Kalakshar US

The city government of Oakland, California was hit by a ransomware attack on February 8th, and its departments can still feel the security breach’s ramifications. While the local government didn’t give out details about the incident, such as how much money the bad actors are demanding, it said in an announcement that the city had to take its network offline to contain the attack. That has rendered many of Oakland’s non-emergency services inaccessible, such as websites that would allow residents to pay parking fines or taxes online. The city’s systems meant for processing reports and issuing permits or licenses are offline, as well. 

While Oakland previously assured residents that 911 dispatch and fire emergency services weren’t affected by the breach, its police department warned people that the attack has delayed response times. It’s now encouraging people to file reports online for non-emergency complaints. Oakland also had to close some of its buildings and is now asking people to email government offices’ service counters before coming to visit. 

However, it warns of delayed response times while it works “around the clock to implement recovery plans that will restore impacted systems as quickly and as securely as possible.” According to the San Francisco Chronicle, residents are also having difficulties reaching city departments by phone and are being redirected to recorded messages, most likely due to an influx of calls. 

On February 14th, local Oakland officials declared state of emergency in an effort to combat the effects of the attack. Doing so allows them to expedite the purchase of equipment and materials needed to get government services running as usual, as well as to deploy emergency workers if needed. Although details surrounding the attack remain unclear, the city’s Information Technology Department is currently working with law enforcement and a leading forensics firm to investigate the scope and severity of the issue. “This continues to be an ongoing investigation with multiple local, state, and federal agencies involved,” Oakland said in an announcement, along with the promise to keep the public updated if it has more details to share.

In a video ad Google posted on Twitter, its yet-to-be-launched AI chatboard Bard confidently spouted misinformation about the James Webb Space Telescope. “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system,” the chatbot replied, which is patently false. (It was the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope that captured images of exoplanets for the first time.) Now, the tech giant is looking to improve Bard’s accuracy, and according to CNBC, it’s asking employees for help. 

Google’s VP for search, Prabhakar Raghavan, reportedly sent an email to staff members, asking them to rewrite Bard responses on topics they know well. The chatbot “learns best by example,” Raghavan said, and training it with factual answers will help improve its accuracy. Raghavan also included a list of “dos” and “don’ts” when it comes to fixing Bard’s responses, based on the email seen by CNBC. 

Responses should be in first person POV, should be unopinionated and neutral, and they should have a polite, casual and approachable tone. Employees are also instructed to “avoid making presumptions based on race, nationality, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, location, or similar categories.” They’re asked not to describe Bard as a person, imply that it has emotions or claim that it has human-like experiences. Plus, they’re instructed to thumbs down any responses the chatbot might give containing “legal, medical, financial advice” or are hateful and abusive.

Raghavan’s memo came after Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed employees, asking them to spend a few hours each week testing the AI chatbot. Google employees reportedly criticized Pichai for a “rushed” and “botched” Bard rollout. The CEO is now giving staffers the chance to “help shape [the chatbot] and contribute” by testing the company’s new product. He also reminded everyone that some of Google’s “most successful products were not first to market” and that they “gained momentum because they solved important user needs and were built on deep technical insights.” 

People have been anticipating Google’s response to ChatGPT ever since the OpenAI chatbot arrived late last year. The Microsoft-backed technology has gained tremendous popularity over the past few months, enough to rattle Alphabet and its investors. Google tried to assuage investors’ concerns during its quarterly earnings call in early February by talking about its own chatbot and by touching on its work developing an AI-powered Search to compete with the next-gen Bing. 

Twitter is loosening its advertising policies to allow cannabis companies to promote their brands on the service. The changes makes Twitter the first major social media platform to welcome cannabis ads within the United States.

“Going forward, Twitter is allowing advertisers to promote brand preference and informational cannabis-related content for CBD, THC, and cannabis-related products and services,” the company announced in a blog post.

While the change will allow companies that sell cannabis products to advertise their businesses, there will still be some restrictions on what can appear in the advertisements. As Axios points out, the ads can’t directly “promote or offer the sale of cannabis” with the exception of certain CBD products. There are also age and location-related restrictions that limit who can be targeted with cannabis-related ads.

