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"The music industry is urging streaming platforms not to let artificial intelligence use copyrighted songs for training, in the latest of a run of arguments over intellectual property that threaten to derail the generative AI sector's explosive growth. In a letter to streamers including Spotify and Apple Music, the record label Universal Music Group expressed fears that AI labs would scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models and copycat versions of pop stars."

"Kahun still relies on its own vast repository of medical knowledge - over 30 million insights from trusted sources - but ChatGPT will now allow patients to describe their symptoms in their own words. Until now it's been a structured conversation, with the AI asking a question, the patient responding, and the AI working its way through a series of more detailed questions based on the answers it gets. Integrating ChatGPT puts the patient in control. They describe their symptoms exactly as they would to a doctor, and ChatGPT responds, just as their doctor would."

"The rapid online spread of deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift has renewed calls, including from US politicians, to criminalise the practice, in which artificial intelligence is used to synthesise fake but convincing explicit imagery. The images of the US popstar have been distributed across social media and seen by millions this week. Previously distributed on the app Telegram, one of the images of Swift hosted on X was seen 47m times before it was removed."

"* 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone * Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk * Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'"

"Dropbox is at the centre of a leak scandal, following the releasing of 400 usernames and passwords by an anonymous user on Pastebin. The hacker claims the initial dump is just a portion of the 6,937,081 Dropbox accounts he claims to have compromised on Tuesday. He then requested Bitcoins in payment before he would allow access to more accounts."

This is the problem with a database with such economic value!

"This is what's about to happen with twitpic, for years the go-to service for posting photos to Twitter, and the people in charge appear to be doing what they can to prevent the Internet Archive preserving the database and to deny users functional archive access to their own uploads. "

"Three software flaws in Facebook's systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook."

"Critics of the government's flagship internet regulation policy are warning it could lead to a North Korean-style censorship regime, where regulators decide which websites Britons are allowed to visit, because of how broad the proposals are."

"People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model. Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for "iPhone slow" spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time."

"Yet so-called smart devices inarguably depend on thousands of low-paid humans who annotate sound snippets so tech companies can upgrade their electronic ears; our faintest whispers have become one of their most valuable datasets."

""This is all identifiable in the smart meter data - it has literally your entire the pattern of life and behaviour through just monitoring where you live and what you do in your home." Vector and AWS say the data is anonymised and cannot be linked back to customers. Privacy advocates dispute that, because the way some customers use power in certain locations will easily identify them. For the companies, it's a tightrope: the more anonymous the data is made, the less value it has overall."

"In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used "manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions". It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions - which did not clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime."