Spudger

In this week's episode of 'Allo 'Allo!, Thib explains all about bridges.

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:

While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.

Today marks the first day of the Report Stage of the Online Safety Bill. As this Bill progresses through the Houses of Parliament, we hope to (once again) raise the alarm around the risks to encryption posed by this Bill.

In the basement today we have quite a rare machine (for North America:) The BBC Master 128. It's an evolution of the original Acorn BBC Micro from 1981. My first task is to service the PSU and convert it to 120v, then see if this machine is working.

The protest has never ended. We have been trying to communicate with Reddit admins, who seemed at first to be willing to talk to us, but we are only getting the silent treatment and threats to reopen the subreddit.

There is huge excitement about ChatGPT and other large generative language models that produce fluent and human-like texts in English and other human languages. But these models have one big drawback, which is that their texts can be factually incorrect (hallucination) and also leave out key information (omission).

In our chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Lying, we look at hallucinations, omissions, and other aspects of “lying” in computer-generated texts. We conclude that these problems are probably inevitable.

Apple has joined the rapidly growing chorus of tech organizations calling on British lawmakers to revise the nation's Online Safety Bill – which for now is in the hands of the House of Lords – so that it safeguards strong end-to-end encryption.

We were already proud to announce that the national agency for the digitalisation of the healthcare system in Germany (gematik) had selected Matrix as the open standard on which to base all its interoperable instant messaging standard, back in 2021.

We are now delighted to let the world know that they are doubling down on sovereignty and sustainability: gematik is the first organisation of the public sector to join the Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member.

The GSM Association (GSMA) and a dozen carriers have announced a plan to make a modest dent in the number of mobile phones that languish, unused, unloved, and unrecycled.

The consortium proclaimed on Tuesday that five billion mobile phones are "currently sitting unused and unloved in desk drawers around the globe".

The literal judgement is in on using AI to write speeches