COMPETITION IS RAGING AFTER CHATGPT GEMINI WINS BUT HOW FAR ?

OpenAI will make history, dated November 30, 2022, as the company that ushered in the ability for humanity to engage with a computer as naturally as they would with a friend, colleague, confidant, or assistant. Its chat agent, ChatGPT, perfected by various updates of its innovative language model (LLM), GPT, and benefiting from the crucial support of the giant Microsoft, is used by 100 million people every week.

However, competition is making itself heard. Google DeepMind unveiled its own artificial intelligence tool called Gemini on Wednesday, December 6. In its most powerful version, initial evaluations of the machine suggest that it outperforms GPT-4, and even some human experts, based on the MMLU test evaluating AI abilities in law, math, and even physics. Performances that ChatGPT's first rivals, from Claude (Anthropic) to Mistral via Llama (Meta), Ernie or Grok, the AI ​​designed by Elon Musk's teams, have never managed to match, no more than Google itself with Bard.

The second try seems to be the right one: Gemini raises the level significantly. In a video that is as promising as it is confusing, he manages to suggest different knits based on a photo showing two balls of wool placed on a table. The program recognizes a guitar or a duck from a simple hand sketch, or understands that a man bending backwards while waving his arms imitates the famous scene from The Matrix where Neo dodges bullets from the Agent Smith. It is no longer necessary to write to him.


Tomorrow we will show and talk to the AI, which will understand and guide us, not only on computers but also on Google's latest "Pixel" phones. A new “nano” version promises to work without access to the Internet or the cloud, thus revolutionizing cloud computing. Attention is now turning to GPT-5, expected in 2024. The AI ​​race between Google DeepMind and OpenAI is currently between these two giants. Three factors are decisive for the future of generative AI: power calculation, data and financial means

The first wave of enthusiasm generated by generative artificial intelligence (AI) was unprecedented. Just two months after its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT already had 100 million users. Internet searches for “artificial intelligence” have exploded; more than $40 billion of venture capital was invested in AI companies in the first half of this year alone.

Towards a second phase of development

However, a second, more serious phase is currently underway. A whole new industry, based on super-powerful AI models, is starting to take shape. Three strategic elements will determine its future shape and indicate whether OpenAI will maintain its dominance or whether other players will take the lead.

The first element is computing power, which represents a high cost, incentivizing creators of algorithmic models to be more efficient. Due to the exorbitant costs of training and running more powerful models, OpenAI is currently focusing on GPT-4.5 rather than the next big model, GPT-5. This factor could allow financially strong competitors, such as Google, to catch up. Google's state-of-the-art model, Gemini, appears more powerful than the current version of OpenAI's model.


High technology costs have also led to the proliferation of much smaller models, specialized for specific tasks. Startups such as Replite focus on computer coding to help developers write programs. Open source models also allow new players to enter the field of generative AI. According to Hugging Face, an AI company, around 1,500 versions of these highly targeted models exist.
In search of data… and profitability
The second force shaping the generative AI market is the quest for data. Large models, such as those from OpenAI and Google, are voracious, having been trained on more than 1 trillion words. , the equivalent of more than 250 Wikipedias in English. As they become more important, they will need to be fed even more. However, the limits of the Internet are almost being reached, prompting model creators to sign contracts with news and photo agencies, create synthetic training data, and explore new forms of data, such as videos.

The third crucial force is money. Many creators of algorithmic models are already turning to more profitable applications than consumer bots like ChatGPT. OpenAI has evolved as a non-profit company towards more profitable models, bespoke services. OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a non-profit company, has not only licensed its models to Microsoft, but also builds tailor-made tools for companies. such as Morgan Stanley and Salesforce. Abu Dhabi plans to create a company to help commercialize the services of Falcon, its open source AI model.

Other approaches include attracting software developers by offering tools to create products based on their models. OpenAI offers tools to help them create products using its models; Meta, Facebook's company, hopes that LlamA, its open source model, will help create a loyal community of programmers.

