All posts tagged: allegedly

iPhone 17 Pro With All-New Camera Bar Design Allegedly Revealed

iPhone 17 Pro With All-New Camera Bar Design Allegedly Revealed

Published by skeptic

Apple’s next-generation iPhone 17 Pro will feature three rear cameras arranged in a familiar triangular layout, but the cameras will be housed in an all-new rectangular camera bar with rounded corners, according to YouTube channel Front Page Tech. In a video uploaded today, Front Page Tech host Jon Prosser said the camera bar will be considerably larger than many earlier concepts circulating online have showed. The camera lenses are positioned on the left side of the bar, while an LED flash, a rear microphone, and the LiDAR Scanner are lined up vertically on the right side. Prosser said the iPhone 17 Pro features a two-tone finish, with the camera bar appearing to be darker than the rest of the rear shell. It is unclear if this alleged design change has any benefits, or if it is purely for aesthetics. Prosser said his information is based on multiple sources familiar with the iPhone 17 Pro’s design, and he said that he has seen the device himself. The redesigned camera array would presumably extend to the iPhone …

Nick Ut allegedly tried to stop Sundance from showing movie about him

Nick Ut allegedly tried to stop Sundance from showing movie about him

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The retired Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, who is credited with taking the famous “Napalm Girl” photo in 1972, tried to stop Sundance from screening a movie that asserts the real photographer is not him but a little-known Vietnamese stringer, filmmakers told THR on Sunday.  The Pulitzer-Prize winner’s lawyers recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to the festival and filmmakers behind the new movie The Stringer, they said; the film world-premiered on Saturday anyway. A festival representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment. A request for comment for Ut sent to the AP was not immediately returned. Ut could not immediately be located. The news about the documentary is the latest turn in a quickly escalating battle that has turned Sundance into nothing less than a referendum on the credibility of modern media. Ut has long been known as the man behind the image emblazoned on the collective brain —  the nine-year-old Kim Phuc running from the napalm attack in the nearby town of Trang Bang, her skin burning off from the chemical weapon. …

the First Amendment Protects “Speech Allegedly Resulting in Suicide”

the First Amendment Protects “Speech Allegedly Resulting in Suicide”

Published by José

Content warning: this story discusses suicide, self-harm, sexual abuse, eating disorders and other disturbing topics. In October of last year, a Google-backed startup called Character.AI was hit by a lawsuit making an eyebrow-raising claim: that one of its chatbots had driven a 14-year-old high school student to suicide. As Futurism‘s reporting found afterward, the behavior of Character.AI’s chatbots can indeed be deeply alarming — and clearly inappropriate for underage users — in ways that both corroborate and augment the suit’s concerns. Among others, we found chatbots on the service designed to roleplay scenarios of suicidal ideation, self-harm, school shootings, child sexual abuse, as well as encourage eating disorders. (The company has responded to our reporting piecemeal, by taking down individual bots we flagged, but it’s still trivially easy to find nauseating content on its platform.) Now, Character.AI — which received a $2.7 billion cash injection from tech giant Google last year — has responded to the suit, brought by the boy’s mother, in a motion to dismiss. Its defense? Basically, that the First Amendment protects it …

Justin Sun Allegedly Squashed Press About His Banana-Eating Stunt

Justin Sun Allegedly Squashed Press About His Banana-Eating Stunt

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Blockchain billionaire and art collector Justin Sun made global headlines in November after shelling out $6.2 million at Sotheby’s for Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), his infamous banana duct-taped to a wall. Sun then ate the banana at a buzzy press conference in Hong Kong. However, it seems Sun didn’t have a taste for all the press that come of it. According to Fortune, the blockchain billionaire and art collector pressured the crypto trade publication CoinDesk to retract a December 2 article by Callan Quinn that was critical of Sun’s press conference. The article was titled “I Watched Justin Sun Eat the World’s Most Expensive Banana. I Don’t Get It.” Related Articles “After Sun’s team complained about the tone of the piece, CoinDesk’s owners, the crypto exchange Bullish, demanded editorial staff remove it from the publication’s website, according to sources familiar with the matter,” Fortune reports, adding that former Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray left his position as chair of an editorial committee in December. The report states that the decision to remove the …

AI Founder Promised Amazing Chatbot to Public Schools, Then Allegedly Spent the Money on a Lavish Wedding and Mansion

AI Founder Promised Amazing Chatbot to Public Schools, Then Allegedly Spent the Money on a Lavish Wedding and Mansion

Published by José

“A disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country.” AllFake After duping the Los Angeles school system into giving her gobs of money, the founder of an AI ed tech firm allegedly spent a lot of it on herself. As the LA Times reports, 33-year-old Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder of an AI startup called AllHere, has been charged by federal prosecutors with identity theft and multiple counts of fraud after her alleged web of lies regarding her company’s sketchy wares came tumbling down. Earlier this year, the same newspaper reported that after being contracted to build out a chatbot connecting families with information from the Los Angeles Unified School District, AllHere filed for bankruptcy despite tens of millions of dollars in public and private investment. Now, the reason why seems to be emerging, per the allegations: that the founder’s repeated lies about the company’s worth, and dips into its investments for her own personal gain, led it to ruin. Double Dipping Prosecutors maintain in their indictment against Smith-Griffin that the …

