We can all agree that robocalls are the worst. While there might never be a way to get rid of them entirely (though agencies are certainly working on it), one the most prolific sources of these intrusions is finally getting hauled into court.
CBS News reports that Attorneys General from 48 states (as well as DC) are coming together to file a bipartisan lawsuit against Arizona-based Avid Telecom, its owner Michael D. Lansky and vice president Stacey S. Reeves. The 141-page suit claims that the company illegally made over 7.5 billion calls to people on the National Do Not Call Registry. Arizona Attorney General Kris Meyes claims that nearly 197 million robocalls were made to phone numbers in her state over a five-year period between December 2018 and January 2023.
The lawsuit says that Avid Telecom spoofed phone numbers, including 8.4 million that appeared to be coming from the government or law enforcement, and others disguised as originating from Amazon, DirecTV and many more. The suit alleges that Avid Telecom violated the Telephone and Consumer Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule and several other telemarketing and consumer laws.
The AGs are asking the court to enjoin Avid Telecom from making illegal robocalls, and to pay damages and restitution to the people it called illegally. They’re also pursuing several statutory avenues to make Avid cough of money on a per-violation basis, which given the enormous volume of calls it has made, could add up quickly. Sumco Panama, which was responsible for a comparatively smaller 5 billion robocalls, was fined nearly $300 million by the FCC late last year.
Earlier this month, it was reported that XCast Labs is being sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over allegedly helping other companies call those on the National Do Not Call Registry.
In 2017, Dish reached a settlement that cost them $210 million. The company allegedly made millions of calls in an attempt to sell and promote its satellite TV service. Dish ultimately had to pay a $126 million civil fine to the US government, and $84 million to residents in California, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio. Hopefully, we’ll see a similar result with Avid Telecom.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/g3F4HAP
With the rise of AI language models and tools like ChatGPT and Bard, we’ve heard warnings from people involved, like Elon Musk, about the risks posed by AI. Now, a group of high-profile industry leaders has issued a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
That’s… heavy. It was posted to the Center for AI Safety, an organization with the mission "to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence," according to its website. Signatories include OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. Turing Award-winning researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the godfathers of modern AI, also put their names to it. Hinton recently left Google over ethical concerns.
It’s not the first statement like this. In March, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 others called for a six-month pause on AI to allow industry and the public to effectively catch up to the technology. "Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict or reliably control," the letter stated. No specific scenarios elaborate on how AI could threaten humanity, but there’s been more than enough science fiction to make me think of worst cases. Thanks, The Matrix.
– Mat Smith
The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.
A mechanically perfect romp through a shallow world.
Blizzard
The story of Diablo IV opens decades after the end of Diablo III, with the world still reeling from the events of that game. Your character is in pursuit of Lilith, the daughter of Mephisto, one of the Prime Evils you defeated in Diablo II. Sometimes, you’ll discover some interesting lore or a named enemy that will drop an item with unique flavor text. Still, those moments are few and far between, according to Engadget’s Igor Bonifacic. Diablo IV will be available on PC, PlayStation and Xbox on June 6th.
You can no longer set an alarm or order Tide Pods with Melissa McCarthy.
Amazon is ditching all of its Alexa-enabled celebrity voices, including Shaquille O’Neal, Melissa McCarthy and Samuel L. Jackson. The celebrity voice assistant features were fairly limited when compared to Alexa’s full feature set as the celebs won’t do reminders and don’t integrate with many skills. They do, however, tell jokes, answer questions and complete simple voice-assisted tasks. Why get rid of the voices now? Reports suggest Amazon is building its own large language model (LLM), like ChatGPT, to transform Alexa radically, and celebrity voices may no longer fit that setup.
The Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed lets you skip Bluetooth.
Razer has introduced Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed buds that include a 2.4GHz RF adapter to plug into the USB-C port (there’s an included USB-A adapter) on your computer or console. This expands support to more devices, of course, but it also drops latency to 40ms versus 60ms for the Bluetooth-based Gaming Mode. The Hammerhead Pro Hyperspeed earbuds are available now for $200.