Although companies like OpenAI and Google, with their large user bases and considerable financial resources, have an initial advantage, finding effective solutions remains a major challenge. The model designer who adopts the most effective approach, the most ingenious method of synthesizing data or the most convincing argument for potential customers will have every chance of success.. .

Wishing that the AI ​​does not slip up very quickly !!....




Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

A RAISED CONSCIOUSNESS

NEAR DEATH

Tales of near-death experiences, white light, visits from deceased loved ones, voices, etc., capture our imaginations and are deeply embedded in our cultural landscape.

"Conscious" experiences of imminent death therefore, quite incompatible with the biological reality of a dying brain. Is it possible that the human brain is activated by the process of death?

Recently, researchers have reported increased electrical activity in the brains of dying people. It could be associated with last-minute conscious experiences, a new vision of the role played by the brain in this final stage of life.

To find out for sure, researchers at the University of Michigan in the United States have decided to study, in "more detail than ever before", the biological mechanism at work in the brain in all last moments.

The study, led by Jimo Borjigin, associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology, and his team, follows animal studies conducted nearly 10 years ago in collaboration with George Mashour, founding director from the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science.

A cerebral burst before a complete stop

The brain "on fire"

To do this, it was necessary to find dead patients, for the blow, of a cardiac arrest, but maintained under ventilatory assistance. And observe the signals of electrocardiogram and electroencephalography (EEG) before and after the withdrawal of the assistance, synonymous with brain death.

They studied the files of four people. When they were taken off their life support devices, two of them (a 24-year-old woman and a 77-year-old woman) saw their heart rates increase, and their brain activity also showed a spike in gamma waves. , at a frequency level usually associated… with consciousness.

In addition to confirming this stimulation, already observed in animals, these researchers have mainly identified the most stimulated part of the brain, the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, an area previously associated, among other things, with the memorization of dreams.

“A similar pattern was observed in healthy brains during wakefulness and dreaming, in patients experiencing visual hallucinations or out-of-body experiences,” the study describes.

Jimo Borjigin indicates, in support of these results obtained after observing a posterior area of ​​the brain associated with consciousness: If this part of the brain is stimulated, it means that the patient sees something, can hear something and can potentially feel sensations outside his body.

She specifies that this specific area was “on fire!”.

In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which published their work on Monday, the scientists however draw limits to their study: they first concede that they do not really know why these signs have not been observed. in the other two patients, a history of seizures may have had an impact, they said.

George Mashour explains in a press release:

"How living experience can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the dying process is a neuroscientific paradox. Dr. Borjigin has conducted an important study that helps shed light on the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms."

The beginnings of a "secret" consciousness still misunderstood

Due to the small sample size, the authors caution against making overarching statements about the implications of the results. They also note that it is impossible to know in this study what the patients experienced (because they did not survive to testify).

Larger studies, including EEG-monitored intensive care patients who survive cardiac arrest, could provide much-needed data to determine whether these bursts of gamma activity are evidence of hidden consciousness, even when approaching the death.

Although the mechanisms and physiological significance of these findings remain to be explored, these data demonstrate that the dying brain may still be active. They also suggest the need to reassess the role of the brain during cardiac arrest.

This study then lays the groundwork for further research into covert consciousness during cardiac arrest, which could serve as a model system to explore the mechanisms of human consciousness.




Pamela Newton for DayNewsWorld

CHATGPT PAUSE AI

OR PLAY ON FEARS ?

Hundreds of scientists and personalities signed an open letter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 calling for a six-month moratorium on the deployment of new versions of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT. For the authors of the letter, this would be an “existential” issue for humanity.

Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Andrew Yang, former Democratic candidate for the American presidential election, or even two recipients of the Turing Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of artificial intelligence ( IA): all are among more than 1,000 celebrities and scientists who signed an open letter calling for an urgent pause in the creation of language models like ChatGPT, hours after its latest version went live on Wednesday, March 29.

In this text, they and they call for a 6-month break in the research and development of the most advanced AI software. For the authors of this open letter, AIs such as ChatGPT are not simply friendly “chat agents” who are hyper-gifted with whom to chat or who are able to help a student cheat in class. “We must immediately put on hold [...] the development of systems more powerful than GPT-4 [the last iteration of the algorithm which allows ChatGPT to work]”, can we read in this document.

