If you have an account with Comcast Xfinity, then you also have a year-long subscription to the Perplexity Pro AI answer engine. Perplexity announced the special deal on Threads. Perplexity Pro differs from the company's free option by allowing unlimited quick answers from a choice of AI models, including GPT-4o, Claude-3 and Sonar Large. Engadget hasn’t reviewed the service, but if you’re already paying for Xfinity, free seems like a good price for you to make up your own mind on its value.
All you have to do to get your free year of Perplexity is to log into your Xfinity Rewards account and obtain a promo code. You’ll punch in your code on Perplexity’s website and you can start using the AI to explore life’s most puzzling mysteries like “Who was that guy who played that squirrely dude in Office Space?” (For the record, that was Stephen Root and his character was Milton).
A Perplexity Pro subscription normally costs $20 but if you take advantage of Comcast Xfinity’s perk, you’ll get a whole year for nothing. You still might want to take Perplexity’s answers with a big grain of salt. The media company Condé Nast has accused the company of plagiarism, and the online retail giant Amazon, which hosts some of Perplexity's infrastructure, has investigated whether the AI company's actions are within its terms of service. So this isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for Perplexity Pro but again, it’s free so you could do worse. A lot worse.
Update, August 30, 4PM ET: A previous version of this article used imprecise wording that suggested Amazon, rather than just Condé Nast, had accused Perplexity of plagiarism. The article has been updated to correctly indicate that Amazon separately investigated claims made by Wired, one of Condé Nast's publications, and has made no allegations of wrongdoing. We regret the error.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/comcast-xfinity-customers-can-get-a-year-of-perplexity-pro-ai-for-free-183727093.html?src=rss
French authorities have now shared the why behind the August 24 arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. His arrest came in response to a series of charges, including complicity in "distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in an organized group." The charges stem from a judicial investigation opened on July 8 against an unnamed individual.
The release, penned by Prosecutor of the Republic Laure Beccuau, details 12 charges in total, including money laundering, drug trafficking, fraud, running an online platform that allows illegal transactions and possessing child pornography. Durov can be held in custody until Wednesday, August 28.
The arrest has raised questions about how much leaders are responsible for what happens on their platforms. Telegram shared a post stating the company "abides by EU laws" and "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform." There have also been outcries from individuals like Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), who posted "#FreePavel" on X, and NSA whistleblower and now Russian citizen Edward Snowden, who called it politically motivated. Telegram is especially popular in Russia and Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron responded on X (formerly Twitter) to "false information" that the arrest was politically motivated. "France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship. It will remain so," Macron shared on August 26. "In a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights. It is up to the judiciary, in full independence, to enforce the law."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/telegram-ceo-charges-include-distributing-csam-and-money-laundering-125336547.html?src=rss
Meta’s decision to shut down CrowdTangle, an analytics tool that was an “invaluable” resource to the research community, is drawing fresh scrutiny from European Union regulators. The EU Commission, which had already raised concerns about the social network’s plan to discontinue the tool ahead of global elections in 2024, is now pressing Meta for more details about its work with researchers.
The EU Commission previously cited the impending shutdown of CrowdTangle as part of a broader investigation into the company’s handling of disinformation campaigns and election-related policies. Now, just days after CrowdTangle was shut off despite pleas from researchers and civil society organizations to keep it online through the end of the year, regulators are pointedly reminding Meta of its “obligation” under the Digital Services Act (DSA) to allow outside researchers access to its data.
“The Commission is requesting Meta to provide more information on the measures it has taken to comply with its obligations to give researchers access to data that is publicly accessible on the online interface of Facebook and Instagram, as required by the DSA, and on its plans to update its election and civic discourse monitoring functionalities,” the EU Commission wrote in a statement. “Specifically, the Commission is requesting information about Meta's content library and application programming interface (API), including their eligibility criteria, the application process, the data that can be accessed and functionalities.”
Meta has previously pointed to the Meta Content Library as a replacement for CrowdTangle. But access to the Meta Content Library is much more tightly controlled, and researchers have said it doesn’t replicate all of CrowdTangle’s functionality.
“We announced earlier this year that we would discontinue CrowdTangle because it did not provide a complete picture of what is happening on our platforms," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to Engadget. "We have built new, more comprehensive tools for researchers, called the Meta Content Library & API, and we remain in discussion with the European Commission on this matter.”
