Technology

NEW YORK (AP) — John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

If you noticed something funky going on with Salesforce and its software-as-a-service empire today, it's not you: it's recovering from an hours-long outage.

As of writing, Salesforce said at 1829 UTC (1130 PT) in a status update that all of its clouds are returning to normal after suffering about a four-hour downtime.

Well, all except for Salesforce's Tableau and Mulesoft, which remain down or affected to some extent.

The IT breakdown started at 1448 UTC, and we're told by the enterprise software giant this hit "customers across multiple clouds including, Commerce Cloud, Mulesoft, Tableau, Core, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Marketing Cloud Intelligence, and Omni Channel."

As a result, "users are unable to log into Salesforce or access any of their services," the biz admitted.

Two hours later, the team said its ClickSoftware, Trailblazer, and Data Cloud products were also affected. At first a third-party cloud provider was thought to be to blame for intermittent networking issues causing Salesforce services to fail.

Then the tech titan said, actually, a cloud provider wasn't at fault, and Salesforce engineers "successfully executed a rollback to mitigate the issue." By 1752 UTC, the biz said its cloud systems were getting back on track, and customers should be able to log in and use their applications as usual, as long as those apps weren't Tableau or Mulesoft.

Philip Paxson's family are suing the company over his death, alleging that Google negligently failed to show the bridge had fallen nine years earlier.

Mr Paxson died in September 2022 after attempting to drive over the damaged bridge in Hickory, North Carolina.

A spokesperson for Google said the company was reviewing the allegations.

The case was filed in civil court in Wake County on Tuesday.

Mr Paxson, a father of two, was driving home from his daughter's ninth birthday party at a friend's house and was in an unfamiliar neighbourhood at the time of his death, according to the family's lawsuit.

His wife had driven his two daughters home earlier, and he stayed behind to help clean up.

"Unfamiliar with local roads, he relied on Google Maps, expecting it would safely direct him home to his wife and daughters," lawyers for the family said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

"Tragically, as he drove cautiously in the darkness and rain, he unsuspectingly followed Google's outdated directions to what his family later learned for nearly a decade was called the 'Bridge to Nowhere,' crashing into Snow Creek, where he drowned."

Local residents had repeatedly contacted Google to have them change their online maps after the bridge collapsed in 2013, the suit claims.

The Climate of Misinformation report by Climate Action Against Disinformation looked at Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter for their content moderation policies and efforts to mitigate inaccurate information such as climate denialism. The group, which is made up of dozens of international climate and anti-disinformation organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, released the report to draw attention towards climate misinformation on major platforms and makes the claim that big tech has become a “complicit actor” in accelerating the spread of climate denial.

Twitter’s low rank in the survey was because it failed to meet almost any of the organization’s criteria for climate misinformation policies, which ranged from having clear and publicly available information on climate science to having clearly articulated policies on what actions the company will take against the spread of misinformation. The report noted that billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk’s purchase of the company last year added to the confusion over how policies are enforced and how the company makes content decisions.

“Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report stated.

Twitter received its only point in the report for fulfilling one of the researchers’ requirements that platforms have an easily accessible and readable privacy policy. Twitter was also the only platform to lack a clear reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for higher review.

Tech platforms have long struggled with creating effective or coherent policies on content moderation, while events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election resulted in swaths of misinformation circulating online. Amid conservative backlash and labor cuts in the tech industry, many companies have also deprioritized content moderation and opened the door to potential surges in misinformation on their platforms.

Although the other platforms fared better, none ranked especially high on the report’s scale – Pinterest scored highest with 12 points out of a possible 21. Issues ranged from a lack of clear definitions of what constituted climate misinformation, failure to enforce existing policies in a transparent way and a lack of proof that companies apply these policies equally across different languages. None of the companies release public reports on how their algorithmic changes affect climate misinformation, according to the report.

The organization’s authors advocate for a number of changes to big tech’s policies, including establishing clear guidelines on climate and updating privacy policies to show when private data is being sold to advertisers that could be linked to the fossil fuel industry.

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Surprisingly good comments section. Even got one poster saying “Comeonguys, stop being so anti-US.”

Joysticks replacing keyboards for example What impact could it have on the design of the computer?

cross-posted from: https://psychedelia.ink/post/521936

DALL·E 3 understands significantly more nuance and detail than our previous systems, allowing you to easily translate your ideas into exceptionally accurate images.

In the ever-evolving world of software development, staying ahead of the curve is essential. As we enter 2023, the landscape of developer tools continues to expand and innovate. To help you navigate this dynamic field, we've curated a list of the best 10+ essential developer tools that every software engineer, coder, and developer should consider integrating into their workflow.

[email protected] - A silly milestone we passed sometime this year: The Internet Archive now emulates (to various degrees, of course), over 250,000 pieces of software, hardware, and electronics, thanks to the effort of a dozen emulation projects and all of them running in the browser. Live again, ancient software!

Today, Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu livestreamed a discussion largely focused on the future of AI on Musk's platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5193714

A few days DHH (from 37signals) wrote about how they moved off the cloud and how that has helped reduce their costs by a good measure.

Well, earlier today, he announced the first bit of tooling that they used as part of their cloud exit move: Kamal - which is already at version 1.0 and, according to DHH, stable.

I took a quick look at the documentation and it looks to me like an augmented and feature-rich Docker Compose which is, to no surprise, rather opinionated.

I think anyone who's had experience with the simplicity of Docker Swarm compared to K8s would appreciate Kamal's way. Hopefully it will turn out to be more reliable than Swarm though.

I found it quite a pragmatic approach to containerising an application suite with the aim of covering a good portion of a the use-cases and requriements of smaller teams.

PS: I may actually try it out in an ongoing personal project instead of Compose or K8s. If I do, I'll make sure to keep this post, well, posted.