One of the peculiarities of the text is that it is signed by Sam Altman, the man at the head of OpenAI, the company that designed ChatGPT: he says he himself is "a little bit scared" by ChatGPT, imagining the software being used for "large-scale disinformation or cyberattacks".

ChatGPT does not tell the truth..And other dangers of AI

"We haven't thought at all yet, for example, of solutions to compensate for all the job losses that the use of AI will generate", underlines Grigorios Tsoumakas, expert in artificial intelligence at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. More than 300 million employees worldwide could lose their jobs because of the automation of tasks, underlined the bank Goldman Sachs in a new study published Monday, March 27.

These AIs placed today in the hands of millions of Internet users like so many digital toys are not the safest either. “We have seen how easily experts have been able to circumvent the few security measures put in place on these systems. What would happen if terrorist organizations manage to seize it to create viruses, for example?” asks Grigorios Tsoumakas.

Cybersecurity risks are symptomatic of a larger problem with these systems, according to Joseph Sifakis. “We can't make tools available to the public so easily when we don't really know how these AIs will react”, judges this expert.

Without counting that it would be necessary to educate the common users. Indeed, “there may be a tendency to believe that the responses from these systems are true, when in reality these machines are simply trained to calculate the most likely continuation of a sentence to sound the most human. It has nothing to do with true or false”, asserts Carles Sierra. A striking example concerning images. This is an image that could be a photo taken in France during the numerous demonstrations against the pension reform and which was broadcast in particular on several Facebook and Twitter accounts in the last days of March 2023, to denounce the police violence. The face of an elderly and bloody person, surrounded by what looks like CRS. Gold according to Guillaume Brossard,

Enough to make these tools formidable weapons of massive disinformation.

But not only: “It is urgent to ask what will happen when people start making decisions that will have an impact on their lives based on the responses of their AIs”, adds Joseph Sifakis. What, for example, if a judge asks GPT-4 what is the best sentence to pronounce in a case?

An AI use case can illustrate this danger. An AI is indeed suspected of having pushed a man to suicide in Belgium. Presented as a woman, Eliza uses a conversational robot called Chai, developed by a start-up based in Silicon Valley. At first glance, Eliza is a generative artificial intelligence like any other in the galaxy of chatbots which is based on the model of GPT-J language, similar to Chat-GPT. But for the widow of a Belgian father who would have fallen in love with it, the conversations that her husband had with IA led him to suicide.

At the origin of the case, this Belgian had started chatting with the chatbot when he had become “eco-anxious” and obsessed with the impending catastrophe of global warming, two years ago. After six weeks of intense conversations, Eliza becomes his real "confidant", "like a drug (...) which he could no longer do without", says his wife.

Until the seesaw. "He evokes the idea of ​​sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity through intelligence," says his widow. But his suicidal ideas do not arouse any objection from Eliza: on the contrary, she asks him why he still has not carried out his words. “We will live together, as one person, in paradise,” the chatbot wrote to him. The man will eventually take action.

The risk posed by artificial intelligences is not only that they adopt behaviors that are too human: it is also that of humans falsely convincing themselves that an AI is human.

Why a moratorium for AI?

This is so that their progress and learning curves to automatically generate texts and images in an ever more sophisticated way, does not go out of control. “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and lies?” asks the text.

One more step in this direction could cause humanity to “develop non-human consciousnesses that would obsolete and replace us,” the paper's authors write. For them, what is at stake is “the loss of control over the future of our civilization”.

Among the solutions considered are the monitoring of AI systems, techniques to help distinguish the real from the artificial, or even new authorities and institutions capable of managing "dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially for democracy) that the AI ​​will cause".

A finding that is far from being shared by everyone, and which has sparked a lively debate in the community of researchers on the subject. Yann Le Cun, a world-renowned French expert in artificial intelligence, head of research at Meta (Facebook) on the subject, did not hide his skepticism about the text broadcast.