Update August 16, 2024, 3:15PM ET: This story has been updated to add a statement from Meta.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/eu-regulators-question-meta-about-the-shutdown-of-crowdtangle-175641308.html?src=rss
As the US government weighs its options following a landmark “monopolist” ruling against Google last week, online publications increasingly face a bleak future. (And this time, it’s not just because of severely diminished ad revenue.) Bloombergreports that their choice now boils down to allowing Google to use their published content to produce inline AI-generated search “answers” or losing visibility in the company’s search engine.
The crux of the problem lies in the Googlebot, the crawler that scours and indexes the live web to produce the results you see when you enter search terms. If publishers block Google from using their content for the AI-produced answers you now see littered at the top of many search results, they also lose the privilege of appearing in other Google search programs like snippets and Discover.
Google uses a separate crawler for its Gemini (formerly Bard) chatbot, but its AI Overviews are generated using data from its main crawler. A Google spokesperson told Engadget that blocking an entire article from AI Overviews would not prevent its crawler from seeing "the full text of what's provided to us for ranking purposes" or from "being indexed and appearing in our web search results."
The spokesperson also said the company's tools for publishers allow sites to only block certain sections of a page from features like snippets or AI Overviews. Web publishers nonetheless have no way to fully prevent AI Overviews without impacting overall search performance.
The catch-22 has led publications, rival search engines and AI startups to pin their hopes on the Justice Department. On Tuesday, The New York Timesreported that the DOJ is considering asking a federal judge to break up parts of the company (spinning off sections like Chrome or Android). Other options it’s reportedly weighing include forcing Google to share search data with competitors or relinquishing its default search-engine deals, like the $18 billion one it inked with Apple.
iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens told Bloomberg, “I can block ClaudeBot [Anthropic’s crawler for its Claude chatbot] from indexing us without harming our business. But if I block Googlebot, we lose traffic and customers.”
Google
Another problem with combining the two is that it gives Google an immeasurable advantage over smaller AI startups. The company gets a plethora of free training data from publishers eager to remain visible in search. In contrast, AI companies are forced to pay publishers for access to their data — and, even then, it wouldn’t add up to the motherlode Google gets (essentially) for free.
From that perspective, it isn’t surprising to read that, according to Bloomberg, Google is spurning publishers that try to negotiate content deals. (Reddit has been the lone exception.) Why waste money on content deals when they get all the training data they want in exchange for the search results most publishers need to survive?
“Now you have a bunch of tech companies that are paying for content, they’re paying for access to that because they need it to be able to compete in any kind of serious way,” Alex Rosenberg, CEO of AI startup Tako Inc., told Bloomberg. “Whereas for Google, they don’t really have to do that.”
It comes down to leverage, which Google wields over desperate publishers. On top of the industry’s existing financial troubles (online ad revenue has fallen off a cliff over the past eight years), AdWeekreported in March that Google’s AI-generated search answers could lead to a 20 to 60 percent drop in organic search traffic.
The ball is now in the Justice Department’s court to figure out where Google — and, to an extent, the entire web — goes from here. Bloomberg’s full story is worth a read.
Update, August 16, 4:55PM ET: This story was updated after publishing to include a number of clarifications from a Google spokesperson.
The original article said that preventing an article from being used in AI Overviews could block Google's webcrawler from including it in search results. The spokesperson asserted that this was incorrect; while blocking an entire article from its AI Overviews does prevent it from being included other search enhancements like snippets and Google Discover, it does not block it from standard web results.
The article's subheading has been ammended to reflect the changes, and a full statement from Google follows:
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and we intend for this long-established value exchange with websites to continue. With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and they’re coming back to search more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. People are using AI Overviews to discover more of the web, and we’re continuing to improve the experience to make that even easier.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/online-publishers-face-a-dilemma-allow-ai-scraping-from-google-or-lose-search-visibility-202246891.html?src=rss
T-Mobile has been fined $60 million for failing to both report and stop data breaches, as indicated by Bloomberg. The hefty fine was levied by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) and represents the largest such financial penalty the organization has ever issued. T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom, a company based in Germany, which is why CFIUS got involved.
These penalties have their origins in the terms of a 2020 deal in which T-Mobile purchased Sprint. CFIUS put some conditions on the purchase, including some related to protecting consumer data. The Committee found that T-Mobile didn’t comply with these conditions by failing to secure data and then by failing to report unauthorized access to this data, as reported by Reuters.
The data access occurred in 2020 and 2021. T-Mobile has blamed it on technical issues that sprang up during its post-merger integration with Sprint. The company says that this impacted “information shared from a small number of law enforcement information requests."
