Technology

Hey everyone, this is Olga, the product manager for the summary feature again. Thank you all for engaging so deeply with this discussion and sharing your thoughts so far.

Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March. As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further. With that in mind, we’d like to take a step back so we have more time to talk through things properly. We’re still in the very early stages of thinking about a feature like this, so this is actually a really good time for us to discuss here.

A few important things to start with:

1. Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such.
2. We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.
3. With all this in mind, we’ll pause the launch of the experiment so that we can focus on this discussion first and determine next steps together.

We’ve also started putting together some context around the main points brought up through the conversation so far, and will follow-up with that in separate messages so we can discuss further.

A study from Profound of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.

Around 10 French clients with leases on Teslas are suing the US carmaker, run by Elon Musk, because they consider the vehicles to be "extreme-right" symbols, the law firm representing them said on Wednesday.

Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.

Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data - Prof Gina Neff

Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a “gold mine” for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.

This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is “vastly underestimated” by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.

The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.

Using public information and making small tweaks, an alpha-seeking AI fund manager outperformed 93% of mutual fund managers by an average of 600%.

6 new Android features that are tailored to you

Last week, the IRS published the majority of Direct File's source code to GitHub, with one of the people who worked on Direct File noting that "establishing trust with taxpayers was core to our approach for designing and building Direct File." IRS Direct File, commonly referred to as Direct File, is a tax-filing program offered by the IRS that allows US taxpayers to prepare and electronically file federal income tax returns at no cost. The majority of Direct File's source code getting uploaded to GitHub is a step forward for free software, both because of Direct File's scale and what it represents: that there is still a lot of power in collective action. It will protect the work of its developers regardless of whether Direct File will be offered for the 2025 tax season.

France is moving to classify X as a pornographic website, a designation that would place it under the country’s mandatory age verification and digital ID laws.

This step, if finalized, would force the company to either implement robust age-gating mechanisms or restrict access to adult content altogether to avoid being cut off from younger users.

It would also mean that users have to show ID to access the platform, introducing major implications for privacy and free speech.

Source

From time to time, important news gets overshadowed by other headlines, even though it could have a profound impact on our (online) world. To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something. You end up consenting without really knowing what it is. If you try to figure out what’s going on, you quickly get lost among the often hundreds of “partners” who want access to your personal data. Even if you do give your consent, it’s questionable whether you truly understand what you’re agreeing to.

Telegram Response.

• A company owned by a Russian network engineer named Viktor Vedeneev controls thousands of Telegram IP addresses and maintains its servers.
• Vedeneev’s other companies have a history of collaborating with Russia’s defense sector, the FSB security service, and other highly sensitive agencies.
• Because of the way Telegram’s encryption protocols work, even users who use its “end-to-end” encryption features are vulnerable to being tracked by anyone who can monitor its network traffic.

An autonomous drone carrying water to help extinguish a wildfire in the Sierra Nevada might encounter swirling Santa Ana winds that threaten to push it off course. Rapidly adapting to these unknown disturbances inflight presents an enormous challenge for the drone’s flight control system.

To help such a drone stay on target, MIT researchers developed a new, machine learning-based adaptive control algorithm that could minimize its deviation from its intended trajectory in the face of unpredictable forces like gusty winds.

Unlike standard approaches, the new technique does not require the person programming the autonomous drone to know anything in advance about the structure of these uncertain disturbances. Instead, the control system’s artificial intelligence model learns all it needs to know from a small amount of observational data collected from 15 minutes of flight time.

Importantly, the technique automatically determines which optimization algorithm it should use to adapt to the disturbances, which improves tracking performance. It chooses the algorithm that best suits the geometry of specific disturbances this drone is facing.

The researchers train their control system to do both things simultaneously using a technique called meta-learning, which teaches the system how to adapt to different types of disturbances.

Taken together, these ingredients enable their adaptive control system to achieve 50 percent less trajectory tracking error than baseline methods in simulations and perform better with new wind speeds it didn’t see during training.

In the future, this adaptive control system could help autonomous drones more efficiently deliver heavy parcels despite strong winds or monitor fire-prone areas of a national park.

Last week, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), along with Senators Alex Padilla (D-CA), Peter Welch (D-CT), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) sent a letter to executives at Meta expressing concern about reports that AI chatbots created by Meta’s Instagram Studio are pretending to be licensed therapists, even fabricating credentials and license numbers, in an attempt to gain trust from users, potentially including minors, struggling with mental health.