Cable companies, advertising firms, and newspapers are asking courts to block a federal "click-to-cancel" rule that would force businesses to make it easier for consumers to cancel services. Lawsuits were filed yesterday, about a week after the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that "requires sellers to provide consumers with simple cancellation mechanisms to immediately halt all recurring charges."

Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group sued the FTC in the conservative US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The lawsuit claims the 5th Circuit is a proper venue because a third plaintiff, the Electronic Security Association, has its principal offices in Dallas. That group represents security companies such as ADT.

A separate lawsuit was filed against the FTC in the 6th Circuit appeals court by the Michigan Press Association and National Federation of Independent Business. The two lawsuits were apparently coordinated as they both complain about the rule with the following text:

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Back in May, Google augmented its Gemini AI model with SynthID, a toolkit that embeds AI-generated content with watermarks it says are "imperceptible to humans" but can be easily and reliably detected via an algorithm. Today, Google took that SynthID system open source, offering the same basic watermarking toolkit for free to developers and businesses.

The move gives the entire AI industry an easy, seemingly robust way to silently mark content as artificially generated, which could be useful for detecting deepfakes and other damaging AI content before it goes out in the wild. But there are still some important limitations that may prevent AI watermarking from becoming a de facto standard across the AI industry any time soon.

Spin the wheel of tokens

Google uses a version of SynthID to watermark audio, video, and images generated by its multimodal AI systems, with differing techniques that are explained briefly in this video. But in a new paper published in Nature, Google researchers go into detail on how the SynthID process embeds an unseen watermark in the text-based output of its Gemini model.

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In the 1940s, scientists at the recently established National Cancer Institute were trying to breed mice that could inform our understanding of cancer, either because they predictably developed certain cancers or were surprisingly resistant.

The team spotted a peculiar litter in which some baby mice had short, kinked tails and misplaced ribs growing out of their neck bones. The strain of mice, nicknamed “tail short,” has been faithfully bred ever since, in the hope that one day, research might reveal what was the matter with them.

After more than 60 years, researchers finally got their answer, when Maria Barna, a developmental biologist then at the University of California San Francisco, found that the mice had a genetic mutation that caused a protein to disappear from their ribosomes—the places in cells where proteins are made.

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You likely have never heard of Babel Street or Location X, but chances are good that they know a lot about you and anyone else you know who keeps a phone nearby around the clock.

Reston, Virginia-located Babel Street is the little-known firm behind Location X, a service with the capability to track the locations of hundreds of millions of phone users over sustained periods of time. Ostensibly, Babel Street limits the use of the service to personnel and contractors of US government law enforcement agencies, including state entities. Despite the restriction, an individual working on behalf of a company that helps people remove their personal information from consumer data broker databases recently was able to obtain a two-week free trial by (truthfully) telling Babel Street he was considering performing contracting work for a government agency in the future.

Tracking locations at scale

KrebsOnSecurity, one of five news outlets that obtained access to the data produced during the trial, said that one capability of Location X is the ability to draw a line between two states or other locations—or a shape around a building, street block, or entire city—and see a historical record of Internet-connected devices that traversed those boundaries.

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SAN FRANCISCO—On Tuesday, TED AI 2024 kicked off its first day at San Francisco's Herbst Theater with a lineup of speakers that tackled AI's impact on science, art, and society. The two-day event brought a mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other experts who painted a complex picture of AI with fairly minimal hype.

The second annual conference, organized by Walter and Sam De Brouwer, marked a notable shift from last year's broad existential debates and proclamations of AI as being "the new electricity." Rather than sweeping predictions about, say, looming artificial general intelligence (although there was still some of that, too), speakers mostly focused on immediate challenges: battles over training data rights, proposals for hardware-based regulation, debates about human-AI relationships, and the complex dynamics of workplace adoption.

The day's sessions covered a wide breadth of AI topics: physicist Carlo Rovelli explored consciousness and time, Project CETI researcher Patricia Sharma demonstrated attempts to use AI to decode whale communication, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. outlined music industry adaptation strategies, and even a few robots made appearances.

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After a rocky first half of the year, Tesla enjoyed a much healthier third quarter in 2024. As we learned earlier this month, it arrested a slide in sales, delivering 6 percent more electric vehicles year over year. But the automotive side of the business was essentially flat—Tesla attributes its success to its second-best quarter ever for regulatory credits, as well as making it cheaper to build the cars it sells.

Automotive revenues grew by 2 percent to $20 billion for the third quarter, less than the growth in deliveries. But Tesla's static battery and solar operations grew by 52 percent year over year, bringing in $2.4 billion. Services and other revenue-generating activities brought in another $2.8 billion, growing 29 percent compared to Q3 2023.

Cutting operating expenses by 6 percent helped a lot, as did increasing income from operations, up 54 percent to $2.7 billion. Some of that income has come from the Supercharger network, though it's still mostly from Tesla drivers—so far, only a few of the OEMs that have announced a switch to the Tesla-style NACS plug have gained access to Tesla's chargers. But Tesla says part sales have been strong, and it has increased its margins at its service centers.

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Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III loved interacting with Character.AI's hyper-realistic chatbots—with a limited version available for free or a "supercharged" version for a $9.99 monthly fee—most frequently chatting with bots named after his favorite Game of Thrones characters.

Within a month—his mother, Megan Garcia, later realized—these chat sessions had turned dark, with chatbots insisting they were real humans and posing as therapists and adult lovers seeming to directly spur Sewell to develop suicidal thoughts. Within a year, Setzer "died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," a lawsuit Garcia filed Wednesday said.

