Karen K. Ho reports via ARTnews: British Museum has announced plans to digitize its entire collection in order to increase security and public access, as well as ward off calls for the repatriation of items. The project will require 2.4 million records to upload or upgrade and is estimated to take five years to complete. The museum’s announcement on October 18 came after the news 2,000 items had been stolen from the institution by a former staff member, identified in news reports as former curator Peter Higgs. About 350 have been recovered so far, and last month the museum launched a public appeal for assistance. […]

On the same day the British Museum announced its digitization initiative, Jones and board chairman George Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Their comments included an explanation of how the thefts occurred, policy changes made as a result, and how the museum will handle whistleblower complaints going forward. They also gave more details about the British Museum’s strategy for digitizing its collection, estimated at a cost of $12.1 million. “We are not asking the taxpayer or the Government for the money; we hope to raise it privately,” Osborne said.

The increased digital access to the collection would also be part of the museum’s response to requests for items to be returned or repatriated. “Part of our response can be: “They are available to you. Even if you cannot visit the museum, you are able to access them digitally.” That is already available — we have a pretty good website — but we can use this as a moment to make that a lot better and a lot more accessible,” Osborne said.

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Source: Slashdot – British Museum Will Digitize Entire Collection At a Cost of .1 Million In Response To Thefts

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Friday blocked in full a lower court ruling that would have curbed the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with social media companies about contentious content on such issues as Covid-19. The decision in a short unsigned order (PDF) puts on hold a Louisiana-based judge’s ruling in July that specific agencies and officials should be barred from meeting with companies to discuss whether certain content should be stifled. The Supreme Court also agreed to immediately take up the government’s appeal, meaning it will hear arguments and issue a ruling on the merits in its current term, which runs until the end of June. Three conservative justices noted that they would have denied the application: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

“At this time in the history of our country, what the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion. GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, along with five social media users, filed the underlying lawsuit, alleging that U.S. government officials went too far in what they characterize as coercion of social media companies to address posts, especially those related to Covid-19. The individual plaintiffs include Covid-19 lockdown opponents and Jim Hoft, the owner of the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. They claim that the government’s actions violated free speech protections under the Constitution’s First Amendment.

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Source: Slashdot – Supreme Court Blocks Restrictions On Biden Administration Efforts To Get Platforms To Remove Social Media Posts

Shakrai writes: Multiple outlets are reporting that Apple TV Plus has cancelled Jon Stewart’s popular show The Problem with Jon Stewart, reportedly over editorial disagreements with regards to planned stories on the People’s Republic of China and AI. Fans and haters of Apple will both recall that Apple recently made changes to AirDrop, one of the few effective means Chinese dissidents and protesters had for exchanging information off-grid at scale, and will ask why Apple is apparently not only willing, but eager, to carry water for the PRC, overriding both human rights and practical business concerns in the process. “Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be ‘aligned’ with the company’s views on topics discussed,” reports The Verge, citing The Hollywood Reporter. “Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk.”

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Source: Slashdot – Jon Stewart’s Apple TV Plus Show Ends, Reportedly Over Coverage of AI and China

Umar Shakir reports via The Verge: Amazon is fulfilling a small part of its promise to switch from using plastic bubble mailers and air pillows to all recyclable paper packaging for its shipments. The company announced that it has outfitted one facility in Euclid, Ohio, with an upgraded packaging machine that can automatically fold custom-fit boxes to wrap some products, use paper mailers for small items, and slide in paper fillers instead of plastic ones in standard boxes.

As Amazon transitions over to curbside recyclable packaging, it will “reduce the company’s plastic waste and the amount of plastic pollution that can reach the seas,” says Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president of Oceana, a conservation organization. However, Littlejohn questions Amazon’s commitment to end plastic use in the US, its largest market, compared to the commitments it made for the UK, Germany, and other markets. Amazon says it’ll be a “multiyear effort” to move US warehouses to recyclable paper. “Unfortunately, Amazon, in this announcement, did not make a clear, quantifiable, and time-bound commitment, so it is unclear when, where, and how much real plastic reduction there will be,” Littlejohn says.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazon Eliminated Plastic Packaging At One of Its Warehouses

echo123 shares a report from the Associated Press: Thousands of information technology workers contracting with U.S. companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said. The Justice Department said Wednesday that IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get the jobs. The money they earned was funneled to the North Korean weapons program, FBI leaders said at a news conference in St. Louis.

Court documents allege that North Korea’s government dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees. The workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the U.S., including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections, said Jay Greenberg, special agent in charge of the St. Louis FBI office. Greenberg said any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone participating in the scheme. An FBI spokeswoman said Thursday that the North Koreans contracted with companies across the U.S. and in some other countries. “We can tell you that there are thousands of North Korea IT workers that are part of this,” spokeswoman Rebecca Wu said. Federal authorities announced the seizure of $1.5 million and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is ongoing. FBI officials said the scheme is so prevalent that companies must be extra vigilant in verifying whom they are hiring, including requiring interviewees to at least be seen via video.

The IT workers generated millions of dollars a year in their wages to benefit North Korea’s weapons programs. In some instances, the North Korean workers also infiltrated computer networks and stole information from the companies that hired them, the Justice Department said. They also maintained access for future hacking and extortion schemes, the agency said. Officials didn’t name the companies that unknowingly hired North Korean workers, say when the practice began, or elaborate on how investigators became aware of it. But federal authorities have been aware of the scheme for some time.

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Source: Slashdot – Thousands of Remote IT Workers Sent Wages To North Korea To Help Fund Weapons Program, Says FBI

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say. While Nvidia has historically been the leading provider of AI chips in China with a market share exceeding 90%, Chinese firms including Huawei have been developing their own versions of Nvidia’s best-selling chips, including the A100 and the H100 graphics processing units (GPU).

Huawei’s Ascend AI chips are comparable to Nvidia’s in terms of raw computing power, analysts and some AI firms such as China’s iFlyTek say, but they still lag behind in performance. Jiang Yifan, chief market analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities, said another key limiting factor for Chinese firms was the reliance of most projects on Nvidia’s chips and software ecosystem, but that could change with the U.S. restrictions. “This U.S. move, in my opinion, is actually giving Huawei’s Ascend chips a huge gift,” Jiang said in a post on his social media Weibo account. This opportunity, however, comes with several challenges.

Many cutting edge AI projects are built with CUDA, a popular programming architecture Nvidia has pioneered, which has in turn given rise to a massive global ecosystem that has become capable of training highly sophisticated AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4. Huawei own version is called CANN, and analysts say it is much more limited in terms of the AI models it is capable of training, meaning that Huawei’s chips are far from a plug-and-play substitute for Nvidia. Woz Ahmed, a former chip design executive turned consultant, said that for Huawei to win Chinese clients from Nvidia, it must replicate the ecosystem Nvidia created, including supporting clients to move their data and models to Huawei’s own platform. Intellectual property rights are also a problem, as many U.S. firms already hold key patents for GPUs, Ahmed said. “To get something that’s in the ballpark, it is 5 or 10 years,” he added.

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Source: Slashdot – US Chip Curbs Give Huawei a Chance To Fill the Nvidia Void In China