Month: September 2023
The China Crackdown — How Are Apple’s Apps Stacking Up Against Beijing?
A question on many people’s minds is, “How close are the goals of Apple Apps and Beijing? Likely, just precisely
The post The China Crackdown — How Are Apple’s Apps Stacking Up Against Beijing? appeared first on ReadWrite.
A question on many people’s minds is, “How close are the goals of Apple Apps and Beijing? Likely, just precisely as close as you think they are — which isn’t close. Apple products, including the newly released iPhone 15 series, have always been popular in China. Wall Street Journal said today that Apple will not be able to offer apps to the Chinese population unless the operator is registered with the government. This has been the stand of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. But how does the Chinese population at large respond to these rules? About like they always have.
Will China Be Able to Crackdown on the Apple App Store?
Some say the new ruling will close a loophole in the Great Firewall — but will that loophole actually close? The tech-savvy Chinese don’t seem to like to be told what to do any more than Western society. There are over 1,000 unregistered foreign apps in China, but can the crackdown discover and eliminate those? Sensor Tower, a market insight company, said the five social media apps have been downloaded over 170 million times from the Apple app store.
Tightening rules has always been the agenda of China. Still, it’s increasing as censorship and data security become a high priority, with the National Security Over Economic Interests begin to clamp down on all cross-border information. Some investors are highly concerned about how these apps will be removed and if they can be stamped out.
David Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors and an Apple shareholder, stated today, “China is my biggest worry for Apple.” China demands that, besides registering all apps with the government, Apple needs to crack down on online scams, pornography, and the circulation of information that violates the censorship rules.
A remaining question might be, “What can be done about all those who engage on the platforms when they log on through a virtual private network or VPN?”
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Zhang Kaiyv; Pexels; Thank you!
The post The China Crackdown — How Are Apple’s Apps Stacking Up Against Beijing? appeared first on ReadWrite.
Wordle today: Here’s the answer and hints for September 30
Here’s the answer for “Wordle” #833 on September 30, as well as a few hints, tips, and clues to help you solve it yourself.
Here’s the answer for “Wordle” #833 on September 30, as well as a few hints, tips, and clues to help you solve it yourself.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Leak Shows 360-Degree View of New Flat-Edge Design – CNET
Next year’s premium Samsung phone could have flatter sides, and metallic edges.
Next year’s premium Samsung phone could have flatter sides, and metallic edges.
$260 Million AI Startup Releases ‘Unmoderated’ Chatbot Via Torrent
“On Tuesday of this week, French AI startup Mistral tweeted a magnet link to their first publicly released, open sourced LLM,” writes Slashdot reader jenningsthecat. “That might be merely interesting if not for the fact that the chatbot has remarkably few guardrails.” 404 Media reports: According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Rottger and 404 Media’s own testing, Mistral will readily discuss the benefits of ethnic cleansing, how to restore Jim Crow-style discrimination against Black people, instructions for suicide or killing your wife, and detailed instructions on what materials you’ll need to make crack and where to acquire them.
It’s hard not to read Mistral’s tweet releasing its model as an ideological statement. While leaders in the AI space like OpenAI trot out every development with fanfare and an ever increasing suite of safeguards that prevents users from making the AI models do whatever they want, Mistral simply pushed its technology into the world in a way that anyone can download, tweak, and with far fewer guardrails asking users trying to make the LLM produce controversial statements. “My biggest issue with the Mistral release is that safety was not evaluated or even mentioned in their public comms. They either did not run any safety evals, or decided not to release them. If the intention was to share an ‘unmoderated’ LLM, then it would have been important to be explicit about that from the get go,” Rottger told 404 Media in an email. “As a well-funded org releasing a big model that is likely to be widely-used, I think they have a responsibility to be open about safety, or lack thereof. Especially because they are framing their model as an alternative to Llama2, where safety was a key design principle.”
The report notes that Mistral will be “essentially impossible to censor or delete from the internet” since it’s been released as a torrent. “Mistral also used a magnet link, which is a string of text that can be read and used by a torrent client and not a ‘file’ that can be deleted from the internet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
“On Tuesday of this week, French AI startup Mistral tweeted a magnet link to their first publicly released, open sourced LLM,” writes Slashdot reader jenningsthecat. “That might be merely interesting if not for the fact that the chatbot has remarkably few guardrails.” 404 Media reports: According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Rottger and 404 Media’s own testing, Mistral will readily discuss the benefits of ethnic cleansing, how to restore Jim Crow-style discrimination against Black people, instructions for suicide or killing your wife, and detailed instructions on what materials you’ll need to make crack and where to acquire them.
