Apple Pulls Meta’s WhatsApp and Threads From App Store in China After Government Order
Apple Inc. said that it removed Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp and Threads from its China apps store after an order from the country’s internet regulator, which said the services pose risks to the country’s security.
The order comes on the heels of a cleanup program Chinese regulators initiated in 2023 that was expected to remove many defunct or unregistered apps from domestic iOS and Android stores. The action against the American tech services comes as the U.S. government is taking steps toward a ban on TikTok, the hit video app from Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. U.S. politicians have also cited national security concerns in their push to force the company to either sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the U.S. market.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree. The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns,” Apple said in a statement. “These apps remain available for download on all other storefronts where they appear.”
Foreign social media platforms like WhatsApp were already largely inaccessible from China without tools to circumvent Beijing’s Great Firewall, such as virtual private networks. The removal of these apps will make it more difficult for users within the country to view content on these international platforms.
In August, China asked all mobile app developers to register with the government by the end of March, a move that Beijing painted as a bid to counter telephone scams and fraud. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that it would carry out supervision work on those filings from April to June, and to take action against apps that were not registered. App developers would also be required to set up and improve mechanisms to handle “illegal information.”
The MIIT move was another step by Beijing to tighten controls across its cyberspace, forcing domestic and foreign companies to block off information considered politically sensitive. Beyond apps, websites and large language AI models have also been subject to greater content curbs.
China’s action comes as TikTok divestiture legislation is expected to be included in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that Congress is expected to vote on this Saturday.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report the removal. A Meta spokesperson referred Bloomberg News to Apple’s statement.
China is a key nation for the iPhone, its largest consumer market outside the U.S. and its primary production base. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook visited the country earlier this year and emphasized its importance to his business. Apple has long said that it needs to follow local laws as part of operating its app store effectively in different countries.
Source: Tech – TIME | 19 Apr 2024 | 4:50 pm
How AI Is Wreaking Havoc on the Fanbases of Taylor Swift, Drake, and Other Pop Stars
In the last week, highly anticipated songs by Drake and Taylor Swift appeared to leak online, sparking enormous reactions. Massive Reddit threads spawned, dissecting musical choices. Meme videos were created simulating other rappers’ reactions to being dissed by Drake. The rapper Rick Ross even responded to the song’s bars about him with a diss track of his own.
But there was one big problem: neither Swift nor Drake confirmed that the songs were real. In fact, loud contingents on social media claimed that the songs were AI-generated hoaxes, and begged fellow fans not to listen to them. Fervent fans soon became engulfed in rabid hunts for clues and debates aimed at decoding the songs’ levels of authenticity.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]These types of arguments have recently intensified and will only continue ballooning, as AI vocal clones keep improving and becoming increasingly accessible to everyday people. These days, even an artist’s biggest fans have trouble telling the difference between their heroes and AI-creations. They will continue to be stymied in the coming months, as the music industry and lawmakers slowly work to determine how best to protect human creators from artificial imposters.
The Advent of AI Deepfakes
AI first shook the pop music world last year, when a song that seemed to be by Drake and the Weekend called “Heart on My Sleeve” went viral, with millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube. But the song was soon revealed to have been created by an anonymous musician named ghostwriter977, who used an AI-powered filter to turn their voice into those of both pop stars.
Many fans of both artists loved the song anyway, and it was later submitted for Grammys consideration. And some artists embraced new deepfake technology, including Grimes, who has long experimented with technological advancements and who developed a clone of her voice and then encouraged musicians to create songs using it.
But soundalikes soon began roiling the fanbases of other artists. Many top stars, like Frank Ocean and Beyoncé, have turned to intense policies of secrecy around their output (Ocean has carried around physical hard drives of his music to prevent leaking), resulting in desperate fans going to extreme lengths to try to obtain new songs. This has opened the door for scammers: Last year, a scammer sold AI-created songs to Frank Ocean superfans for thousands of dollars. A few months later, snippets that purported to be taken from new Harry Styles and One Direction songs surfaced across the web, with fans also paying for those. But many fans argued vociferously that they were hoaxes. Not even AI-analysis companies could determine whether they were real, 404 Media reported.
Read More: AI’s Influence on Music Is Raising Some Difficult Questions
Drake and Taylor… Or Not?
