Police Arrest Former Ubisoft Bosses Over Sexual Misconduct Complaints

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/police-arrest-former-ubisoft-bosses-over-sexual-misconduct-complaints/1100-6518168/


Five former Ubisoft employees have been arrested following a police investigation. As per GamesIndustry.biz, three of the executives were arrested yesterday and the other two were detained today. Serge Hascoët, former chief creative officer, and Tommy François, former VP of editorial and creative services, were among those arrested.

Both Hascoët and François stepped down following abuse allegations in 2020 with other Ubisoft senior management. Liberation, the French publication that originally reported on the incident, didn’t name the others in custody. These arrests follow a lawsuit filed by Solidaires Informatique, a French labor union, and at least two plaintiffs in 2021. A lawyer involved with the case claimed that the results revealed “systemic sexual violence.”

When GameSpot reached out to Ubisoft for comment, a company spokesperson replied, “Ubisoft has no knowledge of what has been shared and therefore can’t comment.”

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier originally broke the news about Ubisoft’s “frat-house” culture in 2020. Even after senior management stepped down, employees spoke about the “fear and oppression” they felt while working there. Other notable executives like Maxime Beland, who also resigned after abuse and assault allegations, were absent from the Liberation report.

No information regarding specific charges has been revealed as of yet, but we’ll report back as we learn more.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

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October 4, 2023 at 10:58AM

Hannah Diamond Has Cracked the Code of Using AI for Music

https://www.wired.com/story/hannah-diamond-has-cracked-the-code-ai-music/


Since last November, when OpenAI unleashed the world-conquering ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has stalked creatives like a malignant doppelgänger. You, a presumably human artist, return to work, and AI is there, drawing your comic, writing your script, acting in your place. Your artistry—your identity—has been replaced by a computer program.

Hannah Diamond knows that feeling. Today, she’s an acclaimed member of PC Music, the influential London-based label responsible for pioneering the glitchy shimmering sound of the genre often dubbed hyperpop. But in 2013, the year she and A.G. Cook founded PC Music, it was just the two of them in Cook’s bedroom, finishing off “Pink and Blue,” Diamond’s first hit, her pitch-shifted vocals like a garage edit of a YouTube Kids’ sing-along: Bubblegum popping into a glittery array of pixels.

After “Pink and Blue” came out and Diamond’s career took off, she began noticing a certain kind of think piece. These articles shared a conviction: Diamond wasn’t real. Instead, she was a model in a pink North Face jacket, and like something out of Singing in the Rain, it was Cook behind the curtain, conjuring “Hannah Diamond” on a computer.

What’s more, when it became clear that she was a (flesh and blood) woman, she says, the hype dissipated. Of course, it wasn’t computers that erased Diamond’s personhood back then, but people: a bro-y tech subculture that venerates some and not others. “Because all of the things that A.G. and I were doing and making with my work at the time, I think people thought they were [ideas] that couldn’t come from a female perspective, a female face, or a female-led project,” she says. From Diamond’s perspective, it seemed as though these people wanted to presume she was a machine (and, by proxy, a man).

A decade later, artificial intelligence is heaving artists into a similar nightmare in which AI replaces human creativity—invited in by greedy corporations.

These fears are not universal. Earlier this month, Creative Commons, the American nonprofit that has long pushed for copyright laws more in tune with modern times, published an open letter signed by artists who work with AI. In it, they address Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), whose summits, attended by tech royalty, aim to pressure Congress to legislate artificial intelligence. These artists, who, in their own words, use “generative AI tools to help us put soul in our work,” are attempting to push back against the rising wave of AI acrimony.

The letter notes that despite its newfound visibility, AI use stretches back years and has lowered the barriers to creating art “that has been traditionally limited to those with considerable financial means, abled bodies, and the right social connections.” It has let people pioneer “entirely new artistic mediums,” furthering human creativity, in other words.