It also says that the data stayed within the law enforcement community, even after the unauthorized access of data. T-Mobile claims that these issues were reported “in a timely manner” and that they were “quickly addressed.”
A representative from the company reached out to Engadget and echoed the above sentiment, saying "this was not a data breach, but a technical issue."
CFIUS has been getting more aggressive in recent months with regard to fines and affiliated penalties. It issued six large penalties in the past year or so, though none get close to the $60 million fine T-Mobile was just hit with. This is approximately three times the number of penalties it has issued during any other similar timeframe throughout its existence, from 1975 until 2022.
“The $60 million penalty announcement highlights the committee’s commitment to ramping up CFIUS enforcement by holding companies accountable when they fail to comply with their obligations,” a US official told Reuters.
Update, August 15 2024, 2:40PM ET: This story has been updated to include a quote by T-Mobile.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/t-mobile-fined-60-million-for-failing-to-stop-data-breaches-170438570.html?src=rss
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) crackdown on fabricated reviews and fake consumer and celebrity testimonials has produced new official federal regulations to prevent the use of these practices on websites and e-commerce hubs. The FTC approved the new rules against the buying and selling of fake reviews and product testimonials with a 5-0 vote on Wednesday. The rules will become effective in 60 days.
The new FTC rules address the practice of buying and selling fake consumer reviews, including the use of AI-generated consumer and celebrity testimonials for products or services. They also prevent “providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative” and prohibit “a business from misrepresenting that a website or entity it controls provides independent reviews or opinions” about products or services, according to a statement released by the FTC.
The formal ban also comes with stiff penalties for violators of the new rules. Fines could reach as high as $50,000 per violation.
The FTC officially announced its intent to seek new rules for such practices last October. The Commission has been trying to get control of fake online reviews and testimonials for years. The first such case was resolved in 2019 against the Amazon seller Cure Encapsulations Inc. The company was accused of paying for fake feedback for its weight-loss products from the amazonvierifiedreviews.com website, and the FTC slapped them with a $12.8 million fine. The FTC has also investigated similar cases against the supplement maker The Bountiful Company for “review hijacking” its products’ reviews and ratings on Amazon that ended with a $600,000 fine, and the skincare maker Sunday Riley that created fake online reviews by ordering employees to write them.
The government isn’t the only entity trying to discourage the buying and selling of fake reviews. The service recommendation website Yelp created a database that lists businesses who received warnings for posting or buying fake reviews for its Yelp page.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-ftc-finalizes-its-rules-clamping-down-on-fake-online-reviews-191339646.html?src=rss
X’s live streaming infrastructure appears to have failed, once again, at a high-profile moment for the company. X owner Elon Musk was supposed to be interviewing Donald Trump live on Spaces, beginning at 8pm ET Monday. But the stream repeatedly crashed and was completely inaccessible to many users.
Musk claimed that the failure was due to a “massive DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack on X,” and that the company “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Instead, only a “smaller number” of people will be able to listen to the conversation live. As of 8:30pm ET, the live stream had yet to begin. “Crashed,” “unable” and “Twitter blackout” trended on the platform.
Those who were able to join the stream were greeted with about a half hour of hold music followed by several minutes of total silence. The live stream finally started at 8:40pm ET. “All of our data lines, like basically hundreds of gigabits of data, were saturated,” Musk said. “We think we've overcome most of that.” Musk didn’t explain how a DDOS attack could target only one specific feature on the service without affecting other aspects of X’s app or website.
It’s not the first time a high-profile live stream on spaces has run into technical difficulties. Last year, Ron DeSantis attempted to announce his short-lived presidential bid during a live conversation with Musk on X, but that stream was also delayed after repeated crashes. Musk, at the time, said that Twitter’s servers were “kind of melting.” Musk’s biographer later reported that the issues were a result of months of instability within Twitter's systems after Musk instructed his cousins to hastily dismantle one of the company’s data centers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/elon-musk-claims-massive-ddos-attack-delayed-his-live-stream-with-donald-trump-004457451.html?src=rss
AMD has begun releasing updates to patch some — but not all — chips affected by the recently discovered “Sinkclose” security flaw. The vulnerability spotted by researchers at IOActive was revealed in a report from Wired last week, and is said to affect most AMD processors going back to 2006. While AMD’s security team has been working to get some of these systems patched, Tom’s Hardware reports that the Ryzen 1000, 2000 and 3000 series along with the Threadripper 1000 and 2000 won’t get any such updates.
