by crissly | Apr 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
Nine Google workers were removed by police from company offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, late Tuesday after staging an hours-long sit-in protest against a cloud contract with Israel’s government.
The Sunnyvale protest occupied the office of Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud division, at a building close to Google’s main HQ in Silicon Valley for more than 8 hours. The New York protest occupied a common area on the tenth floor of Google’s Chelsea location.
Videos seen by WIRED showed people who appeared to be Google security staff walking up to protesting workers in two different offices accompanied by local police. In the video from New York, a man who appears to be relaying a message from Google management informs the protesting workers that they have been placed on administrative leave and asks them to take the opportunity to depart peacefully.
“We will not be leaving,” a protesting worker replies. A man in uniform then introduces the officers as NYPD and delivers a final ultimatum, saying the workers have a last chance to walk out freely. “If not, you can be arrested for trespass,” he says. When the protesters again decline to go, police officers put them in handcuffs.
WIRED could not independently verify that the four workers in New York and five in Sunnyvale apparently detained by police had been arrested or charged. A person involved in coordinating the protests says the New York workers were arrested with desk appearance tickets, which specify when a person must appear in court. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tuesday night’s police action came after “dozens” of employees were placed on administrative leave after participating in the day’s sit-in protests but leaving peacefully, the person involved says. Protest rallies also took place outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale, and Seattle.
The action called on Google to drop a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government known as Project Nimbus that also involves Amazon. Last week Time reported that the contract involves providing direct services to the Israel Defense Forces.
The detained workers in New York include software engineers Hasan Ibraheem and Zelda Montes. They also include two workers who identified themselves by their first names as Jesús and Mohammed on a speaker-phone call with protesters outside Google’s New York office Tuesday.
Project Nimbus has been the target of protests by Google and Amazon workers for years. A campaign group called No Tech for Apartheid—which combines tech workers from the two the Muslim and Jewish-led activist groups MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace—formed in 2021 after details about the cloud contract became public.
Google and Amazon workers protested outside company offices in 2022 after The Intercept published documents showing the contract includes AI technology such as video analysis. The protesting tech workers say such capabilities could be used by Israel’s security apparatus to harm Palestinians.
Israel’s military assault on Gaza, which began after Hamas killed about 1,100 Israelis on October 7, has added new fuel to the internal opposition to Project Nimbus. The Israel Defence Forces have killed more than 34,000 Palestinians since bombing and moving into Gaza last fall.
Last month, Google cloud software engineer Eddie Hatfield disrupted Google Israel’s managing director at Mind The Tech, a company-sponsored conference focused on the Israeli tech industry. More than 600 other Googlers signed a petition opposing the company’s sponsorship of the conference and after Hatfield was fired three days later Google trust and safety policy employee Vidana Abdel Khalek resigned in protest.
Google is not the only Silicon Valley giant to see worker activism related to Israel’s war on Hamas. In late March, more than 300 Apple workers signed an open letter that alleged retaliation against workers who have expressed support for Palestinians, and urged company leadership to show public support for Palestinians.
by crissly | Apr 15, 2024 | Uncategorized
Ravikant said most of the funding for Airchat has come from his own fund, as well as from Jeff Fagnan, a founding partner at Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw in a check, kind of blindly,” Ravikant said. He communicated all of this to me in a public response on Airchat, after politely declining to respond to my DMs and insisting our conversation should happen in public. “It can’t be a side-channel, DM-based interview. That’s the old world that we are leaving behind,” he told me. (In the old world, as in the new world, conducting an interview synchronously is almost always … preferable.)
So far the Airchat feed appears to be filled with tech enthusiasts, early adopters, venture capitalists, and journalists. There’s lots of Bitcoin posting. Winefluencer Gary Vaynerchuk is on the app. So is Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. This weekend Tan posted, “Breakfast is the first step to greatness. What are you eating this morning?” So far it has more than 96 audio responses. Social media is back, baby.
Airchat has AI. What doesn’t? The app’s deployment, though, is quietly sensible. The transcripts for each Airchat voice note appear almost immediately, and they’re good. Pronounced “Ums” appear within the transcript, but other slight pauses and filler words are edited out. When I used the word “Airchat” in a voice note, it first showed as “error chat,” then quickly self-corrected. The app appears to be able to recognize and transcribe other languages, too; one user spoke in Russian and the transcript appeared in Cyrillic, while another spoke in Moroccan Arabic, known as darija, and then marveled in a follow-up voice note at how good the transcription was.
So what will happen to all of this voice data? Ravikant claimed that the creators of Airchat have no intention of training a large language model on user voices and making “weird synthetic clones of you.” He also said he wouldn’t sell Airchat data to another company building AI models, especially given how relatively small the app is and how uncategorized its data. Airchat will, however, likely use people’s voice data to train a model that improves its own audio and transcription functions. If you’re in, you’ve opted in.
