Login
Monkeypox Outbreak Before Election Sparks ‘Do Not Comply’ Movement
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency after a new strain of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, killed at least 450 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The highly contagious disease is now spreading across parts of Central and East Africa.
A day later, Sweden’s public health agency announced that it had confirmed the first known case of the new strain outside of Africa, prompting warnings that a “coordinated international response is essential” to stop the spread of mpox, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. Wednesday marks the second time in just over two years that the WHO has declared mpox as a global emergency.
The outbreak has generated fears that mpox could cause the next pandemic, resulting in global shutdowns and stay-at-home orders. Those worries have caused some panic among those who point out that the threat of a deadly virus comes during an election year again.
“Do not comply! We will not comply! Another election, another pandemic scare. Monkeypox – Imagine that. Get out of here with that Mpox nonsense. We will not listen to the WHO,” a MAGA supporter said in response to a video of Valentina Gomez, a former GOP candidate for Missouri’s secretary of state, on X.
Las Vegas Police Battle Over NFL’s New Facial-Recognition Process Intensifies
It started with a union official venting to TMZ. It has culminated in a bipartisan objection, memorialized in an Associated Press story.
The NFL has a new credentialing process that, for certain areas of a stadium, requires facial recognition. The Las Vegas Police Protective Association opposes the changes. The Las Vegas Police Department supports the union.
The biggest sticking point has been the use of photos for facial recognition. The union said Thursday on social media that the league also wants other personal information regarding police officers, including fingerprints, home addresses, and phone numbers.
The league insists that the photos won’t be used for any other purpose.
TikTok Argues US Overstates Chinese Ties in Legal Fight Over Ban
TikTok pushed back on the U.S. government’s claims about the app’s ties to China in a new court filing as it challenges the constitutionality of a law that requires its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest or face a U.S. ban.
In a brief filed Thursday night, the popular social media app argued that despite its foreign ownership, TikTok is a U.S. company and enjoys First Amendment protections, comparing itself to foreign-owned American media companies.
“TikTok Inc., a U.S. company, is not stripped of First Amendment protection because it is ultimately owned by ByteDance Ltd., a Cayman-incorporated holding company,” the filing reads. “Does the government seriously believe, for example, that Politico (owned by a German company) has no First Amendment rights?”
“Surely the American companies that publish Politico, Fortune, and Business Insider do not lose First Amendment protection because they have foreign ownership,” it later continues.
TikTok emphasized that its recommendation engine is in the U.S. under the protection of American software company Oracle and that U.S. user data resides in “the secure Oracle cloud.”
It also noted the U.S. government has acknowledged it has no evidence China has ever manipulated the content Americans see on TikTok or accessed U.S. user data.
Hackers May Have Stolen Every American’s Social Security Number From Background Check Firm
Billions of records that purportedly contain personal data of every American, Canadian and Briton has reportedly found its way to a shadowy online identify-theft marketplace — where it’s been served up at no charge to legions of criminals.
In April, a notorious hacker group called “USDoD” claimed it had obtained 2.9 billion personal data records that it stole from National Public Data, an obscure background check firm that is a DBA brand of a Jerico Pictures Inc in Coral Springs, Florida. Claiming the data covered every person in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, the hackers put the trove up for sale at $3.5 million.
In the following months, other groups published distinct subsets of the data haul, Bleeping Computer reports. However, on August 6, someone claiming to have obtained breached National Public Data information via another person or entity called “SXUL,” served up 2.7 billion records in two files totaling 277GB — for free.
Google Monopoly Ruling: Where the Tech Giant Goes From Here
A U.S. judge has found that Google is a monopoly and has used this dominance to reinforce its market position.
This ruling, which is subject to appeal, brings the U.S. regulator close to the European Commission in its approach to tech giants such as Google, Meta and Amazon.
Regulators now agree that the nature of these companies’ business means that the market ends up becoming a monopoly dominated by one massive company.
It has thus become the job of the state to protect consumers from tech giants consolidating their dominance. As a company, 80% of Alphabet’s (Google’s owner) revenue, comes from advertising, a total of US$146 billion (£114 billion) in 2021.
Passing Part of a Medical Licensing Exam Doesn’t Make ChatGPT a Good Doctor
ChatGPT was able to pass some of the United States Medical Licensing Exam, or USMLE tests in a study done in 2022. This year, a team of Canadian medical professionals checked to see if it’s any good at actual doctoring. And it’s not.
“Our source for medical questions was the Medscape questions bank,” said Amrit Kirpalani, a medical educator at the Western University in Ontario, Canada, who led the new research into ChatGPT’s performance as a diagnostic tool. The USMLE contained mostly multiple-choice test questions; Medscape has full medical cases based on real-world patients, complete with physical examination findings, laboratory test results, and so on.
This was a bit of a challenge because OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has a restriction against using it for medical advice, so a prompt to straight-up diagnose the case didn’t work. This was easily bypassed, though, by telling the AI that diagnoses were needed for an academic research paper the team was writing. The team then fed it various possible answers, copy/pasted all the case info available at Medscape, and asked ChatGPT to provide the rationale behind its chosen answers.
It turned out that in 76 out of 150 cases, ChatGPT was wrong. But the chatbot was supposed to be good at diagnosing, wasn’t it?
