Month: July 2024

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A familiar debate is once again surrounding Cloudflare, the content delivery network that provides a free service that protects websites from being taken down in denial-of-service attacks by masking their hosts: Is Cloudflare a bastion of free speech or an enabler of spam, malware delivery, harassment and the very DDoS attacks it claims to block?

The controversy isn't new for Cloudflare, a network operator that has often taken a hands-off approach to moderating the enormous amount of traffic flowing through its infrastructure. With Cloudflare helping deliver 16 percent of global Internet traffic, processing 57 million web requests per second, and serving anywhere from 7.6 million to 15.7 million active websites, the decision to serve just about any actor, regardless of their behavior, has been the subject of intense disagreement, with many advocates of free speech and Internet neutrality applauding it and people fighting crime and harassment online regarding it as a pariah.

Content neutral or abuse enabling?

Spamhaus—a nonprofit organization that provides intelligence and blocklists to stem the spread of spam, phishing, malware, and botnets—has become the latest to criticize Cloudflare. On Tuesday, the project said Cloudflare provides services for 10 percent of the domains listed in its domain block list and, to date, serves sites that are the subject of more than 1,200 unresolved complaints regarding abuse.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A familiar debate is once again surrounding Cloudflare, the content delivery network that provides a free service that protects websites from being taken down in denial-of-service attacks by masking their hosts: Is Cloudflare a bastion of free speech or an enabler of spam, malware delivery, harassment and the very DDoS attacks it claims to block?

The controversy isn't new for Cloudflare, a network operator that has often taken a hands-off approach to moderating the enormous amount of traffic flowing through its infrastructure. With Cloudflare helping deliver 16 percent of global Internet traffic, processing 57 million web requests per second, and serving anywhere from 7.6 million to 15.7 million active websites, the decision to serve just about any actor, regardless of their behavior, has been the subject of intense disagreement, with many advocates of free speech and Internet neutrality applauding it and people fighting crime and harassment online regarding it as a pariah.

Content neutral or abuse enabling?

Spamhaus—a nonprofit organization that provides intelligence and blocklists to stem the spread of spam, phishing, malware, and botnets—has become the latest to criticize Cloudflare. On Tuesday, the project said Cloudflare provides services for 10 percent of the domains listed in its domain block list and, to date, serves sites that are the subject of more than 1,200 unresolved complaints regarding abuse.

Enlarge / A marketing image by Microsoft for the desktop version of Skype. (credit: Microsoft)

If you've used Microsoft's Skype in recent years, you've probably noticed that the user experience is less than ideal because of the pervasiveness of ads in the software. Fortunately, that's going to change in a new update coming to all platforms in the near future.

In the latest release notes for Skype Insider build 8.125, product manager Irene Namuganyi writes, "We’re excited to announce that Skype is now ad-free! Our latest update removes all ads from Skype channels and the entire Skype platform, ensuring a smoother, decluttered, and more enjoyable user experience."

Whereas there were previously ads in the "today" section of the application, it will now be ad-free, showing just the relevant newsfeed content. There won't be any ads in conversation views, either.

Enlarge (credit: Tim Goode/PA Images via Getty Images)

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is standing by Reddit’s decision to block companies from scraping the site without an AI agreement.

Last week, 404 Media noticed that search engines that weren't Google were no longer listing recent Reddit posts in results. This was because Reddit updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol (txt file) to block bots from scraping the site. The file reads: "Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content." Since the news broke, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, which can show recent Reddit results.

The change came a year after Reddit began its efforts to stop free scraping, which Huffman initially framed as an attempt to stop AI companies from making money off of Reddit content for free. This endeavor also led Reddit to begin charging for API access (the high pricing led to many third-party Reddit apps closing).

Enlarge (credit: Paper Boat Creative | Stone)

Today, Google announced new measures to combat the rapidly increasing spread of AI-generated non-consensual explicit deepfakes in its search results.

Because of "a concerning increase in generated images and videos that portray people in sexually explicit contexts, distributed on the web without their consent," Google said that it consulted with "experts and victim-survivors" to make some "significant updates" to its widely used search engine to "further protect people."