A switch to a Snapdragon chip could solve complaints about longevity.
engadget
A report from 9to5Google claims the Pixel Watch 2 will switch from Samsung’s 2018-era Exynos 9110 to one of Qualcomm’s much newer Snapdragon W5 models. Although the battery in the new smartwatch isn’t significantly bigger, the longevity is supposed to be much improved. Reportedly, it can last over a day with the always-on display enabled. The Pixel Watch 2 could also house the same health sensors as the Fitbit Sense 2 – Google owns Fitbit now, remember? That could introduce ways to measure stress, skin temperature and other metrics. When might we see it? Well, a previous rumor hinted the Pixel Watch 2 will debut alongside the Pixel 8 this fall.
Google Wallet is having a bit of a day today, receiving its own set of announcements alongside that new Android feature drop. We talked about some of the new features in an earlier write-up, but Google had not yet told us about the biggest new feature coming to their payable platform.
Google says that Google Wallet will “soon” be able to take a photo of cards with QR codes or barcodes and then turn them into accessible passes for use from your phone. Guys, this means that you’ll be able to make your own Google Wallet passes from things like your gym membership card or those random grocery store rewards cards you keep on a keychain or transit tickets and parking passes or almost anything else that has a scannable code. This is a huge step towards being able to leave your wallet at home and live through only your phone.
Unfortunately, there is no date on when this feature will show up. Google only announced that this is “coming soon.” We’ll be sure to let you know once this arrives.
As for other new Google Wallet features, here’s the rest of today’s big news:
Health insurance cards: Google will soon let you add health insurance cards, starting with Humana. You’ll be able to add a digital version of that insurance card that is also kept locked being verification, so your fingerprint or password will be required to access them.
Driver’s license in Maryland: Starting today, Maryland residents can add their ID or driver’s license to Google Wallet as long as your phone is running Android 8.0+. In the coming months, Google expects to expand IDs to Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia.
Digital ID at TSA PreCheck: The digital IDs that are now live in Maryland can even work through TSA PreCheck at “select airports.” Google will rollout additional uses for your Wallet ID like booking a car with Turo or verifying online accounts.
Save Wallet passes from Messages: Another “coming soon” will be a situation where you use Google Messages RCS to complete a travel check-in and then save the boarding pass from Messages to Google Wallet. Google is starting with Vietnam Airlines and Renfe.
Company ID cards and badges: And finally, Google says that will begin accepting corporate badges in Google Wallet later this year. They did not say which companies or how your company might work with them, but that’s neat.
The Moonrush has begun. Last year, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission flew to the Moon and back in a test of the technology that will take humans back to the surface in the next few years. The Artemis program will establish a space station called the Lunar Gateway in orbit and a base on the surface.
There will be other visitors too — both Russia and China are planning crewed missions. And some 30 uncrewed missions are in various stages of completion by spacefaring nations and private companies.
All that heralds a new age of lunar exploration, discovery and commercialization. But it also comes with risks. One problem is that the ejecta from lunar landings and launches could envelop the moon in a cloud of high-velocity dust particles that threaten other lunar missions. But just how significant this problem will be is currently unknown.
Brace For Impact
Enter Philip Metzger at the University of Central Florida and James Mantovani at the NASA Kennedy Space Center, who have attempted to quantify the risks for the first time. They say that spacecraft orbiting high above the lunar surface should be safe but others making closer approaches risk significant impacts with this dust.
The challenge in assessing the risk is that the interaction between rocket exhaust and the lunar surface is poorly understood. The evidence from Apollo missions is that landers’ rocket exhausts appeared to sweep away surface dust leaving a clean rock surface but no crater.
This sweeping occurs when the exhaust is deflected into a horizontal wind that picks up and carries dust particles. That can send ejecta into orbit at an angle that is only 2 or 3 degrees from a surface horizontal. But the formation of a crater could significantly change this angle. The likelihood of further erosion and crater formation is one of the unknowns that NASA and others will have to deal with.
The exhaust from a 40-tonne lander is likely to accelerate surface dust to speeds of around 4500 meters per second, more than enough to send them into lunar orbit and beyond. Metzger and Mantovani calculate the trajectory of these particles and say they will form a sheet of ejecta that the orbiting Lunar Gateway is likely to have to fly through several times before it disperses.
