-tuned model can perform as well as GPT-4 with lower cost in certain scenarios.

In AI, fine-tuning refers to the process of taking a pretrained neural network (like GPT-3.5 Turbo) and further training it on a different dataset (like your custom data), which is typically smaller and possibly related to a specific task. This process builds off of knowledge the model gained during its initial training phase and refines it for a specific application.

So basically, fine-tuning teaches GPT-3.5 Turbo about custom content, such as project documentation or any other written reference. That can come in handy if you want to build an AI assistant based on GPT-3.5 that is intimately familiar with your product or service but lacks knowledge of it in its training data (which, as a reminder, was scraped off the web before September 2021).

Enlarge / This is Apple’s Vision Pro headset. It looks a bit like a particularly bulky pair of ski goggles, with the materials and design language of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Poor Google. The company is about to get lapped in the AR/VR space by Apple's Vision Pro headset, despite dabbling in the AR/VR/XR space for over a decade now. A new report from Business Insider details how Google has fallen so far behind, telling the familiar modern-Google story of a rudderless company with constantly changing priorities and absentee leadership. The BI report describes employees who were "frustrated" at Google's own lack of progress when the Vision Pro was unveiled and provides a glimpse of what Google's current (again, constantly changing) plans for an AR product are.

Google's wheel-spinning in AR and VR is up there with instant messaging and payment platforms as some of the worst-run projects at the company. Hardware projects Google Glass, Cardboard, Daydream, Tango, and Iris have all come and gone. Software projects like ARCore, a VR UI for Android, the painting app Tilt Brush, and several AR Google Maps features are all dead or haven't gotten much traction. Acquisitions of companies North and Raxium haven't produced any results. Google's 12,000 layoffs this year have cut into some of these projects, and AR leadership has been rocky, too, with Google Head of AR/VR Clay Bavor leaving Google in February. A few months later, Google AR OS Senior Director of Engineering Mark Lucovsky quit the company due to "the recent changes in AR leadership and Google’s unstable commitment and vision," and apparently this was part of a larger talent exodus.

The BI report details how Google's latest dead project, Iris, "was beset by a constantly shifting strategy and lack of focus from senior leadership." After "conversations with seven current and former employees close to Google's AR efforts," Business Insider quotes a few of those anonymous employees, with one saying, "Every six months there was a major pivot in the program." At one point Google was working on a pair of custom silicon chips for the glasses' display and compute power and then gave up on the idea of custom chips. That work was apparently near completion, with one person saying, "I think it's weird when you convince yourselves you need to build custom silicon, and then you go and do that—and then flush it down the toilet."

Enlarge / A sideways grip on a rifle-style blaster is unlikely to provide higher accuracy, but it does, in fact, make you feel like a badass rebel. (credit: Nightdive Studios/LucasArts)

A wealth of first-person shooters from the period's golden era have seen remasters lately. Now comes one of the true greats: Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster.

Nightdive Studios, which has been showing everybody how to do justice to classic shooter upgrades recently with its remasters of Quake II and System Shock, is using that same KEX Engine to give just enough modernization, but not too much, to the LucasArts title that was even better than its Doom-but-it's-Star-Wars promise.

In the notes and footage of its reveal trailer, Nightdive promises 4K/120 fps gameplay, modern gamepad support, trophies and achievements, remastered cutscenes, and, of course, blasting Stormtroopers that have markedly better aim on a monitor than they do on film. The remaster is "coming soon" to PS4/5, Xbox One/X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam on PC, with "a release date announcement later this year."

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A newly discovered zeroday in the widely used WinRAR file-compression program has been under exploit for four months by unknown attackers who are using it to install malware when targets open booby-trapped JPGs and other innocuous inside file archives.

The vulnerability, residing in the way WinRAR processes the ZIP file format, has been under active exploit since April in securities trading forums, researchers from security firm Group IB reported Wednesday. The attackers have been using the vulnerability to remotely execute code that installs malware from families including DarkMe, GuLoader, and Remcos RAT.

From there, the criminals withdraw money from broker accounts. The total amount of financial losses and total number of victims infected is unknown, although Group-IB said it has tracked at least 130 individuals known to have been compromised. WinRAR developers fixed the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-38831, earlier this month.