Technology

Worth noting ... the feds are coming for archival sites.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”

The subpoena is supposed to be secret, but the Archive.today X account posted the document on October 30, the same day the subpoena was issued. The X post contained a link to the PDF and the word “canary.”

“If you refuse to obey this subpoena, the United States Attorney General may invoke the aid of a United States District Court to compel compliance. Your failure to obey the resulting court order may be punished as contempt,” the document said. It gave a deadline of November 29.

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.

I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly.

There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of. I would suggest that if your VPN company is running around sending totally bogus DMCA notices that’s a bad sign. But if your VPN company is sending bogus DMCA notices to take down stories about its bogus DMCA stories, well, then you really have found the worst of the worst.

Enter CyberGhost.

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a bizarre copyright takedown involving CyberGhost. In that case, it had sent the takedown to Facebook because we had reposted the Daily Deal we had offered in 2016 for a CyberGhost subscription. As with all Techdirt posts, it had automatically reposted to our Facebook account.

For no clear reason, CyberGhost falsely claimed that Facebook post (but not our original post) violated its copyright (it does not). So yeah, this seemed like CyberGhost sending a copyright takedown of us running a promotion for their VPN from eight years earlier. How bizarre.

At the risk of sounding like a shill, Mullvad is the answer.

Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with a chatbot; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human-A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.

How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, research from M.I.T. has found that these relationships can be therapeutic, providing “always-available support” and significantly reducing loneliness.

We spoke with three people in their 40s and 50s about the wonders — and anxieties — of romance with a chatbot.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

Which is why these long walks of mine are so inspiring (to me), and I feel so compelled to head out on them, again and again: They are nothing if not “space generation” machines for the mind. They’re full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest. How close we are to it (it’s right there!!), every day, and how elusive it has become because of our digital habits, our diets of, mostly, garbage.

Look out, Jensen! With its TPUs, Google has shown time and time again that it's not the size of your accelerators that matters but how efficiently you can scale them in production.

Now with its latest generation of Ironwood accelerators slated for general availability in the coming weeks, the Chocolate Factory not only has scale on its side but a tensor processing unit (TPU) with the grunt to give Nvidia's Blackwell behemoths a run for their money.

First announced in April alongside a comically bad comparison to the El Capitan supercomputer — no, an Ironwood TPU Pod is not 24x faster than the Department of Energy's biggest iron — Google's TPU v7 accelerators are a major leap in performance over prior generations.

Historically, Google's TPUs have paled in comparison to contemporary GPUs from the likes of Nvidia and more recently AMD in terms of raw FLOPS, memory capacity, and bandwidth, making up for this deficit by simply having more of them.

Google has offered its TPUs in pods — large, scale-up compute domains — containing hundreds or even thousands of chips. If additional compute is needed, users can then scale out to multiple pods.

For all the headlines about an on-off relationship with Donald Trump, baiting liberals and erratic behaviour, Tesla shareholders are loath to part with Elon Musk.

Investors in the electric vehicle maker voted on Thursday to put the world’s richest person on the path to become the world’s first trillionaire, despite the controversy that is now seemingly intrinsic to his public profile.

Shareholders approved the $1tn compensation plan, which could yield the largest corporate payout in history if he meets a series of tough-looking goals, not least pushing Tesla from its current market value of $1.4tn to $8.5tn (£1.06tn to £6.4tn). Musk’s fortune, which includes a stake of about 12.5% in Tesla, is already worth $461bn.

“Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Musk,” says Dan Ives, a managing director at the US financial firm Wedbush. “Despite some of the brand damage Musk has caused to Tesla during his political stint, the AI future at Tesla depends on Elon.”

i am reminded that if "social media" didn't devolve we'd have organized and come together to solve (crisis upon crisis) already and politicians would've had a digital polling station and direct communication with the populace.

instead Facebook Twitter YouTube is what it is.

Hello,

TLDR: Trying to extend Wi-Fi to a building maybe 100-200 feet from a house. A third building exists between the two, a TP-Link extender I own 'works' from this third building to provide intermittently functional signal to the desired building. Looking for a stronger extender, preferably without Power over Ethernet to use it outdoors without needing to run a line through a wall/drill.

I'm trying to help someone extend their Wi-Fi coverage to a small extra building (b2), maybe a maximum of two hundred feet from the main house (b1).

She uses the old Google Wi-Fi pods right now, but the pod from the accessory building often disconnects and seemingly fails to ever reconnect without being unplugged and plugged back in.

She says it used to work okay, so I've troubleshot the one she had in the accessory building by bringing it into the main house for a few days, then swapping it with another pod for another few days; neither test showed the total failure as seems to occur in the other building.

