ReportWire

Tag: computer science and information technology

  • Early research suggests promising use of AI to predict risk of heart attack or stroke using a single chest X-ray | CNN

    Early research suggests promising use of AI to predict risk of heart attack or stroke using a single chest X-ray | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Early research suggests a promising use of artificial intelligence to predict the 10-year risk of death from a heart attack or stroke from a single chest X-ray.

    The preliminary findings were presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. The research is in the final draft stages and has not been submitted for publication in a medical journal.

    Researchers used nearly 150,000 chest X-rays to train an artificial intelligence program to identify patterns in the images associated with risk from major cardiovascular disease events. They tested the program on a separate group of about 11,000 people and found “significant association” between the risk level predicted by the AI and the actual occurrence of a major cardiovascular disease event.

    The clinical standard for analyzing risk from cardiovascular disease is the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk score, a calculator that weights various patient data points that have been found to have a high association with adverse cardiovascular events, including age, blood pressure and history of smoking.

    Statin medication is recommended for people with a 10-year risk of 7.5% or higher. The AI model uses the same risk thresholds as the established risk calculator, and early findings suggest that it works just as well.

    “We’ve long recognized that X-rays capture information beyond traditional diagnostic findings, but we haven’t used this data because we haven’t had robust, reliable methods,” said Dr. Jakob Weiss, the lead researcher and a radiologist affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and the AI in Medicine program at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

    Sometimes, the AI findings align with a traditional radiology reading, but other times, it picks up on things that may have been missed, he said.

    “Part of it is anatomical alterations that we would also pick up with our naked eye and that make physiological sense. Let’s say there’s increased blood pressure or cardiac failure – these are findings that we can pick up in a normal chest radiograph as well. But I think a lot of the information captured or extracted is somewhere embedded in the scan, but we can’t make sense of it as traditionally trained radiologists as of now,” Weiss said.

    “It has this black box character to it,” he said, which can sometimes make it hard to communicate risk to patients without an explanation to pinpoint.

    Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and former president of the American Heart Association, was co-chair of the risk assessment panel when the ASCVD risk calculator was created in 2013 and a key player in 2018 when the guidelines were updated to emphasize the relationship between the risk score and personal medical history.

    He was not involved in the new AI research but says it’s important to keep the field moving forward.

    “This is exactly the kind of application that artificial intelligence is best for,” he said. “So we need to continue to do things like this to really understand if we can find, particularly, patients who would otherwise slip through the cracks. I think that’s where it may be most useful.”

    But collecting all of the patient data points that go into the established risk calculator is still critical – because they’re actionable. And whether risk is calculated using a statistical formula or an AI model, the most successful outcomes will still require personalized patient assessments.

    “We don’t cure smoking by a chest X-ray. We actually need to work with the patient to find ways to get them to stop smoking,” Lloyd-Jones said. “The risk calculator is one part of risk assessment, but it’s not the only part. It’s a process that involves both the patient and the doctor in a discussion about what is the patient’s risk and how much we think a statin would help them.”

    For their research, Weiss and co-authors trained the AI using chest X-rays from participants in the National Cancer Institute’s Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial. It was tested on people who had a routine outpatient chest X-ray at Mass General Brigham and were potentially eligible for statin therapy, with an average age of 60.

    Additional research, including a controlled randomized trial, is necessary to validate the deep learning model.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Elon Musk claims Apple has ‘threatened to withhold’ Twitter from its app store | CNN Business

    Elon Musk claims Apple has ‘threatened to withhold’ Twitter from its app store | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk on Monday claimed that Apple has “threatened” to pull Twitter from its iOS app store, a move that could be devastating to the company Musk just acquired for $44 billion.

    “Apple

    (AAPL)     has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk said in one of several tweets Monday taking aim at Apple

    (AAPL)     and its CEO for alleged moves that could undermine Twitter’s business.

    In another tweet, Musk claimed that Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. “Do they hate free speech in America,” he said, in an apparent reference to his oft-stated desire to bolster his idea of free speech on the platform. “What’s going on here [Apple CEO Tim Cook]?” Musk added in a follow-up tweet. He also criticized Apple’s size, claimed it engages in “censorship,” and called out the 30% transaction fee Apple charges large app developers to be listed in its app store.

    The tweetstorm highlights the tenuous relationship between Musk and Apple, which along with Google serves as the major gatekeepers for mobile applications. Long before taking over Twitter, the Tesla CEO said that when the car company was struggling, he considered selling the company to Apple, but that Cook refused to take a meeting with him.

    Removal from Apple’s app store, or that of Google, would be detrimental to Twitter’s business, which is already struggling with a loss of advertisers following Musk’s takeover and a rocky initial attempt at expanding its subscription business.

    Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s tweets. The company has previously shown it’s willing to remove apps from its app store over concerns about their ability to moderate harmful content or if they attempt to circumvent the cut Apple takes from in-app purchases and subscriptions.

    In January 2021, Apple removed Parler, an app popular with conservatives, including some members of the far right, from its app store following the US Capitol attack over concerns about the platform’s ability to detect and moderate hate speech and incitement. Parler was returned to Apple’s app store three months later after updating its content moderation practices.

    In its official app store review guidelines, Apple lists various safety parameters that apps must adhere to in order to be included in the store, including an ability to prevent “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy” such as hate speech, pornography and terrorism. “If you’re looking to shock and offend people, the App Store isn’t the right place for your app,” the guidelines state.

    Various civil society groups, researchers and other industry watchers have raised concerns about Twitter’s ability to effectively moderate harmful content and maintain the platform’s safety following widespread layoffs and mass employee exits at the company. Musk has also claimed he wants to amplify “free speech” on the platform and has begun to restore some accounts that were previously banned or suspended for repeatedly violating Twitter’s rules. Musk himself has shared a conspiracy theory and several other controversial tweets since taking over as Twitter’s owner.

    Musk, long a prolific and antagonistic tweeter, has not let up at all since taking over the company. And what it may have lost in revenue, he has claimed it has made up for in engagement. Part of the strategy appears to be relentlessly taking aim at enemies, either of him personally or of “free speech.”

    In an interview with CBS earlier this month, Cook was asked whether there are any ways in which Twitter could change that would cause Apple to remove it from the app store. “They say that they’re going to continue to moderate and so … I count on them to do that,” Cook responded. “Because I don’t think that anybody really wants hate speech on their platform. So I’m counting on them to continue to do that.”

    In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Roth said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.”

    And last weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

    While the state of Apple and Twitter’s relationship is unclear, the iPhone maker was running Black Friday ads on the platform as recently as last Thursday, according to posts viewed by CNN.

    Many companies have pulled back on digital ad spending in recent months as the economy declined, and Twitter has likely always only been a small portion of Apple’s ad budget. Apple’s impact on Twitter, however, could be much more significant, including if Musk succeeds in shifting its core business to being more reliant on subscription revenue, and potentially has to pay a 30% cut to Apple.

    In one tweet Monday, Musk asked his nearly 120 million followers if they know “Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?” In another tweet, he posted a picture of a highway exit: one lane headed toward “pay 30%,” the other pointed toward “go to war.” An old car labeled “Elon” skidded toward the latter.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Elon Musk has upended Twitter’s business. Here’s how he could fix it | CNN Business

    Elon Musk has upended Twitter’s business. Here’s how he could fix it | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Large companies from General Mills to Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, with more potentially following suit after new owner Elon Musk’s decision to restore the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.

    That would all seem like horrible news for a business that generates the lion’s share of its revenue from advertising. But Musk may not care.

    The Tesla CEO has previously said he “hates advertising” and, as Twitter’s owner, professed a desire to make the company more reliant on subscription revenue than advertising dollars. Twitter has always struggled to turn its outsized influence in media, politics, and culture into a highly successful advertising business. And without needing to please advertisers, the billionaire would be freer to implement his “free speech” vision for Twitter.

    “I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.

    To successfully overhaul Twitter into a thriving subscription business would be to buck the trend of many other media properties that have struggled with the model. And Musk’s attempts right out of the gate have faltered. An updated, $8-per-month version of the Twitter Blue subscription service that allowed users to buy a verification checkmark had to be halted after just two days when it was abused to impersonate prominent people (notably Musk himself), businesses, and government agencies. Musk initially said he would relaunch the service on November 29, but on Monday suggested he might further delay it “until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.”

    Some industry watchers have also questioned whether, given Twitter’s somewhat niche status as a relatively small platform used largely by members of the media, politicians and academics, such a subscription service could be widely adopted. Even if all 217 million daily users Twitter reported having at the end of 2021 signed up for Musk’s $8 per month subscription, the annual revenue would still be less than a quarter of the size of rival Meta’s.

    Still, some industry insiders have reason to think he can pull it off. “Twitter over the last month has been far more entertaining than Netflix and easily worth $8,” Roy Price, the founder of Amazon Studios, said in a tweet Saturday. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a tweet, “don’t underestimate” Musk. And Twitch co-founder Justin Kan tweeted that he thinks Twitter is “likely to survive just fine (and potentially thrive!)” in part because, unlike some high-profile users who have announced their departure from the platform, most regular users likely don’t care about who’s leading the platform and how.

    Indeed, Musk’s shift away from advertising and toward a subscription model could work if Twitter can survive having its entire revenue decimated beforehand, keep its systems up and running, avoid violating laws around copyright infringement and hate speech, and also remain in good standing with Apple and Google, which control the app stores on which Twitter depends.

    The stakes to pull it off are significant for Musk. After borrowing billions of dollars to finance the Twitter takeover, Musk is up against the clock to turn what was already a struggling business into a company that can generate enough cash flow to pay back his debt. He may also risk his reputation as “a gifted and audacious entrepreneur who made Tesla work against widespread doubts and naysaying,” said Robert Bruner, professor of business administration at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

    Whether he likes advertising or not, the business made up 90% of Twitter’s revenue prior to Musk’s takeover and replacing it won’t be an immediate shift.

    In the wake of the chaos at Twitter in recent weeks, there has been talk of brands quitting the platform out of concern that their ads could end up next to objectionable content. But that may not be the only or even primary reason advertisers have walked away — or why attracting new ones could be tricky. Advertisers are also likely on edge about Twitter’s stability, as users and former employees raise concerns that the mass exodus of staff could leave the platform vulnerable to glitches and outages.

    Brands may also be miffed that many of Twitter’s ad sales employees who managed their campaigns have been fired or pushed out, including after another round of layoffs and exits Monday.

    Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”

    By bringing Trump and other controversial figures back to the platform, Twitter may have greater appeal to the right-leaning advertisers that do business on alternative platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.

    Musk is also going to have to contend with potential pressure from regulators, as well as the app store operators at Apple and Google, if he wants to succeed in turning Twitter’s business around. A group of US senators has already called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Musk’s Twitter over potential violations of the company’s 2011 consent decree. And Europe’s Digital Services Act may impose limits on just how free Musk’s “free speech” Twitter can be.

    In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

    Most importantly, Twitter will have to keep users invested in the platform if Musk’s subscription strategy is going to work. And it’s not just existing users — Musk will also need to attract new people to the platform, which has long struggled to break out of its niche status and grow its user base, by ensuring it’s filled with must-read content.

    In the weeks since Musk took over Twitter — which was immediately followed by an uptick in hateful content — there has been much hand-waving from users about moving to other platforms, and several high-profile accounts have announced their exits, including director Shonda Rimes and model Gigi Hadid. But it’s not clear that there has been a broad drop-off in the user base; instead, Musk has claimed in tweets that platform usage is at an all-time high.

    So long as Musk can keep Twitter functioning properly despite having fewer employees, many users will likely stick around, perhaps even more so following the return of controversial accounts that tend to make news with incendiary comments on the platform. Musk himself has pointed out that even as people fret about the demise of Twitter, they’re doing it on the platform itself. And the billionaire has proposed making it easier for creators to earn money on the platform, which could also drive usage.

    Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.

    “Even as both Musk and Trump are driven by the gravity of the attention economy, it doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to cash in on it,” Serazio said. He said Musk likely made the decision to restore Trump’s account because “it was going to cause headlines, it was going to cause attention,” adding that “the attention won’t save Twitter … but I don’t know that [Musk] has any other strategy other than the attention economy, even if he doesn’t know how to profit from it.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The US-China chip war is spilling over to Europe | CNN Business

    The US-China chip war is spilling over to Europe | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    Two European chip deals have run into trouble over their links with China, a sign of concern spreading in the West over potential Chinese control of critical infrastructure.

    Last week, the new owner of Britain’s biggest chipmaker was ordered to unwind its takeover, just days after another chip factory sale was blocked in Germany. Both transactions were hit by national security concerns, and had involved acquisitions by Chinese-owned companies.

    In the United Kingdom, Nexperia, a Dutch subsidiary of Shanghai-listed semiconductor maker Wingtech, was told by the government to sell at least 86% of its stake in Newport Wafer Fab, more than a year after taking control of the factory. Staffers have since been protesting the decision, saying it puts nearly 600 jobs at risk.

    In Germany, the economic ministry barred Elmos Semiconductor, an automotive chipmaker, from selling its factory in the city of Dortmund to Silex, a Swedish subsidiary of China’s Sai Microelectronics.

    Chipmaking was already emerging as a new front in US-China tensions. Now the two troubled deals illustrate how the pressure is also rising in Europe, particularly as Western officials face calls for key sectors to be kept out of Chinese control.

    “These decisions mark a shift towards tougher stances regarding Chinese investment in critical industries in Europe,” said Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo‑technology at Eurasia Group.

    “US pressure definitely contributed to these decisions. [A] growing sense of technology sovereignty also likely prompted these moves — governments around the world are increasingly [viewing the] semiconductors industry as a strategic resource and seek to protect them from foreign takeovers.”

    Legal experts said the two decisions were notable because each deal was initially thought to have been cleared.

    The Newport Wafer case is “the first completed acquisition” that needs to be unwound under a UK national security and investment (NSI) act, which took full effect in January, according to Ian Giles, head of antitrust and competition for Europe, the Middle East and Asia for Norton Rose.

    Nexperia said last week that it was “shocked” by the decision, and that “the UK government chose not to enter into a meaningful dialogue with Nexperia or even visit the Newport site.”

    The company added that it had offered to avoid “activities of potential concern, and to provide the UK government with direct control and participation in the management of Newport,” a 28-acre site in south Wales.

    The factory makes silicon wafers, the basis for making computer chips. Many of its products eventually power cars and medical equipment. Nexperia has indicated that workers at the facility now face an uncertain future.

    In an open letter to the UK government last Thursday, the Nexperia Newport Staff Association said that it was “in disbelief” that employees’ livelihoods had been “put in jeopardy in the run-up to Christmas.”

    “This is clearly a deeply political decision,” the group wrote, rejecting the idea that the deal would undermine British security. “You must see sense and protect our jobs by allowing Nexperia to keep their Newport factory.”

    For Elmos, German authorities had initially indicated that they would issue a conditional approval, and even shared a draft approval after an intense review process lasting about 10 months, the company said in a statement following the injunction.

    Tim Schaper, head of antitrust and competition for Germany at Norton Rose, said government intervention was also significant given that “Elmos’ technology is said to be quite old, state of the art in the 1990s, and allegedly not of great industrial importance.”

    “The transaction became the plaything of a public debate about Chinese investors’ acquiring stakes in key German technologies,” he said.

    A company sign of Elmos Semiconductor, seen on Nov. 9 in the German city of Dortmund.

    It’s possible that regulators were concerned about an outflow of technical know how, according to Alexander Rinne, the Munich-based head of international law firm Milbank’s European antitrust practice.

    “Elmos is known for making chips for the automotive sector, which is Germany’s core industry and the pride of the country,” he said in an interview.

    Elmos and Nexperia both declined interview requests. A Nexperia spokesperson told CNN Business on Tuesday that it was “considering its options regarding the UK government’s decision.”

    Chips are a growing source of tension between the United States and China. Washington has declared a shortage of the materials a national security issue, and highlighted the importance of remaining competitive in advanced technology capabilities.

    This year, the United States ramped up its own restrictions and pressed allies to enact their own, according to Lu. In August, the US government ordered two top chipmakers, Nvidia

    (NVDA)     and AMD

    (AMD)    , to halt exports of certain high-performance chips to China.

    Two months later, the Biden administration unveiled sweeping export controls that banned Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The rules also restricted the ability of American citizens or US green card holders to provide support for the development or production of chips at certain manufacturing facilities in China.

    The pressure is mounting. On Monday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged the West to “be careful not to create new dependencies” on China. Speaking at a NATO parliamentary assembly in Madrid, Stoltenberg said he was seeing “growing Chinese efforts” to control Western critical infrastructure, supply chains, and key industrial sectors.

    “We cannot give authoritarian regimes any chance to exploit our vulnerabilities and undermine us,” he said.

    China has pushed back on the handling of the two European semiconductor cases.

    “We firmly oppose the UK’s move, and call on the UK to respect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and provide a fair, just, and (a) non-discriminatory business environment,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning told a press briefing last Friday when asked about the Newport Wafer order. “The UK has overstretched the concept of national security and abused state power.”

    Zhao Lijian, another Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, called on Germany and other countries to “refrain from politicizing normal economic and trade cooperation” at a press conference earlier this month, without addressing Elmos specifically.

    Germany has shown greater scrutiny of Chinese buyers this year. Last month, a bid by Chinese state shipping giant Cosco for a stake in a Hamburg port terminal operator sparked similar controversy. Under pressure from some members of the government, the size of the investment was later limited.

    Attorneys say if the chipmakers appeal, they could face an uncertain battle that may drag on for years.

    In each case, they would need to file a challenge in court within roughly a month of regulators’ decisions, barring exceptional circumstances, according to Norton Rose.

    Both Britain and Germany have recently added rules that expand government oversight over such decisions, making outcomes harder to predict. In Germany, a change to foreign direct investment rules in 2020 meant the government can intervene in prospective deals “if there is a ‘probable impairment of public order and security,’” said Schaper.

    Previously, by contrast, it could only impose restrictions “if there was an ‘actual, sufficiently serious threat to public order and security,’” he told CNN Business.

    In the UK, the ability of the government to retroactively review deals under the NSI Act “was really something that was considered surprising and far-reaching,” said Andrea Hamilton, a London-based partner at Milbank.

    “If challenged, as Nexperia apparently intends, it will also become a test case as to [the] extent of the NSI Act’s limits,” she said.

    Elsewhere, attention is shifting to the Netherlands. The Dutch government is currently facing pressure from the United States to limit exports to China, particularly from ASML

    (ASML)    , a semiconductor equipment maker that holds a dominant position in the lithography machine market, according to Lu at Eurasia Group.

    “It will become the next case study,” she told CNN Business.

    The Netherlands has made clear it will form its own position.

    Asked about the issue this month, Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade Liesje Schreinemacher said the country would “not copy the US export restrictions for China one-to-one.”

    “We make our own assessment,” she said in an interview with Dutch newspaper NRC.

    — CNN’s Zahid Mahmood, Rose Roobeek-Coppack and Laura He contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Hive is the latest Twitter alternative to gain steam — and to show how hard it would be to replace Twitter | CNN Business

    Hive is the latest Twitter alternative to gain steam — and to show how hard it would be to replace Twitter | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk’s rocky takeover of Twitter has already been marked by mass layoffs, resignations and the reinstatement of former president Donald Trump’s account, as well as other controversial figures, leaving many users uncertain about the direction of the platform’s future.

    Amid the chaos, several Twitter alternatives have reported a surge in new users. The latest to gain mainstream momentum is Hive Social, an app that combines some of the familiar elements of Instagram, Twitter and even MySpace, and which was reportedly started by a college student who taught herself how to code. On Monday, a profanity-laden tweet questioning what Hive was even caught the attention of Musk, who responded with a simple “lmao.”

    App analytics firm Sensor Tower confirmed to CNN Business on Tuesday that Hive Social has seen approximately 871,000 worldwide installs — more than a third of which came in the last week alone. This week, Hive Social garnered the top spot in the social networking category on the US App Store.

    As I tried to download the Hive app on my Apple device, however, I was greeted with a series of errors. First, it had issues letting me register through my email address. Then, I got a pop-up message saying that my device was blocked for “unusual activity.” Despite this, I was able to create an account by giving my phone number. However, the platform does not currently offer two-factor authentication.

    Once I had set up my account, I toggled over to its “Discover” page, where I was immediately served an unexpected image of a fully nude man. (On its barebones website, Hive Social says nude content is permitted, as long as its categorized “NSFW Mature Content.”)

    The interface is more like Instagram than Twitter: largely image-driven, but you also have the option to upload text-only posts. I had trouble using the search function to find people to follow. Adding to the confusion, I saw quite a few different accounts that appeared to have the same exact username — more than a dozen accounts with an @Catherine username, for example.

    I wasn’t served any obvious advertisements or overtly-spam accounts while scrolling through my “For You” tab, which was pleasant. Overall, there was also a strong sense of community-building among many of the new users, as people shared tips and advice for how to get started on the app. The main feed, consisting of posts from people you follow, is chronological, unlike most well known platforms.

    Hive Social, which lists just two employees on LinkedIn, did not respond to CNN Business’ requests for an interview or further comment. A Twitter account associated with the app said Wednesday that it had been inundated with new user sign-ups and “Email verifications are still down but Google and Apple sign in work!” The Twitter account also responded to some troubleshooting requests from Twitter users who were similarly setting up their accounts on the platform and confronting confusion and glitches.

    On its website, Hive Social also outlines goals for keeping the community respectful. “We remove content that contains credible threats or hate speech, content that maliciously targets private individuals, personal information intended to blackmail or harass someone, and repeated unwanted messages,” it states.

    “Threats of harm to the public (including threats of physical harm, theft, vandalism and all forms of financial harm) and personal safety aren’t allowed,” the website added. “Hive carefully reviews reports of threats to determine whether a threat is credible.”

    Hive’s guidelines are admirable, but there remains an open question how it will be able to keep up its content moderation goals amid an overnight surge of new users. In an interview with Newsweek, Hive founder Kassandra (Raluca) Pop said that just three people — herself, a designer, and a developer — run the app. “It’s just the three of us and we’re managing pretty well I think,” she told the outlet. And indeed, for such a small team, the app’s precipitous user growth is a remarkable feat.

    While the interface was inviting and some of the posts engaging, I found myself too frustrated by constant lags and crashes to spend much time on the app just yet. Its lack of a web interface also left me unsure of how well it will fill a Twitter-shaped hole for those looking for an alternative to the Musk-owned platform.

    To be fair, Hive started in 2019 and never sought to be a Twitter clone or to welcome a sudden influx of disgruntled Twitter users. Founder Pop told Newsweek she was inspired to create Hive after her own frustration with Instagram’s algorithm and ads.

    Hive’s viral rise over the past week, and the hiccups associated with other Twitter alternatives like Mastodon (more on that here) or Post.News (which currently is only accepting new users to join a “Waitlist”), in many ways only reveal how difficult it would be to replace a platform that has been so widely used by brands, government agencies and more for over a decade.

    Beyond Twitter’s unusual set of circumstances, other social media giants are also facing a new reckoning brought on by a whiplash in demand and worsening economic climate. As users and developers confront sweeping changes to how social networking might function, digital rights groups are urging that this can also be a time to regroup and rebuild based on past lessons.

    “The problems of living under a system dominated by unaccountable, vast corporations seemed inescapable. But growth has stagnated for these centralized platforms, and Twitter is in the midst of an ugly meltdown,” Cindy Cohn and Rory Mir of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blogpost. “Our hearts go out to the thousands of workers mistreated or let go by the incumbent players.”