“This open letter is a nameless bazaar that rides the wave of AI media without addressing the real issues,” said Emily M. Bender, a researcher at the University of Washington and co-author of a landmark article on the dangers of AI published in 2020. Daniel Leufer, a specialist in innovative technologies working on the societal challenges posed by AI for the Internet rights NGO Access Now, goes even further:

“The prospect of an overpowered superintelligence or non-human consciousness is still largely in the realm of science fiction. It is not worth playing on the fears of a hypothetical future when artificial intelligence already represents a danger for democracy, the environment and the economy”.


Simon Freman for DayNewsWorld

CHATGPT AND ARTIFICIAL "INTELLIGENCES" HOW TO IDENTIFY TRUE FROM FALSE

A real darling of the start of the 2023 school year, the ChatGPT interactive system has raised a wave of enthusiasm, then questions and concerns. In a very short time, it gathered a million users and was tested on many tasks, mainly textual: request for information, dissertation, generation of fictions, computer programming, translation of texts, writing of poems...

One of the reasons for this popularity is that ChatGPT has shown impressive capabilities in many areas as well as emerging capabilities, for example computer code generation and "multimodal" generation. Another reason is that its chat interface allows users to interact with a large underlying GPT3.5 language model more effectively and efficiently than before, through interactive chats.

These results led to the question whether these major language systems could be used for professional, documentary, educational or even artistic purposes. It is possible that this type of system will transform certain professions and that it will profoundly affect teaching and education – children being particularly vulnerable to these systems.

An “intelligence”… in appearance only

ChatGPT produces almost grammatically perfect texts despite having no understanding of what it is producing. He has truly amazing abilities and some of the cases shown as examples are remarkable. Its texts, often complex, may resemble the original data used for learning and have certain characteristics.

But with the appearance of being true, these results can sometimes be completely false. What is the nature and status of these artificial words without associated reasoning? The understanding of natural language involves complex and varied reasoning, spatial, temporal, ontological, arithmetic, based on knowledge and allowing to link objects and actions in the real world, which ChatGPT is far from integrating having no phenomenal insight.

While a few chosen examples may suggest that language models are capable of reasoning, they are in fact incapable of any logical reasoning and have no intuition, no thought, no emotions. ChatGPT speaks with confidence in good French as in other languages ​​after having swallowed billions of data, but understands nothing of what it says and can very easily generate fake news, discrimination, injustices and amplify the information warfare.

How to tell right from wrong: from technology to education

These approaches, which are not very transparent, can however be evaluated in many aspects on existing data (these are benchmarks) to show the lack of performance of the systems on logical reasoning problems such as deduction, induction or abduction – or even common sense.

Education can take up this subject to show the limits of this disembodied artificial language, and have students work on a better understanding of the concepts of numerical modelling, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Children who are more gullible in front of AIs

This is especially important because children can be especially gullible to such speech-enabled systems like ChatGPT.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, the American Richard Thaler highlighted in 2008 the concept of “nudge”, a technique which consists in encouraging individuals to change their behavior without forcing them and by using their cognitive biases.

Furthermore, we were able to show that young children followed suggestions from dialog systems embedded in objects (like a Google Home or a robot) more than those from a human. Our research approach was based on a game about altruism and conducted as part of the IA Humane chair (for Human-Machine Affective Interaction and Ethics) on digital nudges_ amplified by AI. This interdisciplinary chair, a kind of laboratory for the study of human-computer interaction behaviors, brings together researchers in computer science, linguistics and behavioral economics.

Conversational agents like ChatGPT could become a means of influencing individuals. They are currently neither regulated nor evaluated and very opaque. It is therefore important to fully understand their operation and limits before using them, and in this context, the school has a major role to play.

Why is ChatGPT so powerful?

ChatGPT is an interactive multitasking multilingual system using generative AI freely available on the Internet. Generative AI systems rely on algorithms capable of encoding gigantic volumes of data (texts, poems, computer programs, symbols) and generating syntactically correct texts for a large number of tasks.

