"For months, tens of thousands of people around the world have been complaining Meta has been banning their Instagram and Facebook accounts in error..." the BBC reported this month... More than 500 of them have contacted the BBC to say they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended — but some also speak of the profound personal toll it has taken on them, including concerns that the police could become involved.

Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all. It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing — though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it.
One examples is a woman lost the Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop. ("Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant.") "After the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta's press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated... Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again — but the account for the dress shop remained."

Another user spent a month appealing. ("In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked," but concluded he'd breached a policy.) And then "his account was abruptly restored at the end of July. 'We're sorry we've got this wrong,' Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong." Hours after the BBC contacted Meta's press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook... His Facebook account was back two days later — but he was still blocked from Instagram.
None of the banned users in the BBC's examples were ever told what post breached the platform's rules. Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it. Their central accusation — Meta's AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated.

Meta has not commented on these claims. Instagram states AI is central to its "content review process" and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies.
The Guardian reports there's been "talk of a class action against Meta over the bans." Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected... But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement. "We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake," a spokesperson for Meta said.
"It happened to me this morning," writes long-time Slashdot reader Daemon Duck," asking if any other Slashdot readers had their personal (or business) account unreasonably banned. (And wondering what to do next...)

Sam Altman's brain-chip venture is exploring the idea of genetically altering brain cells to make better implants. "The company, which has been referred to as Merge Labs, is looking at an approach involving gene therapy that would modify brain cells," reports Bloomberg. "In addition, an ultrasound device would be implanted in the head that could detect and modulate activity in the modified cells." From the report: It's one of a handful of ideas and technologies the company has been exploring, they said. The venture is still in early stages and could evolve significantly. "We have not done that deal yet," Altman told journalists at a dinner Thursday in San Francisco, referring to a question about a brain-computer interface venture. "I would like us to." Altman said he wants to be able to think something and have ChatGPT respond to it. [...]

For years, researchers have been studying how to genetically change cells to make them respond to ultrasound, a field called sonogenetics. The idea Merge is considering to combine ultrasound with gene therapy could take years, some of the people said. Ultrasound has attracted significant attention recently as a possible brain therapy. Other companies are exploring the idea of using ultrasound transmitters outside the brain to massage brain tissue, with the goal of treating psychiatric conditions. That kind of technology has shown promise in research studies.

Google, Cisco, and McKinsey have reintroduced in-person interviews to combat AI-assisted cheating in virtual technical assessments. Coda Search/Staffing reports client requests for face-to-face meetings has surged to 30% this year from 5% in 2024.

A Gartner survey of 3,000 job seekers found 6% admitted to interview fraud including having someone else stand in for them, while the FBI has warned of thousands of North Korean nationals using false identities to secure remote positions at U.S. technology companies. Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed in June the company now requires at least one in-person round for certain roles to verify candidates possess genuine coding skills.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a "program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies," has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. [...]

"Anubis is an uncaptcha," Iaso explains on her site. "It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server." Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human.

Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we've repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she's working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users' CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn't require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. "The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives," she said. "And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario."

Three space probes are leaving our solar system — yet are still functioning. After the two Voyager space probes, New Horizons "was launched in 2006, initially to study Pluto," remembers New Scientist. But "it has since travelled way beyond this point, ploughing on through the Kuiper belt, a vast, wide band of rocks and dust billions of miles from the sun. It is now speeding at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour..."

And it's just performed the first ever example of interstellar navigation... As it hurtles out of our solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is so far from Earth that the stars in the Milky Way appear in markedly different positions compared with our own view... due to the parallax effect. This was demonstrated in 2020 when the probe beamed back pictures of two nearby stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, to Earth.

Now, Tod Lauer at the US National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona and his colleagues have used this effect to work out the position of New Horizons... Almost all spacecraft calculate their bearings to within tens of metres using NASA's Deep Space Network, a collection of radio transmitters on Earth that send regular signals out to space. In comparison, the parallax method was far less accurate, locating New Horizons within a sphere with a radius of 60 million kilometres, about half the distance between Earth and the sun. "We're not going to put the Deep Space Network out of business — this is only a demo proof of concept," says Lauer. However, with a better camera and equipment they could improve the accuracy by up to 100 times, he says.

Using this technique for interstellar navigation could offer advantages over the DSN because it could give more accurate location readings as a spacecraft gets further away from Earth, as well as being able to operate autonomously without needing to wait for a radio signal to come from our solar system, says Massimiliano Vasile at the University of Strathclyde, UK. "If you travel to an actual star, we are talking about light years," says Vasile. "What happens is that your signal from the Deep Space Network has to travel all the way there and then all the way back, and it's travelling at the speed of light, so it takes years."
Just like a ship's captain sailing by the stars, "We have a good enough three-dimensional map of the galaxy around us that you can find out where you are," Lauer says.

So even when limiting your navigation to what's on-board the spacecraft, "It's a remarkable accuracy, with your own camera!"