Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: A study has concluded that Apple's privacy practices aren't particularly effective, because default apps on the iPhone and Mac have limited privacy settings and confusing configuration options. The research was conducted by Amel Bourdoucen and Janne Lindqvist of Aalto University in Finland. The pair noted that while many studies had examined privacy issues with third-party apps for Apple devices, very little literature investigates the issue in first-party apps -- like Safari and Siri. The aims of the study [PDF] were to investigate how much data Apple's own apps collect and where it's sent, and to see if users could figure out how to navigate the landscape of Apple's privacy settings.

The lengths to which Apple goes to secure its ecosystem -- as described in its Platform Security Guide [PDF] -- has earned it kudos from the information security world. Cupertino uses its hard-earned reputation as a selling point and as a bludgeon against Google. Bourdoucen and Janne Lindqvist don't dispute Apple's technical prowess, but argue that it is undermined by confusing user interfaces. "Our work shows that users may disable default apps, only to discover later that the settings do not match their initial preference," the paper states. "Our results demonstrate users are not correctly able to configure the desired privacy settings of default apps. In addition, we discovered that some default app configurations can even reduce trust in family relationships."

The researchers criticize data collection by Apple apps like Safari and Siri, where that data is sent, how users can (and can't) disable that data tracking, and how Apple presents privacy options to users. The paper illustrates these issues in a discussion of Apple's Siri voice assistant. While users can ostensibly choose not to enable Siri in the initial setup on macOS-powered devices, it still collects data from other apps to provide suggestions. To fully disable Siri, Apple users must find privacy-related options across five different submenus in the Settings app. Apple's own documentation for how its privacy settings work isn't good either. It doesn't mention every privacy option, explain what is done with user data, or highlight whether settings are enabled or disabled. Also, it's written in legalese, which almost guarantees no normal user will ever read it. "We discovered that the features are not clearly documented," the paper concludes. "Specifically, we discovered that steps required to disable features of default apps are largely undocumented and the data handling practices are not completely disclosed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Will Google ever launch its "Find My" network? The Android ecosystem was supposed to have its own version of Apple's AirTags by now. Google has had a crowd-sourced device-tracking network sitting dormant on 3 billion Android phones since December 2022. Partners have been ready to go with Bluetooth tag hardware since May 2023! This was all supposed to launch a year ago, but Google has been in a holding pattern. The good news is we're finally seeing some progress after a year of silence. The reason for Google's lengthy delay is actually Apple. A week before Google's partners announced their Android network Bluetooth tags, Google and Apple jointly announced a standard to detect "unknown" Bluetooth trackers and show users alerts if their phone thinks they're being stalked. Since you can constantly see an AirTag's location, they can be used for stalking by just covertly slipping one into a bag or car; nobody wants that, so everyone's favorite mobile duopoly is teaming up.

Google did its half of this partnership and rolled out AirTag detection in July 2023. At the same time, Google also announced: "We've made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS." Surely Apple would be burning the midnight oil to launch iOS Android tag detection as soon as possible so that Google could start competing with AirTags. It looks like iOS 17.5 is the magic version Google is waiting for. The first beta was released to testers recently, and 9to5Mac recently spotted strings for detecting "unwanted" non-Apple tracking devices that were suddenly following you around. This 17.5 update still needs to ship, and the expectation is sometime in May. That would be 11 months after Google's release. [...]

With the impending iOS release, Google seems to be getting its ducks in a row as well. 9to5Google has a screenshot of the new Find My Device settings page that is appearing for some users, which gives them a chance to opt out of the anonymous tracking network. That report also mentions that some users received an email Thursday of an impending tracking network launch, saying: "You'll get a notification on your Android devices when this feature is turned on in 3 days. Until then, you can opt out of the network through Find My Device on the web." The vast majority of Android users have not gotten this email, though, suggesting maybe it was a mistake. It's very weird to announce a launch in "days remaining" rather than just saying what date something will launch, and this email went out Thursday, which would mean a bizarre Sunday launch when everyone is off for the weekend.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.