    “The major platforms have already screwed it up,” Cohn and Mir added, “but now we have the chance to get it right and build something better.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes | CNN Business

    Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular for generating images, a question has roiled the art world: Can AI create art?

    At bitforms gallery in San Francisco, the answer is yes. An exhibit called “Artificial Imagination” is on display through late December and features works that were created with or inspired by the generative AI system DALL-E as well as other types of AI. With DALL-E, and other similar systems such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, a user can type in words and get back an image.

    Steven Sacks, who founded the original bitforms gallery in New York in 2001 (the San Francisco location opened in 2020), has always focused on working with artists at the intersection of art and technology. But this may be the first art show to focus on DALL-E, which was created by OpenAI, and it is the first one Sacks has presented that concentrates so directly on work created with AI, he told CNN Business.

    Using technologies such as 3D printing and Photoshop is commonplace in art. But new text-to-image systems like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can pump out impressive-looking images at lightning speed, unlike anything the art world has seen before. In just months, millions of people have flocked to these AI systems and they are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers and images to illustrate news stories. Yet while these systems are gaining ground, they’re also courting controversy. For instance, when an image generated with Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, it caused an uproar among artists.

    For Sacks, generative AI systems like DALL-E are “just another tool”, he said, noting that throughout history artists have used past work to create new work in various ways.

    “It’s a brilliant partner creatively,” he said.

    “Artificial Imagination” spans several mediums and many different styles, and includes artists known for using technology in their work, such as Refik Anadol, and others who are newer to it. It ranges from Anadol’s 30-minute video loop of a computer’s take on an ever-changing nature scene to Marina Zurkow’s bright image collages, created with the help of DALL-E, which almost feel reminiscent of Soviet propaganda mixed with old-fashioned storybooks.

    Sacks said the exhibit, which is being presented by bitforms and venture-capital firm Day One Ventures, is in many ways an educational show about the state of DALL-E and how artists are using AI.

    Marina Zurkow used DALL-E to help create her 2022 piece

    Many pieces are more straightforward in their use of AI, and DALL-E in particular, such as August Kamp’s 2022 print, “new experimental version, state of the art”, which looks like a close-up of a retro-futuristic stereo on a spaceship. Kamp said she began creating it by typing what she calls a primer — a series of words like “grainy”, “detailed”, “cinematic”, “movie still” — intended to evoke the aesthetic she’d like, which in this case was meant to look as if she was watching a movie and had just paused it, she said. Then she added words in hopes of generating electronic synthesizers that “looked as weird as they sound,” she said.

    The final piece is a combination of 30 or so different generated images, which were outpainted section by section — a process that uses AI to expand the image by adding more elements to it. Kamp also used Photoshop to tweak the overall image.

    Kamp pointed out that the general idea of art galleries give the sense that good art is scarce, but she sees generative AI tools like DALL-E as a way to get people to consider that art can be plentiful (such as by making it so anyone can wake up from a vivid dream, type in a description of what they were imagining, and generate an image expressing their thoughts).

    “To me art is and should be very abundant because I see it as an expression of love and feelings, which I think are abundant things,” she said.

    Alexander Reben, Ceci N'est Pas Une Barriere, 2020.

    Some of the pieces on display use AI in a more indirect (and perhaps silly) fashion, such as a 2020 sculpture by Alexander Reben called “Cesi N’est Pas Une Barriere.” Reben used AI as a sort of art director: He used text generator GPT-3 and a custom set of algorithms to generate a description of a non-existent artwork that hangs on bitforms gallery’s wall. It includes the title, a fictional artist’s name — Norifen Storgenberg, who is listed as “Swedish, born 1973” — and text such as “It has a very domestic feel, and yet it is very oppressive” and “The use of police issue handcuffs is striking. In the context of society, they are used to restrain prisoners, and yet here, they are used to create a barrier between the viewer and the work.”

    Reben built his sculpture, which also hangs on the wall, around the description, with elements including green roof shingles, a porch light, metal grab bars, and handcuffs.

    “I wanted to just put it out there: Here are a range of artists, here are really different ways of presenting this kind of work, living with this kind of work, connecting with this kind of work,” Sacks said. “I wanted people to ask questions about it.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • UK orders Chinese-owned company to sell Britain’s biggest chipmaker | CNN Business

    UK orders Chinese-owned company to sell Britain’s biggest chipmaker | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    The UK government has ordered a Chinese-owned company to unwind its takeover of Britain’s biggest chipmaker, citing national security concerns.

    Nexperia, a Dutch subsidiary of Shanghai-listed semiconductor maker Wingtech, was told to sell “at least 86%” of its stake in Newport Wafer Fab by UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Grant Shapps, more than a year after taking control of the factory.

    Shapps said in a statement that he was concerned that the company could start working on more advanced so-called “compound” semiconductors at the Newport site and about “the potential for those activities to undermine UK capabilities.”

    Shapps also cited the location of the factory, which is part of an industrial cluster of highly specialized tech firms in Newport, a city in south Wales. “The links between the site and the cluster may prevent the cluster being engaged in future projects relevant to national security,” the government said.

    The UK move illustrates growing concern in the West over Chinese links to critical technologies and infrastructure. Last week, the German government blocked the sale of a semiconductor factory to a Chinese-owned tech firm, citing national security concerns. The United States in August ordered two of its top chipmakers, Nvidia

    (NVDA)     and AMD

    (AMD)    , to halt exports of certain high performance chips to China.

    Nexperia said in a statement Wednesday that it was “shocked” by the decision and would appeal. It cited “two previous security reviews” that it said had already cleared the acquisition.

    “Nexperia does not accept the potential national security concerns raised,” it said. “The far-reaching remedies which Nexperia offered to fully address the government’s concerns have been entirely ignored.”

    The company added that it had offered “not to conduct” the “activities of potential concern, and to provide the UK government with direct control and participation in the management of Newport.”

    Nexperia’s UK manager, Toni Versluijs, said the company would fight to overturn the order, suggesting that it could put more than 500 jobs at risk.

    “This decision sends a clear signal that the UK is closed for business,” he added.

    Newport Wafer bills itself as the UK’s largest semiconductor facility, making more than 35,000 wafer starts a month. The factory has a background in supplying components to automotive and medical companies, according to Nexperia.

    Nexperia is a semiconductor manufacturer based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. It obtained full ownership of the Newport site in July 2021, after previously working with its former owners as a customer and as its second largest shareholder.

    “We rescued an investment-starved company from collapse,” it said. “Those who sold the business to us agreed that it was the only viable solution, and the deal was publicly welcomed by the Welsh government.”

    While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the transaction was valued at £63 million (approximately $75 million), according to a UK parliament report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • A guide to parental controls on social media | CNN Business

    A guide to parental controls on social media | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    A little over a year ago, social media companies were put on notice for how they protect, or fail to protect, their youngest users.

    In a series of congressional hearings, executives from Facebook

    (FB)    , TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram faced tough questions from lawmakers over how their platforms can lead younger users to harmful content, damage mental health and body image (particularly among teenage girls), and lacked sufficient parental controls and safeguards to protect teens.

    Those hearings, which followed disclosures in what became known as the “Facebook Papers” from whistleblower Frances Haugen about Instagram’s impact on teens, prompted the companies to vow to change. The four social networks have since introduced more tools and parental control options aimed at better protecting younger users. Some have also made changes to their algorithms, such as defaulting teens into seeing less sensitive content and increasing their moderation efforts. But some lawmakers, social media experts and psychologists say the new solutions are still limited, and more needs to be done.

    “More than a year after the Facebook Papers dramatically revealed Big Tech’s abuse, social media companies have made only small, slow steps to clean up their act,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who chairs the Senate’s consumer protection subcommittee, told CNN Business. “Trust in Big Tech is long gone and we need real rules to ensure kids’ safety online.”

    Michela Menting, a digital security director at market research firm ABI Research, agreed that social media platforms are “offering very little of substance to counter the ills their platforms incur.” Their solutions, she said, put the onus on guardians to activate various parental controls,such as those intended to filter, block and restrict access, and more passive options, such as monitoring and surveillance tools that run in the background.

    Alexandra Hamlet, a New York City-based clinical psychologist, recalls being invited to a roundtable discussion roughly 18 months ago to discuss ways to improve Instagram, in particular, for younger users. “I don’t see many of our ideas being implemented,” she said. Social media platforms, she added, need to work on “continuing to improve parental controls, protect young people against targeted advertising, and remove objectively harmful content.”

    The social media companies featured in this piece either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment on criticism that more needs to be done to protect young users.

    For now, guardians must learn how to use the parental controls while also being mindful that teens can often circumvent those tools. Here’s a closer look at what parents can do to help keep their kids safe online.

    After the fallout from the leaked documents, Meta-owned Instagram paused its much-criticized plan to release a version of Instagram for kids under age 13 and focused on making its main service safer for young users.

    It has since introduced an educational hub for parents with resources, tips and articles from experts on user safety, and rolled out a tool that allows guardians to see how much time their kids spend on Instagram and set time limits. Parents can also receive updates on what accounts their teens follow and the accounts that follow them, and view and be notified if their child makes an update to their privacy and account settings. Parents can see which accounts their teens have blocked, as well. The company also provides video tutorials on how to use the new supervision tools.

    Another feature encourages users to take a break from the app, such as suggesting they take a deep breath, write something down, check a to-do list or listen to a song, after a predetermined amount of time. Instagram also said it’s taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens and will actively nudge them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been dwelling on any type of content for too long.

    Facebook’s Safety Center provides supervision tools and resources, such as articles and advice from leading experts. “Our vision for Family Center is to eventually allow parents and guardians to help their teens manage experiences across Meta technologies, all from one place,” Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokesperson, told CNN Business.

    The hub also offers a guide to Meta’s VR parental supervision tools from ConnectSafely, a nonprofit aimed at helping kids stay safe online, to assist parents with discussing virtual reality with their teens. Guardians can see which accounts their teens have blocked and access supervision tools, as well as approve their teen’s download or purchase of an app that is blocked by default based on its rating, or block specific apps that may be inappropriate for their teen.

    In August, Snapchat introduced a parent guide and hub aimed at giving guardians more insight into how their teens use the app, including who they’ve been talking to within the last week (without divulging the content of those conversations). To use the feature, parents must create their own Snapchat account, and teens have to opt-in and give permission.

    While this was Snapchat’s first formal foray into parental controls, it did previously have a few existing safety measures for young users, such as requiring teens to be mutual friends before they can start communicating with each other and prohibiting them from having public profiles. Teen users have their Snap Map location-sharing tool off by default but can also use it to disclose their real-time location with a friend or family member even while their app is closed as a safety measure. Meanwhile, a Friend Check Up tool encourages Snapchat users to review their friend lists and make sure they still want to be in touch with certain people.

    Snap previously said it’s working on more features, such as the ability for parents to see which new friends their teens have added and allow them to confidentially report concerning accounts that may be interacting with their child. It’s also working on a tool to give younger users the option to notify their parents when they report an account or piece of content.

    The company told CNN Business it will continue to build on its safety features and consider feedback from the community, policymakers, safety and mental health advocates, and other experts to improve the tools over time.

    In July, TikTok announced new ways to filter out mature or “potentially problematic” videos. The new safeguards allocated a “maturity score” to videos detected as potentially containing mature or complex themes. It also rolled out a tool that aims to help people decide how much time they want to spend on TikToks. The tool lets users set regular screen time breaks, and provides a dashboard that details the number of times they opened the app, a breakdown of daytime and nighttime usage and more.