However, the damage from such impacts is likely to be minimal. The Lunar Gateway will fly in an elliptical orbit reaching distances of 70,000 km from the surface. Metzger and Mantovani say that the particles reaching this altitude are likely to be tiny — about 10 micrometers in diameter — and will in any case have decelerated due to lunar gravity. “The impact velocity will be only in the range of a few hundred meters per second since the Gateway’s orbit is slow,” they say.
“Assuming worst case, if Gateway passes through the ejecta sheet 10 times and receives 10,000 impacts per square meter each time, then after 100 landings only 0.08% of its surface will be abraded a few microns deep,” they suggest. “This is not too severe.”
But the numbers change significantly for spacecraft flying at lower altitudes. The Apollo Command module, for example, orbited at 110 kilometers. At this altitude, the density of ejecta particles will be larger and the collision velocities higher. The researchers estimate that such each square centimeter of such a spacecraft will be hit by some 7 milligrams of lunar dust.
“A spacecraft in Low Lunar Orbit may suffer extensive damage if the timing of its orbit puts it in the path of the ejecta cone from a large lunar lander,” they conclude. That suggests some careful planning will be needed to avoid such incidents.
Atmosphere Of Exhaust
NASA, of course, is aware of the problem and has already begun seeking ways to mitigate the dust problem, perhaps using shields.
But rocket exhaust will create another problem. Contrary to common belief, the Moon has a tenuous atmosphere called an exosphere that consists of gases released from the surface by processes such as the impact of solar wind and the chemical action of ultraviolet light.
The total amount of gas in the lunar exosphere is tiny, perhaps 100 tons in total. But each Apollo lander injected about 20 tons of gas into the exosphere in the form of rocket exhaust. This took many months or years to disperse.
It’s not hard to imagine future missions exceeding this rate of gas injection by a significant amount. For that reason, lunar exploration is likely to quickly overwhelm the lunar exosphere and replace it with a tenuous atmosphere of rocket exhaust.
For planetary scientists, the message is clear. They will need to study the lunar exosphere quickly and in detail before this pristine environment is lost from the Solar System forever.
Ref: The Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft Caused by the Ejecta of Lunar Landers : arxiv.org/abs/2305.12234
Somewhere in your body, your immune system just quietly killed one of your own cells, stopping it from becoming cancer, and saving your life. It does that all the time. The vast majority of cancer cells you develop will be killed without you ever noticing. Which is an incredibly hard job because of what cancer cells are: parts of yourself that start to behave as individuals even if it hurts you.
What is cancer and how does your body kill it all the time? Let’s find out in this video from Kurzgesagt!
Advances in technology are always met with some degree of technophobia—and villainization. And cyborgs represent a special kind of fear inherent in losing ourselves in the technologies we create. Listen as Dr. Emily Zarka explores the world of cyborgs and why they inspire fear in the hearts of humans.
Reddit is one of the biggest and most important websites on the planet, especially since it’s one of the last places human beings can get questions answered by actual human beings. It’s also a colossally active hub for the discussion of video games, a place where millions of gamers gather every day in communities devoted to everything from retro classics to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. So it sucks to see that the company is about to crush many of the best ways to actually experience the whole thing.
The Week In Games: System Shock, Street Fighter 6, And More
For anyone using the site on a desktop computer the Reddit experience is fine, I guess (“Old Reddit” is better), but on phones, that all changes. Reddit’s official app sucks, and is absolutely loaded with intrusive ads, meaning a lot of people rely on the work of third-party apps—like the incredibly popular Apollo on iOS and my own favourite, Infinity on Android—to browse and comment.
The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says:
I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.
Meanwhile one of the developers of RIF, another popular Android app, says that they are not only also being priced out (if Apollo can’t afford it nobody can), but that Reddit is also implementing a change where third-party apps would lose access to NSFW subreddits, while the official site would not:
Removal of sexually explicit material from third-party apps while keeping said content in the official app. Some people have speculated that NSFW is going to leave Reddit entirely, but then why would Reddit Inc have recently expanded NSFW upload support on their desktop site?
It’s obvious that the steep pricing, which goes far beyond what these developers were expecting or could ever afford, is not there to make money. Not when it was clear nobody was ever going to be able to pay it. It’s being brought in to crush third-party alternatives, driving every mobile user to the official app where they’ll either have to watch ads or pay for Reddit Premium.
