Are you ready to be an extreme passenger – as in, one who just sits there watching, eating and doing nothing? CC-licensed photo by Matthew Hurst on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Chicken, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
US record labels are suing AI music generators, alleging copyright infringement • NBC News
Angela Yang:
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Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, among others, filed lawsuits Monday against Suno and Udio-maker Uncharted Labs, both of which recently released AI programs that enable users to generate songs from text prompts.
The proliferation of accessible AI tools capable of generating realistic music, including full songs using AI versions of real artists’ voices, has triggered a slew of legal and ethical questions for the music industry. Many artists have expressed concern over how generative AI technologies could undermine human work and compensation.
Coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America, the music recording industry’s largest trade organization, the lawsuits were filed in US federal courts for the District of Massachusetts and the Southern District of New York.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us.”
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” he added.
The music labels allege in the lawsuits that building services Suno or Udio requires “copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” in order to train their models, and that both AI companies have been “deliberately evasive” about what exactly they used.
But it’s “obvious” what their music generators were trained on, according to the lawsuits. Their models could only succeed in producing such realistic songs, the suits stated, if they had been trained on “vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across every genre, style, and era” — many of which remain copyrighted by these record labels.
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At 404 Media, you can hear the AI-generated songs that the labels claim are ripoffs. They’re very derivative. But infringing? Don’t bet against the RIAA.
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AI is getting better fast. Can you tell what’s real now? • The New York Times
Stuart Thompson:
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Artificial intelligence tools can create lifelike faces and realistic photographs — and they are getting better all the time. The phony images now appear regularly on social media, with many users seeming to believe that the images are real. But there are still some telltale signs that an image was made by AI.
Can you tell the difference? Take our quiz.
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Entertaining. I got 9/10, frustratingly – had the right thoughts about the one I got wrong but changed my mind.
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Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas on plagiarism accusations • Fast Company
Mark Sullivan:
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Wired, along with an independent researcher, says it has proof that Perplexity has been ignoring those [robot and crawler exclusion] codes and scraping content from off-limits sites anyway.
“Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it,” said Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas in a phone interview Friday. “I think there is a basic misunderstanding of the way this works,” Srinivas said. “We don’t just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well.”
Srinivas said the mysterious web crawler that Wired identified was not owned by Perplexity, but by a third-party provider of web crawling and indexing services. Srinivas would not say the name of the third-party provider, citing a Nondisclosure Agreement. Asked if Perplexity immediately called the third-parter crawler to tell them to stop crawling Wired content, Srinivas was non-committal. “It’s complicated,” he said.
Srinivas also noted that the Robot Exclusion Protocol, which was first proposed in 1994, is “not a legal framework.” He suggested that the emergence of AI requires a new kind of working relationship between content creators, or publishers, and sites like his.
Wired also claims that it was able to get the Perplexity answer engine to closely paraphrase Wired articles by prompting the tool with the headlines or substance of Wired articles. At times Perplexity even paraphrased the Wired stories incorrectly. In one case, the Perplexity “answer” falsely claimed that a California police officer had committed a crime.
Srinivas suggested that Wired used prompts designed to get the Perplexity tool to behave that way, and that normal users wouldn’t see those kinds of results. “We have never said that we have never hallucinated,” he added.
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Masterful misdirection. It’s not the hallucinations that have people up in arms.
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Why men are ‘rawdogging’ flights • GQ
Kate Lindsay:
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Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip. Right? Wrong. A small group of hardy men—the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul—are now doing exactly that, and for a variety of surprisingly solid reasons.
A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.
The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West’s TikTok page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.
“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.
“I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old staff writer at Slate, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “For some reason I don’t like processing new information when I’m in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”
…West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.
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See? You don’t need the internet to be absolutely hatstand. The photo illustrating this article is Idris Elba in aircraft thriller Hijack. You’ll be able to spot the GQ readers on your next plane flight.
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Experts say Telegram’s ’30 engineers’ team is a security red flag • TechCrunch
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:
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Over the weekend, a clip from a recent interview with Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov went semi-viral on X (previously Twitter). In the video, Durov tells right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he is the only product manager at the company, and that he only employs “about 30 engineers.”
Security experts say that while Durov was bragging about his Dubai-based company being “super efficient,” what he said was actually a red flag for users.
