Category: Technology

X suspended journalist Ken Klippenstein’s account earlier this afternoon. X’s Safety account says they issued the temporary suspension “for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. [J.D.] Vance’s physical address and the majority of his social security number.”

Several news outlets that received the vetting dossier of the Republican vice presidential candidate leaked by hackers chose not to publish the sensitive document since it contained personal information. Klippenstein felt the dossier was newsworthy and decided to publish it on Substack and his social media channels and one of them took down his account.

Engadget has viewed the dossier and can confirm the details mentioned by X’s Safety team are present and unredacted in Klippenstein’s copy of the document except for the last four numbers of Vance’s social security number.

Klippenstein explained his decision to buck the media’s trend and release Sen. Vance’s dossier on his Substack. President Trump’s campaign has accused Iran’s government on more than one occasion of hacking into its files and releasing the dossier back in June. Other news outlets chose not to release the document but Klippenstein says he felt they declined “in fear of finding itself at odds with the [US} government’s campaign against ‘foreign malign influence’” referring to the National Counterterrorism Center’s organization of the same name that seeks to prevent interference in elections.

“I disagree,” Klippenstein added. “The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season.”

The suspension extends beyond Klippenstein’s account. X has flagged the link to the dossier and automatically prevents anyone who attempts to post it. Those who do receive a warning from X saying “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

X (then Twitter) updated its policy on “hacked materials” after it blocked stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, saying it would allow stories about hacked materials but not links to the material if it was published by the hacker or someone working “in concert” with them.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-suspends-journalist-ken-klippenstein-after-he-published-jd-vance-dossier-214219066.html?src=rss 

As extreme weather events become ever more common, climate risks are playing a role in many people’s long-term decision-making. And few things are more long-term than buying real estate. In response, Zillow has announced a new partnership to bring climate risk information to its for-sale listings.

Property listing pages in the US will include data about flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality risks at that location. This section will also list any climate-related insurance requirements for that property. The information is being provided by First Street, a specialist in climate risk financial modeling. The climate data is rolling out this year to the Zillow website and iOS app, while Android is expected to get the update early next year. Some locations have already been updated to show climate data on the web.

Those five risk categories are also being applied to Zillow’s interactive map search view. Each of the different climate concerns has a color-coded visualization to show the risk levels across the country or in a smaller region. It’s valuable information for anybody in a position to make that big homebuying leap. For everybody else, it may add simply a touch of gloomy reality to the gleeful experience of scrolling through absurd and/or overpriced houses.

Zillow also introduced improvements to its AI search feature earlier this month.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/zillow-is-adding-climate-risk-data-to-all-us-for-sale-listings-220038971.html?src=rss 

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 2426, a new law that requires digital marketplaces to make clearer to customers when they are only purchasing a license to access media. The law will not apply to cases of permanent offline downloads, only to the all-too-common situation of buying digital copies of video games, music, movies, TV shows or ebooks from an online storefront. The Verge spotted the development, which could see marketplaces facing fines for false advertising in the state if they don’t use clear language to explain the limitations of what access entails. In other words, you won’t be seeing language like “buy” or “purchase” once the law takes effect in 2025.

The move to digital storefronts has raised new parallel concerns about ownership and preservation for media in the modern age. Ubisoft’s move to delete The Crew from players’ libraries after the game’s servers shuttered is one of the most recent examples of how customers can suddenly lose access to media they felt they owned. The new California law won’t stop situations like The Crew‘s disappearance from happening, and it won’t stop those losses from hurting. But it does make clearer that ownership is a pretty rare and intangible thing for digital media.

Governor Newsom is having a busy week. He also signed the state’s “click to cancel” bill yesterday and last week signed two bills with protections against unwanted AI likenesses of actors, both living and deceased.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/new-california-law-will-force-companies-to-admit-you-dont-own-digital-content-203053750.html?src=rss 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially issued its full recommended fine against political consultant Steve Kramer for a series of illegal robocalls using deepfake AI technology and caller ID spoofing during the New Hampshire primaries. Kramer must pay $6 million in fines in the next 30 days or the Department of Justice will handle collection, according to a FCC statement.