    The popular short form video app currently offers a Family Pairing hub, which allows parents and teens to customize their safety settings. A parent can also link their TikTok account to their teen’s app and set parental controls, including how long they can spend on the app each day; restrict exposure to certain content; decide if teens can search for videos, hashtags, or Live content; and whether their account is private or public. TikTok also offers its Guardian’s Guide that highlights how parents can best protect their kids on the platform.

    In addition to parental controls, the app restricts access to some features to younger users, such as Live and direct messaging. A pop-up also surfaces when teens under the age of 16 are ready to publish their first video, asking them to choose who can watch the video. Push notifications are curbed after 9 p.m. for account users ages 13 to 15, and 10 p.m. for users ages 16 to 17.

    The company said it will be doing more around boosting awareness of its parental control features in the coming days and months.

    Discord did not appear before the Senate last year but the popular messaging platform has faced criticism over difficulty reporting problematic content and the ability of strangers to get in touch with young users.

    In response, the company recently refreshed its Safety Center, where parents can find guidance on how to turn on safety settings, FAQs about how Discord works, and tips on how to talk about online safety with teens. Some existing parental control tools include an option to prohibit a minor from receiving a friend request or a direct message from someone they don’t know.

    Still, it’s possible for minors to connect with strangers on public servers or in private chats if the person was invited by someone else in the room or if the channel link is dropped into a public group that the user accessed. By default, all users — including users ages 13 to 17 — can receive friend invitations from anyone in the same server, which then opens up the ability for them to send private messages.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Germany blocks sale of chip factory to China over security fears | CNN Business

    Germany blocks sale of chip factory to China over security fears | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    London/Berlin
    CNN Business
     — 

    The German government has blocked the sale of one of its semiconductor factories to a Chinese-owned tech company because of security concerns.

    Germany’s economic ministry said in a statement that it had prohibited Elmos Semiconductor, which makes chips for the automotive industry, from selling its factory in Dortmund to Silex, a Swedish subsidiary of China’s Sai Microelectronics.

    The decision had been taken “because the acquisition would have endangered the public order and safety of Germany,” the ministry said in a statement.

    Silex announced in December that it had signed an agreement with Elmos to buy the factory for €85 million ($85.4 million).

    Silex did not immediately respond to CNN Business’ request for comment. Elmos said in a statement that both companies regretted the government’s decision.

    “The transfer of new micromechanics technologies … from Sweden and significant investments in the Dortmund location would have strengthened semiconductor production in Germany,” Elmos said, adding that it was considering whether to take legal action.

    Sia Microelectronics said in a statement Thursday that it “deeply regretted” the decision by the German government. Its shares fell more than 9% in Shenzhen.

    “We have to take a close look at company acquisitions when important infrastructure is involved or when there is a risk of technology flowing to acquirers from non-EU countries,” German economy minister Robert Habeck said at a press conference.

    He added that the semiconductor industry in Europe, in particular, needed to guard its “technological and economic sovereignty.”

    The planned deal had rattled German authorities concerned that Chinese investment in its critical infrastructure could compromise its intellectual property and leave it exposed to political pressure from Beijing.

    Similar concerns motivated the German government to intervene in plans by Chinese shipping giant Cosco to buy a 35% stake in the operator of a Hamburg port terminal last month.

    Officials limited the planned investment in Hamburger Hafen und Logistik to 24.9%. Several government ministers, including Habeck, has pushed for the deal to be blocked entirely.

    The tensions have arisen at a difficult time for the German economy, which is sliding into a recession triggered by the crisis over Russian energy. Germany’s manufacturers and exporters are eager to maintain their close relationship with China.

    Only last week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the first visit by a G7 leader to Beijing in roughly three years, a trip designed to shore up export markets as Germany’s ties with Russia — once its biggest supplier of natural gas — continue to unravel.

    A delegation of top industry CEOs, including the bosses of Volkswagen

    (VLKAF)    , Siemens

    (SIEGY)     and chemicals giant BASF

    (BASFY)    , traveled with Scholz to Beijing to meet with Chinese business executives.

    But Habeck struck a note of caution on Wednesday. Addressing the blocked chip deal, he stressed that “Germany is and will remain an open investment location” but that it was not “naive”.

    The visit came just a month after the United States introduced stringent controls on chip exports to China, a move designed to protect its national security and bolster its domestic semiconductor industry.

    In early October, the Biden administration banned Chinese firms from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license.

    The rules threaten to strike a huge blow to China’s ambitions to become a tech superpower as they not only bar exports of chips made anywhere in the world using US technology, but also the export of the tools used to make them.

    — Laura He contributed reporting.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • EU opens deeper probe of Microsoft’s Activision deal | CNN Business

    EU opens deeper probe of Microsoft’s Activision deal | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN Business
     — 

    The European Union is taking a closer look at Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion purchase of video game giant Activision Blizzard, citing concerns the deal could hurt competition in the video game industry.

    A preliminary review of the deal found that Microsoft

    (MSFT)     could try to withhold the games it’s acquiring from other distributors, according to an EU press release. The proposed acquisition would see Microsoft

    (MSFT)     become the world’s third-largest video game publisher, controlling popular franchises such as “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft.”

    “Such foreclosure strategies could reduce competition in the markets for the distribution of console and PC video games, leading to higher prices, lower quality and less innovation for console game distributors, which may in turn be passed on to consumers,” the EU said.

    The deeper-level probe, which could run through March of next year, is also driven by fears the acquisition could consolidate power in Microsoft’s Windows operating system at the expense of competition, if Microsoft attempts to make its PC games exclusive to Windows.

    And, according to an EU press release, authorities are concerned the deal may allow Microsoft to concentrate power in its own cloud gaming service and prevent rival cloud services from gaining access to Activision

    (ATVI)     games.

    In September, the United Kingdom announced it had opened a second-stage investigation into the proposed deal.

    “We’re continuing to work with the European Commission on next steps and to address any valid marketplace concerns,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN in a statement. “Sony, as the industry leader, says it is worried about Call of Duty, but we’ve said we are committed to making the same game available on the same day on both Xbox and PlayStation. We want people to have more access to games, not less.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Australia blames cyber criminals in Russia for Medibank data breach | CNN Business

    Australia blames cyber criminals in Russia for Medibank data breach | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Brisbane, Australia
    CNN
     — 

    Cyber criminals in Russia are behind a ransomware attack on one of Australia’s largest private health insurers that’s seen sensitive personal data published to the dark web, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said Friday.

    In a short press conference, AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw told reporters investigators know the identity of the individuals responsible for the attack on health insurer Medibank, but he declined to name them.

    “The AFP is undertaking covert measures and working around the clock with our domestic agencies and international networks including Interpol. This is important because we believe those responsible for the breach are in Russia,” he said.

    Medibank says the stolen data belongs to 9.7 million past and present customers, including 1.8 million international customers. The files include health claims data for almost half a million people, including 20,000 based overseas.

    This week, the group started releasing curated tranches of customer data onto the dark web, in files with titles including good-list, naughty-list, abortions and boozy, which included those who sought help for alcohol dependency.

    Kershaw said police intelligence points to a “group of loosely affiliated cyber criminals” who are likely responsible for previous significant data breaches around the world, without naming specific examples.

    “These cyber criminals are operating like a business with affiliates and associates who are supporting the business. We also believe some affiliates may be in other countries,” said Kershaw, who declined to take questions due to the sensitivity of the investigation.

    Cyber security experts have said the criminals are likely linked to REvil, a Russian ransomware gang notorious for large attacks on targets in the United States and elsewhere, including major international meat supplier JBS Foods last June.

    That breach shut down the company’s entire US beef processing operation and prompted the company to pay an $11 million ransom. Last November, the US State Department offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the identification or location of key leaders of REvil, also known as the Sodinokibi organized crime group.

    In mid-January, Russian state news agency TASS reported that at least eight REvil ransomware hackers had been detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at the request of the US.

    They were facing charges of committing “illegal circulation of payments,” a crime punishable by up to seven years in prison, TASS reported, citing Moscow’s Tverskoi Court.

    In March, Ukrainian national Yaroslav Vasinskyi, one of the chief suspects linked to an attack on US software vendor, Kaseya, was extradited from Poland to the US to face charges, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

    Jeffrey Foster, associate professor in cyber security studies at Macquarie University, said there’s one major link between the REvil network and the group suspected of hacking the Medibank network.

    “The biggest link is that the REvil dark web website now redirects to this website. So that’s the biggest link we have between them, and the only link we have between them,” said Foster, who is monitoring the blog where the group is posting their demands.

    “As Russia has stated that they’ve arrested and disbanded REvil, it seems likely this is a case of maybe a former REvil member, who had access to the dark web website to be able to do the redirect which requires access to the hardware,” he said. “Whether or not REvil has returned, we don’t know.”

    Medibank first detected unusual activity in its network almost a month ago. On October 20, the company issued a statement saying a “criminal” had stolen information from its ahm health insurance and international student systems, including names, addresses, phone numbers and some claims data for procedures and diagnoses.

    An initial ransom demand was made for $10 million (15 million Australian dollars), but the company said after extensive consultation with cybercrime experts it had decided not to pay. It was later lowered to $9.7 million – one for every customer affected, according to Foster.

    At the time, Medibank said there was only a “limited chance” that paying the ransom would stop the data being published or returned to the company.

    In his statement on Friday, Kershaw, the AFP Commissioner, said Australian government policy did not condone paying ransoms to cyber criminals.

    “Any ransom payment small or large fuels the cybercrime business model, putting other Australians at risk,” he said.

    Kershaw said investigators at the Australian Interpol National Central Bureau would be talking with their Russian counterparts about the individuals, who he addressed directly with a threat to see them charged in Australia.

    “To the criminals, we know who you are. And moreover, the AFP has some significant runs on the scoreboard when it comes to bringing overseas offenders back to Australia to face the justice system,” he said.

    Earlier Friday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was “disgusted” by the attacks and, without naming Russia, said the government of the country they come from should be held accountable.

    “The nation where these attacks are coming from should also be held accountable for the disgusting attacks, and the release of information including very private and personal information,” Albanese said.

    In a statement Friday, Medibank CEO David Koczkar said it was clear the criminal gang behind the breach was “enjoying the notoriety,” and it was likely they would release more information each day.

    “The relentless nature of this tactic being used by the criminal is designed to cause distress and harm,” he said. “These are real people behind this data and the misuse of their data is deplorable and may discourage them from seeking medical care.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Why Apple may be working on a ‘hey Siri’ change | CNN Business

    Why Apple may be working on a ‘hey Siri’ change | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    Apple reportedly wants to put an end to “Hey.”

    The company is said to be training its voice assistant Siri to pick up on commands without needing the first half of the prompt phrase “Hey Siri.” The trigger phrase is used to launch Siri on various products, including the iPhone, iPad, HomePod and Apple Watch.

    Bloomberg, which first reported the news, said the change could come next year or in 2024. Apple did not respond to a request for comment from CNN Business.

    Although the update would be seemingly minor, experts say it may signal broader changes are coming and could require extensive artificial intelligence training. Lian Jye Su, a research director at ABI Research, said having two trigger words allows the system to more accurately recognize requests, so the move to one word would lean on a more advanced AI system.

    “During the recognition phase, the system compares the voice command to the user-trained model,” Su said. “‘Siri’ is much shorter than ‘Hey Siri,’ giving the system potentially less comparison points and higher error rate in an echo-y, large room and noisy environments,” such as in the car or when wind is present.

    The move would allow Apple to catch up to Amazon’s “Alexa” prompt that doesn’t require a first wake word for its voice assistant. Microsoft shifted away from “Hey Cortana” in 2018, now allowing users to only say “Cortana” on smart speakers. However, “OK Google” is still required for most Google product requests.

    The move away from “Hey Siri” would also come at a time when Apple, Amazon and Google are collaborating on the Matter automation standard, which will allow automation and Internet of Things devices from different vendors to interoperate.

    With this in mind, James Sanders, a principal analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, said “redoubling efforts on improving Siri functionality is likely a priority at Apple.”

