177053971
submission
samleecole writes:
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications ,a href="https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.404media.co%2Fthis-college-protester-isnt-real-its-an-ai-powered-undercover-bot-for-cops%2F">404 Media obtained via public records requests.
Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media.
175352245
submission
samleecole writes:
Northwell Health, New York State’s largest healthcare provider, recently launched a large language model tool that it is encouraging doctors and clinicians to use for translation, sensitive patient data, and has suggested it can be used for diagnostic purposes, 404 Media has learned. Northwell Health has more than 85,000 employees.
An internal presentation and employee chats obtained by 404 Media shows how healthcare professionals are using LLMs and chatbots to edit writing, make hiring decisions, do administrative tasks, and handle patient data.
In the presentation given in August, Rebecca Kaul, senior vice president and chief of digital innovation and transformation at Northwell, along with a senior engineer, discussed the launch of the tool, called AI Hub, and gave a demonstration of how clinicians and researchers—or anyone with a Northwell email address—can use it. AI Hub can be used for "clinical or clinical adjacent" tasks, as well as answering questions about hospital policies and billing, writing job descriptions and editing writing, and summarizing electronic medical record excerpts and inputting patients’ personally identifying and protected health information. The demonstration also showed potential capabilities that included “detect pancreas cancer,” and “parse HL7,” a health data standard used to share electronic health records.
The leaked presentation shows that hospitals are increasingly using AI and LLMs to streamlining administrative tasks, and shows that some are experimenting with or at least considering how LLMs would be used in clinical settings or in interactions with patients.
175323833
submission
samleecole writes:
It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government. After a challenge it has also remained legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment. This is good news in several long-running yet somehow related sagas that has resulted in both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment and which often cannot be fixed without the help of their manufacturer due to arbitrary software locks that prevent McDonald’s stores and also hospitals from fixing the devices they own.
The new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows for the circumvention of DRM and software locks, which are often called “TPMs” or technical protection measures, on equipment made for “commercial food preparation when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device.” The exemption that allows for the circumvention of software locks on “a lawfully acquired medical device or system, and related data files, when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device or system,” was also renewed, as were exemptions for farm equipment and a host of other devices.
175309339
submission
samleecole writes:
Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.
An investigation into tracking tool Locate X shows in the starkest terms yet how it and others — based on smartphone location data sold to various U.S. government law enforcement agencies, including state entities — could be used to monitor abortion clinic patients. This comes as more states contemplate stricter or outright bans on abortion. Alabama wants to prosecute people who help others get abortions out of state, Idaho and Tennessee have passed “abortion trafficking” laws that have been blocked by courts from going into effect but which anti-abortion politicians want revived, and cities in Texas have considered an unconstitutional law that would ban people from using city roads for traveling to get an abortion. Last month, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton sued to block federal privacy rules that stop investigators from accessing the medical records of people who travel out of the state to seek an abortion.
It also comes before a U.S. election in which access to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states, including Florida, and is one of the most important issues in the presidential election.
175273131
submission
samleecole writes:
After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”
Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave.
“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.
“I'm certain that Matt hasn't eliminated all dissenters, because I'm still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn't leave but wasn't ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” a current employee told 404 Media. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I'm not alone.”
Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company.
On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months).
“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can't disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.”
174740254
submission
samleecole writes:
Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto. For the first time, the group tells their story.
Pratt fled the U.S. in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019—where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million—and just before being charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. (Today, there are more than 100 women who’ve come forward in lawsuits as victims of Girls Do Porn.) Facing life in prison, Pratt was a fugitive, but investigators hadn’t been able to apprehend him. He’d been wanted by the FBI for two years when the small team of open-source and human intelligence experts—who called themselves OP Phoenix Fury, after DeBarber’s investigative firm—decided to try to find Pratt themselves. They had traced Pratt to Barcelona, Spain.
174645468
submission
samleecole writes:
Microsoft and Reddit are offering conflicting explanations for why Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is currently blocked from crawling Reddit and offering links from the site in its search results.
Reddit, which now demands payment from anyone crawling the site and using its data to train AI products, claims that Bing’s crawler is being used to power AI products. Microsoft claims it has made it easy for any site to block its crawler that’s used for AI products, while still allowing a crawler that is only used for search results, and that Reddit’s decision to block Bing is “impacting competition” in the search engine space.
The conflicting reasonings behind the block are further proof that the massive, indiscriminate scraping of the internet to create AI training data in a way that violates long-respected norms about how to access information on the web are eroding trust, making the internet less open, and causing tech companies to beef about this issue in public.
174590580
submission
samleecole writes:
A leaked document obtained by 404 Media shows company-wide effort at generative AI company Runway, where employees collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated content for training data for its Gen-3 Alpha model.
The model—initially codenamed Jupiter and released officially as Gen-3—drew widespread praise from the AI development community and technology outlets covering its launch when Runway released it in June. Last year, Runway raised $141 million from investors including Google and Nvidia, at a $1.5 billion valuation.
