Month: October 2024

Enlarge / This AI prompt stinks... or does it? (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Imagine you're a podcaster who regularly does quick 10- to 12-minute summary reviews of written works. Now imagine your producer gives you multiple pages of nothing but the words "poop" and "fart" repeated over and over again and asks you to have an episode about the document on their desk within the hour.

Speaking for myself, I'd have trouble even knowing where to start with such a task. But when Reddit user sorryaboutyourcats gave the same prompt to Google's NotebookLM AI model, the result was a surprisingly cogent and engaging AI-generated podcast that touches on the nature of art, the philosophy of attention, and the human desire to make meaning out of the inherently meaningless.

Analyzing Poop & Fart written 1,000 times - Creating meaning from the meaningless
byu/sorryaboutyourcats in notebooklm

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Federal prosecutors have charged a man for an alleged “hack-to-trade” scheme that earned him millions of dollars by breaking into the Office365 accounts of executives at publicly traded companies and obtaining quarterly financial reports before they were released publicly.

The action, taken by the office of the US Attorney for the district of New Jersey, accuses UK national Robert B. Westbrook of earning roughly $3.75 million in 2019 and 2020 from stock trades that capitalized on the illicitly obtained information. After accessing it, prosecutors said, he executed stock trades. The advance notice allowed him to act and profit on the information before the general public could. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a separate civil suit against Westbrook seeking an order that he pay civil penalties and return all ill-gotten gains.

Buy low, sell high

“The SEC is engaged in ongoing efforts to protect markets and investors from the consequences of cyber fraud,” Jorge G. Tenreiro, acting chief of the SEC’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, said in a statement. “As this case demonstrates, even though Westbrook took multiple steps to conceal his identity—including using anonymous email accounts, VPN services, and utilizing bitcoin—the Commission’s advanced data analytics, crypto asset tracing, and technology can uncover fraud even in cases involving sophisticated international hacking.”

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On Monday, OpenAI kicked off its annual DevDay event in San Francisco, unveiling four major API updates for developers that integrate the company's AI models into their products. Unlike last year's single-location event featuring a keynote by CEO Sam Altman, DevDay 2024 is more than just one day, adopting a global approach with additional events planned for London on October 30 and Singapore on November 21.

The San Francisco event, which was invitation-only and closed to press, featured on-stage speakers going through technical presentations. Perhaps the most notable new API feature is the Realtime API, now in public beta, which supports speech-to-speech conversations using six preset voices and enables developers to build features very similar to ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) into their applications.

OpenAI says that the Realtime API streamlines the process of creating voice assistants. Previously, developers had to use multiple models for speech recognition, text processing, and text-to-speech conversion. Now, they can handle the entire process with a single API call.

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T-Mobile has agreed to pay a $15.75 million fine and improve its security in a settlement over a series of data breaches over three years that affected tens of millions of customers.

"T-Mobile suffered data breaches in 2021, 2022, and 2023," the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau said in an order approving a consent decree yesterday. "Combined, these breaches affected millions of current, former, or prospective T-Mobile customers and millions of end-user customers of T-Mobile wireless service resellers, which operate on T-Mobile's network infrastructure and are known as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs)."

Four breaches occurring over three years exposed personal information, including customer names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, the features customers subscribed to, and the number of lines on their accounts.

Enlarge / This video screenshot released by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows the site of a derailed freight train in East Palestine, Ohio. (credit: NTSB/Handout via Xinhua)

On February 3, 2023, a train carrying chemicals jumped the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio, rupturing railcars filled with hazardous materials and fueling chemical fires at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

The disaster drew global attention as the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania urged evacuations for a mile around the site. Flames and smoke billowed from burning chemicals, and an acrid odor radiated from the derailment area as chemicals entered the air and spilled into a nearby creek.

Three days later, at the urging of the rail company Norfolk Southern, about 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a chemical that can be toxic to humans at high doses, was released from the damaged train cars and set aflame.

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Broadcom quoted AT&T a 1,050 percent price hike for VMware offerings, AT&T has claimed in legal documents.

AT&T sued Broadcom on August 29, accusing Broadcom of unlawfully denying it the second of three one-year renewals for support services that AT&T thinks it's entitled to. AT&T cites a contract signed before Broadcom bought VMware. The telecommunications firm says it has 75,000 virtual machines (VMs) across approximately 8,600 servers running on VMware. Broadcom, which has stopped selling VMware perpetual licenses, has said that AT&T missed its opportunity to renew support and that the contract between VMware and AT&T has an "End of Availability" provision allowing VMware to retire products and services.

Legal filings from September 27 and spotted by The Register today show an email [PDF] that AT&T EVP and GM of wireline transformation and global supply chain Susan A. Johnson apparently sent to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan pointing to "an impasse" over VMware.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A group of more than 5,000 car dealers have made public their worries about a lack of demand for electric vehicles. Earlier this year the group lobbied the White House to water down impending federal fuel efficiency regulations that would require automakers to sell many more EVs. Now, they're sounding an alarm over impending EV mandates, particularly in the so-called Zero Emissions Vehicle states.

The ZEV states—California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia—all follow the emissions standards laid out by the California Air Resources Board, which require that by 2035, 100 percent of all new cars and light trucks be zero-emissions vehicles (which includes plug-in hybrid EVs as well as battery EVs).

That goes into effect starting with model-year 2026 (i.e. midway through next calendar year) and would require a third of all new vehicles to be a BEV, claim the car dealers. But there is not enough customer demand for electrified vehicles to buy those cars, the dealers say. Worse yet, it would make gasoline-powered cars more expensive.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Staff | Getty Images News)

eBay has defeated a lawsuit that the US Department of Justice raised last fall, which alleged that eBay violated environmental protection and public safety laws by allowing users to sell hundreds of thousands of banned products.

Among products targeted by the DOJ suit were at least 343,011 "aftermarket products for motor vehicles" used to "tamper with or disable vehicle emissions control systems" and at least 23,000 "unregistered, misbranded, or restricted use pesticides." The DOJ also took issue with sales of products containing methylene chloride, which is used as a "thinning agent in paint and coating removal products." Most uses of that chemical were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency this April to prevent causing cancer, liver harm, and death.

In her order, US District Judge Orelia Merchant agreed with eBay that the DOJ failed to prove that eBay was liable for selling some of these targeted products. Ultimately, Merchant ruled that whether the products violated environmental laws or not, Section 230 barred all of the DOJ's claims, as eBay is shielded from liability for third-party postings (in this case, listings) on its platform.