In no art form has this been truer than music, the letter notes—opening with a quote from Björk—as the medium has been using “simpler AI tools, such as in music production software, for decades.” For Diamond, and other like-minded musicians in this lineage, AI is just another tool in their arsenal.

Parallels can be drawn to the early life of PC Music. The question then was: How big of a pop song can someone make with just a mic and a laptop? (A decade later, following the ascendance of PC Music and associated acts like Charli XCX and Sophie, the answer emerged: massive.) The chopped-up vocals of Diamond’s first hits, “Pink and Blue,” “Attachment,” and “Every Night,” she explains, were simply the cleanest way to mask any background noise in the home of Cook’s mother. ‘“When you’re faced with limitations, you end up creating a style,” Cook says.

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

October 4, 2023 at 06:09AM

The New AI Photo Tricks on the Pixel 8 Are Blowing My Mind

https://www.wired.com/story/google-pixel-8-magic-editor-audio-magic-eraser-best-take/


In all my years of reviewing personal technology gadgets, I can count the number of times my jaw has dropped when learning about a new product. It’s good to be a skeptical journalist! But I failed to maintain that detachment when Google demoed a few imaging tricks on its new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones. 

Taken in a vacuum, these features are things anyone with knowledge of Photoshop or video editing software can execute. But the new Pixel phones make them accessible to everyone, which is exciting, and frankly a little scary. Let’s go through ’em. 

Magic Editor

Video: Google

Google teased this feature during its developer conference in May. It’s the natural evolution of Magic Eraser, which Google debuted a few years ago. The latter lets you erase unwanted objects in your photo, like a fire hydrant or a person in the background. Magic Editor can warp the whole photo to a new level.

In a demo, Google showed a picture of a girl running on a beach. With Magic Editor in the Google Photos app, a spokesperson pressed on the subject and the software accurately made a cutout. They were then able to move the subject anywhere in the scene, and the software filled in the space left behind with what it thought should be there. These were photos picked by Google, of course, but Magic Editor filled them in with great accuracy. 

Magic Editor also enabled the option to change the scene’s lighting. If you take a photo at noon with harsh lighting, you can easily change it to golden hour to get those wonderfully warm evening tones—and maybe even throw in a sunset!  

In another photo, a kid about to shoot a basketball from the ground. The spokesperson grabbed the subject in the photo, dragged him up into the air to make it look like he was about to dunk, and then casually said, “You can move their shadow too!”

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

October 4, 2023 at 09:39AM

Your Cheap Android TV Streaming Box May Have a Dangerous Backdoor

https://www.wired.com/story/android-tv-streaming-boxes-china-backdoor/


When you buy a TV streaming box, there are certain things you wouldn’t expect it to do. It shouldn’t secretly be laced with malware or start communicating with servers in China when it’s powered up. It definitely should not be acting as a node in an organized crime scheme making millions of dollars through fraud. However, that’s been the reality for thousands of unknowing people who own cheap Android TV devices.

In January, security researcher Daniel Milisic discovered that a cheap Android TV streaming box called the T95 was infected with malware right out of the box, with multiple other researchers confirming the findings. But it was just the tip of the iceberg. Today, cybersecurity firm Human Security is revealing new details about the scope of the infected devices and the hidden, interconnected web of fraud schemes linked to the streaming boxes.

Human Security researchers found seven Android TV boxes and one tablet with the backdoors installed, and they’ve seen signs of 200 different models of Android devices that may be impacted, according to a report shared exclusively with WIRED. The devices are in homes, businesses, and schools across the US. Meanwhile, Human Security says it has also taken down advertising fraud linked to the scheme, which likely helped pay for the operation.

“They’re like a Swiss Army knife of doing bad things on the internet,” says Gavin Reid, the CISO at Human Security who leads the company’s Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team. “This is a truly distributed way of doing fraud.” Reid says the company has shared details of facilities where the devices may have been manufactured with law enforcement agencies.