Google has introduced a new JPEG library called Jpegli, which reduces noise and improves image quality over traditional JPEGs. Proponents of the technology said it has the potential to make the Internet faster and more beautiful. InfoWorld reports: Announced April 3 and accessible from GitHub, Jpegli maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio at high-quality compression settings, Google said. Jpegli works by using new techniques to reduce noise and improve image quality. New or improved features include adaptive quantization heuristics from the JPEG XL reference implementation, improved quantization matrix selection, calculation of intermediate results, and the possibility to use more advanced colorspace.

The library provides an interoperable encoder and decoder complying with the original JPEG standard and its most convenient 8-bit formalism and API/ABI compatibility with libjeg-turbo and MozJPEG. When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psycho-visually effective computations are also performed; images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts. While improving on the density ratio of image quality and compression, Jpegli's coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches such as MozJPEG, according to Google. Web developers can thus integrate Jpegli into existing workflows without sacrificing coding speed, performance, or memory use.

Jpegli can be encoded with 10-plus bits per component. The 10-bit encoding happens in the original 8-bit formalism and the resulting images are interoperable with 8-bit viewers. The 10-bit dynamics are available as an API extension and application code changes are necessary to apply it. Also, Jpegli compresses images more efficiently than traditional JPEG codecs; this can save bandwidth and storage space and make web pages faster, Google said.

Many investors are lining up to bet on the collapse of former President Donald J. Trump's social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which made its stock market debut last week under the ticker "DJT." The stock has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" since it is highly volatile and there are no fundamental underpinnings. It's being valued at roughly 1,600 times its annual revenue, at Wednesday's closing price. "By comparison, the stock of Facebook's owner trades at about eight times revenues, and Google's owner trades at six times," notes Fast Company. The New York Times reports: Trump Media is the most "shorted" special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit. The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet. "They are looking for this stock to crater and crater very quickly," said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3. Last month, traders lost $126 million betting against Trump Media, according to S3.

On Monday, Trump Media published updated financial information, revealing little revenue, large losses and a statement from the company's independent auditor expressing "substantial doubt" about its financial viability. This appeared to galvanize investors betting against the company, as the stock slipped from its highs. But short-sellers are finding it difficult and costly to trade in Trump Media. There are roughly 137 million shares in the company, and only around five million of those are available to short-sellers. Mr. Trump owns about 60 percent of shares, and company executives also hold a chunk of the stock. Company insiders tend not to lend their shares to short-sellers. Big asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which regularly lend out shares, are not major holders of Trump Media, further crimping the supply.

According to S3, 4.9 million of the roughly five million available shares are already on loan. As with any loan, when share owners lend their stock to a short-seller, they charge a fee, usually expressed as an annual interest rate on the stock's current value. Typically, the fee for borrowing stock is a fraction of a percentage point. For Trump Media, it has risen to 550 percent, Mr. Dusaniwsky said. Trump Media's stock currently trades at around $50. That means that shorting it for a month would cost more than $20 per share. For a short-seller to break even, the stock price would have to fall by almost half by early May.

There is another wrinkle, too. One large broker said much of the short trading was not an outright bet against Trump Media. Since the advent of meme-stock trading and the vilification of short-sellers that win only if popular companies lose, large investors are wary of making such trades. Instead, the current trade driving demand is designed to capture the difference between DJT's stock price and outstanding "warrants," which will give the owners the right to new stock at a fixed price as long as regulators approve the new shares. Partly because of that uncertainty, those warrants currently trade below $19, with a list of hedge funds as recent holders. Even after the high cost to borrow stock is accounted for, they are still able to profit from the $30 difference between existing stock and what the warrants are worth, assuming the warrants become registered as shares.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, got a "copyright infringement notice" from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal: "We're reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in relation to an image connected to our client," it read. [...] In this case, though, the email didn't demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a "visible and clickable link" beneath the photo in question to a website called "tech4gods" or the law firm would "take action." Smith began looking into the law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images of its "lawyers" are AI generated.

