Tag: technology

Call of Duty to snoop on players for ‘hate speech’

Games publisher Activision has announced that it will use artificial intelligence to listen in on the voice chat of ‘Call of Duty’ players and punish anyone using “hate speech” or “discriminatory language.” 

The feature was rolled out on Wednesday for US players of Call Of Duty’s ‘Modern Warfare II’ and ‘Warzone’ titles, and will be launched globally with ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’ on November 10.

In a statement on Wednesday, Activision said that it will use a machine learning tool to “identify in real-time and enforce against toxic speech,” including “hate speech, discriminatory language, harassment and more.” 

Activision’s announcement made no distinction between private chat among teammates and public chat audible to all players in a server. Presumably, both will be subject to the same monitoring.

Call Of Duty’s code of conduct bans insults based on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, culture, faith, and country of origin. Players deemed to have breached this code of conduct will be punished with temporary voice chat restrictions, temporary account bans, or permanent bans for repeat offenders, Activision said.

Around 90 million gamers worldwide play Call of Duty every month. At present, Activision depends on reports from other players and text chat monitoring to weed out allegedly “toxic” conduct. According to the developer, around one million accounts have been penalized since the launch of ‘Modern Warfare II’ last October.

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Right to repair’s unlikely new adversary: Scientologists

The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don’t think product repairability should be government-mandated, it has been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple’s place is a new entity aiming to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.

Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc. The company, its website and letterhead say, represents the “literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology. Author Services, according to records archived via the WayBackMachine, is owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology, which describes itself as a church within Scientology.

The letter addresses Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which “makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works.” The Scientology group’s letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.

Author Services’ letter argues that while that exemption works for the “many consumer devices” that include “unilateral ‘shrink-wrap’ licenses governing the terms of use of the software,” they shouldn’t apply to devices that “can only be purchased and used by someone who possess [sic] particular qualifications or has been specifically trained in the use of the device.” With those products, the license agreement is “negotiated and agreed to in advance” of purchase and may include restrictions that are critical to “safe and proper” device usage.

The Scientology-tied group seeks an amendment to the exemption so that it doesn’t apply to software-powered devices that can only be purchased by someone with particular qualifications or training or that use software “governed by a license agreement negotiated and executed” before purchase.

Before we get into what horse the Church of Scientology could have in the right-to-repair race, let’s consider whether its amendment is extreme.

“It’s a totally unreasonable proposal,” Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability at iFixit, told Ars Technica. “I can imagine manufacturers using the presence of a ‘quick start’ guide for a product as evidence that their consumers are ‘specially trained in use of the device’ and thus denying broad access to repair.”

She noted that such an amendment would render the proposed exemptions for commercial and industrial equipment from right-to-repair activists “toothless.”

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Injured person reportedly dies after Cruise cars block first responders

On Aug. 14, two stalled Cruise vehicles delayed an ambulance from leaving the scene of a crash in which a driver had hit a pedestrian with their car, according to reports from the San Francisco Fire Department. The pedestrian later died of their injuries, which first responders linked to the delay in getting them to the hospital. 

“The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable,” one emergency responder wrote in a report. Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo countered that one of the cars cleared the scene and that traffic to the right of it remained unblocked. “The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,” she wrote in a statement to SFGATE. 

According to several reports written by first responders, first obtained by Forbes, emergency personnel arrived at Seventh Street and Harrison in SoMa and began treating a “critically injured” pedestrian who had been struck by a car. The patient was quickly loaded into an ambulance, but the ambulance driver was unable to immediately leave the scene, according to two reports written by members of the ambulance team.

Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or locate an officer who could move the police car. 

Collectively, these interferences “contributed to a poor patient outcome, delaying the definitive care required in severe trauma cases,” according to one of the reports. The patient reportedly died of their injuries approximately 30 minutes after arriving at San Francisco General Hospital.

SFFD representatives did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment. 

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U.S. SPY AGENCY DREAMS OF SURVEILLANCE UNDERWEAR IT’S CALLING “SMART EPANTS”

THE FUTURE OF wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. 

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

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Human-Pig Hybrid Created in the Lab

In a remarkable—if likely controversial—feat, scientists announced that they have created the first successful human-animal hybrids. The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, survive, and even grow inside a host animal, in this case, pigs.

This biomedical advance has long been a dream and a quandary for scientists hoping to address a critical shortage of donor organs.

What if, rather than relying on a generous donor, you could grow a custom organ inside an animal instead?

That’s now one step closer to reality, an international team of researchers led by the Salk Institute reports in the journal Cell. The team created what’s known scientifically as a chimera: an organism that contains cells from two different species.

In the past, human-animal chimeras have been beyond reach. Such experiments are currently ineligible for public funding in the United States (so far, the Salk team has relied on private donors for the chimera project). Public opinion, too, has hampered the creation of organisms that are part human, part animal.

But for lead study author Jun Wu of the Salk Institute, we need only look to mythical chimeras—like the human-bird hybrids we know as angels—for a different perspective.