Human Security’s research is divided into two areas: Badbox, which involves the compromised Android devices and the ways they are involved in fraud and cybercrime. And the second, dubbed Peachpit, is a related ad fraud operation involving at least 39 Android and iOS apps. Google says it has removed the apps following Human Security’s research, while Apple says it has found issues in several of the apps reported to it.

First, Badbox. Cheap Android streaming boxes, usually costing less than $50, are sold online and in brick-and-mortar shops. These set-top boxes often are unbranded or sold under different names, partly obscuring their source. In the second half of 2022, Human Security says in its report, its researchers spotted an Android app that appeared to be linked to inauthentic traffic and connected to the domain flyermobi.com. When Milisic posted his initial findings about the T95 Android box in January, the research also pointed to the flyermobi domain. The team at Human purchased the box and multiple others, and started diving in.

In total the researchers confirmed eight devices with backdoors installed—seven TV boxes, the T95, T95Z, T95MAX, X88, Q9, X12PLUS, and MXQ Pro 5G, and a tablet J5-W. (Some of these have also been identified by other security researchers looking into the issue in recent months). The company’s report, which has data scientist Marion Habiby as its lead author, says Human Security spotted at least 74,000 Android devices showing signs of a Badbox infection around the world—including some in schools across the US.

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

October 4, 2023 at 05:03AM

Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth Could Cost an Astronomical $11 Billion

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03034-1


Humanity’s biggest and most ambitious plan to search for extraterrestrial life is about to go back to the drawing board.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been working on a strategy to fly a set of Mars rocks, carefully collected by the Perseverance rover, back to Earth for study. But a new independent assessment of the plan says it can’t be done on current budgets and schedules. The entire project will probably cost between US$8 billion and $11 billion — far more than the roughly $4 billion estimated in a previous independent review report, issued three years ago. And there’s a “near zero probability” of the missions launching in 2027 and 2028, as the space agencies had hoped. Even pushing the launch dates out to 2030 would still cost between US$8 billion and $9.6 billion, the report estimates — comparable with the cost of building the James Webb Space Telescope, the single most expensive astronomy project in history.

The report, released on 21 September, stresses that Mars sample return is strategically important to the space agencies, in that it would demonstrate US and European ‘soft power’ at a time when China has also announced plans to bring back rocks from Mars. The mission is also scientifically important: it is the culmination of a decades-long quest to search for life beyond Earth. But the current plan is unworkable, according to the report, which was commissioned by NASA and led by a former NASA manager, Orlando Figueroa.

NASA says it will put current plans on hold and come up with an alternative strategy by early next year. “It’s going to take a little time for us to assess the path forward,” says Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary-science division in Washington DC. The recommendations from the report are “big”, she says. “They’re not things that can be answered overnight.”

In a statement, ESA said it is evaluating how it can adjust its plan while still achieving the overall mission objectives. “We are conducting preliminary studies to assess all options given the various scenarios and will inform member states and coordinate with NASA on the outcome as soon as possible.”

A valuable collection

As currently envisioned, a Mars sample-return mission would involve NASA building a lander that would fly to the Red Planet to grab up to 30 rock samples, as well as a rocket that would blast off from the Martian surface to carry them into orbit around Mars. ESA would build the spacecraft to retrieve the precious cargo from orbit and fly it back to Earth.

Scientists can analyse the rocks in much greater detail in laboratories on Earth than with the compact instruments available on robotic rovers. The analysis would include hunting for ‘biosignatures’, molecules or other signals of past life in the samples. “These measurements are difficult to do remotely,” says Daniel Glavin, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You really want the samples back and in the lab.”

NASA’s Perseverance rover has already collected a bevy of samples from Mars’s Jezero Crater and has even placed ten sealed tubes, containing rock cores, on the ground for possible retrieval. The rover continues to travel around Jezero, gathering more samples that make its collection increasingly valuable as time goes on, the report says. The rocks gathered so far formed in an ancient river delta and lake that were probably once similar to life-friendly environments on Earth.

