An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You may be disappointed if you go looking for Google's open Gemma AI model in AI Studio today. Google announced late on Friday that it was pulling Gemma from the platform, but it was vague about the reasoning. The abrupt change appears to be tied to a letter from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who claims the Gemma model generated false accusations of sexual misconduct against her. Blackburn published her letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday, just hours before the company announced the change to Gemma availability. She demanded Google explain how the model could fail in this way, tying the situation to ongoing hearings that accuse Google and others of creating bots that defame conservatives. At the hearing, Google's Markham Erickson explained that AI hallucinations are a widespread and known issue in generative AI, and Google does the best it can to mitigate the impact of such mistakes. Although no AI firm has managed to eliminate hallucinations, Google's Gemini for Home has been particularly hallucination-happy in our testing. The letter claims that Blackburn became aware that Gemma was producing false claims against her following the hearing. When asked, "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?" Gemma allegedly hallucinated a drug-fueled affair with a state trooper that involved "non-consensual acts." Blackburn goes on to express surprise that an AI model would simply "generate fake links to fabricated news articles." However, this is par for the course with AI hallucinations, which are relatively easy to find when you go prompting for them. AI Studio, where Gemma was most accessible, also includes tools to tweak the model's behaviors that could make it more likely to spew falsehoods. Someone asked a leading question of Gemma, and it took the bait.

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A long-simmering battle over who controls credit scoring in America has erupted into open warfare. Fair Isaac, whose FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., announced it will double the price of its mortgage credit score to $10 next year. The company also said it will bypass the three credit-reporting firms that have supplied the data feeding into its algorithm for decades. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion created VantageScore in 2006 as an alternative to FICO and collectively own the scoring system. The move came months after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would allow lenders to use VantageScore for mortgage approvals. The three credit-reporting firms responded by offering VantageScore free for many loans. Fair Isaac had charged a few cents per score for decades before chief executive Will Lansing began raising prices several years ago. Revenue from selling credit scores reached $920 million in fiscal 2024, nearly five times what it was a decade earlier.

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Apple is paying Google to create a custom Gemini-based model that will run on the company's private cloud servers and power the next version of Siri, according to Bloomberg. The decision marks a departure from Apple's tradition of building core technologies in-house. The arrangement follows a competition Apple held this year between Anthropic and Google, the report said. Anthropic offered a superior model, but Google made more financial sense because of the tech giants' existing search relationship. Neither company is expected to discuss the partnership publicly, the report added. The new Siri will introduce AI-powered web search and other features users have come to expect from voice assistants. The custom model will not flood Siri with Google services or Gemini features already available on Android devices. Instead, it will provide the underlying AI capabilities through an Apple user interface. The company is betting heavily on the revamped Siri to undo years of brand damage.

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The Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth webpage last month and received congratulations from San Francisco, which declared October 22 "Internet Archive Day." Senator Alex Padilla designated the nonprofit a federal depository library. The organization currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. But these victories arrived after years of bruising copyright battles that forced the removal of more than 500,000 books from the Archive's Open Library. "We survived, but it wiped out the Library," founder Brewster Kahle told ArsTechnica. In 2024, the Archive lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over its e-book lending model. Damages could have topped $400 million before publishers announced a confidential settlement. Last month, the organization settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. That settlement was also confidential. In both cases, the Archive's experts challenged publishers' estimates as massively inflated. Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a way for Wikipedia to link to book scans and help researchers reference e-books. The Archive wanted to deepen Wikipedia's authority as a research tool by surfacing information often buried in books. "That's what they really succeeded at -- to make sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books," Kahle said of the publishers. He thinks "the world became stupider" when the Open Library was gutted. The Archive is now expanding Democracy's Library, a free online compendium of government research and publications that will be linked in Wikipedia articles.

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Captchas have largely vanished from the web in 2025, replaced by invisible tracking systems that analyze user behavior rather than asking people to decipher distorted text or identify traffic lights in image grids. Google launched reCaptcha v3 in 2018 to generate risk scores based on behavioral signals during site interactions, making bot-blocking technology "completely invisible" for most users, according to Tim Knudsen, a director of product management at Google Cloud. Cloudflare followed in 2022 by releasing Turnstile, another invisible alternative that sometimes appears as a simple checkbox but actually gathers data from devices and software to determine if users are human. Both companies distribute their security tools for free to collect training data, and Cloudflare now sees 20% of all HTTP requests across the internet. The rare challenges that do surface have become increasingly bizarre, ranging from requests to identify dogs and ducks wearing various hats to sliding a jockstrap across a screen to find matching underwear on hookup sites.