“In ancient civilisations, chimeras were associated with God,” he says, and our ancestors thought “the chimeric form can guard humans.” In a sense, that’s what the team hopes human-animal hybrids will one day do.

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Scientists Create New Material Five Times Lighter and Four Times Stronger Than Steel

Materials that are both strong and lightweight can improve everything from cars to airplanes to medical equipment. Now, researchers have created an extraordinarily strong material with very low density–using two unlikely building blocks: DNA and glass.

“For the given density, our material is the strongest known,” according to Seok-Woo Lee of the University of Connecticut, who partnered with colleagues from Columbia University and Brookhaven National Lab.

“I am a big fan of Iron Man movies,” mused nanomaterials scientist Oleg Gang. “I have always wondered how to create a better armor for Iron Man. It must be very light for him to fly faster. It must be very strong to protect him from enemies’ attacks.

“Our new material is five times lighter but four times stronger than steel.”

Some metals, such as titanium, are stronger and lighter than iron. Certain alloys are even stronger—allowing for lightweight body armor, better medical devices, and safer, faster cars and airplanes. Metallurgical techniques have reached a limit in recent years, until nano materials unleashed creative opportunities.

The colleagues reported in Cell Reports Physical Science that by building a structure out of DNA and then coating it with glass, they have created a very strong material with very low density. Glass might seem a surprising choice, as it shatters easily. However, glass usually shatters because of a flaw – such as a crack, scratch, or missing atoms – in its structure. A flawless cubic centimeter of glass can withstand 10 tons of pressure, more than three times the pressure that imploded the Oceangate Titan submersible near the Titanic this summer.

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New York Police to Use Drones to Monitor Backyard Labor Day Parties

New York police will use drones to monitor backyard Labor Day parties this weekend.

Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner made the announcement during a security briefing on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival.

Daughtry’s plan to use police drones to monitor backyard barbecues got immediate backlash from civil liberties groups.

Why a Veteran-Owned Freeze-Dried Beef Company Unabashedly Embraces an America First Worldview

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics, according to AP. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

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Bizarre AI app stirs controversy as it lets you text ‘Jesus and Satan’

Artificial intelligence has brought along a wide range of weird and wonderful creations since its sudden growth in popularity, with some proving more useful than others as the technology develops. 

The AI app Text With Jesus was launched in July by Catloaf Sofware, which according to developers is for: “’devoted Christians seeking a deeper connection with the Bible’s most iconic figures.”

Using the use of ChatGPT’s AI technology, users are reportedly able to interact with chatbots that represent biblical characters to provide an instant messaging service that uses bible studies to reference from.

Most notable figures include Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and even more shockingly the devil himself, Satan.

After the AI application was released to the public, the bizarre service has since gone viral.

Thousands of people have downloaded the app to their phones, whereby due to its sensitive religious theme, has also naturally divided opinion.

Most of the reviews for the app are positive, with a 4.2 score out of a possible 5, overall rating according to Apple.

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Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype — Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It

Hackers are able to grab a target’s IP address, potentially revealing their general physical location, by simply sending a link over the Skype mobile app. The target does not need to click the link or otherwise interact with the hacker beyond opening the message, according to a security researcher who demonstrated the issue and successfully discovered my IP address by using it.

Yossi, the independent security researcher who uncovered the vulnerability, reported the issue to Microsoft earlier this month, according to Yossi and a cache of emails and bug reports he shared with 404 Media. In those emails Microsoft said the issue does not require immediate servicing, and gave no indication that it plans to fix the security hole. Only after 404 Media contacted Microsoft for comment did the company say it would patch the issue in an upcoming update.

The attack could pose a serious risk to activists, political dissidents, journalists, those targeted by cybercriminals, and many more people. At minimum, an IP address can show what area of a city someone is in. An IP address can be even more revealing in a less densely populated area, because there are fewer people who could be associated with it.

“I think just about anybody could be harmed by this,” Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist at activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said when I explained the issue to him. Quintin said the major concern was “finding people’s location for physical escalations, and finding people’s IP address for digital escalations.”

To verify that the vulnerability has the impact that Yossi described, I asked him to test it out on me. To start, Yossi sent me a link via Skype text chat to google.com. The link was to the real Google site, and not an imposter.

I then opened Skype on an iPad and viewed the chat message. I didn’t even click the link. But very soon after, Yossi pasted my IP address into the chat. It was correct.

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Microsoft Files For a Face-Tracking Patent

A patent filed in the US shows that Microsoft is working on technology that would allow it to track a person’s face in a way so comprehensive that the device powered by the tech could be referred to as a “face reader.”

And it could be used for gaming, but also for tracking remote employees. And who knows what else in between.

Microsoft says it needs the patent approved to develop mixed reality headsets that would be cheaper yet better at “understanding” expressions on human faces.

The patent filing doesn’t go into many considerations other than those of a purely technical nature, and this in a nutshell is how the under-development technology works.

Currently, converters are used that are not only bulkier to render high resolution tracking but also cost more to manufacture.

Now Microsoft wants to replace this method of tracking with elements directly embedded, circumventing the need for converters, and also what’s referred to as processing circuit area.

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