Technology

... while they feign child protection to avoid costs

A New Mexico jury ruled Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.

The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case.

Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state's Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew about about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.

The jury agreed with allegations that Meta made false or misleading statements and also agreed that Meta engaged in "unconscionable" trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children.

Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1913698/disney-exits-openai-deal-after-ai-giant-shutters-sora

Original WSJ exclusive: OpenAI Scraps Sora App in Continued Push to Focus on Coding and ‘Agent’ Tools

Paywall removal: https://archive.is/cKWkf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44699253

This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.

Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.

Archive

Alongside the extensive DeepSeek fingerprints, we observed a high degree of novelty in the dataset. Approximately 39% of analyzed samples had zero detections by signature‑based antivirus engines at the time of collection, evidence that AI-assisted development is producing code with no existing signature fingerprint. When we examined attribution separately, only 1.4% of AI‑assisted samples mapped to known threat groups, showing that the surge in new malware is being driven largely by unknown or lower‑skill actors, not mature clusters; expanding volume more than sophistication.

The registry trick came with caveats, though. Third-party SSD management tools like Samsung Magician and Western Digital Dashboard were not compatible with the new driver, and BitLocker could trigger recovery prompts after the driver swap.

The surprising order means any new Wi-Fi router models sold in the country must be US-made, or receive an exemption from the Pentagon or Homeland Security Department.

Paywall removed https://archive.ph/HjdeG

Every engineer in Canada walks out of school wearing a reminder that people died because someone got the math wrong. It’s called the Iron Ring, and if you look closely, you’ll see a plain metal band, with no engraving or school logo. It’s worn on the pinky of your working hand, and drags across every drafting, drawing, calculation, keyboard and surface one touches while working. While it is unobtrusive, it is intended to be a constant reminder of the human lives at risk with each decision.

The tradition goes back to 1925, when a mining professor named H.E.T. Haultain recruited Rudyard Kipling (!) to write an oath for graduating engineers. The ceremony is called the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. It sounds like something out of a Masonic lodge crossed with a trade school . The event is private and simple: make the obligation and receive the ring...

What’s a ritual without a good back-story? The tale behind this one is the Quebec Bridge collapse. Two collapses, actually… The first one on August 29, 1907, killed 75 of the 86 workers on the span when the south cantilever buckled into the St. Lawrence River. Thirty-three of the dead were Mohawk steelworkers from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. The Royal Commission found that consulting engineer Theodore Cooper had committed deadly errors in design and load calculations, and nobody on site had the authority or competence to stop work when the compression chords started visibly bending.

You're not productive if you don't use a lot of AI, says guy who makes all of his money selling AI hardware