An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: With only 30 minutes of audio, companies can now create a digital clone of your voice and make it say words you never said. Using machine learning, voice AI companies like VocaliD can create synthetic voices from a person's recorded speech -- adopting unique qualities like speaking rhythm, pronunciation of consonants and vowels, and intonation. For tech companies, the ability to generate any sentence with a realistic-sounding human voice is an exciting, cost-saving frontier. But for the voice actors whose recordings form the foundation of text-to-speech (TTS) voices, this technology threatens to disrupt their livelihoods, raising questions about fair compensation and human agency in the age of AI. At the center of this reckoning is voice actress Bev Standing, who is suing TikTok after alleging the company used her voice for its text-to-speech feature without compensation or consent. This is not the first case like this; voice actress Susan Bennett discovered that audio she recorded for another company was repurposed to be the voice of Siri after Apple launched the feature in 2011. She was paid for the initial recording session but not for being Siri. Rallying behind Standing, voice actors donated to a GoFundMe that has raised nearly $7,000 towards her legal expenses and posted TikTok videos under the #StandingWithBev hashtag warning users about the feature. Standing's supporters say the TikTok lawsuit is not just about Standing's voice -- it's about the future of an entire industry attempting to adapt to new advancements in the field of machine learning. Standing's case materializes some performers' worst fears about the control this technology gives companies over their voices. Her lawsuit claims TikTok did not pay or notify her to use her likeness for its text-to-speech feature, and that some videos using it voiced "foul and offensive language" causing "irreparable harm" to her reputation. Brands advertising on TikTok also had the text-to-speech voice at their disposal, meaning her voice could be used for explicitly commercial purposes. [...] Laws protecting individuals from unauthorized clones of their voices are also in their infancy. Standing's lawsuit invokes her right of publicity, which grants individuals the right to control commercial uses of their likeness, including their voice. In November 2020, New York became the first state to apply this right to digital replicas after years of advocacy from SAG-AFTRA, a performers' union. "We look to make sure that state rights of publicity are as strong as they can be, that any limitations on people being able to protect their image and voice are very narrowly drawn on first amendment lines," Jeffrey Bennett, a general counsel for SAG-AFTRA, told Motherboard. "We look at this as a potentially great right of publicity case for this voice professional whose voice is being used in a commercial manner without her consent."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: For years YouTube's video-recommending algorithm has stood accused of fuelling a grab bag of societal ills by feeding users an AI-amplified diet of hate speech, political extremism and/or conspiracy junk/disinformation for the profiteering motive of trying to keep billions of eyeballs stuck to its ad inventory. And while YouTube's tech giant parent Google has, sporadically, responded to negative publicity flaring up around the algorithm's antisocial recommendations -- announcing a few policy tweaks or limiting/purging the odd hateful account -- it's not clear how far the platform's penchant for promoting horribly unhealthy clickbait has actually been rebooted. The suspicion remains nowhere near far enough. New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up, suggesting YouTube's AI continues to puff up piles of "bottom-feeding"/low-grade/divisive/disinforming content -- stuff that tries to grab eyeballs by triggering people's sense of outrage, sewing division/polarization or spreading baseless/harmful disinformation -- which in turn implies that YouTube's problem with recommending terrible stuff is indeed systemic; a side effect of the platform's rapacious appetite to harvest views to serve ads. That YouTube's AI is still -- per Mozilla's study -- behaving so badly also suggests Google has been pretty successful at fuzzing criticism with superficial claims of reform. The mainstay of its deflective success here is likely the primary protection mechanism of keeping the recommender engine's algorithmic workings (and associated data) hidden from public view and external oversight -- via the convenient shield of "commercial secrecy." But regulation that could help crack open proprietary AI blackboxes is now on the cards -- at least in Europe.

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TikTok is expanding into job recruitment. From a report: As of today, the company has launched a pilot program that allows people in the US to apply for entry, associate and senior level positions by tagging videos they upload to the platform using the #TikTokResumes hashtag. You can see a list of the approximately three dozen companies that are taking part in the pilot, as well as the jobs they're hiring for, by visiting TikTok's dedicated resumes website. Some of the more notable brands taking part include Shopify, Target and the Detroit Pistons. Applicants have until July 31st to apply for the first set of jobs posted on the platform. In expanding in this way, the company says it "believes there's an opportunity to bring more value to people's experience with TikTok by enhancing the utility of the platform as a channel for recruitment."

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It's important to know what you don't know.

A cyber-espionage group has been observed targeting Indian targets with government and military-related lures in a broad campaign to infect victims with malware. From a report: Tracked under the name of SideCopy, this cyber-espionage group has been active since 2019, according to Seqrite, Quick Heal's threat intelligence team, which first documented its spear-phishing campaigns last September. But in a report published today, Cisco Talos, one of the networking giant's cybersecurity divisions, said the group did not retreat or stop its operations after having its attacks and tooling exposed last year.

