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Category Archives: Internet

Meta releases its biggest ‘open’ AI model yet

TechCrunch: “Meta’s latest open source AI model is its biggest yet. Today, Meta said it is releasing Llama 3.1 405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. At 405 billion parameters, Llama 3.1 405B isn’t… Continue Reading

Ryanair Wins Legal Case Against Booking.Com Over Screen Scraping & Reselling Tickets

Bloomberg via MSN: “Ryanair, a major player in European aviation, has won a case in the US court against Booking.com, one of the world’s largest online travel agencies. The US court has ruled that the Dutch agency violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing the Ryanair website without permission. Court documents identified that… Continue Reading

New York Times, Washington Post compete with meme accounts for chance to be first with big headline

NiemanLab: “The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source. It’s not often that massive political news breaks on a Sunday afternoon — especially one in steamy late July, the leading edge of the Greater August vacation season. But break news Joe Biden most certainly did with this tweet… Continue Reading

NewsGuard Launches 2024 Paris Olympics Misinformation Tracking Center

“…To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified and is tracking 14 misinformation narratives relating to the 2024 Paris Olympics  in 13 languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The claims have spread on social media as well as on 31 unreliable news and information websites.  Sixteen of the 31 sites have… Continue Reading

How data brokers sell our location data and jeopardise national security

Netzpolitic.org: “The AdTech industry is torpedoing the privacy of millions of people in Germany and is a threat to national security. But the underlying problem is global: databrokers sell location data without sufficient control. This is the summary of a joint research by netzpolitik.org and BR. Our investigation with BR (Bayerischer Rundfunk) shows for the… Continue Reading

Massive IT outage spotlights major vulnerabilities in the global information ecosystem

Via LLRX – Professor Richard Forno highlights the fragility of our enterprise IT systems against the backdrop of the global information technology outage on July 19, 2024 that paralyzed organizations ranging from airlines to hospitals and the delivery of uniforms for the Olympic Games, representing a growing concern for cybersecurity professionals, businesses and governments. Continue Reading

A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbots

Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “In the hour after President Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, most popular AI chatbots seemed oblivious to the news. Asked directly whether he had dropped out, almost all said no or declined to give an answer. Asked who was running for president of the United States,… Continue Reading

Ransomware Attack Takes Down Computer System for America’s Largest Trial Court

AP: “A ransomware attack has shut down the computer system of the largest trial court in the country, officials with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County said. The cybersecurity attack began early Friday and is not believed to be related to the faulty CrowdStrike software update that has disrupted airlines, hospitals and governments around… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 20, 2024

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 20, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading

Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available

Yet another reason to stop using google via Google for Developers: “In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time.… Continue Reading

Detect DeepFakes: How to counteract misinformation created by AI

MIT: “See for yourself how accurately you can identify AI-generated images at the DetectFakes Experiment and if you want to learn to spot deepfakes, please check out our recent paper on How to Distinguish AI-Generated Images from Authentic Photographs. You can find more of our work at publications in PNAS, a workshop at IJCAI, and pre-print on arXiv. Check out… Continue Reading