Kramer violated the Truth in Caller ID Act passed in 2009 that prohibits anyone from “knowingly transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information with the intent to defraud, cause harm or wrongfully obtain anything of value,” according to legislative records. The law preceded the widespread usage of AI, but the FCC voted unanimously to have it apply to such deepfakes this past February.

The phony robocalls delivered pre-recorded audio of President Biden’s voice using deepfake AI technology to New Hampshire residents leading up to the 2024 presidential primary election. The phony President Biden told voters not to vote in the upcoming primary saying “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” according to an earlier report from CBS New York. The robocalls were spoofed so as to appear to originate from the former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, according to the New York Times.

Kramer hired New Orleans magician (no, really, an actual magician) Paul Carpenter to make the phony recordings. Carpenter showed NBC News how he made the deepfake audio files of President Biden using an AI voice generator called ElevenLabs. The recordings, he claims, only took around 20 minutes to make. Carpenter says Kramer paid him through Venmo and he thought the work he was doing was authorized by President Biden’s campaign. Eleven Labs has since shut down Carpenter’s account.

Kramer claims he sent the robocalls to raise awareness about the dangers and misuse of the technology. His apparent experiment only cost him $500 but, according to the political consultant, resulted in a massive return. “For me to do that and get $5 million worth of exposure, not for me,” Kramer told CBS New York. “I kept myself anonymous so the regulations could just play themselves out or begin to play themselves out. I don’t need to be famous. That’s not my intention. My intention was to make a difference.”

Kramer doesn’t just face a hefty FCC fine, he’s also facing criminal charges. New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella announced last May that Kramer received 13 felony counts of voter suppression and 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonation of a candidate.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/fcc-fines-political-consultant-6-million-for-deepfake-robocalls-190050186.html?src=rss 

StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft II: Campaign Collection are coming to PC Game Pass, as announced by Xbox at Tokyo Game Show. Both titles will be available on November 5 to anyone with a PC Game Pass or Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

The multiplayer components of both games are already free-to-play on PCs, but this will allow people to experience the single-player campaigns. Starcraft II: Campaign Collection, for instance, includes over 70 missions pulled from all of the various DLC, like Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm, among others.

StarCraft: Remastered adds some modern goodies to the original game, like 4K visuals, enhanced audio and newly-designed leaderboards. This update has been floating around since 2017, but Game Pass availability should introduce the iconic 1998 real-time strategy (RTS) title to a new audience.

Despite getting a bit long in the tooth, both games still have active multiplayer communities. This also holds true in the world of professional competitive gaming. Many credit StarCraft II, which released back in 2010, with assisting in the rise of live streaming.

This isn’t the only Blizzard-centric news to come out of Tokyo Game Show. Overwatch 2 is getting (probably very expensive) skins based on the anime My Hero Academia. This promotion goes from October 17 to 30.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/starcraft-remastered-and-starcraft-ii-are-coming-to-pc-game-pass-170133814.html?src=rss 

Researchers have spotted an apparent downside of smarter chatbots. Although AI models predictably become more accurate as they advance, they’re also more likely to (wrongly) answer questions beyond their capabilities rather than saying, “I don’t know.” And the humans prompting them are more likely to take their confident hallucinations at face value, creating a trickle-down effect of confident misinformation.

“They are answering almost everything these days,” José Hernández-Orallo, professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, told Nature. “And that means more correct, but also more incorrect.” Hernández-Orallo, the project lead, worked on the study with his colleagues at the Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Spain.

The team studied three LLM families, including OpenAI’s GPT series, Meta’s LLaMA and the open-source BLOOM. They tested early versions of each model and moved to larger, more advanced ones — but not today’s most advanced. For example, the team began with OpenAI’s relatively primitive GPT-3 ada model and tested iterations leading up to GPT-4, which arrived in March 2023. The four-month-old GPT-4o wasn’t included in the study, nor was the newer o1-preview. I’d be curious if the trend still holds with the latest models.

The researchers tested each model on thousands of questions about “arithmetic, anagrams, geography and science.” They also quizzed the AI models on their ability to transform information, such as alphabetizing a list. The team ranked their prompts by perceived difficulty.