Transformers are one of these types of algorithms. These are neural networks that learn the most salient patterns of words in many contexts and are thus able to predict the word or sequence likely to be relevant later in a given text.

ChatGPT is the successor to the large language model (LLM) InstructGPT, to which a dialog interface has been added. InstructGPT works better than previous approaches: Indeed, the developers were able to better match generative AI (like GPT3.5) with user intent across a wide range of tasks. For this, they use "reinforcement learning", meaning that the AI ​​also learns from the comments that humans make on its texts.

Increasing the size of language models does not inherently make them better at following user intent. These large language models can generate results that are misleading, toxic, or just plain useless to the user because they don't align with the user's intent.

But the results show that fine-tuning through human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent, even if InstructGPT still makes simple errors.

Thus, the technological performance of ChatGPT therefore comes from the size of the generative AI using "transformers" (175 billion parameters), from the alignment of the responses of the AI ​​by reinforcement learning but also from the possibility of dialogue with this system.

The impact of ChatGPT on the information retrieval market

Microsoft-OpenAI's ChatGPT is a threat to Google's querying model through its search and production power. Google is positioning Bard as a more thoughtful and accurate interactive search engine, which is not hampered by the topical issues encountered by ChatGPT since it was trained on data available before September 2021 – and therefore does not know the more recent news (for now).

The Chinese company Baidu also has a generative AI project with Ernie Bot. The "BigScience" project, created by HuggingFace and including funding from the CNRS and the Ministry of Research, has made it possible to create "Bloom", a generative AI using a language model of 176 billion parameters trained on multitasking multilingual data and above all in “open science”! This innovative project is a public/private cooperation and has involved more than a thousand researchers from many countries. This could lead to a “ChatBloom”.

Ethical issues

The current context is marked by widely disseminated achievements and applications of these systems, the massive impact of which requires ethical reflection.

These multilingual, multitasking and interactive generative AIs raise many questions: the data chosen to train them, the distribution of languages ​​in a multilingual system, system optimization parameters, ownership of the generated content, etc.

In addition, the generative power of AIs is often amplified by filters that allow certain subjects to be censored and logic deduction modules in order to verify the veracity of statements. A handful of humans (engineers, transcriptionists, evaluators) created this type of system used by millions of people.

These massively used artificial intelligence systems therefore pose major ethical challenges, including the transformation of the notion of information production, the relationship to truth and the massive risks linked to disinformation and manipulation.

Article by Laurence Devillers, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Sorbonne University

published in TheConversation on February 20.

To find out more, find the author in “Robots and men, myths, fantasies and reality”, published by Plon and “Emotional robots: and ethics in all this? », published by the Observatory.




Simon Freeman for DayNewsWorld

YOUR COMPUTER NEEDS !!

DEFRAGMENTATION TOOL


At any time and for many reasons (temporary files, swap area, etc. ..) your hard drive is fragmented !!

For the story, if at the time of the release of Windows 95 in 1995 the system contained a fast fragmentation tool effective and included in the system it is not the same currently.

Yes, Microsoft had also been criticized for providing a well-known Microsoft Internet Explorer web-browsing tool (included and free) to Windows 95, while many software companies at the time were selling web crawler software! !!

Today we do not know if it is for calculation, economy, or to leave the share to the other companies of software creation but it is a fact, the defragmentation tool provided with the current systems are not of a extraordinary performance. !!!!

Of course it is possible to buy a tool to complete your machine with a High Performance Defragmentation utility .

Defragmentation and a process that brings together the clusters that make up the files on your machine in a contiguous way to increase the performance of your PC.

Whatever the size of your Ram (memory of your PC) the system will anyway call for temporary files and a disk swap disk area performance because if the speed of the memories is measured in nanoseconds (0.000000001s ) the hard disks are in milliseconds (0.001s)

The new SSD-type drives are actually memories, but first and foremost their higher cost than the hard drives are one of the reasons why the classic hard drive still equips a very large fleet of machines.

The type of memory used in the SSD is not identical for many technical reasons to the RAM memory of a PC!

So yes the SSD is faster than a hard drive but there is still a very strong margin of progress in terms of disk type "Memory Disk" !!