    Siri launched in February 2010 as a standalone iOS app in the Apple App Store before it was acquired by the tech giant two months later. The company then integrated Siri into the iPhone 4S, which was released the following year, and introduced the ability to say “Hey Siri” without physically touching a button in 2014.

    Siri has gotten smarter over the years, thanks to integration with third-party developers, such as ride hailing and payment apps, and supporting follow-up questions, more languages and different accents. However, it still has issues with not understanding users and responding incorrectly.

    “While the ‘Hey Siri’ change requires a considerable amount of work, it would be surprising if Apple announced only this change to Siri,” Sanders said. “Considering the rumored timing, I would anticipate this change to be bundled with other new or improved functionality for Siri, perhaps alongside a new model of HomePod and integrations with other smart home products via Matter, as a reintroduction to Apple’s voice assistant.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Instagram goes down for some users | CNN Business

    Instagram goes down for some users | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Thousands of Instagram users reported issues with accessing the platform on Monday morning.

    Approximately 7,000 users reported the app was down around 10:15 a.m. ET, according to outage-tracking site Down Detector. After about 45 minutes, however, the number of reports had dipped noticeably.

    Instagram confirmed in a tweet it was looking into the issue.

    “We are aware that some Instagram users in different parts of the world are having issues accessing their Instagram accounts,” a Meta spokesperson told CNN Business in a statement. “We’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and apologize for the inconvenience.”

    Additional information on the cause of the outage was not immediately available.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • US curbs on microchips could throttle China’s ambitions and escalate the tech war | CNN Business

    US curbs on microchips could throttle China’s ambitions and escalate the tech war | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s push to “win the battle” in core technologies and bolster China’s position as a tech superpower could be severely undermined by Washington’s unprecedented steps to limit the sale of advanced chips and chip-making equipment to the country, analysts say.

    On October 7, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that ban Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The rule also restricts the ability of “US persons” — including American citizens or green card holders — to provide support for the “development or production” of chips at certain manufacturing facilities in China.

    “The US moves are a major threat to China’s technological ambitions,” said Mark Williams and Zichun Huang, analysts at Capital Economics, in a recent research report. The analysts pointed out that the global semiconductor industry is “almost entirely” dependent on the United States and countries aligned with it for chip design, the tools that make them, and fabrication.

    “Without these,” the analysts said, “Chinese firms will lose access not only to advanced chips, but to technology and inputs that might over time have allowed domestic chipmakers to climb the ladder and compete at the cutting edge.” They added: “The US has chopped the rungs away.”

    Chips are vital for everything from smartphones and self-driving cars to advanced computing and weapons manufacturing. US officials have talked about the move as a measure to protect national security interests. It also comes as the United States is looking to bolster its domestic chip manufacturing abilities with heavy investments, after chip shortages earlier in the pandemic highlighted the country’s dependance on imports from abroad.

    Arthur Dong, a teaching professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, described the recent US sanctions as “unprecedented in modern times.”

    Previously, the US government has banned sales of certain tech products to specific Chinese companies, such as Huawei. It has also required some major US chip-making firms to halt their shipments to China. But the latest move is much more expansive and significant. It not only bars the export to China of advanced chips made anywhere in the world using US technology, but also blocks the export of the tools used to make them.

    With its Made in China 2025 road map, Beijing has set a target for China to become a global leader in a wide range of industries, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G wireless, and quantum computing. At the Communist Party Congress earlier this month, where he secured a historic third term, Xi highlighted that the nation will prioritize tech and innovation and grow its talent pool to develop homegrown technologies.

    “China will look to join the ranks of the world’s most innovative countries by 2035, with great self-reliance and strength in science and technology,” Xi said in the party congress report, released on October 16.

    Dong said the latest US sanctions will make it harder for China to advance in AI as well as 5G, given the role advanced chips play in both industries.

    “In any circumstances,” Williams from Capital Economics said, “China would find achieving global tech leadership hard to achieve.”

    One dramatic, and potentially disruptive aspect of the rules is the ban on American citizens and legal residents working with Chinese chip firms.

    Dane Chamorro, a partner at Control Risks, a global risk consultancy based in London, said such measures are usually “only enacted against ‘rogue regimes’” such as Iran and North Korea. The decision to use this against China is “unprecedented,” Chamorro said.

    Many executives working for Chinese firms may now have to choose between keeping their jobs or acting as lawful US residents. “You can’t do both,” Chamorro said.

    The ban could lead to a mass resignation of top executives and core research staff working at Chinese chip firms, which will hit the industry hard, Dong from Georgetown University said.

    So far it’s not clear exactly how many American workers there are in China’s domestic chip industry. But an examination of company filings indicates that more than a dozen chip firms have senior executives holding US citizenship or green cards. At Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment China (AMEC), one of the country’s largest semiconductor equipment manufacturers, at least seven executives, including founder and chairman Gerald Yin, hold US citizenship, the latest company documents show.

    A woman inspects the quality of a chip at a manufacturer of IC encapsulation in Nantong in east China's Jiangsu province Friday, Sept. 16, 2022.

    Other examples include Shu Qingming and Cheng Taiyi, who currently serve as vice chairman and deputy general manager, respectively, at GigaDevice Semiconductor, an advanced memory chip firm. The Financial Times report said in a recent report that Yangtze Memory Technologies has already asked American employees in core tech positions to leave, citing anonymous sources. But it’s unclear how many.

    AMEC, GigaDevice Semiconductor, and Yangtze Memory Technologies didn’t respond to requests for comments.

    If these senior executives depart, “this will create a leadership and technological void within China’s chipmaking industry,” Dong said, as the country loses executives with years of chipmaking experience in an industry with “one of the most complex manufacturing processes known to mankind.”

    While much of the world’s chip manufacturing is centered in East Asia, China is reliant on foreign chips, especially for advanced processor and memory chips and related equipment.

    It is the world’s largest importer of semiconductors, and has spent more money buying them than oil. In 2021, China bought a record $414 billion worth of chips, or more than 16% of the value of its total imports, according to government statistics.

    But some Western suppliers have already started preparing to halt sales to China in response to the US export curbs.

    ASM International

    (ASMIY)    , the Dutch semiconductor equipment supplier, said Wednesday that it expected the export restrictions will affect more than 40% of its sales in China. The country accounted for 16% of ASML’s equipment sales in the first nine months of this year.

    Lam Researc

    (LRCX)    h, which supplies semiconductor equipment and services, also flagged last week that it could lose between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in annual revenue in 2023 as a result of the US export curbs.

    The party congress, which recently wrapped up, has slowed China’s response to latest US export controls, analysts said. But as Beijing starts assessing the significance of the measures, it might retaliate. Xi is “concerned” about US plans to bolster domestic chip production as his administration moves to restrict China’s ability to make them, said US President Joe Biden in a speech on Thursday.

    “This conflict is just beginning,” said Chamorro.

    Chamorro said the most valuable “card” in China’s hand might be the supply of processed rare earth minerals, which Beijing could embargo. Rare earth minerals are important materials in electric vehicle production, battery making and renewable energy systems.

    “These are not easily or quickly replaced and China dominates the processing and supply chain,” Chamorro said.

    The Biden administration, meanwhile, is also weighing further restrictions on other technology exports to China, a senior US Commerce Department official said Thursday, according to the New York Times.

    If either country takes these steps, it could shift the tech arms race between the United States and China to a whole new level.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Facebook became Meta one year ago. Its metaverse dream feels as far away as ever | CNN Business

    Facebook became Meta one year ago. Its metaverse dream feels as far away as ever | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    Even by Facebook’s standards, 2021 was a rough year.

    A series of damning reports based on leaks from a whistleblower raised uncomfortable questions about Facebook’s impact on society; the company continued reeling from concerns about the use of its platform to organize the January 6 Capitol riot; and privacy changes from Apple threatened its core advertising business. Meanwhile, young users were flocking to TikTok.

    At a virtual reality event on October 28, 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to turn the page. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta and go all in on building a future version of the internet called the “metaverse,” proving to all in the process that the company he launched in 2004 was more than just a social media business.

    One year and billions of dollars later, the so-called metaverse still feels years away, if it ever manifests at all. And the company formerly known as Facebook remains very much a social media business — one that is facing more financial pressure than when it announced the change.

    Meta’s Quest 2 consumer virtual-reality headset, released two years ago, is popular in its category but remains a niche product overall. Its newest headset, the much pricier $1,500 Quest Pro, is intended for enterprise customers and likely won’t move the needle with everyday consumers. And Meta’s flagship social VR app Horizon Worlds can feel like a ghost town (albeit a ghost town with laser tag).

    While some brands have since made measured bets on the metaverse, including by hiring “chief metaverse officers,” it’s not clear whether consumers actually want to work or play in it, or even know what the hard-to-define term means. The metaverse refers, generally, to a sort of virtual world that people can walk around in, as well as the idea of making the internet more ubiquitous and interconnected.

    Meanwhile, Meta’s core business is contracting as it confronts growing competition from TikTok and an advertising industry in retreat amid looming recession fears. The company this week reported its second-ever quarterly drop in revenue and saw profit cut in half from the prior year. It’s selling more ads but making less money on them, and user growth on its social media platforms is slowing. After hitting a $1 trillion market cap for the first time last summer, it’s now worth about a quarter of that, or less than Home Depot.

    “The business is not growing in 2022,” said Gil Luria, technology strategist at D.A. Davidson. “There is expectation that it will grow going forward, but that expectation may prove to be optimistic.”

    A bet that looked bold a year ago now looks borderline unhinged. Meta lost $9.4 billion in the first nine months of 2022 on its metaverse efforts and expects losses from the unit to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023. This has prompted even some of Meta’s supporters to urge it to rethink its strategy shift, and possibly slow it down. (It also prompted a tearful Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money,” to apologize to viewers for trusting Meta’s management team and recommending that investors buy the stock.)

    “People are confused by what the metaverse even means. If the company were investing $1-2B per year into this project, then that confusion might not even be a problem. You would simply do R&D quietly and investors would focus on the core business,” Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital, a shareholder in Meta, wrote in an open letter to Zuckerberg this week. He urged Meta to “cap its metaverse investments to no more than $5B per year with more discrete targets and measures of success.”

    The current pace of spending, he added, “is super-sized and terrifying, even by Silicon Valley standards.”

    Meta did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

    Though the name change was just announced a year ago, the shift from Facebook to Meta has been years in the making. Zuckerberg has said in the past that it’s a long-term bet for the company — not an overnight transformation. It began with Facebook’s 2014 purchase of Oculus VR, and in the years since, the company has rolled out a series of headsets that are increasingly capable, affordable and portable.

    Meta’s latest headset, the Quest Pro, is its first effort at combining the immersiveness of VR with the real world. It can display text and fine details in VR, track your eyes and facial features to give you a sense of connection with other people in virtual spaces, and show you a view of the world around you in color while letting you interact with digital objects — all nods toward Meta’s goal of attracting more business users.

    It’s a far cry from the Oculus Rift headset available in 2016: That cost $599, but users also had to connect it to a powerful PC and use it with a sensor camera on a stand that tracked the headset. At first, that headset didn’t even come with tracked hand controllers; it initially shipped to customers with an Xbox controller and a small handheld remote.

    Although the headsets have improved dramatically, VR and AR are still nascent technologies searching for purpose and popularity. The VR headset market is still tiny compared to, say, an established gadget market like console video games. ABI Research expects 11.1 million VR headsets will ship out this year, about 70% of which it predicts will be Quest 2 headsets. That’s a drop from its estimate of 14.5 million headsets in 2021, of which Quest 2 headsets made up 85% of the total.

    There’s potential for these products, some technology experts say, including in the workplace, but in the near term its adoption by everyday users remains uncertain at best.