The threat to "activate the case No. 86342" is obviously nonsense. Beyond that, Commonwealth Legal's website looks generic and is full of stock photos, though I've seen a lot of generic template websites for real law firms. All of its lawyers have vacant, thousand-yard stares that are commonly generated by websites like This Person Does Not Exist, none of them come up in any attorney or LinkedIn searches, and the only reverse image search results for them are for a now-broken website called Generated.Photos, which offered a service to "use AI to generate people online that don't exist, change clothing and modify face and body traits. Download generated people in different postures." "All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model," Ali Shahriyari, cofounder and CTO of the AI detection startup Reality Defender told 404 Media. Commonwealth Legal's listed address is the fourth floor of a one-story building that looks nothing like the image on its website, and both of its phone numbers are disconnected. No one responded to the contact form that I filled out. Smith realized that what's happening here isn't a copyright enforcement or copyright trolling attempt at all. Instead, it's a backlink SEO scam, where a website owner tries to improve their Google ranking by asking, paying, or threatening someone to link to their website.

Tech4Gods.com is a gadget review website run by a man named Daniel Barczak, whose content is "complemented by AI writing assistants." In this case, the photo that Smith had "infringed" was a photo downloaded from the royalty free, free-to-use website Unsplash, which 404 Media also sometimes uses. The image was not taken by Barczak, and has nothing to do with him, he told me in an email: "I certainly don't own any images on the web," he said. The original photographer did not respond to a request for comment sent through Unsplash. Barczak told me that he had been previously buying backlinks to his website for SEO, but said he wasn't aware of who was doing this or why. "I have no idea; it certainly has nothing to do with me," he said. "However, recently, someone has been building spammy links against my site that I have been dealing with." "I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately, I buy links due to a lack of time," he added. "In the past, I had a bad link builder. I wonder if it's him going mad at me for letting him go It's hard to say the web is massive, and everyone can link whenever they want." Link building is an SEO strategy devised to get outside websites to link to your website. He added that "bad links may damage [the site's] profile in Google's eyes." In this case, however, the "lawyers" were threatening a well-established tech blogger, and a link from Tedium would likely be treated as a positive in the search algorithm's eyes.

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. From a report: I was able to find the AI-generated books with the same method we've previously used to find AI-generated Amazon product reviews, papers published in academic journals, and online articles. Searching Google Books for the term "As of my last knowledge update," which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase. Some of the books are about ChatGPT, machine learning, AI, and other related subjects and include the phrase because they are discussing ChatGPT and its outputs. These books appear to be written by humans. However, most of the books in the first eight pages of results turned up by the search appear to be AI-generated and are not about AI.

For example, the 2024 book Bears, Bulls, and Wolves: Stock Trading for the Twenty-Year-Old by Tristin McIver, bills itself as "a transformative journey into the world of stock trading" and "a comprehensive guide designed for beginners eager to unlock the mysteries of financial markets." In reality, it reads like ChatGPT-generated text with surface, Wikipedia-level analysis of complex financial events like Facebook's initial public offering or the 2008 financial crisis summed up in a few short paragraphs. [...] Other books appear to be outdated to the point of being useless at the time they are published because they are generated with a version of ChatGPT with an old "knowledge update."

Google parent Alphabet has been talking to its advisers about the possibility of making an offer for HubSpot, an online marketing software company with a market value of $32 billion, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: If Alphabet moves ahead with an offer, it would be a rare example of a major technology company attempting a mega deal amid heightened regulatory scrutiny of the sector under U.S. President Joe Biden's administration.