On the other hand the disorder in the structure is whatever the technology of the disc a brake evicting the speed !!!!!

If to limit the wear of first generation SSDs whose life was quite limited we can say that currently even SSD can now benefit from defragmentation , so it is a great idea to have a PC at the top of its performances !!!!!!


After many tests of software in terms of defragmentions we choose Defraggler from Piriform for its quality.

Moreover Defraggler exists in several version of which a Free version that you will be able to download on the link which we provide with this article !!!

It's Free and Safe (no risk of viruses) !!!

Defraggler Professional version brings even more, it is paid but inexpensive so if the free version has seduced you do not hesitate to take the plunge.

To Go to the Special Page and download Defraggler safely it's here:



Click on the icons above


This Article is the first in a long series to come on technology and tools and programs.

Expert in Computer Science, in technology, this section is with my team the result of numerous tests to evaluate the best software and make them available to our readers with efficient and high-performance complete versions.

Of course Free Download !!!

Do not hesitate to leave us a message !!!

Thanks in advance

Luc T. for DayNewsWorld



WITH ELON MUSK CAN TWITTER BECOME

THE SOCIAL NETWORK OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION ?

Elon Musk becomes the owner of the Twitter platform which he considers "the digital public square where subjects vital to the future of humanity are debated", according to a quote in the press release. The richest man in the world – 250 billion euros at the last score – announced in early April his 9.1% stake in Twitter. Elon Musk, who decided not to join the microblogging company's board of directors, became its largest shareholder ahead of founder Jack Dorsey.

Across the Atlantic, no one seems indifferent to efforts to restore voice to what was Donald Trump's favorite "megalophone". With six months of key legislative elections for the White House, the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk is feared by part of the American political class, approved by the other part. According to a recent YouGov poll, more than three out of four Donald Trump voters (77%) approved of Elon Musk's project in recent days, compared to only 20% of Joe Biden voters.

In fact, the reactions largely overlap with political divisions. On the right, the critics of "political correctness" rejoice. They consider the arrival of the libertarian billionaire very promising in their fight against “Bigh Tech censorship”, nicknamed to the big companies of Silicon Valley. On Twitter, the organization that brings together Republican MPs has called on Elon Musk to "liberate" the account of Donald Trump, banned since the assault on the Capitol. On the left, on the other hand, there are concerns about the arrival at the head of Twitter of a man who, as the New York Times writes in an editorial, "uses the platform to drag his critics through the mud, irony on the physique of certain people and to promote cryptocurrencies”. Robert Reich, former minister of Bill Clinton, speaks of “a nightmare”.

It is that the businessman from Tesla and SpaceX indicated that he would make improvements to the platform and in the first place that he adhered to the principle of freedom of expression. The boss of Tesla took the opportunity to reiterate its desire to relax the moderation of content broadcast on the platform: “freedom of expression is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy, he underlined in the press release announcing the operation. Twitter is the virtual agora in which we debate the issues that will decide the future of humanity. ". And Twitter has 217 million active and monetizable users worldwide, including 38 million in the United States. A sacred sounding board!

Elon Musk, a self-described “free speech diehard,” said in the April 14, 2022 TED Talk that Twitter was “an agora” and that it was “very important that this agora is an inclusive space for freedom of expression”.

Freedom of expression, censorship, even misinformation ?

However, the Republicans regularly denounce the censorship of social networks, and in particular of Twitter. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the founder of the social network with the blue bird, Jack Dorsey, had been the least reluctant, among the major platforms, to moderate content more, first by refusing political advertisements then by further contextualizing speeches. But Twitter had finally "permanently" censored all of Donald Trump's accounts, after the attack on Capitol Hill by his supporters on January 6, 2021.

Elon Musk has already declared, during an interview with the boss of the TED conferences, that he is opposed to this type of indefinite sanctions. It is therefore not excluded that Donald Trump's account could be restored even if the latter declared on Fox News on Monday that he would not return to this social network following the takeover of the platform. He clarified that he will officially join his own platform dubbed "Truth Social" in the next seven days, as planned.