The company told Tom’s Hardware that these are among “older products that are outside our software support window.” Newer models and all of AMD’s embedded processors have reportedly already received or will be receiving the patch. The Sinkclose flaw is considered to be more of a risk for governments or other large entities than for the average user, and even then, taking advantage of it would require deep access to a particular system. But the researchers who found it warned that it could be disastrous if exploited, letting hackers run code in the chips’ normally protected System Management Mode.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/outdated-amd-chips-reportedly-wont-get-a-patch-for-the-sinkclose-security-flaw-200549740.html?src=rss
Susan Wojcicki, who served as YouTube's CEO for almost a decade until she stepped down last year, has died. She was 56 years old. Her husband Dennis Troper has shared the news on Facebook, revealing that Wojcicki lived two years with non-small cell lung cancer. "Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many," he wrote in his post. "Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable."
Google operated out of Wojcicki's garage when the company was just starting out, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin using it as their office. She became the company's first marketing manager, co-created Google Image Search and was the first product manager of AdSense. Wojcicki also headed Google's video efforts and was the one who encouraged the company to purchase YouTube in 2006, a year after the video-sharing platform debuted.
In 2014, she was appointed as the CEO of YouTube, which became a key part of Google under her leadership. For the fiscal year of 2022, the year before she stepped down, YouTube ads brought in $29.24 billion in revenue, which made up over 10 percent of the company's total earnings. Outside of her work with Google, Wojcicki brought attention to the gender gap issue in tech and to the plight of refugees. She was also a proponent of lengthy parental leaves and talked about they're actually good for business. In a post on X, Alphabet's current CEO, Sundar Pichai, said Wojcicki was "as core to the history of Google as anyone" and described her someone who's "had a tremendous impact on the world."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/former-youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-has-died-110020190.html?src=rss
Security researchers have found a vulnerability in AMD processors that has persisted for decades, according to reporting by Wired. This is a fascinating security flaw because it was found in the firmware of the actual chips and potentially allows malware to deeply infect a computer’s memory.
The flaw was discovered by researchers from the security firm IOActive, who are calling the AMD-based vulnerability a “Sinkclose" flaw. This potentially allows hackers to run their own code in the most privileged mode of an AMD processor, System Management Mode. This is typically a protected portion of the firmware. The researchers have also noted that the flaw dates back to at least 2006 and that it impacts nearly every AMD chip.
"Researchers warn that a bug in AMD’s chips would allow attackers to root into some of the most privileged portions of a computer..." New piece from @WIRED featuring research from IOActive Principal Security Consultants, Enrique Nissim & Krzysztof Okupski. https://t.co/UuvzC2qyGI
That’s the bad news. Now onto some better news. Despite being potentially catastrophic, this issue is unlikely to impact regular people. That’s because in order to make full use of the flaw, hackers would already need deep access to an AMD-based PC or server. That’s a lot of work for a random home PC, phew, but could spell trouble for corporations or other large entities.
This is particularly worrisome for governments and the like. In theory, malicious code could burrow itself so deep within the firmware that it would be almost impossible to find. As a matter of fact, the researchers say that the code would likely survive a complete reinstallation of the operating system. The best option for infected computers would be a one-way ticket to the trash heap.
“Imagine nation-state hackers or whoever wants to persist on your system. Even if you wipe your drive clean, it's still going to be there,” says Krzysztof Okupski from IOActive. “It's going to be nearly undetectable and nearly unpatchable.”
Once successfully implemented, hackers would have full access to both surveil activity and tamper with the infected machine. AMD has acknowledged the issue and says that it has “released mitigation options” for data center products and Ryzen PC products “with mitigations for AMD embedded products coming soon.” The company has also published a full list of impacted chips.
AMD has also emphasized just how difficult it would be to take advantage of this exploit. It compares using the Sinkclose flaw to accessing a bank’s safe-deposit boxes after already bypassing alarms, guards, vault doors and other security measures. IOActive, however, says that kernel exploits — the equivalent of plans to get to those metaphorical safe-deposit boxes — exist readily in the wild. “People have kernel exploits right now for all these systems,” the organization told Wired. “They exist and they're available for attackers.”
IOActive has agreed to not publish any proof-of-concept code as AMD gets to work on patches. The researchers have warned that speed is of the essence, saying “if the foundation is broken, then the security for the whole system is broken.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/researchers-discover-potentially-catastrophic-exploit-present-in-amd-chips-for-decades-161541359.html?src=rss