The change is the latest way that Twitter has shaken up its rules under Elon Musk’s leadership in order to allow content that was once barred. The policy update also comes at a time when many advertisers have either fled the platform or significantly reduced how much they’re spending. By opening up to cannabis companies, which until now have had extremely limited options to reach people on social media platforms, Twitter has the opportunity to bring in a fresh set of advertisers.

In its announcement, Twitter suggested that cannabis companies could reach a large audience on the platform, noting that cannabis-related conversation “is larger than the conversation around topics such as pets, cooking, and golf, as well as food and beverage categories including fast food, coffee, and liquor.”

Apple may be narrowing down the launch window for its fabled mixed reality headset. Bloombergsources say the headset is now set to premiere at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. The device, possibly called Reality Pro, was unofficially slated to arrive in April but reportedly needed extra development time to address hardware and software issues. The company has already declined to comment, but the hardware might ship later in the year.

The headset is believed to carry a steep price tag, possibly as high as $3,000, but may also include capabilities not found even on alternatives like the Meta Quest Pro. Rumors suggest it could include dual 4K displays and a wide range of cameras that allow advanced tracking and controller-free input. You’d have to wear the battery in an external pack, but you’d also get an M2 processor that outperforms the mobile chips in other stand-alone AR and VR wearables.

The underlying platform, xrOS, is said to include an iOS-style interface that relies on finger pinches and voice commands for interaction. There would be an emphasis on health as well as upgraded versions of familiar experiences, such as full-body avatars during FaceTime calls. You might even have an easy way to create apps using Siri.

This initial model is supposedly aimed at creators and enthusiasts, and a WWDC debut would help developers understand the technology just as it becomes public. However, rumors also suggest Apple is working on a more affordable headset that’s nearer to the Quest Pro’s $1,500 price. That more accessible design might not surface before 2024, but it hints at a long-term strategy to make the company’s mixed reality tech more accessible.

Now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, they’re preparing to grill technology giants over accusations of content censorship. The Wall Street Journal has learned that House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has subpoenaed the CEOs of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft for information on their content moderation methods. The leaders have until March 23rd to provide any communications between them and the federal government’s executive branch on the subject.

Jordan’s panel wants to know “how and to what extent” the federal government allegedly pressured and coordinated with companies to censor content. The requests include details about people responsible for shaping moderation policies as well as those who’ve talked to the executive branch. Like numerous Republican politicians, Jordan has long maintained that major tech companies censor conservative views under the guise of curbing hate speech and misinformation.

The representative notably didn’t subpoena Twitter, which he likely feels is more supportive of right-wing views with Elon Musk at the helm. The social network recently reinstated Donald Trump’s account (still inactive), and has been sharing internal “Twitter Files” that covered the company’s sharing limits on a New York Post story on Hunter Biden as well as the decision to ban Trump following the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol. While right-wing figures have portrayed the disclosure as proof of anti-conservative censorship, critics have argued the documents don’t offer substantially new details, don’t provide evidence of conspiracy and were given only to writers likely to share Musk’s views.

We’ve asked the five companies for comment. Microsoft confirmed the request in a statement to Engadget, noting that it’s providing documents and plans to work in “good faith” with the committee. The firms have repeatedly denied allegations of bias and insist that they’re only trying to remove falsehoods and other harmful material.

Whether or not the House panel can take action is another matter. Attempts to prove an anti-conservative bias have failed so far, with multiplestudies showing no evidence of these leanings. There’s also evidence that platforms like Facebook made exemptions for right-wing content that violated misinformation policies, fearing a backlash if they enforced their rules consistently.

Dead by Daylight features a roster full of memorable killers. If horror icons like Freddy Krueger and Pyramid Head aren’t your thing, you can turn to more original additions like Ji-woon, a K-pop star turned serial killer. The game’s newest killer fits in that latter mold. Adriana Imai, aka The Skull Merchant, is a wealthy tech executive who, when she’s not eliminating competition like any good monopolist, uses the skulls of her past victims to craft aerial drones to hunt her next kill. A bit on the nose? Definitely, but she looks to add something new to a game that has been around since 2016.