Based on the specs of these pods, I'm not surprised it's struggling, and confused that she says it's seemingly worked fine in the past. She doesn't spend much time out in the separate building, so it may just be a lack of seeing it fail.

I've briefly tested one of my own TP-Link AX1500 in a third building (b3), which sits between the main house and the desired accessory building. This has provided an intermittently functional signal in the desired accessory building (b2), but with, understandably, very low strength and frequent disconnects.

I've looked at additional extenders, for indoor and outdoor, but wanted to see what, if anything, people suggest.

Also, I'm finding some of the longer range extenders to be powered by Ethernet, or with a USB connector. Which, if using this extender outdoors to remove one wall of interference, creates the need to either drill a hole in an existing wall, or otherwise have a cable go into the house somewhere. Is anyone familiar with a medium/long-range extender powered just from a power adaptor or something?

Thank you very much for your time and I really appreciate any suggestions or direction you might be able to provide.

archive link

I ended up in Captcha hell trying to archive this, so I'm afraid I can't provide a link.

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.

The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.

I know the Fira fonts and IBM Plex. What others are there?

The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.

Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.”

Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.

Since its founding, Facebook has described itself as a kind of public service that fosters relationships. In 2005, not long after the site’s launch, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described the network as an “icebreaker” that would help you make friends. Facebook has since become Meta, with more grandiose ambitions, but its current mission statement is broadly similar: “Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”

More than 3 billion people use Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram every day, and more still use rival platforms that likewise promise connection and community. But a new era of deeper, better human fellowship has yet to arrive. Just ask Zuckerberg himself. “There’s a stat that I always think is crazy,” he said in April, during an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. “The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more; I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”

Zuckerberg was wrong about the details—the majority of American adults say they have at least three close friends, according to recent surveys—but he was getting at something real. There’s no question that we are becoming less and less social. People have sunk into their phones, enticed into endless, mindless “engagement” on social media. Over the past 15 years, face-to-face socialization has declined precipitously. The 921 friends I’ve accumulated on Facebook, I’ve always known, are not really friends at all; now the man who put this little scorecard in my life was essentially agreeing.

Zuckerberg, however, was not admitting a failure. He was pointing toward a new opportunity. In Marc Andreessen’s influential 2023 treatise, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the venture capitalist wrote, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” In this same spirit, Zuckerberg began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing.

Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

Wikipedia is the most ambitious multilingual project after the Bible: There are editions in over 340 languages, and a further 400 even more obscure ones are being developed and tested. Many of these smaller editions have been swamped with automatically translated content as AI has become increasingly accessible. Volunteers working on four African languages, for instance, estimated to MIT Technology Review that between 40% and 60% of articles in their Wikipedia editions were uncorrected machine translations. And after auditing the Wikipedia edition in Inuktitut, an Indigenous language close to Greenlandic that’s spoken in Canada, MIT Technology Review estimates that more than two-thirds of pages containing more than several sentences feature portions created this way.

This is beginning to cause a wicked problem. AI systems, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, learn to “speak” new languages by scraping huge quantities of text from the internet. Wikipedia is sometimes the largest source of online linguistic data for languages with few speakers—so any errors on those pages, grammatical or otherwise, can poison the wells that AI is expected to draw from. That can make the models’ translation of these languages particularly error-prone, which creates a sort of linguistic doom loop as people continue to add more and more poorly translated Wikipedia pages using those tools, and AI models continue to train from poorly translated pages. It’s a complicated problem, but it boils down to a simple concept: Garbage in, garbage out.

“These models are built on raw data,” says Kevin Scannell, a former professor of computer science at Saint Louis University who now builds computer software tailored for endangered languages. “They will try and learn everything about a language from scratch. There is no other input. There are no grammar books. There are no dictionaries. There is nothing other than the text that is inputted.”

There isn’t perfect data on the scale of this problem, particularly because a lot of AI training data is kept confidential and the field continues to evolve rapidly. But back in 2020, Wikipedia was estimated to make up more than half the training data that was fed into AI models translating some languages spoken by millions across Africa, including Malagasy, Yoruba, and Shona. In 2022, a research team from Germany that looked into what data could be obtained by online scraping even found that Wikipedia was the sole easily accessible source of online linguistic data for 27 under-resourced languages.

This could have significant repercussions in cases where Wikipedia is poorly written—potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them.

“Wikipedia will be reflected in the AI models for these languages,” says Trond Trosterud, a computational linguist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, who has been raising the alarm about the potentially harmful outcomes of badly run Wikipedia editions for years. “I find it hard to imagine it will not have consequences. And, of course, the more dominant position that Wikipedia has, the worse it will be.”

I wish they linked a source on this, but overall seems like a breakthrough.