14-Year-Old Arrested for Allegedly Trying to Sell Guns He 3D Printed

14-Year-Old Arrested for Allegedly Trying to Sell Guns He 3D Printed

Published by José

“It’s scary for everyone. At that age, do they have the ability to know right from wrong?” Stop the Presses A teenager in Detroit was arrested after his house was raided in a 3D-printed gun sting, CBS News reports, amid a federal crackdown into illegal weapons parts produced with consumer fabrication tech. The culmination of a joint investigation with the Department of Homeland Security, the Detroit Police Department Organized Crime unit executed a search warrant at the house on Wednesday, uncovering evidence of an illegal operation. Among the confiscated items, according to authorities, were 3D-printers, twelve 3D-printed handgun “lowers” — the lower half of a handgun frame — and five rifle lowers. The big ticket item, though, was a 3D-printed Glock “switch,” a small device that converts pistols of the popular brand into fully automatic weapons. The arrested teenager, a 14-year-old, is facing felony weapons charges. According to CBS, the teenager will likely face federal charges as well, due to Homeland Security’s involvement in the arrest and investigation. Smoking Gun Generally, 3D-printing guns and gun …

OpenAI allegedly caught an ‘Iranian Influence Operation’ using ChatGPT

OpenAI allegedly caught an ‘Iranian Influence Operation’ using ChatGPT

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OpenAI, the company that brought us ChatGPT, said on Friday that it discovered and banned “accounts linked to an Iranian influence operation.” The accounts were allegedly using ChatGPT to “generate content focused on multiple topics, including the U.S. presidential campaign,” OpenAI said in a statement. The group is known as Storm-2035 which, according to Axios, has a reputation for attempting to influence elections by creating fake news websites and sharing them on social media. The OpenAI statement said the group used ChatGPT to “generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites.” It generated content about both major party presidential candidates — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump — along with Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Spanish and English-language discussions about the rights of Latinx communities in the U.S., Venezuelan politics, and Scottish independence. Storm-2035 also created some fashion and beauty content which, OpenAI suspects, is an attempt to “appear …

Waymo Is Suing People Who Allegedly Smashed and Slashed Its Robotaxis

Waymo Is Suing People Who Allegedly Smashed and Slashed Its Robotaxis

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The people of San Francisco haven’t always been kind to Waymo’s growing fleet of driverless taxis. The autonomous vehicles, which provide tens of thousands of rides each week, have been torched, stomped on, and verbally berated in recent months. Now Waymo is striking back—in the courts. This month, the Silicon Valley company filed a pair of lawsuits, neither of which have been previously reported, that demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from two alleged vandals. Waymo attorneys said in court papers that the alleged vandalism, which ruined dozens of tires and a tail end, are a significant threat to the company’s reputation. Riding in a vehicle in which the steering wheel swivels on its own can be scary enough. Having to worry about attackers allegedly targeting the rides could undermine Waymo’s ride-hailing business before it even gets past its earliest stage. Waymo, which falls under the umbrella of Google parent Alphabet, operates a ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles that is comparable to Uber and Lyft except with sensors and …

40 Allegedly Counterfeit Paintings Identified on eBay Using AI

40 Allegedly Counterfeit Paintings Identified on eBay Using AI

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An artwork authentication expert recently said she identified 40 supposedly fake painting being offered for sale on eBay, including two attributed to Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Dr. Carina Popovici, CEO and co-founder of the Swiss firm Art Recognition, told The Guardian earlier this week that she applied “cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI)” technology to photos on the e-commerce platform and found “up to 40” paintings had a high probability of not being authentic. “The algorithm identified all of them as fakes,” she told The Guardian. “We looked today and we downloaded some images, and there were fakes all over the place. Everything that we have analysed turns out to be not real art, a negative probability with 95% or so. I’m sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg.” Related Articles According to The Guardian, the images identified as fakes by Dr. Popovici’s AI tests included one listed as a work by ‘Monet’ titled Forest With a Stream priced at $599,000. Another item described as a study by ‘Renoir’ was priced at …

California superintendent allegedly investigated students for not applauding daughter

California superintendent allegedly investigated students for not applauding daughter

Published by skeptic

A San Diego-area school district superintendent was fired this week, nearly a year after students alleged she threatened to ban them from graduation ceremonies after they inadequately applauded her daughter at a banquet. The board that oversees the roughly 35,000-student Poway Unified School District voted unanimously to dismiss Marian Kim Phelps during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday. In a statement read by President Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff, the board said it “has lost all confidence and trust in Dr. Phelps’ ability to continue to serve as superintendent.” The vote followed a board-launched investigation into Phelps’ actions that began Nov. 15 and concluded April 18. “The investigation brought to light previous unknown evidence with witnesses with direct first-hand knowledge that contradicted Dr. Phelps’ statements and assertions to the board, district staff and the public,” the board’s statement said. The board said it would not comment further or provide additional information regarding the investigation, since minors were involved. The school district did not respond to an email or phone call seeking further comment this week. A phone call to …