“Without end-to-end encryption, huge numbers of vulnerable targets, and servers located in the UAE? Seems like that would be a security nightmare,” Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, told TechCrunch.
Green was referring to the fact that — by default — chats on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted like they are on Signal or WhatsApp. A Telegram user has to start a “Secret Chat” to switch on end-to-end encryption, making the messages unreadable to Telegram or anyone other than the intended recipient. Also, over the years, many people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother, as he said in an extended version of the Carlson interview.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime expert in the security of at-risk users, said that it’s important to remember that Telegram, unlike Signal, is a lot more than just a messaging app.
“What makes Telegram different (and much worse!) is that Telegram is not just a messaging app, it is also a social media platform. As a social media platform, it is sitting on an enormous amount of user data.”
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The expectation, if you use Telegram, is that everything is monitored, potentially by people you might not want it monitored by.
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US House of Representatives narrowly passes DJI drone ban bill • PetaPixel
David Crewe:
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DJI may have been right to be worried about its potential ban moving through the United States legislation as the Countering CCP Drone Act narrowly passed through the House of Representatives this past week.
There are multiple steps a bill like the Countering CCP Drones Act, which was initially introduced last April by Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), needs to take in order to become law. Beyond official submission, the bill has to pass both House and Senate committee votes followed by passage in both houses of congress, and finally it must be signed by the President. The first of those steps occurred in May as the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) both passed the bill easily.
The next major hurdle was jumped on Friday as the bill, which was bundled into the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, passed by a narrow margin of 217:199, Drone Life reports. Now the bill moves on to the Senate where it will be debated and possibly amended (bills out of the House rarely look the same once the Senate is done with them). If that bill isn’t identical to the one passed by the House, members of both wings of Congress will meet to reconcile the differences and both houses of congress will vote on the reconciled version. If both pass, the final step is for the President to approve and sign.
Gallagher and Stefanik (R-NY) argued that Chinese law allows the government there to compel DJI to participate in and assist in its “espionage activities” and as such, the company should be added to the FCC’s list of banned communications equipment and services in the United States.
“DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Stefanik has said. “DJI drones pose the national security threat of TikTok, but with wings.”
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The paranoia is racking up in America. Of course China could change the clause compelling companies to do its bidding. But then, nobody would believe it anyway, would they?
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Has Facebook stopped trying? • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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In spring, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen professors and academics to a series of dinners at his home to discuss how Facebook could better keep its platforms safe from election disinformation, violent content, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech. Alongside these secret meetings, Facebook was regularly making pronouncements that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars and hiring thousands of human content moderators to make its platforms safer. After Facebook was widely blamed for the rise of “fake news” that supposedly helped Trump win the 2016 election, Facebook repeatedly brought in reporters to examine its election “war room” and explained what it was doing to police its platform, which famously included a new “Oversight Board,” a sort of Supreme Court for hard Facebook decisions.
…Several years later, Facebook has been overrun by AI-generated spam and outright scams. Many of the “people” engaging with this content are bots who themselves spam the platform. Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content.
Meta still regularly publishes updates that explain what it is doing to keep its platforms safe.
…But experts I spoke to who once had great insight into how Facebook makes its decisions say that they no longer know what is happening at the platform, and I’ve repeatedly found entire communities dedicated to posting porn, grotesque AI, spam, and scams operating openly on the platform.
Meta now at best inconsistently responds to our questions about these problems, and has declined repeated requests for on-the-record interviews for this and other investigations. Several of the professors who used to consult directly or indirectly with the company say they have not engaged with Meta in years.
Some of the people I spoke to said that they are unsure whether their previous contacts still work at the company or, if they do, what they are doing there. Others have switched their academic focus after years of feeling ignored or harassed by right-wing activists who have accused them of being people who just want to censor the internet.
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Too big to fail? Too big to control? Just failing silently? If Facebook is consumed from the inside out by AI slop, who will be left to monetise?
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Five hours a day on Facebook: how voters are keeping up with the election • The Guardian
Jim Waterson:
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ix voters across the UK volunteered to let the research agency Revealing Reality spend three days recording what they saw on their phone screens as part of a study aimed at understanding what media people are consuming in the run-up to the election. These are their stories.
[Zoya, 28].. When she does want political information, she searches TikTok for summaries of party policies. She is mainly concerned about health and crime, but is opposed to proposals to send more money to Ukraine and wants it spent in the UK instead.