The potential deal would also allow Alphabet to put some of its cash pile, which reached $110.9 billion as of the end of December, to work. Alphabet has met with Morgan Stanley investment bankers in recent days about a potential offer for HubSpot, the sources said. It has been discussing how much it should offer and whether antitrust regulators would clear such a tie-up, the sources added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Google is considering charging for new "premium" features powered by generative artificial intelligence, in what would be the biggest ever shake-up of its search business. The proposed revamp to its cash cow search engine would mark the first time the company has put any of its core product behind a paywall, and shows it is still grappling with a technology that threatens its advertising business, almost a year and a half after the debut of ChatGPT. Google is looking at options including adding certain AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services, which already offer access to its new Gemini AI assistant in Gmail and Docs, according to three people with knowledge of its plans. Engineers are developing the technology needed to deploy the service but executives have not yet made a final decision on whether or when to launch it, one of the people said. Google's traditional search engine would remain free of charge, while ads would continue to appear alongside search results even for subscribers. But charging would represent the first time that Google -- which for many years offered free consumer services funded entirely by advertising -- has made people pay for enhancements to its core search product. "For years, we've been reinventing Search to help people access information in the way that's most natural to them," said Google. "With our generative AI experiments in Search, we've already served billions of queries, and we're seeing positive Search query growth in all of our major markets. We're continuing to rapidly improve the product to serve new user needs."

It added: "We don't have anything to announce right now."

An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall -- because he couldn't find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That's on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat.

What's more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to anyone outside the startup interested in experimenting with Stability's models. One external researcher cited in the report estimated that a now-cancelled project was provided with at least $2.5 million worth of compute over the span of four months. Stability AI's infrastructure spending was not matched by revenue or fresh funding. The startup was projected to make just $11 million in sales for the 2023 calendar year. Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million. Google Cloud and CoreWeave were also not paid in full, with debts to the pair reaching $1.6 million as of October, it's reported.

It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company -- once valued at a billion dollars -- weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties. The failing was pinned on Mostaque's inability to devise and execute a viable business plan. The company also failed to land deals with clients including Canva, NightCafe, Tome, and the Singaporean government, which contemplated a custom model, the report asserts. Stability's financial predicament spiraled, eroding trust among investors, making it difficult for the generative AI darling to raise additional capital, it is claimed. According to the report, Mostaque hoped to bring in a $95 million lifeline at the end of last year, but only managed to bring in $50 million from Intel. Only $20 million of that sum was disbursed, a significant shortfall given that the processor titan has a vested interest in Stability, with the AI biz slated to be a key customer for a supercomputer powered by 4,000 of its Gaudi2 accelerators. The report goes on to mention further fundraising challenges, issues retaining employees, and copyright infringement lawsuits challenging the company's future prospects. The full expose can be read via Forbes (paywalled).

A new ChromeOS update (M123) is rolling out that brings keyboard shortcuts and mouse buttons and enables hotspot connections on cellular Chromebooks. The Verge reports: The keyboard shortcut feature will work like it does in other operating systems, in which you can assign specific actions to specific key combinations. Google uses the examples of tweaking shortcuts to be easier to carry out one-handed or making them resemble those you're used to in, say, macOS. The same goes for mouse button customizing -- if your mouse has extra buttons besides just left and right clicks, and you want to turn that weird side button into a mute button, you can do that in ChromeOS with this update.

The company also added per-app language preferences for Android apps that you're running in ChromeOS, and it says it has made its offline text-to-speech voices more natural-sounding. As is Google's way, these updates will be rolling out over the next few days.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November.

A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back. Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.

The UK and US have signed a landmark deal to work together on testing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and develop "robust" safety methods for AI tools and their underlying systems. "It is the first bilateral agreement of its kind," reports the BBC. From the report: UK tech minister Michelle Donelan said it is "the defining technology challenge of our generation." "We have always been clear that ensuring the safe development of AI is a shared global issue," she said. "Only by working together can we address the technology's risks head on and harness its enormous potential to help us all live easier and healthier lives."