The Skull Merchant’s power, Eyes in the Sky, allows her to send up to four drones to scout for the survivors she’s tasked with eliminating. Once Imai finds her targets, she can use a hand claw to eliminate them. Alongside Imai, Dead by Daylight developer Behavior Interactive is adding two new survivors as part of the game’s upcoming “Tools of Torment” update. Thalita and Renato Lyra are siblings who hail from Brazil. Before they had the misfortune of being tossed into the hellscape that is Dead by Daylight’s world, Thalita and Renato owned a kite-flying business that mentored kids in their local community. The two come with teamwork perks that prompt cooperative play.

Tools of Torment won’t introduce a new map, but it will come with a tweak to the game’s existing Shelter Woods arena that adds The Skull Merchant’s hunting ground. You can play the update starting on March 7th when it arrives on PC and consoles.

American politicians may not be the only government figures concerned about Amazon’s proposed acquisition of iRobot. The Financial Timessources claim European Union regulators are grilling Amazon ahead of a “likely” official investigation. The European Commission has sent questions about potential privacy issues, including Roomba robot vacuums’ ability to capture imagery. Officials are worried Amazon might combine the pictures with Alexa data to gain a “competitive advantage,” according to one source.

MIT Technology Review recently discovered that photos taken by development versions of Roomba J7 vacuums had reached private Discord and Facebook groups. At the time, iRobot said the technology never made it to production models, was clearly labeled for testers and included a warning to remove “sensitive” items from the robovac’s view. The findings led iRobot to cut ties with Scale AI, a startup that relies on contractors to label data for AI training — it appeared that people working on this project leaked the pictures.

Amazon is supposedly poised to counter a possible investigation by noting that production Roombas only have rudimentary home mapping and aren’t likely to create privacy issues. We’ve asked the European Commission for comment. In a statement to Engadget, Amazon said it was “working cooperatively” with regulators.

A formal investigation is weeks away at best, the claimed insiders say. However, Amazon may want to address any initial worries quickly. The EU would start with a limited probe, but would conduct a more substantial “phase 2” investigation if Amazon couldn’t satisfy regulators.

The potential challenge comes just as the EU is vowing to get tougher against Big Tech companies like Amazon when investigating alleged privacy abuses. Civil liberty advocates have accused the EU of being too lenient and slow when dealing with these violations. An investigation of the iRobot deal wouldn’t be directly linked to this crackdown, but would make clear that privacy is a major focus for merger reviews.

Great news everyone, we’re pivoting to chatbots! Little did OpenAI realize when it released ChatGPT last November that the advanced LLM (large language model) designed to uncannily mimic human writing would become the fastest growing app to date with more than 100 million users signing up over the past three months. Its success — helped along by a $10 billion, multi-year investment from Microsoft — largely caught the company’s competition flat-footed, in turn spurring a frenetic and frantic response from Google, Baidu and Alibaba. But as these enhanced search engines come online in the coming days, the ways and whys of how we search are sure to evolve alongside them.

“I’m pretty excited about the technology. You know, we’ve been building NLP systems for a while and we’ve been looking every year at incremental growth,” Dr. Sameer Singh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), told Engadget. “For the public, it seems like suddenly out of the blue, that’s where we are. I’ve seen things getting better over the years and it’s good for all of this stuff to be available everywhere and for people to be using it.”

As to the recent public success of large language models, “I think it’s partly that technology has gotten to a place where it’s not completely embarrassing to put the output of these models in front of people — and it does look really good most of the time,” Singh continued. “I think that that’s good enough.”

“I think it has less to do with technology but more to do with the public perception,” he continued. “If GPT hadn’t been released publicly… Once something like that is out there and it’s really resonating with so many people, the usage is off the charts.”