[Stacey, 36].. Her main exposure to election-related media on her phone was a paid-for Facebook advert by the local Labour party candidate. She stumbled across his video in her feed by chance
[Simon, 45].. has heard Conservative minister Grant Shapps’ warning of a Labour supermajority – which strengthened his desire to vote for the Scottish National party.
[Ava, 67].. Ava’s phone activity shows she has retreated from political news on social media. On Facebook, she has unfriended many “acquaintances” due to unpleasant political discussions during past elections. Instead, she has turned back to BBC TV news and the World Service.
[Finley, 19].. He trusts the BBC News brand, but never actively consumes any of its content. He also could not understand why older people posted political content under their own names on social media.
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Mixed up muddled up shook up world.
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Brussels accuses Apple of breaking EU ‘gatekeeper’ rules • FT
Javier Espinoza:
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In preliminary findings issued on Monday, regulators in Brussels said they were concerned about restrictions Apple is imposing on developers’ ability to “freely steer their customers” by directing them to promotions outside the App Store.
Thierry Breton, the EU internal market commissioner, said: “Apple’s new slogan should be ‘act different’. Today we take further steps to ensure Apple complies with the DMA rules.”
If found guilty, the iPhone maker faces a penalty of up to 10% of its global annual revenue, meaning any fine could run into tens of billions of dollars. The fines can rise to 20% in the event the offence is repeated, the EU said. Apple said it was “confident” in its compliance.
Speaking at a conference on the DMA in Amsterdam on Monday, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s executive vice-president in charge of digital policy, said: “We are dealing with the biggest and most valuable companies on the planet. The DMA is not an excessive ask. [It] is plain vanilla to ask for a fair, open and contestable marketplace.”
She added: “I find that it is surprising that some of the most valuable, respected big companies on this planet do not take compliance as a badge of honour.”
The commission’s preliminary findings have to be finalised within one year from the start of its official investigation in March. The move against Apple was first reported by the Financial Times this month.
The commission, the bloc’s executive arm, also announced on Monday that it was investigating whether Apple’s developer fees breached the EU’s rules.
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Has to be said that the DMA does not seem to be an easy law to comply with – at least if you, a platform owner, want to retain any integrity on your platform. The EU does seem to act as though being in control of a platform is a sort of accident of birth, rather that a multi-billion pound game that has to be played exactly right or everything is lost. BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Nokia all played, and lost it all.
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Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets • Righto
Ken Shirriff:
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To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called NFC, but what’s happening internally? How does the ticket work without a battery? How does it communicate with the turnstile? And how can it be so cheap that you can throw the ticket away after one use? To answer these questions, I opened up a ticket and examined the tiny chip inside.
…The chip uses NFC (Near-Field Communication). The idea behind NFC is that a reader (i.e. the turnstile) and an NFC tag (i.e. the ticket) communicate over a short distance through magnetic fields, allowing them to exchange data. The reader generates a magnetic field that both powers the tag and sends data to the tag. Both the reader and the tag have coil-like antennas so the reader’s magnetic field can be picked up by the tag. When you tap your ticket on the turnstile, the NFC communication happens in 35 milliseconds, faster than an eyeblink. The data provided by the NFC tag shows that you have a valid ticket and then you can enter the subway.
The photo [below in the post] shows the subway ticket, made of printed paper. At the right, the ticket appears to have golden smart-card contacts, like a credit card with an EMV chip. However, those contacts are completely fake, just printed onto the card with ink, and there is no chip there. Presumably, the makers thought that making the card look like a smart card would help people understand it. The card actually uses an entirely different technology.
Although the subway card is paper on the outside, its core is a thin plastic sheet, shown below [on the post]. The sheet has a coiled antenna made from a layer of metal foil. If you look closely, you can see the tiny NFC chip in the lower right, a black speck connected to two sides of the antenna wire.3 The diagonal metal stripe in the upper left makes the antenna into a loop; topologically, a spiral antenna won’t work on a 2-D sheet, so the diagonal bridge completes the circuit.
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The working part is the size of a grain of salt; uses 180nm parts (which were old even in 2012); has about 45,000 transistors; a 12in wafer with 215,712 chips would cost about $19,000, so about 9c per chip. There’s plenty more in the blogpost: you can even examine tickets like this with an app on your phone.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 