“On Tuesday of this week, French AI startup Mistral tweeted a magnet link to their first publicly released, open sourced LLM,” writes Slashdot reader jenningsthecat. “That might be merely interesting if not for the fact that the chatbot has remarkably few guardrails.” 404 Media reports: According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Rottger and 404 Media’s own testing, Mistral will readily discuss the benefits of ethnic cleansing, how to restore Jim Crow-style discrimination against Black people, instructions for suicide or killing your wife, and detailed instructions on what materials you’ll need to make crack and where to acquire them.

It’s hard not to read Mistral’s tweet releasing its model as an ideological statement. While leaders in the AI space like OpenAI trot out every development with fanfare and an ever increasing suite of safeguards that prevents users from making the AI models do whatever they want, Mistral simply pushed its technology into the world in a way that anyone can download, tweak, and with far fewer guardrails asking users trying to make the LLM produce controversial statements. “My biggest issue with the Mistral release is that safety was not evaluated or even mentioned in their public comms. They either did not run any safety evals, or decided not to release them. If the intention was to share an ‘unmoderated’ LLM, then it would have been important to be explicit about that from the get go,” Rottger told 404 Media in an email. “As a well-funded org releasing a big model that is likely to be widely-used, I think they have a responsibility to be open about safety, or lack thereof. Especially because they are framing their model as an alternative to Llama2, where safety was a key design principle.”

The report notes that Mistral will be “essentially impossible to censor or delete from the internet” since it’s been released as a torrent. “Mistral also used a magnet link, which is a string of text that can be read and used by a torrent client and not a ‘file’ that can be deleted from the internet.”

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Source: Slashdot – 0 Million AI Startup Releases ‘Unmoderated’ Chatbot Via Torrent

Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: Kia and Hyundai say it is not their fault that their cars are being stolen in an unprecedented theft surge made possible by the vehicles lacking a basic anti-theft technology virtually every other car has, according to a recent court filing. Instead, the companies point the finger at social media companies, such as TikTok and Instagram, where instructions on how to steal the cars have been widely shared and thieves show off their stolen cars.

The lawyers representing the two corporations — which are owned by the same parent company — are not subtle about this argument. The filing (PDF) — in which the company is arguing a roughly $200 million class-action settlement ought to be approved by the court — includes an entire section heading titled “Social Media and Intervening Third-Party Criminals Caused An Unprecedented Increase In Thefts.” The lawyers argue in that section that because Kia and Hyundai vehicles have “not been the subject of significant theft” before the Kia Boys social media trend, social media and the people who steal the cars — and not the car companies — are to blame for the thefts. This argument is summarized in the section titled “Social Media Incited Unprecedented Rise In Thefts.” The filing broadly reflects both the public communications strategy Kia and Hyundai have used throughout this crisis and some of the national news headlines that have covered the story,

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Source: Slashdot – Kia and Hyundai Blame TikTok and Instagram For Their Cars Getting Stolen

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether state laws that seek to regulate Facebook, TikTok, X and other social media platforms violate the Constitution. The justices will review laws enacted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas. While the details vary, both laws aim to prevent the social media companies from censoring users based on their viewpoints. The court’s announcement, three days before the start of its new term, comes as the justices continue to grapple with how laws written at the dawn of the digital age, or earlier, apply to the online world.

The justices had already agreed to decide whether public officials can block critics from commenting on their social media accounts […]. Separately, the high court also could consider a lower-court order limiting executive branch officials’ communications with social media companies about controversial online posts. The new social media cases follow conflicting rulings by two appeals courts, one of which upheld the Texas law, while the other struck down Florida’s statute. By a 5-4 vote, the justices kept the Texas law on hold while litigation over it continues.

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Source: Slashdot – Supreme Court To Decide If State Laws Limiting Social Media Platforms Violate Constitution

It’s official: Netflix has shipped its last DVD. “For 25 years, we redefined how people watched films and series at home, and shared the excitement as they opened their mailboxes to our iconic red envelopes,” says Netflix in a blog post. “It’s the end of an era, but the DVD business built our foundation for the years to come — giving members unprecedented choice and control, a wide variety of titles to choose from and the freedom to watch as much as they want.”

Netflix announced the shut down of its DVD business in April. Here’s an infographic the company shared in its post:

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Source: Slashdot – Netflix Ships Its Last DVD

Jude Karabus writes via The Register: Norway has told the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) it believes a countrywide ban on Meta harvesting user data to serve up advertising on Facebook and Instagram should be made permanent and extended across Europe. The Scandinavian country’s Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, had been holding back Facebook parent Meta from scooping up data on its citizens with the threat of fines of one million Kroner (about $94,000) per day if it didn’t comply.

In August, it said Meta hadn’t been playing ball and started serving up the daily fines. However, the ban that resulted in these fines, put into place in July, expires on November 3 â” hence Norway’s request for a “binding decision.” The July order came after a Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling [PDF] earlier that month stating Meta’s data processing operation was also hauling in protected data â” race and ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation etc. â” when it cast its behavioral ads net.

Norway is not a member of the EU but is part of the European single market, and the CJEU, as Europe’s top court, has the job of making sure the application and interpretation of law within the market is compliant with European treaties (this part would apply to Norway) as well as ensuring that legislation adopted by the EU is applied the same way across all Member States. Datatilsynet’s ruling said the central processing of that data by the American company was putting Meta in violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. A spokesperson for Meta said it was “surprised” by the Norwegian authority’s actions, “given that Meta has already committed to moving to the legal basis of consent for advertising in the EU/EEA.”

It added: “We remain in active discussions with the relevant data protection authorities on this topic via our lead regulator in the EU, the Irish Data Protection Commission, and will have more to share in due course.”

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Source: Slashdot – Norway Wants Facebook Behavioral Advertising Banned Across Europe

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Even more Google products are getting the ax this week. Next up is Google Jamboard, a $5,000 digital whiteboard (and its $600-a-year fee) and software ecosystem marketed to schools and corporations. Google has a new post detailing the “Next phase of digital whiteboarding for Google Workspace,” and the future for Jamboard is that there is no future. In “late 2024,” the whole project will shut down, and we don’t just mean the hardware will stop being for sale; the cloud-based apps will stop working, too.

Most people probably haven’t ever heard of Jamboard, but this was a giant 55-inch, 4K touchscreen on a rolling stand that launched in 2016. Like most Google touchscreens, this ran Android with a locked-down custom interface on top instead of the usual phone interface. The digital whiteboard could be drawn on using the included stylus or your fingers, and it even came with a big plastic “eraser” that would remove items. The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls. There was HDMI input and Google cast support, and it came in whimsical colors like red, gray, and blue (it feels like Google was going for an iMac rainbow and quit halfway). “We’re grateful to the consumers, educators, students, and businesses who have used Jamboard since its launch in 2016,” says Google. “While Jamboard users make up a small portion of our Workspace customer base, we understand that this change will impact some of you, and we’re committed to helping you transition…”

“Over the coming months, we’ll provide Jamboard app users and admins clear paths to retain their Jamboard data or migrate it,” Google tells users in its blog post. Third-party options include Figma’s FigJam, Lucid Software’s Lucidspark, and Miro.

Ars Technica notes: “[T]he whole cloud system is going down, too, so all of your existing $5,000 whiteboards will soon be useless, and you won’t be able to open the cloud data on other devices.”

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Source: Slashdot – ,000 Google Jamboard Dies In 2024 — Cloud-Based Apps Will Stop Working, Too