Search providers have big, big ideas for how the artificial intelligence-enhanced web crawlers and search engines might work and damned if they aren’t going to break stuff and move fast to get there. Microsoft envisions its Bing AI to serve as the user’s “copilot” in their web browsing, following them from page to page answering questions and even writing social media posts on their behalf.

This is a fundamental change from the process we use today. Depending on the complexity of the question users may have to visit multiple websites, then sift through that collected information and stitch it together into a cohesive idea before evaluating it.

“That’s more work than having a model that hopefully has read these pages already and can synthesize this into something that doesn’t currently exist on the web,” Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at NYU Tandon, told Engadget. “The information is still out there. It’s still verifiable, and hopefully correct. But it’s not all in place.”

For its part, Google’s vision of the AI-powered future has users hanging around its search page rather than clicking through to destination sites. Information relevant to the user’s query would be collected from the web, stitched together by the language model, then regurgitated as an answer with reference to the originating website displayed as footnotes.

This all sounds great, and was all going great, right up to the very first opportunity for something to go wrong. When it did. In its inaugural Twitter ad — less than 24 hours after debuting — Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, confidently declared, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.” You will be shocked to learn that the James Webb Space Telescope did not, in fact, discover the first exoplanet in history. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope holds that honor from 2004. Bard just sorta made it up. Hallucinated it out of the digital ether.

Of course this isn’t the first time that we’ve been lied to by machines. Search has always been a bit of a crapshoot, ever since the early days of Lycos and Altavista. “When search was released, we thought it was ‘good enough’ though it wasn’t perfect,” Singh recalled. “It would give all kinds of results. Over time, those have improved a lot. We played with it, and we realized when we should trust it and when we shouldn’t — when we should go to the second page of results, and when we shouldn’t.”

The subsequent generation of voice AI assistants evolved through the same base issues that their text-based predecessors did. “When Siri and Google Assistant and all of these came out and Alexa,” Singh said, “they were not the assistants that they were being sold to us as.”

The performance of today’s LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT, are likely to improve along similar paths through their public use, as well as through further specialization into specific technical and knowledge-based roles such as medicine, business analysis and law. “I think there are definitely reasons it becomes much better once you start specializing it. I don’t think Google and Microsoft specifically are going to be specializing it too much — their market is as general as possible,” Singh noted.

In many ways, what Google and Bing are offering by interposing their services in front of the wider internet — much as AOL did with the America Online service in the ‘90s — is a logical conclusion to the challenges facing today’s internet users.

“Nobody’s doing the search as the end goal. We are seeking some information, eventually to act on that information,” Singh argues. “If we think about that as the role of search, and not just search in the literal sense of literally searching for something, you can imagine something that actually acts on top of search results can be very useful.”

Singh characterizes this centralization of power as, “a very valid concern. Simply put, if you have these chat capabilities, you are much less inclined to actually go to the websites where this information resides,” he said.

It’s bad enough that chatbots have a habit of making broad intellectual leaps in their summarizations, but the practice may also “incentivize users not go to the website, not read the whole source, to just get the version that the chat interface gives you and sort of start relying on it more and more,” Singh warned.

In this, Singh and Dolan-Gavitt agree. “If you’re cannibalizing from the visits that a site would have gotten, and are no longer directing people there, but using the same information, there’s an argument that these sites won’t have much incentive to keep posting new content.” Dolan-Gavitt told Engadget. “On the other hand the need for clicks also is one of the reasons we get lots of spam and is one of the reasons why search has sort of become less useful recently. I think [the shortcomings of search are] a big part of why people are responding more positively to these chatbot products.”

That demand, combined with a nascent marketplace, is resulting in a scramble among the industry’s major players to get their products out yesterday, ready or not, underwhelming or not. That rush for market share is decidedly hazardous for consumers. Microsoft’s previous foray into AI chatbots, 2014’s Taye, ended poorly (to put it without the white hoods and goose stepping). Today, Redditors are already jailbreaking OpenAI to generate racist content. These are two of the more innocuous challenges we will face as LLMs expand in use but even they have proven difficult to stamp out in part, because they require coordination amongst an industry of viscous competitors.