This week, AI shook up the fanbases of two of the biggest pop stars in the world: Taylor Swift and Drake. First came a snippet of Drake’s “Push Ups,” a track that seemingly responded to Kendrick Lamar’s taunts of him in the song “Like That.” (“Pipsqueak, pipe down,” went one line from “Push Ups.”) The track, which also took aim at Rick Ross, The Weeknd, and Metro Boomin, quickly went viral, and Ross fired back a diss track of his own.
But the internet was divided as to whether or not the clip was actually made by Drake. The original leak was low quality; Drake’s vocals sound grainy and monotone. Even the rapper Joe Budden, who hosts the prominent hip-hop podcast The Joe Budden Podcast, said that he was “on the fence” for a while about whether or not it was AI.
A higher quality version of the song was subsequently released, leading many news outlets and social media posters to treat “Push Ups” as a genuine Drake song. Strangely enough, Drake has toyed with this ambiguity: He has yet to claim the song as his own, but posted an Instagram story containing people dancing to parts of it. Whether or not he made it, the song has become an unmistakable entry in a sprawling rap beef that has taken the hip-hop world by storm.
“Push Ups” has a reference to Taylor Swift: It accuses Lamar of being so controlled by his label that they commanded him to record a “verse for the Swifties,” on the 2015 remix of her song “Bad Blood.” On Wednesday, Swifties went into a frenzy when a leaked version of her highly anticipated new album, The Tortured Poets Department, began making the rounds online two days before its release date. Purported leaks have been popping up for months, including some that were eventually debunked as AI-generated. Given all of the false trails across the web, many Swift fans dismissed these new leaks as fake as well. But the songs are also being treated as real by many fans on Reddit, who are already announcing their favorite tracks and moments a day before the album’s official release.
Read More: Everything We Know About Taylor Swift’s New Album The Tortured Poets Department
listened to TTPD leaks and genuinely it’s so funny that even her fans can’t tell if it’s AI or not. pretty sure they were real tracks but just the fact that her own stans were in denial tells me everything I need to know about the root of the love for her artistry
— mina 🤹🏽♀️ (@tectonicromance) April 18, 2024
Can the music industry fight back?
Some of these vocal deepfakes are not much more than a nuisance to major artists, because they are low-quality and easy to detect. AI tools often will get the timbre of a distinctive voice slightly wrong, and can glitch when artists use melisma—sliding up and down on a single syllable—or suddenly jump registers. Some pronunciations of lyrics also come out garbled, or with a slightly wrong accent.
But AI tools are constantly improving and getting closer to the real thing. OpenAI recently shared a preview of Voice Engine, their latest tool that generates natural-sounding speech mimicking certain speakers. Researchers and AI companies are racing to create voice clone detection software, but their success rates have been uneven.
So some musicians and music labels are fighting back with the avenues they have available to them. Three major music publishers—Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO—sued the AI company Anthropic, alleging that the company infringed on copyrighted song lyrics. More than 200 musicians, including Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, and Nicki Minaj, recently signed a letter decrying the “predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses.” And BPI, a UK music industry group, threatened legal action against the vocal cloning service Jammable.
The music industry has growing support from lawmakers. Last month, Tennessee governor Bill Lee signed into law the ELVIS Act, which prohibits people from using AI to mimic an artist’s voice without their permission. And U.S. senators announced a similar bill called the NO FAKES Act. “We must put in place rules of the road to protect people from having their voice and likeness replicated through AI without their permission,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar wrote in a statement.
It will likely take a long time for this bill or other similar ones to wind their way through the halls of Congress. Even if one of them passes, it will be exceedingly hard to enforce, given the anonymity of many of these online posters and the penchant for deleted songs to pop back up in the form of unlicensed copies. So it’s all but assured that deepfaked songs will continue to excite, confuse, and anger music fans in the months and years to come.
Source: Tech – TIME | 19 Apr 2024 | 8:04 am
Google Fires 28 Workers Involved in Protests Over $1.2 Billion Israeli Contract
Alphabet Inc.’s Google fired 28 employees after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc. to provide the Israeli government and military with AI and cloud services.
Read More: Google Contract Shows Deal With Israel Defense Ministry
The protests, which were led by the No Tech for Apartheid organization, took place Tuesday across Google offices in New York City, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, California. Protesters in New York and California staged a nearly 10-hour sit-in, with others documenting the action, including through a Twitch livestream. Nine of them were arrested Tuesday evening on trespassing charges.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Several workers involved in the protests, including those who were not directly engaged in the sit-in, received a message from the company’s Employee Relations group informing them that they had been put on leave. Google told the affected employees that it’s “keeping this matter as confidential as possible, only disclosing information on a need to know basis” in an email seen by Bloomberg. On Wednesday evening, the workers were informed they were being dismissed by the company, according to a statement from Google staff with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign.
“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” Google said in a statement about the protesters. “After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety. We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will continue to investigate and take action as needed.”
Read More: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
The protest came a day before the Israeli government approved its five-year strategic plan to transition to the cloud under Project Nimbus and expand digital services. Israel’s Defense Ministry and military were listed in a government statement as partners in Project Nimbus, along with other government offices. A representative for Google said that the Nimbus contract is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Google has long favored a culture of open debate, but employee activism in recent years has tested that commitment. Workers who organized a 2018 walkout over the company’s handling of sexual assault allegations said Google punished them for their activism. Four other workers alleged they were fired for organizing opposition to Google’s work with federal Customs and Border Protection and for other workplace advocacy.
U.S. labor law gives employees the right to engage in collective action related to working conditions. Tech workers will likely argue that this should grant them the ability to band together to object to how the tools they create are used, said John Logan, a professor of labor at San Francisco State University.
“Tech workers are not like other kinds of workers,” he said. “You can make an argument in this case that having some sort of say or control or ability to protest about how their work product is being used is actually a sort of key issue.”
Tech companies like Google have a reputation for having “more egalitarian and very cosmopolitan work cultures, but when they encountered labor activism among their own workers, they actually responded in a sort of quite draconian way,” Logan added.
Two Googlers who were involved in the protest in California told Bloomberg that a group of workers gathered on the sixth floor of Google’s Sunnyvale bureau, where Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian’s office is located, to show support for those who were staging the sit-in. It’s unclear how Google identified participants in the protest, as only some had their badges scanned by security personnel, and some of those who were fired were outside Google’s offices, according to the employees.
One worker said Google may have framed the move to initially place employees on leave as “confidential” to save face publicly, and argued that the protesters did not violate any company policies. The protesters left the building as soon as they were asked to and did not obstruct or disrupt others at the company, the person said.
“Every single one of the twenty-eight people whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We carefully confirmed every single one (and then actually reconfirmed each one) during our investigation. The groups were live-streaming themselves from the physical spaces they had taken over for many hours, which did help us with our confirmation. And many employees whose work was physically disrupted submitted complaints, with details and evidence. So the claims to the contrary being made are just nonsense.”
Beyond the protest, Google has struggled with how to manage internal debate about the Middle East conflict. After the demonstration, posts on internal Google forums featured a mix of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sentiment, with a number of other workers saying they felt the topic was inappropriate for the workplace, a Google employee said. Moderators locked down some threads on the subject, saying prior discussions had gotten too heated, the employee added.
Despite Google’s response, employees demonstrating against Project Nimbus have seen an uptick in support since the sit-in, said one of the fired workers.
Source: Tech – TIME | 18 Apr 2024 | 6:05 pm
What’s the Deal With the Bitcoin Halving?
If you’ve talked to anyone invested in bitcoin lately, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the halving. Some crypto enthusiasts intone the halving like a religious event with near mystical importance: They believe its mechanics are crucial to bitcoin’s continuing price surge. However, detractors claim that the halving is closer to a marketing gimmick.
The halving is expected to take place on April 19 or 20, depending on the current rate at which bitcoins are created. So, what is it, exactly? And is it hard-coded genius, or smoke and mirrors?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]What is the bitcoin halving?
The halving goes all the way back to bitcoin’s origin story, born in the ashes of the 2008 financial crash. The cryptocurrency’s creator—who went by Satoshi Nakamoto, but whose real identity remains unknown—invented bitcoin the following year, and dreamed of creating an international currency that would operate outside the control of governments or central banks. Crucially, Satoshi wrote that there would only ever be 21 million bitcoin, so as to temper its inflation and potentially make each bitcoin more valuable over time.