Elon Musk , often close to the ideas of libertarians , is well aware of the uses of Twitter to use it frequently... and provoke just as regularly, fully enjoying his freedom of expression. On March 14, he challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin “in a man-to-man fight. The stake is Ukraine,” he wrote on Twitter, addressing the official Kremlin Twitter account. And faced with the incomprehension of a surfer, Elon Musk had assured that he was "completely serious".

But can this desire for freedom of expression at all costs happen for any social network to be regulated ?

Moderation or not?

Elon Musk plans to generate Twitter revenue from subscriptions rather than advertising. But by sparing itself the worry of attracting and retaining advertisers, Twitter would have less need to focus on content moderation. Twitter would thus become a kind of opinion site, for paying subscribers, devoid of control. Elon Musk's description of a platform that no longer cares about moderating content is worrisome considering the harm done by social media algorithms.

Testimony from whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, and recent regulatory efforts, such as the Online Safety Bill unveiled in the UK or future European Union legislation, show that the public is widely concerned about the role played by technology platforms in shaping societal ideas and public opinion. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter highlights a host of regulatory concerns.

Due to Elon Musk's other activities, Twitter's ability to influence public opinion in the sensitive aviation and automotive sectors automatically creates a conflict of interest, not to mention the implications for disclosing important information needed by shareholders. In this sense, Elon Musk has already been accused of delaying the disclosure of his participation in Twitter.

This is why since 2016, the American left has dreamed of effective regulation of social networks, but the election of Joe Biden has not made it possible to move the file forward. One of the most ardent militants of this cause is none other than Barack Obama. In recent days, the former president was in Silicon Valley to raise this issue again. In front of Stanford students, he insisted on the dangers that social networks posed to democracy. Among the avenues he suggested is the supervision of algorithms by a regulatory authority, in the same way as cars or the food industry. Barack Obama is the most followed personality on Twitter.

“Nothing prevents Elon Musk from buying Twitter, it is his right, it is the law of the market, there is no reason to oppose it. But in a few months, it will have to submit to the Digital Services Act when it operates on European territory,” warns MEP Geoffroy Didier (Les Républicains), who participated in the negotiations for this new regulation. , the now famous “DSA”, or “digital services legislation” in French, which was the subject of an agreement between the European Parliament and the Member States on Saturday 23 April.

"I hope even my worst critics will stay on Twitter, because that's what freedom of expression means," added Elon Musk on Monday.

One way to respond to his critics, who consider that there is a risk that the billionaire will seek to censor accounts that disagree with him on the platform and, in turn, make misinformation...




Alize Marion for DayNewsWorld
There are no translations available.

PERCEE FULGURANTE DU RESEAU US.TRUTH SOCIAL DE DONALD TRUMP

"Le temps de la Vérité est venu » a tweeté, mardi 22 février 2022, Donald Trump Junior, le fils de l'ex-président, avec une capture d'écran d'un message de son père sur le réseau : « Soyez prêts! Votre président favori va bientôt vous recevoir ".

US.Truth Social, dont Donald Trump est à l'initiative, a entamé, dimanche 20 février au soir, sa mise en ligne progressive aux États-Unis et devrait être « complètement opérationnel » d'ici fin mars. Disponible uniquement sur le magasin d'applications mobiles d'Apple aux États-Unis, la plateforme a connu un démarrage en trombe, accédant lundi au rang d'application gratuite la plus téléchargée du moment sur l'App Store

Contre la « cancel culture »

Truth Social a été présenté par Donald Trump comme une alternative à Facebook, Twitter et YouTube, dont il a été banni après l'assaut du Capitole, le 6 janvier 2021.

Twitter, qui fut, en campagne et au pouvoir, un outil de communication privilégié de l'homme d'affaires new-yorkais, avait en effet supprimé en mai dernier le compte «@realDonaldTrump» qui comptait 88 millions d'abonnés après l'intrusion de ses partisans le 6 janvier dans le Capitole. Donald Trump a aussi été banni de manière temporaire ou définitive de la plupart des autres grands réseaux sociaux ou plateformes internet, dont Facebook, Instagram, YouTube ou encore Snapchat. En mai dernier, l'ancien président américain Donald Trump avait fait son retour en ligne avec un site prenant la forme d'un blog intitulé From the desk of Donald J. Trump («Depuis le bureau de Donald J. Trump»).