Competing priorities

Mars sample return was one of the highest-ranked priorities recommended for NASA in the last two planetary ‘decadal’ surveys — reports, put together with input from the research community, that aim to guide the direction of US planetary science for the following ten years. But the project has struggled to remain affordable as engineers have refined the designs for the various spacecraft that would be part of the mission. The earlier independent review, which NASA commissioned from experts outside the agency specifically to head off problems with unexpected cost increases, recommended spending $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion on the sample-return project.

But that was before engineers had a full sense of what would be involved and hence how much it would cost, Glaze says. And NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which would lead much of the Mars sample-return project, has struggled with an overstretched work force. This led NASA to delay last year’s planned launch of a separate mission, a spacecraft destined for the asteroid Psyche.

There are also questions about how to balance the cost of Mars sample return against other missions in the $3.2-billion budget for NASA’s planetary-science division. The most recent decadal survey, released in 2022, recommended limiting the cost of Mars sample return to no more than 35% of the division’s overall budget. That’s a big challenge as the agency also tries to keep funding going for other priority projects, such as the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, slated for later this decade, and a mission to Uranus next decade.

That means all eyes remain on how to pay for Mars sample return. “The community knew that prioritization of a multi-mission effort and the single most ambitious effort in the history of planetary sciences would have challenges,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who helped to lead the most recent decadal survey. “That’s why the [survey] highlights the importance of NASA working with Congress to augment the budget and figure out the appropriate funding profile to get Mars sample return done.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 27, 2023.

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October 3, 2023 at 11:21AM

AI Algorithms Are Biased Against Skin With Yellow Hues

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-algorithms-are-biased-against-skin-with-yellow-hues/


After evidence surfaced in 2018 that leading face-analysis algorithms were less accurate for people with darker skin, companies including Google and Meta adopted measures of skin tone to test the effectiveness of their AI software. New research from Sony suggests that those tests are blind to a crucial aspect of the diversity of human skin color.

By expressing skin tone using only a sliding scale from lightest to darkest or white to black, today’s common measures ignore the contribution of yellow and red hues to the range of human skin, according to Sony researchers. They found that generative AI systems, image-cropping algorithms, and photo analysis tools all struggle with yellower skin in particular. The same weakness could apply to a variety of technologies whose accuracy is proven to be affected by skin color, such as AI software for face recognition, body tracking, and deepfake detection, or gadgets like heart rate monitors and motion detectors.

“If products are just being evaluated in this very one-dimensional way, there’s plenty of biases that will go undetected and unmitigated,” says Alice Xiang, lead research scientist and global head of AI Ethics at Sony. “Our hope is that the work that we’re doing here can help replace some of the existing skin tone scales that really just focus on light versus dark.”

But not everyone is so sure that existing options are insufficient for grading AI systems. Ellis Monk, a Harvard University sociologist, says a palette of 10 skin tones offering light to dark options that he introduced alongside Google last year isn’t unidimensional. “I must admit being a bit puzzled by the claim that prior research in this area ignored undertones and hue,” says Monk, whose Monk Skin Tone scale Google makes available for others to use. “Research was dedicated to deciding which undertones to prioritize along the scale and at which points.” He chose the 10 skin tones on his scale based on his own studies of colorism and after consulting with other experts and people from underrepresented communities.

X. Eyeé, CEO of AI ethics consultancy Malo Santo and who previously founded Google’s skin tone research team, says the Monk scale was never intended as a final solution and calls Sony’s work important progress. But Eyeé also cautions that camera positioning affects the CIELAB color values in an image, one of several issues that make the standard a potentially unreliable reference point. “Before we turn on skin hue measurement in real-world AI algorithms—like camera filters and video conferencing—more work to ensure consistent measurement is needed,” Eyeé says.

The sparring over scales is more than academic. Finding appropriate measures of “fairness,” as AI researchers call it, is a major priority for the tech industry as lawmakers, including in the European Union and US, debate requiring companies to audit their AI systems and call out risks and flaws. Unsound evaluation methods could erode some of the practical benefits of regulations, the Sony researchers say.

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

October 3, 2023 at 06:06AM