The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology added that the agreement builds upon commitments made at the AI Safety Summit held in Bletchley Park in November 2023. The event, attended by AI bosses including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and tech billionaire Elon Musk, saw both the UK and US create AI Safety Institutes which aim to evaluate open and closed-source AI systems. [...]

Gina Raimondo, the US commerce secretary, said the agreement will give the governments a better understanding of AI systems, which will allow them to give better guidance. "It will accelerate both of our Institutes' work across the full spectrum of risks, whether to our national security or to our broader society," she said. "Our partnership makes clear that we aren't running away from these concerns - we're running at them."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++. Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language.

Bergstrom said that while Dropbox in 2016 and Figma in 2018 offered early accounts of rewriting code in memory-safe Rust - and doubts about productivity and the language have subsided - concerns have lingered about its reliability and security. "Even six months ago, this was a really tough conversation," he said. "I would go and I would talk to people and they would say, 'Wait, wait you have an `unsafe` keyword. That means we should all write C++ until the heat death of the Universe.'"

But there's been a shift in awareness across the software development ecosystem, Bergstrom argued, about the challenges of using non-memory safe languages. Such messaging is now coming from government authorities in the US and other nations who understand the role software plays in critical infrastructure. The reason is that the majority of security vulnerabilities in large codebases can be traced to memory security bugs. And since Rust code can largely if not totally avoid such problems when properly implemented, memory safety now looks a lot like a national security issue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police, written by Dhruv Bhutani: As someone who is an early adopter of all things smart and has invested a significant amount of money in building a fancy smart home, it saddens me to say that I feel cheated by the thousands of dollars I've spent on smart devices. And it's not a one-off. Amazon's recent move to block off local ADB connections on Fire TV devices is the latest example in a long line of grievances. A brand busy wrestling away control from the consumer after they've bought the product, the software update gimps a feature that has been present on the hardware ever since it launched back in 2014. ADB-based commands let users take deep control of the hardware, and in the case of the Fire TV hardware, it can drastically improve the user experience. [...] A few years ago, I decided to invest in the NVIDIA Shield. The premium streamer was marketed as a utopia for streaming online and offline sources with the ability to plug in hard drives, connect to NAS drives, and more. At launch, it did precisely that while presenting a beautiful, clean interface that was a joy to interact with. However, subsequent updates have converted what was otherwise a clean and elegant solution to an ad-infested overlay that I zoom past to jump into my streaming app of choice. This problem isn't restricted to just the Shield. Even my Google TV running Chromecast has a home screen that's more of an advertising space for Google than an easy way to get to my content.

But why stop at streaming boxes? Google's Nest Hubs are equal victims of feature deterioration. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Nest Hubs and outfitted them in most of my rooms and washrooms. However, Google's consistent degradation of the user experience means I use these speakers for little more than casting music from the Spotify app. The voice recognition barely works on the best of days, and when it does, the answers tend to be wildly inconsistent. It wasn't always the case. In fact, at launch, Google's Nest speakers were some of the best smart home interfaces you could buy. You'd imagine that the experience would only improve from there. That's decidedly not the case. I had high hopes that the Fuchsia update would fix the broken command detection, but that's also not the case. And good luck to you if you decided to invest in Google Assistant-compatible displays. Google's announcement that it would no longer issue software or security updates to third-party displays like the excellent Lenovo Smart Display, right after killing the built-in web browser, is pretty wild. It boggles my mind that a company can get away with such behavior.