Whereas the Federal Reserve, in contrast, can adjust the supply of dollars when they deem necessary, bitcoins would be released at a predetermined and ever-slowing pace. Satoshi determined that roughly every four years, the reward to create new bitcoins would be cut in half, in events known as “halvings.” As it became harder to create new bitcoins, each one would become rarer and more valuable, the theory went. Eventually, new bitcoin would stop being created entirely (that will likely not happen for at least another century).
Read More: Why Bitcoin Just Hit Its All-Time High
What has happened during past bitcoin halvings?
The halving is designed to make bitcoin more scarce, and ostensibly to push bitcoin’s price upward. And for the last three halvings, that’s exactly what has happened. After bitcoin’s first halving in November 2012, bitcoin’s price rose from $12.35 to $127 five months later. After the second halving in 2016, bitcoin’s price doubled to $1,280 within eight months. And between the third halving in May 2020 and March 2021, bitcoin’s price rose from $8,700 to $60,000.
But correlation does not imply causation, especially with such a small sample size. First, it’s possible that the timing of these rises was purely coincidental. It’s also possible that bitcoin’s rise has less to do with the actual mechanics of the halvings as opposed to the halvings’ narratives. With each halving, excitement grows about bitcoin’s potential, leading more people to buy in. That increase in demand causes the price to increase, which causes even more interest in a self-reinforcing cycle.
What will happen to bitcoin during this halving?
The halving will likely not cause a significant movement in price on the day it happens. Part of the economic impact of the halving has likely already occurred, with investors buying bitcoin in anticipation of the event, and the aftershocks of the halving will continue for months or years afterward, experts say.
“Given the previous history, the day-of tends to be a non-event for the price,” says Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at the global investment manager VanEck.
Another factor that makes it difficult to predict where bitcoin is headed post-halving is that this time, the economic circumstances surrounding it are different. It’s the first time that bitcoin has peaked before a halving, as opposed to after—last month, bitcoin rallied to an all-time high of $70,000 before dropping back down. That rally was aided by the rise of bitcoin ETFs: investment vehicles that allow mainstream institutional investors to bet on bitcoin’s price without having to actually buy bitcoin itself.
But there are some pessimists who believe that bitcoin’s big run has already happened, thanks to the ETFs—and that its price will actually decrease after the halving. A big reason for this, they believe, will be the actions of traders embarking on the strategy of “selling the news,” who cash in on their holdings in order to capitalize on a potential gold rush of interested buyers. JP Morgan predicted in February that bitcoin’s price will drop back down to $42,000 after “Bitcoin-halving-induced euphoria subsides.”
“Have we already created the buzz for bitcoin prior to halving—or is the ETF what allows Bitcoin to make similar run ups that we’ve seen in previous halvings?” says Adam Sullivan, the CEO of the bitcoin mining company Core Scientific. “We don’t have to answer that question yet.”
While many bitcoin optimists swear that its price will dramatically increase in the months following the halving, it’s important to remember that bitcoin does not always behave rationally, especially during chaotic global news events. After Iran launched a missile attack on Israel on April 13, for example, rattling the global economy, bitcoin’s price plummeted 7% in less than an hour.
Read More: A Texas Town’s Misery Underscores the Impact of Bitcoin Mines Across the U.S.
What will happen to bitcoin miners during the halving?
While determining the halving’s impact on average bitcoin investors is challenging, it seems certain that the halving will dramatically change the bitcoin mining industry. Bitcoin “miners” are essentially the network’s watchdogs, who safeguard the network from attacks, create new bitcoins, and get rewarded financially for doing so. After the halving, miners’ rewards for processing new transactions will be reduced from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125 (about $200,000)—a significant immediate reduction of revenue.
As a result, mining will become unprofitable for many smaller operations. As they fold or sell themselves to bigger operations, like Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. or CleanSpark Inc., the industry will likely consolidate. “People are going to operate in a marginally profitable environment for as long as they possibly can,” Sullivan says. “Those are folks that will probably look to get scooped up, probably in the six-to-12 month timeframe.”
But the bitcoin mining companies that weather the storm and gain market share from those who have bowed out could reap enormous rewards, Matthew Sigel says. “Miners are always the cockroaches of the energy markets; they’re very nimble,” he says. “We think the second half of the year will be very strong for bitcoin miners, as long as the bitcoin price rallies.”
Source: Tech – TIME | 18 Apr 2024 | 3:06 am
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