Remember when Elon Musk shut down Starlink around Ukraine a few months ago because he was shitty about the US government sucking him in to covering the costs? According to an excerpt from his own biography (written by Walter Isaacson, due for release next week), that shutdown was actually "driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk's conversations with senior Russian officials". After that conversation he ordered SpaceX engineers to turn off the network above the warzone, thwarting a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's naval fleet. Musk re-enabled Starlink once the US and EU paid for a huge bulk order of 100,000 terminals. We all know Musk is a dumb motherfucker, so I am not surprised he got finessed by a slick talking Russian spy a conference to do their bidding while making him feel like he is some sort of peace crusader.
One of the big issues with AI/LLMs is that they're trained on copyrighted materials without permission and the output of those systems can reproduce copyrighted content that you don't have permission to reproduce. To ease that fear, Microsoft has announced the Copilot Copyright Commitment. From their blog post - "if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft's Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products". Meanwhile, the Github Copilot class action is still happening over in the USA.
The Search Code Industry Code of Practice for the Online Industry (lol) has been approved by the eSafety Commissioner. This one relates to search engines and wasn't approved with the rest of the codes back in June because it didn't do enough to "address the risk of class 1 material including child sexual abuse material on their services in Australia". The industry submitted an updated code that eSafety is now happy with, which requires "services like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo to take important steps to reduce the risk that material like child abuse material is returned in search results and that AI functionality integrated with the search engines are not used to generate 'synthetic' versions of this material". What this means in practice, I don't know (pretty sure the search engines already try pretty hard to avoid CSAM popping up, nobody wants that!), but it's a thing.
Chrome got a big update this week and there's one feature Google hasn't been too keen to promote. It's called the "Privacy Sandbox", which is a a new name for what was previously called FLoC, then the Topics API and is is enabled by default. According to Arstechnica, "this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask". Google calls it a "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web", as they plan to use this privacy sandbox feature instead of third party tracking cookies other browsers like Safari and Firefox got rid of years ago. Google isn't keen on doing that without an equivalent way to track users lined up, so that's why the dubiously named Privacy Sandbox and API exists in Chrome, but not other browsers, as the other browsers have no business interest in spying on you for advertising purposes.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
The Datong Solar Power Top Runner Base is a work in progress, but it's already one of the biggest solar farms in the world in terms of capacity—clocking in at an impressive 1.07 GW so far. An additional 600 MW is currently under construction and the long-term plan is for the total capacity to hit 3 GW. (Trilect Solar)
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