It’s hard not to read Mistral’s tweet releasing its model as an ideological statement. While leaders in the AI space like OpenAI trot out every development with fanfare and an ever increasing suite of safeguards that prevents users from making the AI models do whatever they want, Mistral simply pushed its technology into the world in a way that anyone can download, tweak, and with far fewer guardrails asking users trying to make the LLM produce controversial statements. “My biggest issue with the Mistral release is that safety was not evaluated or even mentioned in their public comms. They either did not run any safety evals, or decided not to release them. If the intention was to share an ‘unmoderated’ LLM, then it would have been important to be explicit about that from the get go,” Rottger told 404 Media in an email. “As a well-funded org releasing a big model that is likely to be widely-used, I think they have a responsibility to be open about safety, or lack thereof. Especially because they are framing their model as an alternative to Llama2, where safety was a key design principle.”
The report notes that Mistral will be “essentially impossible to censor or delete from the internet” since it’s been released as a torrent. “Mistral also used a magnet link, which is a string of text that can be read and used by a torrent client and not a ‘file’ that can be deleted from the internet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kia and Hyundai Blame TikTok and Instagram For Their Cars Getting Stolen
Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: Kia and Hyundai say it is not their fault that their cars are being stolen in an unprecedented theft surge made possible by the vehicles lacking a basic anti-theft technology virtually every other car has, according to a recent court filing. Instead, the companies point the finger at social media companies, such as TikTok and Instagram, where instructions on how to steal the cars have been widely shared and thieves show off their stolen cars.
The lawyers representing the two corporations — which are owned by the same parent company — are not subtle about this argument. The filing (PDF) — in which the company is arguing a roughly $200 million class-action settlement ought to be approved by the court — includes an entire section heading titled “Social Media and Intervening Third-Party Criminals Caused An Unprecedented Increase In Thefts.” The lawyers argue in that section that because Kia and Hyundai vehicles have “not been the subject of significant theft” before the Kia Boys social media trend, social media and the people who steal the cars — and not the car companies — are to blame for the thefts. This argument is summarized in the section titled “Social Media Incited Unprecedented Rise In Thefts.” The filing broadly reflects both the public communications strategy Kia and Hyundai have used throughout this crisis and some of the national news headlines that have covered the story,
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: Kia and Hyundai say it is not their fault that their cars are being stolen in an unprecedented theft surge made possible by the vehicles lacking a basic anti-theft technology virtually every other car has, according to a recent court filing. Instead, the companies point the finger at social media companies, such as TikTok and Instagram, where instructions on how to steal the cars have been widely shared and thieves show off their stolen cars.
The lawyers representing the two corporations — which are owned by the same parent company — are not subtle about this argument. The filing (PDF) — in which the company is arguing a roughly $200 million class-action settlement ought to be approved by the court — includes an entire section heading titled “Social Media and Intervening Third-Party Criminals Caused An Unprecedented Increase In Thefts.” The lawyers argue in that section that because Kia and Hyundai vehicles have “not been the subject of significant theft” before the Kia Boys social media trend, social media and the people who steal the cars — and not the car companies — are to blame for the thefts. This argument is summarized in the section titled “Social Media Incited Unprecedented Rise In Thefts.” The filing broadly reflects both the public communications strategy Kia and Hyundai have used throughout this crisis and some of the national news headlines that have covered the story,
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Behold the world’s oldest sandals, buried in a “bat cave” over 6,000 years ago
Some basketry from same site is even older, dating back 9,500 years to Mesolithic period.
Enlarge / Wooden mallet and esparto sandals from Cueva de los Murciélagos in Spain dated to the Neolithic period, 6,200 years ago. (credit: MUTERMUR project)
In the 19th century, miners in southern Spain unearthed a prehistoric burial site in a cave containing some 22 pairs of ancient sandals woven out of esparto (a type of grass). The latest radiocarbon dating revealed that those sandals could be 6,200 years old—centuries older than similar footwear found elsewhere around the world, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The interdisciplinary team analyzed 76 artifacts made of wood, reeds, and esparto, including basketry, cords, mats, and a wooden mallet. Some of the basketry turned out to be even older than the sandals, providing the first direct evidence of basketry weaving among the hunter-gatherers and early farmers of the region.
Organic plant-based materials rarely survive the passage of thousands of years, but when they do, archaeologists can learn quite a bit about the culture in which they were produced. For example, last year we reported on the world’s oldest known pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago. With the help of an expert weaver—who created a replica of the pants—archaeologists unraveled the design secrets behind the 3,000-year-old wool trousers that were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man, who died between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.
A local landowner discovered Cueva de los Murciélagos (“Cave of the bats”) in 1831, and made good use of all that bat guano in the main chamber to fertilize his land. At some point it was also used to house goats, but then the discovery of galena turned the site into a mining operation. As the miners removed blocks to access the vein, they opened up a gallery containing several partially mummified corpses, along with an array of baskets, wooden tools, and other artifacts. Most of the plant-based artifacts were either burned or given to the local villagers.