Lifeboat Foundation

On the stand in US v. Google, the Microsoft CEO said he’d do just about anything to make Bing better. Google’s lawyers said he should have been doing that for decades.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is not as good as Google. Believe it or not, it seems nobody — not even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — disputes that fact. But over hours of contentious testimony from Nadella during the landmark US v. Google.

Nadella, in a dark blue suit, took the stand early Monday morning after a few minutes of scheduling updates and a delay long enough that Judge Amit Mehta asked jokingly, Mr. Nadella didn’t go back to Seattle, did… More.

Continue reading “Satya Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google — and Apple could fix it” »

The Transportation Authority of Marin board has voted to accept a framework to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, in some cases faster than required under state law.

The “Marin Countywide Electric Vehicle Acceleration Strategy,” developed by the interagency Marin County Climate and Energy Partnership, is meant to provide a playbook of policies and actions for jurisdictions to employ to ready their communities for a growing number of electric vehicles.

Several Marin communities have already accepted the strategy, and the Transportation Authority of Marin board did so on Thursday. The authority is a state-managed congestion management agency that also provides rebates to public agencies for installing charging stations and electrifying their vehicle fleets.

The Federal Court of Appeal in the USA has just ruled that Google is not covered by exemption for journalistic or artistic work.in a 2–1 court ruling, Google which drives more than 75% of internet searches in Canada, which opens the door for people to demand that their names in any articles are made unsearchable known as the right to be forgotten.

Valerie Lawton, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, said it is pleased the court agreed with its position that Google’s search engine service is subject to federal privacy law. “This brings welcome clarification to this area of the law.”

This legal case was actually started in 2017 when a complaint to the Federal… More.

Continue reading “Google Faced With An AI Privacy Challenge: Do I Have The Right To Be Forgotten?” »

WASHINGTON, Sept 27 (Reuters) — The founder of Branch Metrics, which developed a method of searching within smartphone apps, told a U.S. antitrust trial on Wednesday how his company struggled to integrate with devices because of steps Google took to block them.

The testimony came during the third week of a more than two-month trial in which the U.S. Justice Department is seeking to show that Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) abused its monopoly of search and some search advertising. Google has said that its business practices were legal.

Google is accused of paying $10 billion a year based on “revenue share agreements” to smartphone makers, wireless carriers and others who agree to make its software the default and maintain its monopoly in search.

And potentially very embarrassing for all of crypto.

The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried is likely to be more consequential than just whether the man himself is found guilty. Depending on what evidence is introduced during the trial, it could be rough for the entire crypto industry.

“How much damage can this trial do to the already beaten-down reputation of the industry at this point?” asks Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. “This trial is going to be an excruciating moment for the industry because no one knows what kind of evidence might come out.”

Continue reading “The FTX trial is bigger than Sam Bankman-Fried” »

And it will pay legal fees if its customers end up in any lawsuits about it.

Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers.

The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent.

Scientists can now create realistic human embryo models in the lab, leading some to suggest that we rethink how we legally define an embryo.

Numerous natural language processing (NLP) applications have benefited greatly from using large language models (LLMs). While LLMs have improved in performance and gained additional capabilities due to being scaled, they still have a problem with “hallucinating” or producing information inconsistent with the real-world facts detected during pre-training. This represents a significant barrier to adoption for high-stakes applications (such as those found in clinical and legal settings), where the generation of trustworthy text is essential.

The maximum likelihood language modeling target, which seeks to minimize the forward KL divergence between the data and model distributions, may be to blame for LMs’ hallucinations. However, this is far from certain. The LM may assign a non-zero probability to phrases that are not fully consistent with the knowledge encoded in the training data if this goal is pursued.

From the perspective of the interpretability of the model, studies have shown that the earlier layers of transformer LMs encode “lower level” information (such as part-of-speech tags). In contrast, the later levels encode more “semantic” information.

Users should continue to evaluate their settings to understand how they are being tracked.

Following a lengthy examination into its data practices, Google has agreed to pay $93 million to resolve claims that it misled customers about how and when their location information was being tracked and stored. The investigation was led by the California Department of Justice.

This is according to a statement released by California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office on Thursday.

Continue reading “Google fined $93 million for deceiving users about tracking” »