    “I’m not sure this is going to translate to end-user consumers any time soon,” said David Lindlbauer, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who leads the school’s Augmented Perception Lab. (Meta is sponsoring Lindlbauer’s research into developing advanced user interfaces for AR and VR.)

    For Zuckerberg, and Meta, that creates a unique challenge.

    Zuckerberg successfully pivoted Facebook’s operations once before from desktop to mobile devices shortly after taking the company public, a move that helped supercharge its advertising business and ensure its dominance for much of the next decade. But smartphones were already ubiquitous at that time; if anything Facebook was a bit late.

    Now, the company is trying to spearhead a new technology and hoping consumers will follow its lead.

    Meta has positioned the shift as a sort of existential imperative for the company. After Apple’s app tracking changes hurt Meta’s ability to target ads to its users, the company doesn’t want to rely on any outside hardware or app store in the future.

    A visitor to the 2022 Tokyo Game Show tests the Meta Quest 2 VR headset.

    But there’s a big difference between looking at a computer or smartphone display and wearing a headset. While Lindlbauer can imagine using a headset for perhaps an hour a day, alternating between immersive views in VR and digital imagery that mixes with the physical world, “I think we haven’t hit the sweet spot yet of something I want to wear all day,” he said.

    Meta is also facing an enormous challenge when it comes to showing off VR content that users like the looks of and want to use repeatedly. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, internal documents show Horizon Worlds has fewer than 200,000 active monthly users, a rounding error for a company with 3.7 billion monthly active users across its various services. (A Meta spokesperson told the Journal that it’s “easy to be a cynic about the metaverse” but Meta thinks it is “the future of computing.”)

    “They’re starting with this idea that they want to build one big space like Horizon Worlds in which everybody’s just going to show up and start building stuff,” said Avi Bar-Zeev, founder of AR and VR consultancy RealityPrime and a former employee at Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, where he worked on the HoloLens VR headset. “There’s no virtual world that was ever successful building a canvas that people would just come and start painting.”

    Zuckerberg has personally received intense criticism for the way Meta envisions work and play interactions in virtual spaces after posting on Facebook an image of his blocky, cartoon-like avatar in Horizon Worlds — an image he later admitted was “pretty basic.”

    “As far as the quick-twitch, give-me-more public is concerned, the progress seen so far is a letdown,” said Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. “Meta is suffering tremendous ridicule in social media and in the overall public zeitgeist.”

    The Quest Pro’s face-tracking capabilities can help make avatars’ facial expressions look more realistic: Initially, users can access this tracking in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, Meta said, as well as in several developers’ apps such as Painting VR and DJ app Tribe XR.

    But even with facial tracking, what users see when they pop in to Horizon Worlds — blocky, human-like avatars that exist only from the torso up, floating around a virtual plaza — will for now continue to contrast sharply with the image Zuckerberg portrayed during Meta’s Connect event on October 11 of his own full-body avatar.

    In the meantime, investors appear to be getting fed up with the investments in the metaverse at a time when the future of its core business is also deeply uncertain.

    “I think kind of summing up how investors are feeling right now is that there are just too many experimental bets versus proven bets on the core,” Jeffries analyst Brent Thill said on Meta’s earnings call this week.

    Zuckerberg, for his part, is defending the strategy shift. “I’d say that there’s a difference between something being experimental and not knowing how good it’s going to end up being,” he responded. Separately, he added: “I think people are going to look back decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Microsoft earnings hit by personal computing slowdown | CNN Business

    Microsoft earnings hit by personal computing slowdown | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN Business
     — 

    Microsoft posted a double-digit profit decline in the three-month period ending in September as the company confronted a slowdown in the personal computing industry and a broader economic downturn.

    The tech giant on Tuesday reported net income of $17.6 billion for the quarter, a decrease of 14% from the year prior. Microsoft

    (MSFT)    ’s revenue, meanwhile, grew a modest 11% to $50.1 billion. Both results were better than analysts had expected.

    Microsoft’s Azure cloud services unit saw revenue increase by 35% from the prior year, but the growth was slower than some analysts had hoped for a division that has been one of the company’s biggest bright spots in recent years.

    Other parts of Microsoft’s business declined. Microsoft said revenue from its Windows OEM operations fell 15% from the year prior, which comes as demand for personal computers has fallen sharply on the heels of a pandemic-fueled boom. Consulting firm Gartner reported earlier this month that worldwide PC shipments declined 19.5% in the third quarter of 2022, compared to the same period last year. This marks the steepest market decline since Gartner began tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s.

    Microsoft also said revenue from Xbox content and services declined by 3%. The company reportedly recently laid off employees in its Xbox division, among other parts of the company, as it — like many other tech companies right now — looks to cut costs.

    Shares of Microsoft fell 2% in after-hours trading Tuesday following the earnings report.

    Microsoft’s stock has fallen more than 25% since the beginning of the year, amid a broader market downturn as rising inflation, geopolitical uncertainty from the war in Ukraine and more macroeconomic headwinds continue to wreak havoc on the tech industry.

    “In this environment, we’re focused on helping our customers do more with less, while investing in secular growth areas and managing our cost structure in a disciplined way,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in a statement Tuesday announcing the quarterly earnings.

    Haris Anwar, senior analyst at Investing.com, called Microsoft’s earnings report a “mixed bag” in a commentary after the results were released on Tuesday.

    “It shows that Microsoft is weathering the economic storm better than other technology players and its diversified business model is playing a big role in doing so,” Anwar said. But he added that the slowing cloud computing growth was cause for concern.

    “If this growth deceleration continues, it could harm an investment case in the company’s stock which is considered a safe-haven amid the market turmoil, with these concerns reflected in the company’s shares being down in extended trading,” Anwar said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Best mesh Wi-Fi routers of 2022 | CNN Underscored

    Best mesh Wi-Fi routers of 2022 | CNN Underscored

    [ad_1]

    With more and more devices in our homes — phones, tablets, TVs, computers, game consoles, smart appliances and more — demanding Wi-Fi bandwidth, a reliable, speedy network is more important than ever. And if your home has a challenging layout, or you live in an older building with impenetrable walls, a single router might not cut it, leaving you with poor connectivity or dropouts. The answer is a mesh system, which in place of a single router uses multiple miniature units you can place throughout your home to effectively eliminate dead zones and improve wireless internet speeds.

    After months of testing mesh routers to find the best of the best, we found one that rises to the top.

    Best mesh Wi-Fi router

    Eero continues to master making Wi-Fi easier and better for the masses with a streamlined setup, wide-ranging coverage, high speeds and affordability combined with easy-to-manage parental controls, ad blocking, and network security.

    EERO

    The Eero 6+ mesh Wi-Fi system is our new top pick for the best mesh Wi-Fi system, replacing the very similar Eero 6. The two systems are similar, with the 6+ gaining critical features such as more bandwidth, which improved the overall experience in our testing. On top of new capabilities, the Eero 6+ is currently priced lower than the Eero 6 (which remains on the market for now), at $194 for a three-pack, compared to $199 for an Eero 6 router and two extenders.

    As was the case with the earlier version, initial setup of the Eero 6+ is streamlined, with the iPhone or Android app making the process easy enough for even the non-tech savvy to upgrade from a traditional Wi-Fi router to a mesh system with multiple access points.

    You’ll need access to your internet service provider’s modem in order to connect one of the Eero access points directly to it. Unlike the Eero 6 which had a dedicated base station meant to serve as the router access point, the 6+ units are interchangeable and you can use any of them as your main access point.

    The app will walk you through giving your wireless network a name, adding any additional Eero access points, and starting your 30-day free trial of Eero Plus, the company’s subscription service that adds additional features to the Eero offering, such as ad blocking, advanced security, content filtering (including parental controls) and access to the password managing app 1Password, VPN service Encrypt.me, antivirus software Malwarebytes, and a DDNS service as a means to access your home network from anywhere.

    Formerly Eero Secure+, an Eero Plus subscription costs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year after your trial expires. There’s no longer a basic tier without apps as there was in earlier versions, and there have been some understandable complaints about this from users. Still, for $100 a year, you’re gaining access to plenty of handy features on your home Wi-Fi network, in addition to apps that collectively cost more than the Eero Plus subscription. For comparison, TP-Link’s Deco HomeCare Pro subscription is bit better deal at $55 a year for similar features, without any third-party app access. To get the same level of functionality from Netgear, you need two different subscriptions (parental controls and security features) for its Orbi systems, totaling $170 a year. But all things considered, $99.99 a year for Eero Plus isn’t the worst deal in the mesh networking landscape.

    With an active subscription, you’ll have the ability to block certain websites, apps or services for specific user profiles. For instance, you can create a profile for your kids’ devices and set time limits, and schedules for bedtime or dinner to pause internet access, and track data usage.

    Also part of Eero Plus is the option to block ads as you browse the internet. The ad-blocking feature isn’t quite as good as running a homemade PiHole server, but it does a good job at blocking a lot of ads, in turn speeding up website load times and preventing tracking.

    As for security features, which are also part of the subscription, you can turn on Advanced Security to allow Eero to prevent anyone on your network from accessing harmful sites that may contain viruses or be phishing attempts.

    The software experience is a big part of any mesh Wi-Fi system’s story, but not the entire story. For the Eero 6+, you’re getting a kit with powerful hardware that’s sure to provide fast internet access to your home and the devices inside it for years to come. The Eero 6 had a top speed of 500Mbps. The Eero 6+ doubles that to 1Gbps. Of course, your internet service provider will need to provide that type of speed to your home in order for you to see those speeds in real-world use.

    Over the course of a few weeks, we tested a three-pack of the Eero 6+, one unit in the basement of a ranch-style home. A second unit was placed upstairs on the opposite end of the house, with the third unit in a detached garage.

    During testing, we consistently saw speeds around 700 Mbps on our smartphones using the Speedtest.net app. The speed results would drop the further away we got from an access point, but that’s to be expected.

    Often times there would be two to three gaming PCs connected and actively playing games — think Fortnite, Roblox, and Call of Duty — while Netflix or Hulu were streaming 4K content on a TV.

    Outside of having to adjust a Wi-Fi antenna that had been moved on a gaming PC, there weren’t any instances of lagging while gaming or buffering while streaming content, even when everyone was connected and active, including countless smart home connected devices such as Ring cameras, smart locks, a video doorbell, light switches and random light bulbs.

    Alternatively, you can use the Ethernet ports to connect a gadget that’s near the access point to boost its Wi-Fi connectivity. So, if you have an older PC that lacks Wi-Fi 6 capabilities, you can connect the PC to the Ethernet port on the back of the Eero 6+ and it’s now getting faster internet without having to upgrade any components on the PC. `

    You can get the Eero 6+ in three different configurations. A single pack is $139, a two-pack is $155 (normally $239) and a three-pack is $194, marked down from its typical price of $299.

    The core features remain the same, regardless if you have a single access point or three. You get dual-band 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, which translates to multiple radios inside the access points to carry your data transitions back and forth at higher speeds. On the back of each Eero 6+ unit, you’ll find two Ethernet ports, which allow you to connect a secondary unit to Ethernet (if your house is wired for it) as a hardwired system, which can help boost performance.

    The Eero 6+ is very much a set-it-and-forget-it system. Once turned on and devices started connecting to them, there wasn’t a whole lot of management or worry on our part. We could get as granular as we wanted within the Eero app about usage, setting up profiles and what to block, or we could just let the network run and forget about having to manage a thing.

    We crafted our testing pool based on current Wi-Fi standards, top-rated mesh routers and our own expertise with products on the market. We then designed testing categories that would make for a fair comparison across all routers.

    Once each router arrived, we began our analysis by examining everything from the packaging and labeling of the hardware to the included instructions. We also paid close attention to what interface we had to use for setup, determining if it was a web page to visit, a desktop app or a purely mobile experience. When it came to placing the router, we noted if the onboarding process helped by suggesting where the router and each node should be placed and tested the connection strength afterward.