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NASA's next big space telescope just took a big step forward toward its planned launch this fall. From a report: The $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope mission has passed a key launch review, keeping it on track to lift off atop an Ariane 5 rocket before the end of the year, European Space Agency (ESA) officials announced last week. "This major milestone, carried out with Arianespace, the Webb launch service provider, confirms that Ariane 5, the Webb spacecraft and the flight plan are set for launch," ESA officials wrote in a July 1 update. "It also specifically provides the final confirmation that all aspects of the launch vehicle and spacecraft are fully compatible." While Webb is primarily a NASA mission, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are important partners. The CSA is providing the telescope's guidance sensor and one of its scientific instruments. ESA is contributing some science gear to the mission as well and is also providing launch services, procuring the Ariane 5 heavy lifter to get Webb off the ground. The launch will take place from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Mission teams are working toward a launch readiness date of Oct. 31, but liftoff is not expected to actually take place on Halloween. "The precise launch date following 31 October depends on the spaceport's launch schedule and will be finalized closer to the launch readiness date," ESA officials wrote in the same statement.

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About Trump's claim that Twitter and Facebook are obligated by the First Amendment, I'm not sure that's wrong. If a social network is so large that they effectively control all speech in a channel, if there's no way around them, different rules should apply. On the other hand, speech, even as guaranteed by the government, is not an absolute. The Constitution is not a suicide pact, President Lincoln said.

After all we've been through, Covid, the Insurrection, the fires and hurricanes, it amazes me how little imagination has crept into American political discourse.

The University of Oxford this week started vaccinations of a novel HIV vaccine candidate as part of a Phase I clinical trial in the UK. From a report: The goal of the trial, known as HIV-CORE 0052, is to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of the HIVconsvX vaccine -- a mosaic vaccine targeting a broad range of HIV-1 variants, making it potentially applicable for HIV strains in any geographical region. Thirteen healthy, HIV-negative adults, aged 18-65 and who are considered not to be at high risk of infection, will initially receive one dose of the vaccine followed by a further booster dose at four weeks. The trial is part of the European Aids Vaccine Initiative (EAVI2020), an internationally collaborative research project funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 health programme for research and innovation. Professor Tomas Hanke, Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, and lead researcher on the trial, said: 'An effective HIV vaccine has been elusive for 40 years. This trial is the first in a series of evaluations of this novel vaccine strategy in both HIV-negative individuals for prevention and in people living with HIV for cure.' While most HIV vaccine candidates work by inducing antibodies generated by B-cells, HIVconsvX induces the immune system's potent, pathogen obliterating T cells, targeting them to highly conserved and therefore vulnerable regions of HIV -- an "Achilles heel" common to most HIV variants.

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Grubhub and Russian self-driving startup Yandex are teaming up to use robots to deliver food on US college campuses. It represents the latest deal that envisions hundreds of six-wheeled self-driving robots that essentially act as roving lunchboxes in cities across the country. From a report: The robot-powered delivery service won't kick off until this fall when college students return to campus. Yandex, which is often described as Russia's Google, will operate the robots, as well as handle the entire food delivery process. Grubhub, which has partnerships with over 250 college campuses in the US, will serve as the platform for the delivery transactions. Grubhub cited the cost savings it will get by eliminating the delivery worker from the equation as a potential benefit from the deal with Yandex -- though neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership. "We're excited to offer these cost-effective, scalable and quick food ordering and delivery capabilities to colleges and universities across the country that are looking to adapt to students' unique dining needs," said Brian Madigan, vice president of corporate and campus partners at Grubhub, in a statement. Yandex says that its delivery robots can navigate pavement, pedestrian areas and crosswalks, and reach campus areas not accessible by car. "Such functionality enables the robots to handle delivery tasks traditionally performed by people and provides efficient last-mile logistics automation," the company says.