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The prince has key environmental work planned with the Earthshot Prize and a speech at the COP30 summit - but started with a cable car trip up Sugarloaf Mountain.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy organization representing Japanese IP holders like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, released a letter last week asking OpenAI to stop using its members' content to train Sora 2, as reported by Automaton. The letter states that "CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement," since the resulting AI model went on to spit out content with copyrighted characters. Sora 2 generated an avalanche of content containing Japanese IP after it launched on September 30th, prompting Japan's government to formally ask OpenAI to stop replicating Japanese artwork. This isn't the first time one of OpenAI's apps clearly pulled from Japanese media, either -- the highlight of GPT-4o's launch back in March was a proliferation of "Ghibli-style" images. Altman announced last month that OpenAI will be changing Sora's opt-out policy for IP holders, but CODA claims that the use of an opt-out policy to begin with may have violated Japanese copyright law, stating, "under Japan's copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections."

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A developer operating under the handle @XenoPanther has stripped Windows 7 down to 69MB. The OS boots but runs almost nothing because critical files like common dialog boxes and common controls are missing. @XenoPanther described the project on X as "more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable." The desktop appears and the genuine check remains intact.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven't been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are "little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues," according to a press release about the change. arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it's become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don't pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.

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Palantir launched a fellowship that recruited high school graduates directly into full-time work, bypassing college entirely. The company received more than 500 applications and selected 22 for the inaugural class. The four-month program began with seminars on Western civilization, U.S. history, and leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Fellows then embedded in client teams working on live projects for hospitals, insurance companies, defense contractors, and government agencies. CEO Alex Karp, who studied at Haverford and Stanford, said in August that hiring university students now means hiring people engaged in "platitudes." The program wraps up in November. Palantir executives said they had a clear sense by the third or fourth week of which fellows were succeeding in the company environment. Fellows who perform well will receive offers for permanent positions without college degrees.

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Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says only biological beings are capable of consciousness, and that developers and researchers should stop pursuing projects that suggest otherwise. From a report: "I don't think that is work that people should be doing," Suleyman told CNBC in an interview this week at the AfroTech Conference in Houston, where he was among the keynote speakers. "If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it's totally the wrong question." Suleyman, Microsoft's top executive working on artificial intelligence, has been one of the leading voices in the rapidly emerging field to speak out against the prospect of seemingly conscious AI, or AI services that can convince humans they're capable of suffering.

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A new study suggests that changes to Hektoria Glacier are unprecedented - but not all scientists agree.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese President Xi Jinping joked about security backdoors while presenting a pair of Xiaomi smartphones to his South Korean counterpart, a rare moment of spontaneous levity captured during a week of tense trade negotiations with Donald Trump. Xi, in South Korea to meet Trump on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, presented the pair of devices to Korean President Lee Jae Myung. In a video circulated on social media, Lee asked: "Is the line secure?" Xi chuckled, pointed at the gadgets and replied through an interpreter: "You can check if there's a backdoor." The two leaders burst into laughter. The exchange was striking because the issue of security and alleged espionage is a sensitive one and a major thorn in US-Chinese relations. American lawmakers have raised the possibility that tech companies such as Huawei build backdoors -- ways to gain access to sensitive data -- into their equipment or services, something the firms have repeatedly denied.

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OpenAI will pay Amazon $38 billion for computing power in a seven-year deal that marks the companies' first partnership. Amazon expects all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement will be available to OpenAI by the end of next year. The ChatGPT maker will train new AI models using Amazon's data centers and use them to process user queries. The deal is small compared with OpenAI's $300 billion agreement with Oracle and its $250 billion commitment to Microsoft. OpenAI ended its exclusive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft last month and has since signed almost $600 billion in new cloud commitments. Amazon Web Services is the industry's largest cloud provider, but Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud-revenue growth in recent years after capturing new demand from AI customers.

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From the beginning, I wanted FeedLand to make excellent use of WebSockets. It's an amazing technology for its power and simplicity. Basically it allows a server running in the cloud to send information to an app running in the browser, or for that matter an iOS app running on an phone. Then the question is what do you want to use the socket for? And the answer is that to make syndication even simpler and faster than RSS. If you want to know more, there's a client toolkit and demo app on GitHub, open source of course. How real is it? The blogroll on scripting.com is a sockets app, a much-improved blogroll from the ones we had 20 years ago. Also runs on WordPress sites. It's been running smoothly since March 2024. Pretty solid. And WordPress, that doesn't break formats, has supported the rssCloud protocol since 2009, and of course so does FeedLand.