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Assange Wins High Court Victory in Temporary Reprieve From Extradition to U.S.
The High Court in London ruled Monday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the U.S. Given it was essentially his ‘last chance’ to mount a final challenge before he could have been handed over to U.S. custody and on a plane to American soil, Monday marks a huge win.
His legal team successfully convinced the court that Assange is being denied his First Amendment rights and that these protections cannot be guaranteed for him if transferred to the U.S.
According to CNN, “His legal team made the case that Assange could be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality, as an Australian-born foreign national.”
“In a short ruling, the judges said the U.S. submissions were not sufficient, granting Assange permission to a full appeal in relation to the points on freedom of speech and nationality,” the report noted. No date has yet to be announced for the full appeal.
With JPMorgan, Mastercard on Board in Biometric ‘Breakthrough’ Year, You May Soon Start Paying With Your Face
Automated fast food restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy, in Pasadena, Calif., opened in January to considerable hype due to its robot burger makers, but the restaurant launched with another, less heralded innovation: the ability to pay for your meal with your face.
It’s not the only fast-food chain to employ the technology. In January, Steak ’N Shake, a fast-casual restaurant in the Midwest, started installing facial recognition kiosks in its 300 locations for patron check-in. The chain says that using PopID takes two to three seconds compared with a check-in with a QR code or mobile app, which can take up to 20 seconds.
Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success — 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. Late last year, Mastercard said it was teaming with NEC to bring its Biometric Checkout Program to the Asia-Pacific region.
As stores implement biometric technology for a variety of purposes, from payments to broader anti-theft systems, consumer blowback, and lawsuits, are rising. In March, an Illinois woman sued retailer Target for allegedly illegally collecting and storing her and other customers’ biometric data via facial recognition technology without their consent. Amazon and T-Mobile are also facing legal actions related to biometric technology.
Ex-NIH Director Confirms ‘No Science’ Behind 6-Foot Distancing Rules
Newly released testimony from former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins confirms that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx did not base the pandemic-era six-foot social distancing rule on science, and instead were making things up as they went along. On Thursday, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released a transcript from Collins’ January closed-door interview, in which he’s asked about a range of issues — including the lab-leak theory and the six-foot social distancing rule.
“We asked Dr. Fauci where the six feet came from and he said it kind of just appeared, is the quote,” the majority counsel on the committee told Dr. Collins, per the transcript. “Do you recall science or evidence that supported the six-foot distance?”
“I do not,” Collins replied.
A number of experts and studies have warned about the harms of prolonged isolation during the pandemic. For instance, the American Psychological Association said in November 2023 that Americans have suffered “collective trauma” related to the pandemic. The association cited a study suggesting that the heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 outbreak — which, in addition to the social distancing rule, included quarantines, school closures, business shutdowns, and near-universal mandating of masks — had a negative effect on people’s physical and mental health.
Another study that looked at a wide array of research into lockdowns concluded that such measures can be an effective tool in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic but only if “long-term collateral damage is neglected.” The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save,” the study’s authors wrote.
U.S. FDA Clears Neuralink’s Brain Chip Implant in Second Patient, WSJ Reports
The U.S. health regulator has allowed billionaire Elon Musk‘s Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person after it proposed to fix a problem that occurred in its first patient, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Earlier this month, Neuralink said tiny wires implanted in the brain of its first patient had pulled out of position. Reuters reported last week, citing sources, the company knew from animal testing that the wires might retract.
The company intends to fix the problem by embedding some of the device’s wires deeper into the brain, the WSJ report said citing a person familiar with the company and a document it had viewed.
Neuralink expects to implant its device in the second patient in June and a total of 10 people this year, the report said, adding that more than 1,000 quadriplegics had signed up for its patient registry.
Slack Is Training Its Machine Learning on Your Chat Behavior — Unless You Opt Out via Email
Slack has been using customer data to power its machine learning functions, including search result relevance and ranking, leading to the company being criticized over confusing policy updates that led many to believe that their data was being used to train its AI models.
According to the company’s policy, those wishing to opt out must do so through their organization’s Slack admin, who must email the company to put a stop to data use.
In response to uproar among the community, the company posted a separate blog post to address concerns arising, adding: “We do not build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce any customer data of any kind.”
Slack confirmed that user data is not shared with third-party LLM providers for training purposes. The company added in its correspondence to TechRadar Pro that its “intelligent features (not Slack AI) analyze metadata like user behavior data surrounding messages, content and files but they don’t access message content.”
Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give Its Tech Away Free
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Mark Zuckerberg has an unusual plan for winning the artificial intelligence race: giving away his company’s technology for free.
Like many of its rivals, Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms is spending tens of billions of dollars on high-end computer chips, top-flight computer scientists and gigawatts of electricity to build the most powerful AI tools it can. Unlike any of those rivals, some of whom made AI announcements last week, Zuckerberg is giving away the fruit of that investment — Meta’s most advanced chatbots and the technology that drives them.
For the AI giveaway strategy to work, Meta must get its billions of users to look to those free AI services in the same way they flocked to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It wagers that advertising can come later, as it did in the past. Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into ad dollars is well established, although early user responses to its AI services have been mixed.
Vermont’s Data Privacy Law Sparks State Lawmaker Alliance Against Tech Lobbyists
Vermont lawmakers just defied national trends by passing the toughest yet state bill protecting online data privacy — and they did it by using a new tactic designed to get around industry pressure.
The bill lets Vermont residents sue companies directly for collecting or sharing sensitive data without their consent. As they drafted and finalized it, lawmakers deployed a countermeasure against business pushback: They brought together lawmakers in states from Maine to Oklahoma who had fought their own battles with the tech industry and asked them for advice.
The Vermont story is a rare but powerful exception to an emerging national current: With little action in Congress, the burden of regulating tech has shifted to the states. And that pits state lawmakers, often with small staffs and part-time jobs, against powerful national lobbies with business and political clout.
It’s not clear Vermont’s new game plan is waterproof: Republican Gov. Phil Scott has yet to sign the bill, and lawmakers and industry are still jousting over it.
Colorado Governor Signs Sweeping AI Regulation Bill
Colorado will require developers of artificial intelligence (AI) to avoid discrimination in high-risk systems as part of a bill signed into law Friday by Gov. Jared Polis (D).
The first-in-the-nation law adds requirements for developers of “high-risk” AI systems to “use reasonable care to avoid algorithmic discrimination.”
It will also require developers to disclose information about the systems to regulators and the public and complete impact assessments of such systems.
The bill faced opposition from technology industry groups, but ultimately was signed into law by Polis.
AI Chatbots’ Safeguards Can Be Easily Bypassed, Say UK Researchers
Guardrails to prevent artificial intelligence models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, U.K. government researchers have found.
The U.K.’s AI Safety Institute (AISI) said systems it had tested were “highly vulnerable” to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing.
The AISI said it had tested five unnamed large language models (LLM) — the technology that underpins chatbots — and circumvented their safeguards with relative ease, even without concerted attempts to beat their guardrails.