“The kinds of things that I tend to worry about are, on the software side, whether this puts malicious capabilities into more hands, makes it easier for people to write malware and viruses,” Dolan-Gavitt said. “This is not as extreme as things like misinformation but certainly, I think it’ll make it a lot easier for people to make spam.”

“A lot of the thinking around safety so far has been predicated on this idea that there would be just a couple kinds of central companies that, if you could get them all to agree, we could have some safety standards.” Dolan-Gavitt continued. “I think the more competition there is, the more you get this open environment where you can download an unrestricted model, set it up on your server and have it generate whatever you want. The kinds of approaches that relied on this more centralized model will start to fall apart.”

Microsoft has begun rolling out a new update for Xbox consoles. Among the more notable features the February release adds is the “carbon aware” functionality the company began testing last month. When your Xbox has access to the internet, you can set it to schedule game, app and operating system updates based on local carbon intensity data. According to Microsoft, doing so may lead to your console producing fewer carbon emissions because it’s programmed to download files when more renewable energy is likely available. It may also save you money on your electricity bill.

Additionally, all Xbox users now have access to the company’s new “Shutdown (energy saving)” option. If you don’t mind longer startup times and missing out on the Xbox’s remote wake functionality, Microsoft says the feature can cut your console’s power consumption by up to 20 times compared to if you were to leave it in sleep mode. “For every two consoles that switch to Shutdown (energy saving) for one year, we will save the equivalent amount of carbon removed by one tree planted and grown for a decade,” says Microsoft.

Separately, the February update adds a feature that allows you to prevent games from changing the background of your Xbox’s home screen. You can now set a solid color of your choice. You can do so by navigating to the Personalization menu within the Settings app. Microsoft has also partnered with Google to allow Xbox owners to use the company’s Home app as a touch remote for their console. “Now, when you add your Xbox console to your Google Home app, you’ll be able to easily turn your console on and off, navigate on-screen, control media playback and more,” Microsoft notes. Once you have access to the February update, open the Google Home app on your phone and pull down on the interface to refresh the list of available devices. Then tap on your Xbox to get started.

Amid ongoing unionization efforts at the company, Activision will soon require Blizzard employees to spend the majority of their week working out of the company’s offices. An Activision spokesperson told Engadget employees with the company’s publishing unit will be required to work from the office at least three days per week starting April 10th. On July 10th, the same policy goes into effect for Blizzard Entertainment employees. At the company’s King mobile division, team leaders can set the office schedule for their units.   

“Activision Blizzard has been returning teams to the office over the past year, and on February 13th, we updated our future-of-work plan,” the spokesperson said. “In close partnership with each leadership team, we customize a plan based on what’s best for our business and our teams. We look forward to the increased real-time, in-person collaboration and opportunities this change will foster.”

Information on the company’s return-to-office plan was first shared earlier this week by @LeastMyHairIsOk, a Twitter user who says they work at Blizzard’s customer support department (via Game Developer). In a Twitter thread, they said the “majority” of Activision Blizzard employees “have no interest” in returning to the office. The worker went on to predict Activision will see a workforce drain if it moves forward with the plan. On top of ongoing worries about COVID-19, @LeastMyHairIsOk alleges the company has failed to address employee concerns about the cost of living in many of the cities where Activision has offices and studios. Specifically, they claim leadership has repeatedly denied requests from “lower earning departments” to include yearly cost-of-living adjustments as part of salary negotiations. “Our most recent meetings from last month suggest that there are no plans for this to change this year,” they added.

Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to Engadget’s questions about its salary policies.

Details on Activision’s return to office plan come amid allegations of union-busting. In January, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) withdrew a petition for a union election at Proletariat, a Blizzard support studio that’s currently working on World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. A CWA spokesperson accused studio head Seth Sivak of holding captive audience meetings that allegedly “demoralized and disempowered” pro-union workers enough that they felt the vote wouldn’t be fair.

Update 1:23PM ET: Added more timely information about King’s return to office arrangement.