The situation is both absurd and entirely predictable. AI models like ChatGPT make use of large language models (LLMs), a type of AI model trained on billions of examples scraped from the web. These models don’t actually understand human language—they merely generate natural-sounding text by predicting what word will come next, based on training data and the previous words in a sequence. They’re also infamous for reproducing racist and sexist stereotypes, which AI companies have attempted to filter and suppress with extremely spotty results.
The team at the newly popular Twitter alternative Hive is in over its head. The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researchers who discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed. The issues they found would allow attackers access to all data, including private posts and messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages, as well as the ability to edit other people’s Hive posts.
In a conceptual rendering, astronauts watch robots 3D-print structures out of processed lunar dirt. (Credit: Icon Technology)
The raw material for the first such structure is already on the Moon: the surface layer of soil, or regolith (PDF(Opens in a new window)) to geologists. NASA’s plans for long-term exploration of the Moon and, eventually, Mars rely heavily on generating needed materials and supplies from what’s on the ground there—what it calls “In situ resource utilization(Opens in a new window)”—instead of shipping everything from Earth.
The penalty relates to an inquiry which was opened by the DPC on April 14, 2021, following media reports of more than 530M Facebook users’ personal data — including email addresses and mobile phone numbers — being exposed online.
At the time, Facebook tried to play down the breach — claiming the data that had been found floating around online was “old data” and that it had fixed the issue that led to the personal data being exposed.
Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — suggested the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.”
The problem is, the Quest Pro isn’t very good. It’s a device seemingly launched without plan or purpose, highlighting VR’s persistent drawbacks without making good use of its strengths — and topped off with some irredeemably bad software. We might be seeing a roadmap for where Meta is going, but right now, it’s not a particularly fun place to be. And if Meta lingers there much longer, its metaverse is in trouble.
Though unnoticed by most people, the occasional one-second adjustment can cause problems for systems that require an exact, uninterrupted flow of time.
Reddit, for instance, was down for 40 minutes in 2012 when a leap second confused the company’s servers; four years later, Cloudflare’s DNS services were interrupted due to the miniscule time change.