Now imagine the plight of Nest Secure owners. A home security system isn't something one expects to switch out for many many years. And yet, Google decided to kill the Nest Secure home monitoring solution merely three years after launching the product range. While I made an initial investment in the Nest ecosystem, I've since switched over to a completely local solution that is entirely under my control, stores data locally, and won't be going out of action because of bad decision-making by another company. "It's clear to me that smart home devices, as they stand, are proving to be very poor investments for consumers," Bhutani writes in closing. "Suffice it to say that I've paused any future investments in smart devices, and I'll be taking a long and hard look at a company's treatment of its current portfolio before splurging out more cash. I'd recommend you do the same."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI search engine Perplexity, which claims to be a Google competitor and recently snagged a $73.6 million Series B funding from investors like Jeff Bezos, is going to start selling ads, the company told ADWEEK. Perplexity uses AI to answer users' questions, based on web sources. It incorporates videos and images in the response and even data from partners like Yelp. Perplexity also links sources in the response while suggesting related questions users might want to ask.

These related questions, which account for 40% of Perplexity's queries, are where the company will start introducing native ads, by letting brands influence these questions, said company chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko. When a user delves deeper into a topic, the AI search engine might offer organic and brand-sponsored questions. Perplexity will launch this in the upcoming quarters, but Shevelenko declined to disclose more specifics. While Perplexity touts on its site that search should be "free from the influence of advertising-driven models," advertising was always in the cards for the company. "Advertising was always part of how we're going to build a great business," said Shevelenko.

The surge of money flooding into AI has resulted in some crypto-like hype that is obscuring the incredible scientific progress in the field, according to Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. From a report: The chief executive of Google's AI research division told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars being poured into generative AI start-ups and products "brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever."

"Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal," he added. "In a way, AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped. We're talking about all sorts of things that are just not real." The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 sparked an investor frenzy as start-ups raced to develop and deploy generative AI and attract venture capital funding. VC groups invested $42.5bn in 2,500 AI start-up equity rounds last year, according to market analysts CB Insights. Public market investors have also rushed into the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia, that are spearheading the AI revolution. Their rise has helped to propel global stock markets to their strongest first-quarter performance in five years.

Google plans to destroy a trove of data that reflects millions of users' web-browsing histories, part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked millions of users without their knowledge. WSJ: The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private "Incognito" browsing option. The lawsuit alleged that Google's marketing and privacy disclosures didn't properly inform users of the kinds of data being collected, including details about which websites they viewed. The settlement details, filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, set out the actions the company will take to change its practices around private browsing. According to the court filing, Google has agreed to destroy billions of data points that the lawsuit alleges it improperly collected, to update disclosures about what it collects in private browsing and give users the option to disable third-party cookies in that setting.

The agreement doesn't include damages for individual users. But the settlement will allow individuals to file claims. Already the plaintiff attorneys have filed 50 in California state court. Attorney David Boies, who represents the consumers in the lawsuit, said the settlement requires Google to delete and remediate "in unprecedented scope and scale" the data it improperly collected. "This settlement is an historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies," Boies said.

Companies racing to develop more powerful artificial intelligence are rapidly nearing a new problem: The internet might be too small for their plans (non-paywalled link). From a report: Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies. Some executives and researchers say the industry's need for high-quality text data could outstrip supply within two years, potentially slowing AI's development.

AI companies are hunting for untapped information sources, and rethinking how they train these systems. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has discussed training its next model, GPT-5, on transcriptions of public YouTube videos, people familiar with the matter said. Companies also are experimenting with using AI-generated, or synthetic, data as training material -- an approach many researchers say could actually cause crippling malfunctions. These efforts are often secret, because executives think solutions could be a competitive advantage.

Data is among several essential AI resources in short supply. The chips needed to run what are called large-language models behind ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and other AI bots also are scarce. And industry leaders worry about a dearth of data centers and the electricity needed to power them. AI language models are built using text vacuumed up from the internet, including scientific research, news articles and Wikipedia entries. That material is broken into tokens -- words and parts of words that the models use to learn how to formulate humanlike expressions.

"After taking a look at Floorp Browser, I was left wondering whether there was a Chromium-based web browser that was as good, or even better than Chrome," writes a "First Look" reviewer at It's Foss News.

"That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'." [Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were:

Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5

So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system).

Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more.
Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article.

"Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."