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If you use an iPhone or Android phone, chances are the majority of your most-used apps were made by Apple and Google. From a report: That's the takeaway from a new Comscore study that ranks the popularity of preinstalled iOS and Android apps, such as Apple's Messages, alongside apps made by other developers. The results show that the majority of apps people use on their phones in the US come preinstalled by either Apple or Google. The first-of-its-kind report was commissioned by Facebook, one of Apple's loudest critics, and shared exclusively with The Verge. Preinstalled services dominate when it comes to basics like weather, photos, and clocks, according to the report, suggesting these categories will be difficult for other apps to compete in. Defaults don't win out exclusively, though: Apple Maps and Music don't appear on the iOS list at all, and Gmail makes the iOS list several entries below Apple Mail. The timing, as Facebook likely intentioned, is apt: Apple and Google are increasingly under scrutiny for how they favor their own services over competitors like Spotify. US lawmakers are currently reviewing a new set of bills designed to curb the power of Big Tech, including legislation that could potentially bar Apple and Google from giving their services the upper hand against rivals. The pushback stems from how Apple and Google bundle their apps and services with their mobile operating systems in ways that some of their competitors think is unfair. The criticism is harsher against Apple, given that it more tightly controls the apps that come preinstalled on the iPhone and doesn't allow developers to circumvent its App Store.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As we carefully map the stars of our Milky Way, we're able to identify features that tell us of its history. These include local details, such as the stars that have passed through an area from which something would be able to detect Earth. And it includes far larger structures, like the trails of stars left behind by smaller galaxies that have merged with our own. But one feature we've discovered has been a bit confusing: trails of stars that are too small and thin to have come from a galaxy collision. There are dozens of them that we've not identified a source for. Their size suggests they came from a globular cluster, but there's no obvious mechanism for these clusters to eject stars at a rate sufficient to generate this sort of stream. Now, a team of researchers has suggested a not-so-obvious mechanism: Over time, clusters may become dominated by black holes that eject all the stars. Globular clusters are dense groups of stars that orbit the Milky Way together. They're held in association by their mutual gravity. Complex interactions will inevitably eject some of the stars, but not at an appreciable rate, which makes the clusters extremely long-lived. The researchers started their work, however, by looking at an unusual globular cluster called Palomar 5. It has both extended tails of lost stars, and its total mass is relatively small, making it diffuse compared to other clusters we've studied. The lower density makes it easier for Palomar 5 to lose stars, but it could also have been caused by past star loss, creating a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. So, the researchers decided to model globular cluster evolution and try to find a model that could produce something that looks like Palomar 5. The researchers created a model that takes a cluster of stars and models their gravitational interactions with each other and the Milky Way as they orbit the galactic center. Thanks to some help from a cluster of GPUs and the right software, they were able to run these simulations for billions of years. By changing the parameters, they could find which factors were associated with clusters that ended up looking like Palomar 5.

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Chime, a "neobank" serving millions, is racking up complaints from users who can't access their cash. The company says it's cracking down on an "extraordinary surge" in fraudulent deposits. That's little consolation to customers caught in the fray. ProPublica: Chime, which provides app-based banking services to an estimated 12 million customers, has according to experts been generating a high rate of complaints, with 920 filed at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since April 15, 2020. "For a company that most people have never heard of, I think that's a lot of complaints," said Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center. Many customers have told the CFPB that they can't access their money or accounts, and that, among other things, Chime is slow to resolve problems. Of the 920 complaints filed about Chime, 197 were tagged as involving a "closed account." The CFPB's complaints are labeled inconsistently, and many of the other 723 also detail problems involving accounts that were closed against customers' will. By comparison, Wells Fargo, a bank with six times as many customers and a lengthy recent history of misbehavior in its consumer bank, has 317 CFPB complaints tagged for closed accounts over the same time period. Marcus, the new online bank created by Goldman Sachs, with 4 million customers, has generated seven such complaints. Customers have also filed 4,439 complaints against Chime at the Better Business Bureau, compared to 3,281 for Wells Fargo. Meanwhile, several Facebook groups have sprung up with names like "Chime Bank has FAILED" and "Chime Thieves." They've attracted some 700 members combined. One group has more than 100 posts and comments, almost all of them saying some version of the same thing. "Chime stole my entire unemployment backpay," reads one typical post. Another says, "I'm a single mom of 4 kids and they stolen $1400 from me and refuse to give it back and now we are about to be evicted." Chime doesn't look much better on Google, where, according to the site's "People Also Ask" feature, two of the questions most often posed about Chime are "Is Chime bank a real bank?" and, at various points in recent weeks, "Is Chime a ripoff?" or "Does Chime steal your money?"

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Former President Donald Trump, who has complained about censorship by social media giants, plans to announce class action lawsuits today against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Axios reported Wednesday. From the report: It's the latest escalation in Trump's yearslong battle with Twitter and Facebook over free speech and censorship. Trump is completely banned from Twitter and is banned from Facebook for another two years. Trump is scheduled to make an announcement at a press conference today at 11 am. Trump's legal effort is supported by the America First Policy Institute, a non-profit focused on perpetuating Trump's policies. The group's president and CEO and board chair, former Trump officials Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins, will accompany him during the announcement. Class action lawsuits would enable him to sue the two tech CEOs on behalf of a broader group of people that he argues have been censored by biased policies. To date, Trump and other conservative critics have not presented any substantial evidence that either platform is biased against conservatives in its policies or implementation of them.

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I have made dreams of mine come true several times before, so I know it can happen. We're almost there with outliners. The web was designed to be organized by outliners. Very few people know this, but the ones who do, are very excited. I'm one of them. ;-)