The data showed that the chatbots’ portion of wrong answers (instead of avoiding questions altogether) rose as the models grew. So, the AI is a bit like a professor who, as he masters more subjects, increasingly believes he has the golden answers on all of them.

Further complicating things is the humans prompting the chatbots and reading their answers. The researchers tasked volunteers with rating the accuracy of the AI bots’ answers, and they found that they “incorrectly classified inaccurate answers as being accurate surprisingly often.” The range of wrong answers falsely perceived as right by the volunteers typically fell between 10 and 40 percent.

“Humans are not able to supervise these models,” concluded Hernández-Orallo.

The research team recommends AI developers begin boosting performance for easy questions and programming the chatbots to refuse to answer complex questions. “We need humans to understand: ‘I can use it in this area, and I shouldn’t use it in that area,’” Hernández-Orallo told Nature.

It’s a well-intended suggestion that could make sense in an ideal world. But fat chance AI companies oblige. Chatbots that more often say “I don’t know” would likely be perceived as less advanced or valuable, leading to less use — and less money for the companies making and selling them. So, instead, we get fine-print warnings that “ChatGPT can make mistakes” and “Gemini may display inaccurate info.”

That leaves it up to us to avoid believing and spreading hallucinated misinformation that could hurt ourselves or others. For accuracy, fact-check your damn chatbot’s answers, for crying out loud.

You can read the team’s full study in Nature.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/advanced-ai-chatbots-are-less-likely-to-admit-they-dont-have-all-the-answers-172012958.html?src=rss 

You can now upload YouTube videos and audio files to NotebookLM, an AI-powered summarizing tool for education and research. The update means Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro-powered virtual assistant can now handle Google Docs, PDFs, text files, Google Slides, YouTube video URLs, audio files and web pages. This expands NotebookLM’s potential sources to include lecture recordings, informative YouTube content and group discussions. Google claims that it securely stores all information uploaded to NoteBookLM and does not use it to train AI.

Google launched the virtual research assistant in the summer of 2023 and upgraded it to run on Gemini 1.5 Pro this past June. Alongside the AI-powered bump, Google expanded NotebookLM to be available in over 200 countries and territories. Most recently, Google added Audio Overview to NotebookLM. The tool has two AI hosts — hopefully not foreshadowing what hosting will look like in the future — discuss your sources, summarize material and “banter.” Google is now adding the ability to share Audio Overviews with others through a public URL. 

The irony here is that the reason we’d need an AI to briefly summarize a YouTube video in the first place is because Google incentivized the creation of ever-longer videos.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/notebooklm-can-now-summarize-youtube-videos-160037375.html?src=rss 

September 26 is The Last of Us Day and to mark the occasion, HBO has dropped the first proper trailer for season two of its misery simulator TV adaptation. This expands on a sizzle reel we saw several weeks ago, which included the first glimpses of Catherine O’Hara’s character (seemingly a therapist) and Kaitlyn Dever as a pivotal newcomer, Abby. There’s more of both here, including that terrifying sequence of infected nearly crushing Abby under a chain-link fence.

There are quite a few other recognizable moments from The Last of Us Part II in the new clip, including an encounter between Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and an infected in an abandoned supermarket and a famous scene of her playing guitar for Dina (Isabela Merced). The game’s subway segment is featured, along with the Seraphites and Jeffrey Wright, who reprises his Part II role as the leader of a militant faction. Of course, Joel (Pedro Pascal) is featured throughout the trailer too — he plays guitar with Ellie and sheds a tear, seemingly while in a therapy appointment with O’Hara.

Unfortunately, the clip doesn’t narrow down the release date for the season, which will air in 2025. However, HBO boss Casey Bloys recently indicated it will arrive in the first half of next year to make it eligible for the next Emmy awards (the same goes for the next season of The White Lotus).

Elsewhere, Naughty Dog is marking TLoU Day in its own way with some new merch and other tidbits. There’s a new bunch of TLoU-related avatars and emoji you can pick up using Steam Points, along with a thematic Steam Deck startup video. Meanwhile, PS Plus Extra and Premium members have access to the PS5 remake of the first game at no extra cost starting today.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-last-of-us-season-two-trailer-shows-ellie-in-danger-and-joel-in-therapy-160401898.html?src=rss