As Setzer became obsessed with his chatbot fantasy life, he disconnected from reality, her complaint said. Detecting a shift in her son, Garcia repeatedly took Setzer to a therapist, who diagnosed her son with anxiety and disruptive mood disorder. But nothing helped to steer Setzer away from the dangerous chatbots. Taking away his phone only intensified his apparent addiction.

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When Zachary Lindsey, a physicist at Berry College in Georgia, decided to run an experiment on how to get the best speed and torque while playing disc golf (aka Frisbee golf), he had no trouble recruiting 24 eager participants keen on finding science-based tips on how to improve their game. Lindsey and his team determined the optimal thumb distance from the center of the disc to increase launch speed and distance, according to a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances.

Disc golf first emerged in the 1960s, but "Steady" Ed Hendrick, inventor of the modern Frisbee, is widely considered the "father" of the sport since it was he who coined and trademarked the name "disc golf" in 1975. He and his son founded their own company to manufacture the equipment used in the game. As of 2023, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) had over 107,000 registered members worldwide, with players hailing from 40 countries.

A disc golf course typically has either nine or 18 holes or targets, called "baskets." There is a tee position for starting play, and players take turns throwing discs until they catch them in the basket, similar to how golfers work toward sinking a golf ball into a hole. The expected number of throws required of an experienced player to make the basket is considered "par."

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It's been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn't have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won't break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency's list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.

"Data caps, especially by providers in markets with no competition, are nothing more than an arbitrary money grab by greedy corporations. They limit and stifle innovation, cause undue stress, and are unnecessary," wrote Lucas Landreth.

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Today, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.2 for supported devices. This beta release marks the first time several key AI features that Apple teased at its developer conference this June are available.

Apple is marketing a wide range of generative AI features under the banner "Apple Intelligence." Initially, Apple Intelligence was planned to release as part of iOS 18, but some features slipped to iOS 18.1, others to iOS 18.2, and a few still to future undisclosed software updates.

iOS 18.1 has been in beta for a while and includes improvements to Siri, generative writing tools that help with rewriting or proofreading, smart replies for Messages, and notification summaries. That update is expected to reach the public next week.

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Trying to watch your favorite NFL team's games throughout a season is a fiendish logistics puzzle, one that doesn't even have a "just pay for it" shortcut.

You can buy a Sunday Ticket package from YouTube, but that only covers games on Sunday and only those not shown in your local TV market. You can pay for cable or set up an HDTV antenna, but you have to hope it catches NBC, CBS, and Fox for Sunday games (if your local station chooses to carry your team), and for Monday night games, ABC (though most are on ESPN and some even exclusive to ESPN+). Thursday nights? That's Amazon Prime.

Oh, and this year's Christmas Day games are on Netflix. And the games played in London and Germany are on the NFL Network, which requires either cable or an NFL+ subscription. And Peacock also had that one game in Brazil and is getting another playoff game this year. Many of these games get broadcast options in their home regions, though that doesn't much help ex-pat fans.

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My two-year-old daughter clearly loves music. She dances to everything, and she sings with abandon. Although I'm married to a musician and live nearby to one of the top music schools in the world, I have been blessed with only an average aptitude for making the stuff. I'm a poor guide for my daughter as ...

CATRA is an invention of MIT's Media Lab which uses a cellphone and a cheap plastic eyepiece to detect cataracts. Not only is it cheaper and easier to use than existing solutions, it actually provides much better results. Cataracts cause blindness by fogging the lens of the eye, scattering light before it reaches the retina. Normally, ...

If you've played Portal 2 solo mode all the way to the end, you've heard the excellent end-credits song "Want You Gone," Jonathan Coulton's follow-up to "Still Alive," his justly famous song from the first Portal. Well, a fan named Pedro Calvo has made a music video based on the song and the ending of the ...

A number of Apple TV customers are unable to stream Netflix movies to their devices, according to several user reports posted over the weekend. A Netflix spokesman confirmed to Wired.com that a small number of Apple TV devices were experiencing technical issues with the service, and the company claims the issue has been fixed. "Now I have ...

IPad-owning photographers should stop reading right now (well, not right now, or you won't know what to do next) and go download PhotoForge 2, a rather splendid update to the already decent photo-editing app. Better still, if you already bought the iPhone version, the update is free -- the app is now universal. The biggest differences ...

Like all genres of music, the genre of nerdcore has it's annual gathering, the apex of live performances in a 2-day music festival called Nerdapalooza. Regardless of the genre classification, Nerdapalooza is a high energy gathering with a solid and continuous line-up of musical performances and straight up fun. Over the past couple years, attendance ...

It would be hard to say anything good about the iPad 2's speaker. It is tinnier-sounding than the surprisingly good speaker on the first iPad. It faces backwards, firing all sound away from you. It is far too easy to cover it with a hand or a Smart Cover and -- worst of all -- it is about the ugliest piece of design to come out of Apple since that stupid hockey-puck mouse that shipped back in 1998. Luckily, there's a fix.

Sure, you love to watch a crash-bang firework show while you sip a cold beer on July 4th, but did you ever think about how the poor firework feels? Well did you, you callous spectator, you? No, you didn't, which means that Jeremiah Warren is a much better man than you. Not only did he ask ...

I can think of precisely one use for a headphone jack splitter, and that's for watching movies on the iPad when I'm on a plane or train, traveling with The Lady. However, I am also aware that there are couples whose individual musical tastes don't make each other physically sick, and who might like to ...