I asked Ravikant about whether some AI company might still scrape Airchat data without a formal agreement. He replied, “We’ll block them, we’ll sue them, and then, if I have a battery of orbital satellites, we’d nuke them from orbit.”
Airchat’s monetization plans are less clear. Navikant hasn’t said anything about charging for access. The current format seems to lend itself to audio ads, but there’s always the risk of making the app unlistenable.
There’s also the issue of content moderation when people’s unfiltered sound bytes are posted to a timeline the moment they release the virtual microphone. One troll seemed to be pushing the boundaries of it on Sunday, cursing the app’s founders, calling the app “fucking trash,” and in as many words telling the founders to, uh, perform fellatio. The voice note is still there. So is a thread where two users go back and forth telling a story about “gay Jewish teens” and “neo-Nazi killers.”
by crissly | Apr 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
It’s a shame that two of the best retro gaming consoles in recent years, the NES Classic Mini and the SNES Classic Mini, have been discontinued. Both feature great designs with a miniaturized look that’s true to the originals, silky performance, and strong game lineups of Nintendo’s greatest hits. You can still buy them online (usually from third-party resellers), but prices are seriously inflated. The SNES Classic Mini, for example, was $80 at launch, but a reseller has it for more than $300 on Amazon right now. You might have better luck buying one used.
Nintendo fans keen on some classic gaming action might be better served by snagging a Switch and buying a Nintendo Switch Online membership ($20 for a year) to access more than 100 NES and SNES titles (here’s the full list). Add the Expansion Pack ($50 for a year) and you can get these N64 games too. If you’re craving some old-school pocket-sized Nintendo fun, check out the revived Game & Watch ($50) line. They are limited to a couple of games each, but when those games are Super Mario or Zelda titles, that can be enough for hours of fun.
The Analogue Mega SG ($200) (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is expensive, and it doesn’t come with any games or controllers (they cost $25 apiece). But it can play old Sega Genesis cartridges, so it’s a solid choice if you have a box of them in the basement. Thanks to an FPGA chip, this console runs the original games just as you remember them.
There are plenty of classic arcade games available on PlayStation 4 or 5. If you opt for a PS Plus Premium subscription ($18 for a month or $160 for a year), you get the Classics Catalog, packed with old PlayStation games.
The Xbox Series X|S boasts the best backward compatibility, as Microsoft’s newest consoles can play Xbox One, Xbox 360, and original Xbox titles. You can also find classic titles included in our favorite gaming subscription, the excellent Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ($17 per month).
If you have Valve’s Steam Deck, check out the comprehensive EmuDeck to emulate a wide variety of old systems in style.
PC gamers also have an enormous choice of emulators. I like RetroArch because it emulates multiple systems, but if you have a favorite old console and want to get close to that original experience, you can likely find a tailor-made emulator to scratch that itch.
Do you miss all those Flash-based browser games you used to play in the office when you were meant to be working? Read our guide, How to Play All of Those Old Flash Games You Remember.
The Panic Playdate ($199) (7/10, WIRED Recommends) isn’t strictly a retro console, but it is fun, creative, and quirky, and it has a distinct retro feel. It even has a crank for an all-new way to interact with games!
The Analogue Duo ($250) (6/10, WIRED Review) makes TurboGrafx-16 and PC Engine games look incredible on any HDMI screen. It boasts HuCARD and CD-ROM functionality, so existing games work regardless of media, region, or other requirements. Sadly, it’s pricey, controllers cost extra, and there’s no openFPGA support.
by crissly | Apr 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
On Saturday, Iran launched more than 200 drones and cruise missiles at Israel, a response to an strike earlier this month against Iran’s embassy in Syria. As the drones made their way across the Middle East en route to their target, Israel has invoked a number of defense systems to impede their progress. None will be more important than the Iron Dome.
The Iron Dome, operational for well over a decade, comprises at least 10 missile-defense batteries strategically distributed around the country. When radar detects incoming objects, it sends that information back to a command-and-control center, which will track the threat to assess whether it’s a false alarm, and where it might hit if it’s not. The system then fires interceptor missiles at the incoming rockets that seem most likely to hit an inhabited area.
“All of that process was designed for defense against low-flying, fast-moving missiles,” says Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado. Which also makes it extremely well-prepared for an onslaught of drones. “A drone is going to be flying probably slower than these rockets,” Boyd says, “so in some ways it’s an easier threat to address.”
Things get more complicated if the drones are flying so low that the radar can’t detect them. The biggest challenge, though, may be sheer quantity. Israel has hundreds of interceptor missiles at its disposal, but it’s still possible for the Iron Dome to get overwhelmed, as it did on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel with a barrage of thousands of missiles.
US officials have said that so far Iran has launched a total of 150 missiles at Israel. The Iron Dome has already been active in deflecting them, although a 10-year-old boy was reportedly injured by shrapnel from an interceptor missile.