    After we set up the network, we took a look at the included features. For instance, are parental controls available out of the box, or did we need to sign up for a monthly plan? What type of security protocols and protections were in place from the get-go?

    We then conducted a number of speed tests and benchmarks to test connectivity in a quantitative format. After those benchmarks, we measured the performance in a qualitative manner with our everyday workflows on a plethora of devices. We also stress-tested with more than 100 devices on the network at any given time. In the realm of smart home, we looked at what extra connectivity was included inside the router.

    Without a doubt, the ZenWiFi AX (XT8) is the most advanced mesh networking system we tested in our first round. And Asus has taken the kitchen sink approach here — it’s a tri-band system with a single lane for 2.4 GHz and two lanes for 5 GHz. You can opt to broadcast a single network, combining all three bands, or split them up if you want to decide which network a device connects to. Additionally, the XT8 offers a built-in VPN that will keep your coffee shop Wi-Fi sessions safe and allow you to access your home network. It also works with Amazon’s Alexa platform, or you can create automations with the website If This Then That (IFTTT).

    The XT8 will block malicious sites, allows for parental controls and will even let you designate which device or content types should be prioritized across your home network. Each access point supports an external hard drive for network access, which, if combined with VPN features, will put your files at your fingertips no matter where you are.

    Our lone complaint about the XT8 has nothing to do with performance but rather the overall interface for managing the network. There are so many options; this system is clearly designed for someone who is comfortable with managing a network, and even then it’s still somewhat intimidating.

    Asus sells the XT8 in two-packs for $449, making it the most expensive setup we tested.

    In terms of its feature set, the Eero, originally known as the “all-new Eero” (in 2019), is pretty similar to the Eero 6. It has a slightly bulkier design, lacks the Zigbee antenna for easy smart home connectivity and, most importantly, is missing Wi-Fi 6 support. At only $80 more for a three-pack, it makes sense to spend the extra for the latest-generation router.

    Eero 6 and two extenders

    With its foolproof setup process, nearly unrivaled speeds and coverage areas, Eero 6 was our favorite mesh system before the introduction of the Eero 6+, which we recommend at this point (the systems will set you back the same amount, so there’s no reason to sacrifice the bandwidth gains you’ll get from the newer version. If prices drop on the old version and your needs are modest, it could be worth a look.

    The Eero Pro 6 is the step-up model from the Eero 6, now supplanted by the newer Eero Pro 6E (which is a better deal, and provides better performance). Aside from a shorter and wider design, it has a few other pro features. Notably, this supports gigabit speeds (aka 1,000 Mbps) on upload and download in a mesh configuration. If you’re paying for those speeds, like with Fios Gigabit, it makes sense to pay the extra and opt for the Pro 6.

    It also has a bit more room for devices to connect with a tri-band setup. That means it has a three-lane highway versus a two-lane setup on a dual-band router. In total, the Eero Pro 6 features a single 2.4 GHz band and two 5 GHz bands. It’s a noticeable difference if you have more than 100 data-heavy devices connected all at once.

    $699 $419 at Amazon

    Eero’s Pro 6E system has all of the bells and whistles as our top pick the Eero 6+ such as Eero Plus, parental controls, easy setup and an easy-to-use

    What makes the Pro 6E so special, and more expensive, is that it supports the latest connectivity standard Wi-Fi 6E, which increases overall throughput and speeds and the number of devices your network can handle at the same time. More specifically, the Eero Pro 6E can support up to 2.3Gbps, over 100 devices and covers 2,000 square feet per access point.

    Google’s Nest Wi-Fi mesh networking system used to be the gold standard of mesh systems: It’s incredibly simple to set up and manage, with everything done directly in the Google Home app. You can bundle devices into groups and set access schedules, or pause Wi-Fi access on demand through the app or by telling Google Assistant.

    You can also use those same groups to block access to inappropriate websites. From the initial setup process to more advanced controls, using Nest Wi-Fi is very easy and meant for those who aren’t all that tech-savvy. It’s truly a set-it-and-forget-it mesh networking system.

    Each Nest Wi-Fi access point acts as a Google Home device, meaning you can use the wake phrase of “OK/Hey Google” to ask questions and control your smart home devices.

    The Velop MX4200 is Linksys’ original Wi-Fi 6 mesh networking system, with useful features such as supporting network hard drives, support for up to 2,404 Mbps on Wi-Fi 6 and three gigabit LAN ports on each access point.

    You can tell the system to prioritize a device if you need to ensure you don’t break up during a video call, for example, or if you want to be certain your gaming session is getting all the bandwidth it needs. You can also set up basic parental controls, like pausing internet access on a specific device, setting a schedule or blocking specific websites.

    The Linksys Atlas Max 6E hits all of the marks for a Wi-Fi 6E system — a wide 9,000 square foot coverage area, support for over 195 devices at the same time, and speeds up to 8.4 Mpbs. Our testing showed the system can indeed put out impressive speeds (though we don’t have the capabilities to test its full potential), and coverage was slightly above average. Although, we did have to adjust our normal testing placement to bring two of the access points closer together, which isn’t something we have to often do. Furthermore, the app for controlling the system doesn’t provide an option to group devices for parental controls, for instance, if your kids are like ours, they have multiple devices and having to manually adjust individual devices all the time gets tiresome.

    Plume’s $159 SuperPods with Wi-Fi 6 are incredibly easy to set up and start getting better Wi-Fi coverage throughout your home. You could opt to use a single SuperPod as a traditional router or pair it with additional pods for a full mesh system. Either way, Plume’s $99 per year HomePass subscription service takes care of optimizing the network, blocking malware and ads, and gives you access to parental controls. In addition to managing your network for you, HomePass also doubles as a home security system; the Pods have built-in motion sensors that can alert you if something or someone is moving in your home — and it’ll even include the name of the room where the movement has been detected. It’s really cool and all of this aims to let you forget about your network setup.

    In our test setup, we used five SuperPods to cover a two-story home and a detached office. Each Pod also features two Ethernet ports, which is handy if you prefer a hardwired connection, say for a smart TV or computer or gaming console.

    One potential downside to Plume’s offering is that without the yearly HomePass subscription, the pods won’t include many of the advanced features such as guest modes, content filets and parental controls. For this reason, for most people, we’d recommend our top pick of the Eero 6 whether you want to use it as a traditional router or in a mesh setup. But if you don’t mind paying extra for a reliable mesh Wi-Fi network with some added smarts, then the Plume SuperPods are worth looking at.

    The Netgear Orbi AX600 supports the current Wi-Fi 6 standards and features some smart home connectivity. But you’re paying a lot of money for the AX600: $999 for a two-pack.

    For that price, it’s a tri-band experience and 6 Gbps-capable router (which translates to 6,000 Mbps in total). But you’ll need a really fast connection from your service provider to deliver that. Given this router’s high price point, you’re much better off opting for an Eero 6E system.

    $199.99 at B&H Photo Video

    The entry-level Orbi AX1200 from Netgear is a bare-bones mesh system that features a neat geometric design pattern on small square routers. Like the Eero 6, it’s a dual-band system that can cover 4,500 square feet of space, slightly less than what our top pick can deliver. In our testing, it was about 50 Mbps to 75 Mbps behind the other routers we tested, and it doesn’t feature Wi-Fi 6 support.

    Like the Eero and SmartThings Wi-Fi, there’s a companion Orbi app that hides a majority of security and parental control features behind a monthly plan. Netgear has partnered with Circle for parental controls here. The combination of subscriptions ends up being pricier than Eero’s, so given the balance of price and performance we’d recommended going with that system instead.

    The biggest — and really, only — problem we have with the Netgear Orbi AXW11000 is its price. At $1,500, you’d better be really sure you have to have this system. That said, its specification sheet does begin to explain its high price tag. The AXW11000 supports up to 10.8Gbps speeds, 9,000 square feet of coverage, and 200 devices on the same network. On top of that, the Orbi app isn’t as intuitive as Eero’s for common tasks like parental controls. And more advanced tasks require you to use a dedicated admin portal via your web browser.

    That said, this system is fast and powerful and definitely something we’d urge you to consider if it wasn’t so expensive, or if you have the budget and need for its ultra-high performance.

    Samsung’s SmartThings Wi-Fi launched in late 2018 and hasn’t received a hardware update since. The real highlight of the SmartThings Wi-Fi system, outside of its mesh networking capabilities with support of up to 32 different hubs (yes, you read that right, 32) is that it doubles as a smart home hub for the SmartThings platform.

    That means you can use it to connect to and control any product or service that works with SmartThings, such as the recently added Nest product line, along with countless other accessories and devices. SmartThings Wi-Fi has support for Zigbee and Z-Wave protocols, allowing compatible devices to connect directly to the hub, adding to its feature set.

    As for its Wi-Fi capabilities, you get free access to the Plume app, which provides access to more advanced Wi-Fi controls and mesh networking features. But despite the capabilities of Plume’s networking features, it’s also a drawback of SmartThings Wi-Fi because you’re forced to use two different applications to manage your home network, with each one offering different settings.

    We hope that Samsung updates SmartThings Wi-Fi with modern features and connection speeds, because its smart home features and platform are some of the best for a mesh networking system.

    On paper, the TP-Link Deco XE75 checks all of the boxes. It supports Wi-Fi 6E, up to 200 devices, 7,200 square feet and speeds of up to 5,400mbps. But we struggled with interference issues, which often lead to troubleshooting in the Deco app for network interference — of which, there was a lot — and that’s not something we experienced with other systems we tested in the same environment. When the Deco XE75 was working properly, the speeds were slightly lower than the Eero 6+, and the parental controls felt well thought out and streamlined for anyone to put to use.

    The Deco X55 is an affordable Wi-Fi 6 mesh system, with a three-pack priced at $219. For that, you get three access points with coverage of 6,500 total square feet, a max speed of 2,400Mbps, and the same Deco app for parental controls and managing your network. However, the X55 was also impacted by interference issues in our testing. Again, that’s not something we experienced with other systems that we tested. When it was working, speeds weren’t as impressive as the competition. This is not a system we’d recommend — it’s better to step up to the Eero 6+, especially when its available at a comparable price.

    A three-pack of Vilo’s mesh Wi-Fi system is priced incredibly low at $80 and does a good job of covering your space in Wi-Fi. It’s a system designed for basic internet use and streaming, and not for a household with multiple online gamers or 4K streams. The Vilo app is basic and frustrating at times, but once your system is set up, you shouldn’t have to spend too much time using the app. If you need a bare-bones network and don’t want to spend a ton, Vilo surely gets the job done.

    Read more from CNN Underscored’s hands-on testing:

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Meta’s stock falls 17% as its quarterly profit is cut in half | CNN Business

    Meta’s stock falls 17% as its quarterly profit is cut in half | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Meta on Wednesday posted the second quarterly revenue decline in its history since going public and warned that it is making “significant changes” aimed at cutting costs ahead of 2023, as it confronts an economic downturn that is hitting its core online advertising business.

    For the three months ended in September, Meta

    (FB)     posted revenue of $27.7 billion, down 4% year-over-year and slightly above Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The Facebook parent company posted its first-ever quarterly revenue decline during the June quarter.

    The company reported net income of nearly $4.4 billion — less than half the amount it made during the same period in the prior year and below analysts’ projections.

    “We’re approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency that will help us navigate the current environment and emerge an even stronger company,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.

    Meta’s stock fell almost 17% in after-hours trading Wednesday following the results.

    Demand for online advertising has declined in recent months amid rising inflation and fears of a looming recession. Tech companies like Google and Snap have also seen hits to their ad revenues. Meta CFO David Wehner said on a call with analysts following the report that the average price per ad across Meta’s platforms fell 18% during the quarter.