Specifically, Google made it easier for targets of fake explicit images—which experts have said are overwhelmingly women—to report and remove deepfakes that surface in search results. Additionally, Google took steps to downrank explicit deepfakes "to keep this type of content from appearing high up in Search results," the world's leading search engine said.

Enlarge / A naked-eye sunspot group on May 11, 2024. There are typically 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots observed in ~11-year solar cycles. (credit: E. T. H. Teague)

A team of Japanese and Belgian astronomers has re-examined the sunspot drawings made by 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler with modern analytical techniques. By doing so, they resolved a long-standing mystery about solar cycles during that period, according to a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Precisely who first observed sunspots was a matter of heated debate in the early 17th century. We now know that ancient Chinese astronomers between 364 and 28 BCE observed these features and included them in their official records. A Benedictine monk in 807 thought he'd observed Mercury passing in front of the Sun when, in reality, he had witnessed a sunspot; similar mistaken interpretations were also common in the 12th century. (An English monk made the first known drawings of sunspots in December 1128.)

English astronomer Thomas Harriot made the first telescope observations of sunspots in late 1610 and recorded them in his notebooks, as did Galileo around the same time, although the latter did not publish a scientific paper on sunspots (accompanied by sketches) until 1613. Galileo also argued that the spots were not, as some believed, solar satellites but more like clouds in the atmosphere or the surface of the Sun. But he was not the first to suggest this; that credit belongs to Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricus, who published his scientific treatise on sunspots in 1611.

Enlarge / Oclean's X Ultra, released in July, has optional Wi-Fi connectivity. (credit: Oclean)

One of the most unlikely passengers on the AI gadgets hype train is the toothbrush. With claims of using advanced algorithms and companion apps to help you brush your teeth better, toothbrushes have become a tech product for some brands.

So-called "AI toothbrushes" have become more common since debuting in 2017. Numerous brands now market AI capabilities for toothbrushes with three-figure price tags. But there's limited scientific evidence that AI algorithms help oral health, and companies are becoming more interested in using tech-laden toothbrushes to source user data.

AI toothbrushes

Kolibree was the first company to announce a "toothbrush with artificial intelligence." The French company debuted its Ara brush at CES 2017, with founder and CEO Thomas Serval saying, "Patented deep learning algorithms are embedded directly inside the toothbrush on a low-power processor. Raw data from the sensors runs through the processor, enabling the system to learn your habits and refine accuracy the more it’s used."

Enlarge / Some of the galaxies in the JADES images. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani)

One of the things that the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do was look at some of the earliest objects in the Universe. And it has already succeeded spectacularly, imaging galaxies as they existed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. But these galaxies were small, compact, and similar in scope to what we'd consider a dwarf galaxy today, which made it difficult to determine what was producing their light: stars or an actively feeding supermassive black hole at their core.

This week, Nature is publishing confirmation that some additional galaxies we've imaged also date back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang. Critically, one of them is bright and relatively large, allowing us to infer that most of its light was coming from a halo of stars surrounding its core, rather than originating in the same area as the central black hole. The finding implies that it formed through a continuing burst of star formation that started just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Age checks

The galaxies at issue here were first imaged during the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) imaging program, which includes part of the area imaged for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Initially, old galaxies were identified by using a combination of filters on one of Webb's infrared imaging cameras.

Enlarge / If you enjoyed taking out adorable, if dangerous, widdle cweatures with an assault rifle after a while, Palworld's team wants you to know that's normal and cool. (credit: Pocketpair)

Palworld's head of community has a radical idea: Stop caring about how many people are playing a game at the same time as you. It's pitched mostly at developers and games media, but John Buckley also wants players to let go of the "dead game" mentality.

"Who cares if there's only five people playing it? Just enjoy yourself. Just enjoy games. I don't think it needs to be any more complex than that," Buckley said in an interview on the Going Indie YouTube channel.

The people at Palworld developer Pocketpair, in particular, would have reason for panic, if they subscribed to the mentality that active online players are the key benchmark for modern gaming. The game launched into Early Access in January 2024 at rocket speed, selling 5 million copies and reaching 1.3 million concurrent Steam players, surpassing Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3. By February 1, the game had sold 19 million between Xbox and Steam, and was the biggest third-party game launch yet on Xbox's Game Pass service.