Month: December 2023

There’s little to no evidence suggesting that “your devices are listening to you,” but that hasn’t stopped people from believing big tech is monitoring every word you say. Now, a marketing subsidiary of Cox Media Group is throwing fuel on the fire with claims that it can deploy “active listening” through your smartphone, smart TV, and other devices to target ads for its clients.

First reported by 404 Media, Cox Media Group Local Solutions plastered the theory on its website as an advertising strategy. “With Active Listening, CMG can now use voice data to target your advertising to the EXACT people you are looking for,” the company wrote.

CMG has since redirected the “Active Listening” page of its website, but you can find it on the internet archive, and it’s still listed as a strategy. The marketing company asks you to “imagine” what it would do for your business if you could target clients using specific phrases in their day-to-day conversations. “The AC is on it’s last leg!” the company uses as an example. The marketing company seems to be promoting a conspiracy theory, and privacy nightmare, that your phone’s microphone is recording everything you say and selling it to advertisers. CMG Local Solutions provides very few details on how they do this, and its claims are dubious, to say the least.

Cox Media Group and its marketing subsidiary did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Past research has shown very little evidence that your phone’s microphone is listening to you. There is much more conclusive evidence that the combination of your search queries, social media usage, and cookies is more than enough for advertisers to track your data and understand your life. However, CMG Local Solutions seems to be making ad deals with “active listening” as a product.

So is this legal? CMG Local Solution’s website says “YES- it is totally legal for phones and devices to listen to you. That’s because consumers usually give consent when accepting terms and conditions of software updates or app downloads.” However, the marketing company provides very few details about how the data is truly gathered or who is giving it to them, and these claims cannot be verified. Apple also lets users know if their microphone or screen is being actively recorded with a small icon on your screen, so you’d likely know if your iPhone was monitoring ambient audio.

The marketing company says they create an audience with voice data and retarget ads to users via streaming, social media, YouTube, and Google search. CMG Local Solutions says it has partnered with Google for 12 years, and lists other partners like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. These partners and the Federal Communications Commission did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

The gravitational pull from black holes is  so strong that nothing can escape its grasp. So could we ever harness the gargantuan power of black holes as a source of energy?

In a new study, scientists propose two ways to use black holes as energy sources someday. They predicted processes for extracting energy from black holes by using their rotational and gravitational properties.

"We know that we can extract energies from black holes, and we also know that we can inject energy into them, which almost sounds like a battery," lead author Zhan Feng Mai, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, told Live Science.

In the first hypothetical scenario, scientists would "charge" the black hole by injecting it with massive, electrically charged particles. These charges would continue being sucked in until the black hole itself had an electric field that began repelling any additional charges that they attempted to inject, the scientists explained in the study, published Nov. 29 in the journal Physical Review D.

Related: Supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is approaching the cosmic speed limit, dragging space-time along with it

When this electromagnetic repulsion was greater than the gravitational pull of the black hole, scientists would consider it "fully charged." In keeping with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which says that mass can be treated as equivalent to energy, the black hole’s available energy would come from a combination of the electrical charges injected into it as well as the mass of those electrical charges.

"The black hole battery is transforming the energy of the particle’s mass into charge energy," Mai said.

The researchers calculated the efficiency of the recharging process to be 25%, meaning that black hole batteries could transform about a quarter of the mass inputted into available energy in the form of an electric field. This would make the efficiency of the battery around 250 times higher than that of an atomic bomb, the team calculated.

To extract the energy, the researchers would utilize a process known as superradiance, which is based on the theory that space-time is literally dragged around the rotation of a spinning black hole because of its intense gravitational field.

Gravitational or electromagnetic waves that entered this region of rotation would get dragged along too, but assuming they had not yet passed the black hole’s event horizon — the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape — some waves might be deflected with more energy than they initially carried, the researchers wrote. This process would convert the black hole’s rotational energy, determined by its mass, into the waves that are deflected.

The other method of harnessing a black holes’ energy would involve extracting that energy in the form of so-called Schwinger pairs, or paired particles that form spontaneously in the presence of an electric field.

If we started with a fully charged black hole, the electric field near the event horizon might be so strong that it would spontaneously create an electron and positron, which is like an electron but with an opposite charge, Mai explained. If the black hole were positively charged, the positron would be shot out from the black hole due to repulsion. That runaway particle could then, theoretically, be collected as energy.

Mai said he does not know if we will ever see a battery like this, but the theoretical exercise was inspired by scientists’ previous attempts to theoretically extract energy from black holes.

"We see the black hole as a place where quantum mechanics and gravity have to somehow get together," Daniele Faccio, a physicist at the University of Glasgow who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "By looking at them from the perspective of energy mining, we can understand a little more about what’s going on."

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Tesla is recalling more than two million vehicles, nearly all of the vehicles it has sold in the US to date, to fix a flawed system designed to make sure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.

Rather than physically recalling vehicles, documents posted today by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that Tesla will send out a software update in an attempt to fix the problem.

The recall covers nearly all of the vehicles Tesla sold in the US, including the Model X, Model S, Model Y, and Model 3, and impacts those produced between October 5, 2012, and December 7 2023.

It comes after a two-year investigation by the NHTSA into a series of crashes that supposedly happened while Autopilot system was in use. Since 2016, the NHTSA has opened more than 40 special crash investigations involving Teslas and where advanced driver assistance such as Autopilot were suspected of being switched on. Nineteen crash deaths have been reported in these investigations.

NHTSA states that its investigation has found that Autopilot’s method of ensuring drivers are paying attention and in control are inadequate and “in certain circumstances when Autosteer is engaged, the prominence and scope of the feature’s controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse."

Aside from Tesla’s software update including added controls and alerts “to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the NHTSA safety recall report states that update—already issued to some vehicles and with the rollout ongoing—will apparently limit where Autosteer can be used.

“Additional controls will include, among others, increasing the prominence of visual alerts on the user interface, simplifying engagement and disengagement of Autosteer, additional checks upon engaging Autosteer and while using the feature outside controlled access highways and when approaching traffic controls, and eventual suspension from Autosteer use if the driver repeatedly fails to demonstrate continuous and sustained driving responsibility while the feature is engaged,” the NHTSA report states.

According to Tesla’s own literature, “Autopilot is a hands-on driver assistance system that is intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver. It does not turn a Tesla into a self-driving car nor does it make a car autonomous.” So, despite its name, although Autopilot can steer, accelerate and brake automatically in lane, it cannot drive for you.