    At the same time, Meta’s user growth is slowing amid heightened competition from rivals like TikTok. Meta reported having 2.96 billion monthly active users on its core Facebook app at the end of the quarter, up 2% year-over-year. That’s down from the 6% growth rate it posted in the year-ago quarter. Daily active users on Meta’s family of apps grew 4% to 2.93 billion, down from the 11% increase it posted the year prior.

    Zuckerberg noted on the call that Instagram now has more than 2 billion monthly active users and WhatsApp has more than 2 billion daily active users.

    These challenges to its core business come as Meta is funneling billions of dollars into an ambitious new bet to build a future version of the internet called the metaverse that likely remains years away.

    Wehner said operating losses from the company’s metaverse ambitions, which are categorized under its Reality Labs unit, are expected to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023. Reality Labs lost nearly $3.7 billion in the September quarter, and has cost the company a total of $9.4 billion so far this year. Revenue from the Reality Labs unit also fell by nearly 50% year-over-year in the September quarter.

    Altimeter Capital, a Meta sharehoder, last week wrote an open letter calling on the company to reduce its headcount expenses by at least 20% and its annual capital expenditure by at least $5 billion, and to limit its investment in the metaverse to no more than $5 billion per year.

    In Wednesday’s report, Wehner said the company is “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently.” Executives said the company expects headcount at the end of 2023 will be roughly in line with or slightly smaller than the 87,314 it reported as of the end of September (an increase of 28% from the year prior).

    “We are holding some teams at in terms of headcount, shrinking others and investing headcount growth only in our highest priorities,” Wehner said. He also hinted that the company could shrink its physical office footprint.

    Zuckerberg said on the call that the three key areas of investment for the company in the coming year are its AI discovery engine that’s powering Reels and other recommendations, ads and business messaging, and its future vision for the metaverse. Meta earlier this month unveiled its newest virtual-reality headset, the Meta Quest Pro, and touted its potential for business customers.

    In the final three months of the year, Meta expects quarterly revenue between $30 billion and $32.5 billion. On the high end, the projection would mark a 3.5% year-over-year decline from the same period in the prior year.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • WhatsApp suffers major outage | CNN Business

    WhatsApp suffers major outage | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    WhatsApp suffered a serious outage on Tuesday, preventing users across the globe from sending or receiving messages on the platform.

    The world’s most popular messaging app started having problems around 3 a.m. ET. As of 4:50 a.m. the service was back for some users, but appeared to remain patchy elsewhere.

    There were nearly 70,000 reports of outages on the platform, according to data from Down Detector, which tracks service disruptions around the world.

    The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, the global tech giant formerly known as Facebook

    (FB)    .

    In a statement, a company spokesperson told CNN Business that it had resumed service.

    “We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today,” the representative said. “We’ve fixed the issue and apologize for any inconvenience.”

    In a post on Twitter, Down Detector said that user reports indicated that WhatsApp had been “having problems” since 3:17 a.m. ET.

    WhatsApp is the world’s top messaging app, with more than 2 billion users. As much as 31% of the global population uses it, according to a 2022 analysis by digital intelligence platform Similarweb.

    Many users in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market, posted on other social media that they had experienced problems communicating through the app. The country has a whopping 400 million WhatsApp users.

    — CNN’s Manveena Suri and Swati Gupta contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • These artists found out their work was used to train AI. Now they’re furious | CNN Business

    These artists found out their work was used to train AI. Now they’re furious | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Erin Hanson has spent years developing the vibrant color palette and chunky brushstrokes that define the vivid oil paintings for which she is known. But during a recent interview with her, I showed Hanson my attempts to recreate her style with just a few keystrokes.

    Using Stable Diffusion, a popular and publicly available open-source AI image generation tool, I had plugged in a series of prompts to create images in the style of some of her paintings of California poppies on an ocean cliff and a field of lupin.

    “That one with the purple flowers and the sunset,” she said via Zoom, peering at one of my attempts, “definitely looks like one of my paintings, you know?”

    With Hanson’s guidance, I then tailored another detailed prompt: “Oil painting of crystal light, in the style of Erin Hanson, light and shadows, backlit trees, strong outlines, stained glass, modern impressionist, award-winning, trending on ArtStation, vivid, high-definition, high-resolution.” I fed the prompt to Stable Diffusion; within seconds it produced three images.

    “Oh, wow,” she said as we pored over the results, pointing out how similar the trees in one image looked to the ones in her 2021 painting “Crystalline Maples.” “I would put that on my wall,” she soon added.

    Hanson, who’s based in McMinnville, Oregon, is one of many professional artists whose work was included in the data set used to train Stable Diffusion, which was released in August by London-based Stability AI. She’s one of several artists interviewed by CNN Business who were unhappy to learn that pictures of their work were used without someone informing them, asking for consent, or paying for their use.

    Once available only to a select group of tech insiders, text-to-image AI systems are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. These systems include Stable Diffusion, from a company that recently raised more than $100 million in funding, and DALL-E, from a company that has raised $1 billion to date.

    These tools, which typically offer some free credits before charging, can create all kinds of images with just a few words, including those that are clearly evocative of the works of many, many artists (if not seemingly created by the same artist). Users can invoke those artists with words such as “in the style of” or “by” along with a specific name. And the current uses for these tools can range from personal amusement to more commercial cases.

    In just months, millions of people have flocked to text-to-image AI systems and they are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers and images to illustrate news stories. An image generated with an AI system called Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, and caused an uproar among artists.

    But as artists like Hanson have discovered that their work is being used to train AI, it raises an even more fundamental concern: that their own art is effectively being used to train a computer program that could one day cut into their livelihoods. Anyone who generates images with systems such as Stable Diffusion or DALL-E can then sell them (the specific terms regarding copyright and ownership of these images varies).

    “I don’t want to participate at all in the machine that’s going to cheapen what I do,” said Daniel Danger, an illustrator and print maker who learned a number of his works were used to train Stable Diffusion.

    The machines are far from magic. For one of these systems to ingest your words and spit out an image, it must be trained on mountains of data, which may include billions of images scraped from the internet, paired with written descriptions.

    Some services, including OpenAI’s DALL-E system, don’t disclose the datasets behind their AI systems. But with Stable Diffusion, Stability AI is clear about its origins. Its core dataset was trained on image and text pairs that were curated for their looks from an even more massive cache of images and text from the internet. The full-size dataset, known as LAION-5B was created by the German AI nonprofit LAION, which stands for “large-scale artificial intelligence open network.”

    This practice of scraping images or other content from the internet for dataset training isn’t new, and traditionally falls under what’s known as “fair use” — the legal principle in US copyright law that allows for the use of copyright-protected work in some situations. That’s because those images, many of which may be copyrighted, are being used in a very different way, such as for training a computer to identify cats.

    But datasets are getting larger and larger, and training ever-more-powerful AI systems, including, recently, these generative ones that anyone can use to make remarkable looking images in an instant.

    A piece by illustrator Daniel Danger that was included in the training data behind the Stable Diffusion AI image generator.

    A few tools let anyone search through the LAION-5B dataset, and a growing number of professional artists are discovering their work is part of it. One of these search tools, built by writer and technologist Andy Baio and programmer Simon Willison, stands out. While it can only be used to search a small fraction of Stable Diffusion’s training data (more than 12 million images), its creators analyzed the art imagery within it and determined that, of the top 25 artists whose work was represented, Hanson was one of just three who is still alive. They found 3,854 images of her art included in just their small sampling.

    Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque told CNN Business via email that art is a tiny fraction of the LAION training data behind Stable Diffusion. “Art makes up much less than 0.1% of the dataset and is only created when deliberately called by the user,” he said.

    But that’s slim comfort to some artists.

    Danger, whose artwork includes posters for bands like Phish and Primus, is one of several professional artists who told CNN Business they worry that AI image generators could threaten their livelihoods.

    He is concerned that the images people produce with AI image generators could replace some of his more “utilitarian” work, which includes media like book covers and illustrations for articles published online.

    “Why are we going to pay an artist $1,000 when we can have 1,000 [images] to pick from for free?” he asked. “People are cheap.”

    Tara McPherson, a Pittsburgh-based artist whose work is featured on toys, clothing and in films such as the Oscar-winning “Juno,” is also concerned about the possibility of losing out on some work to AI. She feels disappointed and “taken advantage of” for having her work included in the dataset behind Stable Diffusion without her knowledge, she said.

    “How easy is this going to be? How elegant is this art going to become?,” she asked. “Right now it’s a little wonky sometimes but this is just getting started.”

    While the concerns are real, the recourse is unclear. Even if AI-generated images have a widespread impact — such as by changing business models — it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re violating artists’ copyrights, according to Zahr Said, a law professor at the University of Washington. And it would be prohibitive to license every single image in a dataset before using it, she said.

    “You can actually feel really sympathetic for artistic communities and want to support them and also be like, there’s no way,” she said. “If we did that, it would essentially be saying machine learning is impossible.”

    McPherson and Danger mused about the possibility of putting watermarks on their work when posting it online to safeguard the images (or at least make them look less appealing). But McPherson said when she’s seen artist friends put watermarks across their images online it “ruins the art, and the joy of people looking at it and finding inspiration in it.”

    If he could, Danger said he would remove his images from datasets used to train AI systems. But removing pictures of an artist’s work from a dataset wouldn’t stop Stable Diffusion from being able to generate images in that artist’s style.

    For starters, the AI model has already been trained. But also, as Mostaque said, specific artistic styles could still be called on by users because of OpenAI’s CLIP model, which was used to train Stable Diffusion to understand connections between words and images.

    Christoph Schuhmann, an LAION founder, said via email that his group thinks that truly enabling opting in and out of datasets will only work if all parts of AI models — of which there can be many — respect those choices.

    “A unilateral approach to consent handling will not suffice in the AI world; we need a cross-industry system to handle that,” he said.

    Partners Mathew Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, Berlin-based artists experimenting with AI in their collaborative work, are working to tackle these challenges. Together with two other collaborators, they have launched Spawning, making tools for artists that they hope will let them better understand and control how their online art is used in datasets.

    In September, Spawning released a search engine that can comb through the LAION-5B dataset, haveibeentrained.com, and in the coming weeks it intends to offer a way for people to opt out or in to datasets used for training. Over the past month or so, Dryhurst said, he’s been meeting with organizations training large AI models. He wants to get them to agree that if Spawning gathers lists of works from artists who don’t want to be included, they’ll honor those requests.

    Dryhurst said Spawning’s goal is to make it clear that consensual data collection benefits everyone. And Mostaque agrees that people should be able to opt out. He told CNN Business that Stability AI is working with numerous groups on ways to “enable more control of database contents by the community” in the future. In a Twitter thread in September, he said Stability is open to contributing to ways that people can opt out of datasets, “such as by supporting Herndon’s work on this with many other projects to come.”

    Tara McPherson's

    “I personally understand the emotions around this as the systems become intelligent enough to understand styles,” he said in an email to CNN Business.

    Schuhmann said LAION is also working with “various groups” to figure out how to let people opt in or out of including their images in training text-to-image AI models. “We take the feelings and concerns of artists very seriously,” Schuhmann said.

    Hanson, for her part, has no problem with her art being used for training AI, but she wants to be paid. If images are sold that were made with the AI systems trained on their work, artists need to be compensated, she said — even if it’s “fractions of pennies.”

    This could be on the horizon. Mostaque said Stability AI is looking into how “creatives can be rewarded from their work,” particularly as Stability AI itself releases AI models, rather than using those built by others. The company will soon announce a plan to get community feedback on “practical ways” to do this, he said.

    Theoretically, I may eventually owe Hanson some money. I’ve run that same “crystal light” prompt on Stable Diffusion many times since we devised it, so many in fact that my laptop is littered with trees in various hues, rainbows of sunlight shining through their branches onto the ground below. It’s almost like having my own bespoke Hanson gallery.

    [ad_2]

    Source link