While the Iron Dome is Israel’s last and arguably best line of defense, it’s not the only factor here. The UAVs in question are likely Iran-made Shahed-136 drones, which have played a prominent role in Russia’s war against Ukraine. These so-called suicide drones—it has a built-in warhead and is designed to crash into targets—are relatively cheap to produce.
“At one level they’re not difficult to take down. They’re not stealthy, they don’t fly very fast, and they don’t maneuver,” says David Ochmanek, senior defense analyst at the nonprofit RAND Corporation. “In some way, they’re like airborne targets.”
That slowness and fixed flight path in particular mean the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have to travel for several hours before they reach their intended destination, leaving ample opportunities to intercept them.
“Because there’s so much indication of warning in advance of the UAS, presumably there’s going to be a lot of fixed-wing, manned aircraft that are looking at these things, tracking these things, and presumably trying to engage these things,” says Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy think tank.
by crissly | Apr 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized.
After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community’s spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years.
Legislation extending the program—controversial for being abused by the government—passed in the House in a 273–147 vote. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.
Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the “compelled assistance” of US communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
The House bill also dramatically expands the statutory definition for communication service providers, something FISA experts, including Marc Zwillinger—one of the few people to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—have publicly warned against.
“Anti-reformers not only are refusing common-sense reforms to FISA, they’re pushing for a major expansion of warrantless spying on Americans,” US senator Ron Wyden tells WIRED. “Their amendment would force your cable guy to be a government spy and assist in monitoring Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
The FBI’s track record of abusing the program kicked off a rare détente last fall between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans—both bothered equally by the FBI’s targeting of activists, journalists, and a sitting member of Congress. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House members voted down an amendment earlier in the day that would’ve imposed new warrant requirements on federal agencies accessing Americans’ 702 data.
“Many members who tanked this vote have long histories of voting for this specific privacy protection,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the civil-liberties-focused nonprofit Demand Progress, “including former speaker Pelosi, Representative Lieu, and Representative Neguse.”
The warrant amendment was passed earlier this year by the House Judiciary Committee, whose long-held jurisdiction over FISA has been challenged by friends of the intelligence community. Analysis by the Brennan Center this week found that 80 percent of the base text of the FISA reauthorization bill had been authored by intelligence committee members.
“Three million Americans’ data was searched in this database of information,” says Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee. “The FBI wasn’t even following its own rules when they conducted those searches. That’s why we need a warrant.”
Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, campaigned alongside top spy agency officials for months to defeat the warrant amendment, arguing they’d cost the bureau precious time and impede national security investigations. The communications are legally collected and already in the government’s possession, Turner argued; no further approval should be required to inspect them.
by crissly | Apr 11, 2024 | Uncategorized
In the drawn-out contract battle between TikTok and Universal Music Group, a high-profile exemption has been made for Taylor Swift. A few of her songs became available again as TikTok sounds on Thursday, just a week before the release of Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. It remains unclear what kind of arrangement was made for her official music to come back or how long it will remain on the social media platform.
Madeline Macrae, a Swift fan and TikTok creator, heard the news Thursday morning and immediately started searching TikTok and Google to confirm it wasn’t some hoax. “I’m really excited to have that catalog back, and I don’t have to rely on sped-up versions or edited versions,” she says. “I can just use her actual music.” Songs like “Cruel Summer,” “Cardigan,” and “Style (Taylor’s Version)” can now be used by content creators on the platform, as first reported by Variety.
In addition to being excited about using Swift songs in new videos, Macrae is grateful for the pop megastar’s music to be potentially unmuted for her past videos on TikTok. “I was going back and forth on deleting them or keeping them, because they look kind of silly muted,” she says. When UMG’s music was initially pulled from TikTok’s library in January, many creators were stunned to see their archive of past videos with certain songs go silent overnight.
Does this mean that The Tortured Poets Department album will be available to use for videos on TikTok? It’s uncertain, but Macrae is hopeful: “I think this move also just shows the power of Taylor Swift.” Billie Eilish, another major UMG artist, will soon be promoting her upcoming album, May’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, but Eilish fans will have to wait to see if her music also returns to TikTok before it drops.
Most UMG artists have been absent from TikTok for nearly 10 weeks, greatly shifting the user experience on the social media platform and opening the door for non-UMG artists, like Beyoncé, to go viral with TikTok’s algorithm.
It remains a mystery when the long-standing contract dispute between TikTok and UMG will come to a resolution. As one of the biggest record companies in the world, UMG removing songs from TikTok has impacted the careers of many established artists as well as rising stars. Multiple artists expressed frustration about the move, often citing disrupted marketing plans or decreased audience reach. A spokesperson for UMG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
No matter what eventually happens between the two companies, Swifties on TikTok are feeling grateful for her music’s return as they prepare for listening parties to celebrate the new album. “I already know my Friday night plans,” says Macrae. “Staying in with friends, drinking some wine, and just listening to this album.” Sounds like an evening of truly social media.
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