Month: September 2024

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

Valve Corporation, tired of paying arbitration fees, has removed a mandatory arbitration clause from Steam's subscriber agreement. Valve told gamers in yesterday's update that they must sue the company in order to resolve disputes.

The subscriber agreement includes "changes to how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved," Steam wrote in an email to users. "The updated dispute resolution provisions are in Section 10 and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration. We've also removed the class action waiver and cost and fee-shifting provisions."

The Steam agreement previously said that "you and Valve agree to resolve all disputes and claims between us in individual binding arbitration." Now, it says that any claims "shall be commenced and maintained exclusively in any state or federal court located in King County, Washington, having subject matter jurisdiction."

Enlarge / “When you spend more time putting electrodes back on than you do actually recording the EEGs, you get creative." (credit: Alienor Delsart)

Our feline overlords aren't particularly known for obeying commands from mere humans, which can make it difficult to study their behaviors in controlled laboratory settings. So a certain degree of ingenuity is required to get usable results—like crocheting adorable little hats for kitties taking part in electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments. That's what researchers at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada, did to learn more about assessing chronic pain in cats—and they succeeded. According to their recent paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods, it's the first time scientists have recorded the electrical activity in the brains of conscious cats.

According to the authors, one-quarter of adult cats suffer from osteoarthritis and chronic pain that worsens with age. There are currently limited treatment options, namely, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which can have significant side effects for the cats. An injectable monoclonal antibody tailored for cats has recently been developed to neutralize excessive nerve growth factor, but other alternative treatment options like supplements and regenerative medicine have yet to be tested. Nor has the effectiveness of certain smells or lighting in altering pain perception in felines been tested.

That was the Montreal team's primary objective for their experiments. Initially, they tried to place electrodes on the heads of 11 awake adult cats with osteoarthritis, but the cats kept shaking off the electrodes.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.

Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database that had been searched by roughly 2,000 company engineers, who collectively queried the stash more than 9 million times.

Meta investigated for five years

Meta officials said at the time that the error was found during a routine security review of the company’s internal network data storage practices. They went on to say that they uncovered no evidence that anyone internally improperly accessed the passcodes or that the passcodes were ever accessible to people outside the company.

Enlarge (credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Most members of Dell’s sales team will no longer have the option to work remotely, starting on Monday, Reuters reported this week, citing an internal memo. The policy applies to salespeople worldwide and is aimed at helping “grow skills,” per the note.

Like the rest of Dell's workforce, Dell's salespeople have previously been allowed to work remotely two days per week. A memo, which a Reddit user claims to have posted online (The Register reported that the post “mirrors” one that it viewed separately), says that field sellers aren’t required to go into an office but “should prioritize time spent in person with customers and partners.” The policy doesn’t apply to “remote sales team members,” but Dell said to expect additional unspecified communications regarding remote workers “in the coming weeks.” Bloomberg reported that top sales executives Bill Scannell, Dell’s president of global sales and customer operations, and John Byrne, president of sales and global regions at Dell Tech Select, signed the memo, saying:

… our data showed that sales teams are more productive when onsite.

Dell is viewing mandatory on-site work as a way to maintain its sales team’s culture and drive growth, according to the memo, which mentions things like “real-time feedback” and “dynamic" office energy. Moving forward, remote work will be permitted as an exception, Dell said.

Enlarge / Examples of the kind of CAPTCHAs that image-recognition bots can now get past 100 percent of the time. (credit: Arxiv, Plesner et al.)

Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.

ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.

Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low "human" confidence rating.

Enlarge / A screen capture of AJ Smith doing his Eleanor Rigby duet with OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode through the ChatGPT app. (credit: AJ Smith / Getty Images)

OpenAI's new Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) of its ChatGPT AI assistant rolled out to subscribers on Tuesday, and people are already finding novel ways to use it, even against OpenAI's wishes. On Thursday, a software architect named AJ Smith tweeted a video of himself playing a duet of The Beatles' 1966 song "Eleanor Rigby" with AVM. In the video, Smith plays the guitar and sings, with the AI voice interjecting and singing along sporadically, praising his rendition.

"Honestly, it was mind-blowing. The first time I did it, I wasn’t recording and literally got chills," Smith told Ars Technica via text message. "I wasn’t even asking it to sing along."

Smith is no stranger to AI topics. In his day job, he works as associate director of AI Engineering at S&P Global. "I use [AI] all the time and lead a team that uses AI day to day," he told us.