Chinese boffins have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a way to stop chips from going pear-shaped during manufacture by literally freezing the process mid-flow.

According to researchers at Peking University, Tsinghua, and HKU, the new method can slash lithography defects by a 99 per cent.

One of the trickiest bits of making semiconductors is photolithography, where light is used to “print” circuits onto silicon wafers. It’s rather like developing a microscopic photograph, except it costs billions and breaks more often.

The process involves spreading a photoresist, a light-sensitive goo, over the wafer. Ultraviolet light then shines through a mask that carries the circuit pattern, and the exposed material is chemically developed so some bits dissolve while others stay put. What remains forms the stencil for the later steps, like etching the metal or silicon layers.

That’s all well and good until the photoresist starts misbehaving. During development, dissolved material sometimes clumps together into microscopic particles that can stick back onto the wafer. At five-nanometre or smaller nodes, even a 30-nanometre blob can ruin a circuit.

"I went looking for manufactured outrage and found it!"

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.

We're all seeing the breathless hype surrounding the vacuous marketing term. It'll change everything! It's coming for our jobs! Some 50% of white-collar workers will be laid off!

Setting aside "and how will it do that?" as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it's a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

I was having a conversation on Reddit along these lines a couple of days ago, and after seeing more news that just parrots Altman's theme-du-jour, I need a sanity check.

Something I've always found hilarious at work is someone asking if you have a calculator (I guess that dates me to the flip-phone era) ... my canned response was "what's wrong with the very large one on your desk?"

Like, automation is literally why we have these machines.

And it's worth noting that you can't automate the interesting parts of a job, as those are creative. All you can tackle is the rote, the tedious, the structured bullshit that no one wants to do in the first place.

But here's the thing: I've learned over the decades that employers don't want more efficiency. They shout it out to the shareholders, but when it comes down to the fiefdoms of directors and managers, they like inefficiency, thank you very much, as it provides tangible work for them.

"If things are running smoothly, why are we so top heavy" is not something any manager wants to hear.

Whatever the fuck passes for "AI" in common parlance can't threaten management in the same way as someone deeply familiar with the process and able to code. So it's anodyne ... not a threat to the structure. Instead of doubling efficiency via bespoke code (leading to a surplus of managers), just let a couple people go through attrition or layoffs and point to how this new tech is shifting your department's paradigm.

Without a clutch.

I've never had a coding title, but I did start out in CS (why does this feel like a Holiday Inn Express ad?), so regardless of industry, when I end up being expected to use an inefficient process, my first thought is to fixing it. And it has floored me how severe the pushback is.

I reduced a team of 10 auditors to five at an audiobook company with a week of coding in VB. A team of three placing ads to 0.75 (with two of us being me and my girlfriend) at a newspaper hub.

Same hub, clawed back 25% of my team's production time after absurd reporting requirements were implemented despite us having all the timestamps in our CMS -- the vendor charged extra to access our own data, so management decided a better idea than paying the vendor six figures was overstaff by 33% (250 total at the center) to get those sweet, sweet self-reported error-laden data!

At a trucking firm, I solved a decadelong problem with how labour-intensive receiving for trade shows was. Basically, instead of asking the client for their internal data, which had been my boss' approach, I asked how much they really needed from us, and could I simplify the forms and reports (samples provided)? Instant yes, but my boss hated the new setup because I was using Microsoft Forms to feed Excel, and then a 10-line script to generate receivers and reports, and she didn't understand any of that, so how was she sure I knew what I was doing?

You can't make this shit up.

Anyway, I think I've run far afield of my central thesis, but I think these illustrations point to a certain intransigence at the management level that will be far more pronounced than is being covered.

These folks locked in their 2.9% mortgage and don't want to rock the boat.

My point is, why would management suddenly be keen on making themselves redundant when decades of data tell us otherwise?

This form of "AI" does not subvert the dominant paradigm. And no boss wants fewer employees.

As such, who's actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/31224405

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/31224403

Title: Long-time iOS user considering switch to Android - Need advice on $1000 flagships

Body:

Hey everyone, I'm looking at phones around the $1000 price point and would love some input. I've been an iOS user for years but I'm seriously considering making the jump to Android this time.

Here's what I'm looking at:

iPhone 17 Pro - The safe choice since I'm already in the ecosystem

Samsung Galaxy S25 - Hearing good things about this generation

Pixel 10 Pro - Probably crossing this one off the list due to the stability issues I've been reading about (the 911 call failures, overheating problems, etc.)

Nothing Phone - The design looks really cool, but I'm not sure if they have anything in this price range

For those who've made the switch from iOS to Android (or vice versa), what would you recommend? Any major gotchas I should know about? And is the Nothing Phone even worth considering as a daily driver at this price point?

Thanks in advance!