Month: October 2023

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Artists suing Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney hit a roadblock this week in their quest to prove allegations that AI image generators illegally use copyrighted works to mimic unique artistic styles without compensation or consent.

On Monday, US district judge William H. Orrick dismissed many of the artists' claims after finding that the proposed class-action complaint "is defective in numerous respects." Perhaps most notably, two of the three named plaintiffs—independent artist Kelly McKernan and concept artist/professional illustrator Karla Ortiz—had apparently never registered any of their disputed works with the Copyright Office. Orrick dismissed their claims with prejudice, dropping them from the suit.

But while McKernan and Ortiz can no longer advance their claims, the lawsuit is far from over. Lead plaintiff, cartoonist, and illustrator Sarah Andersen will have the next 30 days to amend her complaint and keep the copyright dispute alive.

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Tesla's controversial driver assistance feature Autopilot has received another pass. On Tuesday a jury in California found that Autopilot was not to blame for a 2019 crash in Riverside County that killed the driver and left his wife and son severely injured. That marks the second time this year a jury has found that Autopilot was not responsible for a serious crash.

The case was filed by the two survivors of the Riverside crash and alleged that an Autopilot malfunction caused Micah Lee's Tesla Model 3 to veer off a highway at 65 mph (105 km/h) before it struck a tree and burst into flames. Lee died in the crash, and his wife and then-8-year-old son were seriously injured; as a result the plaintiffs asked for $400 million plus punitive damages.

But Tesla denied Autopilot was defective and claimed that Lee had been drinking alcohol before the crash. Nine members of the jury agreed with Tesla after four days of deliberation.

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On Tuesday, The Guardian accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll beside one of its articles on the Microsoft Start website. The poll, created by an AI model on Microsoft's news platform, speculated on the cause of a woman's death, reportedly triggering reader anger and leading to reputational concerns for the news organization.

"This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I’ve ever seen," wrote one commenter on the story. The comment section has since been disabled.

The poll appeared beside a republished Guardian story about Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with head injuries in Sydney. The AI-generated poll presented readers with three choices to speculate on the cause of James' death: murder, accident, or suicide. Following negative reactions, the poll was removed, but critical comments remained visible for a time before their removal.

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued SolarWinds Corp. and Chief Information Security Officer Timothy Brown yesterday, alleging that they concealed security failures that led to a nearly two-yearlong cyberattack known as "Sunburst." The attack, reportedly carried out by Russian hackers, inserted malicious code into SolarWinds network-management software used by thousands of customers, including US government agencies and private companies.

From the time of its initial public offering in October 2018 until January 2021, SolarWinds and Brown "defrauded SolarWinds' investors and customers through misstatements, omissions, and schemes that concealed both the Company's poor cybersecurity practices and its heightened—and increasing—cybersecurity risks," the SEC lawsuit said. "SolarWinds' public statements about its cybersecurity practices and risks painted a starkly different picture from internal discussions and assessments about the Company's cybersecurity policy violations, vulnerabilities, and cyberattack."

The SEC sued the company and Brown in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The SEC is seeking disgorgement of "ill-gotten gains," civil monetary penalties, and a permanent ban on Brown from acting as an officer or director for any company that issues securities.

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Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we've seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled "Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready."

Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator"—which is targeted at app developers doing app development—Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It's the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack—the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet.

The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind—it's all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should Just Work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will still be great for testing, though.

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Windows 11's next yearly update is here. Microsoft is rolling out the Windows 11 2023 Update, also known as Windows 11 23H2, to the general public starting today, the company announced in a blog post.

Microsoft Windows Servicing and Delivery VP John Cable describes the 23H2 update as "scoped," "cumulative," and "streamlined," which are all different ways of saying that it doesn't do a whole lot in and of itself other than rolling the version number over. Most of the big new features, including the Copilot AI assistant, actually began rolling out a month ago to Windows 11 22H2. It's just that you'll know that any PC running 23H2 has those features, whereas older versions of 22H2 may not.

Cable notes a couple of 23H2-specific additions, namely that the Chat app from earlier Windows 11 releases has been replaced by Microsoft Teams (free) (that was not our parenthetical; that's what the company calls it), which is pinned to the taskbar by default just like Chat used to be. Built-in system apps get a new "system" label in the "All apps" view on the Start menu, and system apps are now managed separately from other apps in the Settings app under System > System Components.

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Classic whodunit mysteries work because just about every character ends up being a murder suspect. The demise of non-avian dinosaurs is a lot like that. The Chicxulub impact and its aftereffects created a huge range of potentially lethal suspects. Whodunit? A giant fireball and massive tsunamis? Wild swings in the climate? Global wildfires? A blackened sky that shut down photosynthesis? All of the above?

Modeling these impacts, combined with data on the pattern of extinctions, has led to various opinions on what proved decisive regarding the extermination of so many species. In the latest look at the end-Cretaceous extinction, a team of scientists largely based in Brussels has revisited deposits laid down in the aftermath of the impact and found that much of the debris came from fine dust. When that dust is plugged into climate models, global temperatures plunge by as much as 25° C, and photosynthesis shuts down for almost two years.

Dust to dust

There was a lot going on in the atmosphere in the years after the impact. Debris thrown up by the impact would have re-entered Earth's atmosphere, burning up into fine rocky and sulfur-rich particles in the process. The heat generated by this process would have set off massive wildfires, adding a lot of soot to the mix. And all of that was churned up with the debris from the impact that stayed within the atmosphere.