The spreadsheet of training data viewed by 404 Media and our testing of the model indicates that part of its training data is popular content from the YouTube channels of thousands of media and entertainment companies, including The New Yorker, VICE News, Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and many others. It also includes links to channels and individual videos belonging to popular influencers and content creators, including Casey Neistat, Sam Kolder, Benjamin Hardman, Marques Brownlee, and numerous others.
173955929
submission
samleecole writes:
In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.
"Company shall immediately disassemble all products that are created or assembled out of, comprised of, or that contain any Service Parts not purchased from Samsung,” a section of the agreement reads. “And shall immediately notify Samsung in writing of the details and circumstances of any unauthorized use or misappropriation of any Service Part for any purpose other than pursuant to this Agreement. Samsung may terminate this Agreement if these terms are violated."
The contract also requires the “daily” uploading of details of each and every repair that an independent company does into a Samsung database called G-SPN “at the time of each repair,” which includes the customer’s address, email address, phone number, details about what is wrong with their phone, their phone’s warranty status, details of the customer’s complaint, and the device’s IMEI number, which is a unique device identifier. 404 Media has verified the authenticity of the original contract and has recreated the version embedded at the bottom of this article to protect the source. No provisions have been changed.
The use of aftermarket parts in repair is relatively common. This provision requires independent repair shops to destroy the devices of their own customers, and then to snitch on them to Samsung.
173869613
submission
samleecole writes:
For the last decade, farmers have been warning that John Deere, a company celebrated by farmers, country musicians, and politicians, has been doing something else very American: Concentrating power, stripping away the ownership rights of people who buy their products, and adding a bevy of artificial, software-based repair restrictions that have effectively created a regime in which farmers can no longer fix their own tractors, combines, harvesters, and other agricultural equipment. Farmers have resorted to pirating John Deere’s software and firmware on underground forums and torrent sites, and have used software cracked by Ukrainian pirates in order to simply fix the things they own. Farmers often have to wait days or weeks for an “authorized” John Deere dealership to come to their farms to repair their equipment, meanwhile their crops die on the vine.
For years, very little happened to slow down John Deere’s march toward total control of the repair market. But interviews with farmers, activists, and lawyers, and a review of court records reveal a turn in the story: There is increased scrutiny on Deere’s repair practices not just in this class action lawsuit, but from state legislators, the White House, and a series of federal agencies. The walls on Deere’s repair monopoly may finally be closing in.
173717904
submission
samleecole writes:
Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state’s recently-enacted transphobic “bathroom bill.” The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public—without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people’s submissions.
After 404 Media contacted the auditor's office for comment, they changed the permissions to require authentication.
The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles.
Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission—a photo of the yelling table cat meme—appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven’t seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.
173380193
submission
samleecole writes:
In Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Utah, age verification laws require sites with more than one third adult content to force users to upload their driver’s license, passport, or other government-issued ID. Indiana and Idaho’s age verification laws will take effect on July 1, and bills are progressing in several more states.
The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what’s actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not “harmful to minors.”
The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.
173331317
submission
samleecole writes:
Last month, the surveillance company Flock Safety published a study and press release claiming that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are “instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in the U.S.” The study was done by Flock employees, and given legitimacy with the “oversight” of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper. Now, one of those researchers has told 404 Media that “I personally would have done things much differently” than the Flock researchers did.
The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
Flock is one of the largest vendors of ALPR cameras and other surveillance technologies, and is partially responsible for the widespread proliferation of this technology. It markets its cameras to law enforcement, homeowners associations, property managers, schools, and businesses. It regularly publishes in-house case studies and white papers that it says shows Flock is instrumental in solving and reducing crime, then uses those studies to market its products.
173074146
submission
samleecole writes:
A trove of leaked emails shows how administrators of one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction censored themselves because the awards ceremony was being held in China.
The emails, which show the process of compiling spreadsheets of the top 10 works in each category and checking them for “sensitive political nature” to see if they were “an issue in China,” were obtained by fan writer Chris M. Barkley and author Jason Sanford, and published on fandom news site File 770 and Sanford’s Patreon, where they uploaded the full PDF of the emails. They were provided to them by Hugo Awards administrator Diane Lacey. Lacey confirmed in an email to 404 Media that she was the source of the emails.
“In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different...we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work,” Dave McCarty, head of the 2023 awards jury, directed administrators in an email. “It's not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China...that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot of if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”
172767047
submission
samleecole writes:
A food delivery robot company instructed a public university to promote its service on campus with photographs and video featuring only students who “have a healthy-looking BMI,” [body mass index] according to emails and documents I obtained via a public records request. The emails also discuss how ordering delivery via robot should become a “habit” for a “captured” customer base of students on campus.
These highly specific instructions show how universities around the country are going to extreme lengths to create a welcoming environment on campus for food delivery robots that sometimes have trouble crossing the street and need traffic infrastructure redesigned for them in order to navigate campus, a relatively absurd cache of public records obtained by 404 Media reveals.
Starship delivery robots are currently semiautonomously performing the critical public service of driving orange chicken from Panda Expresses, Wendy’s, and other restaurants on campus to dorm rooms at 32universities across around America: “Over 5 million autonomous deliveries now completed! Thousands of Starship delivery robots are operating globally, every day,” the company’s website notes.