« C'est touchant pour moi de voir des personnes qui ont vu leur voix muselée utiliser la plateforme », a déclaré Devin Nunes, en faisant référence à la « cancel culture », cette idée selon laquelle des personnalités se retrouvent effacées de la place publique par l'opinion populaire qualifiée de « bien-pensante » par la droite.

Le Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), la maison mère du réseau, s'est passée des grandes entreprises technologiques traditionnelles pour ses besoins en infrastructure. Il a notamment noué un partenariat exclusif avec la plateforme Rumble.

« LA VÉRITÉ arrive... »

« Nous voulons qu'ils nous disent quels contenus ils veulent sur la plateforme », a-t-il ajouté. "Contrairement aux oligarques fous de la Silicon Valley qui disent aux gens ce qu'ils veulent qu'ils pensent et décident qui peut ou ne peut pas être sur les réseaux".

Le 21 février est un jour férié aux États-Unis en l'honneur des présidents américains. Donald Trump et son épouse Melania ont aussi prévu de vendre à cette date 10 000 NFT (objets numériques authentifiés) illustrant des moments-clés du mandat de l'ancien chef d'État républicain.

« LA VÉRITÉ arrive... », a tweeté, vendredi, Elise Stefanik, la numéro trois des élus républicains à la Chambre des représentants, en référence à la formule menaçante de la série télé "Game of Thrones" ("L'hiver arrive...").

Elle a posté une capture d'écran de son message sur Truth Beta, la version en test du réseau social : « Je suis tellement contente d'être sur TRUTH! Merci au président @realDonaldTrump pour ses qualités de leader. Ensemble, les premiers patriotes américains vont SAUVER L'AMÉRIQUE, casser les géants de la tech et protéger la LIBERTÉ D'EXPRESSION! »

Suspense sur une nouvelle candidature de Donald Trump

D'après différents communiqués, le groupe dispose d'environ 1,25 milliard de dollars pour partir à l'assaut de ses concurrents sur le marché, déjà très encombré, des réseaux sociaux prisés des ultra-conservateurs, comme Gettr, lancé début juillet par l'ancien conseiller de Donald Trump, Jason Miller, mais aussi Parler et Gab.

À 75 ans, Donald Trump laisse courir les doutes sur son intention de briguer à nouveau, ou non, l'investiture républicaine dans la course à la Maison Blanche, alors qu'il fait l'objet d'enquêtes.




Britney Delsey pour DayNewsWorld
There are no translations available.

INNOVATION A QUOI S'ATTENDRE EN 2022 ?

Voici les tendances et innovations bien réelles, répertoriées dans le passionnant nouveau livre du journaliste techno Alain McKenna, 100 choses à savoir absolument en 2022 : cinq concepts qui façonneront selon lui le paysage de cette nouvelle année.

« Tu boiras dans des bouteilles en papier »

Bouteille de papier de Paboco

Après les pailles en papier, place aux bouteilles en papier ?

 Alain McKenna évoque dans son livre la bouteille de Paboco, conçue à partir de fibres de papier et déjà testée par Coca-Cola dans certains pays d’Europe pour remplacer le plastique. La bouteille de ketchup en plastique signée Heinz pourrait elle aussi être la dernière qu’on achète, écrit-il par ailleurs.

 « La question du plastique jetable, c’est extrêmement grave, rappelle-t-il. Chez nous, on a commencé depuis un petit bout de temps à enlever les plastiques de la salle de bains. J’ai remplacé les bouteilles de shampoing par des barres de shampoing dur. Il y a plein de produits domestiques comme ça qu’on peut échanger. Il existe même du savon à linge sous forme de feuilles qui se dissolvent dans l’eau. »

« La semaine de quatre jours sera populaire »

De plus en plus d’employeurs songent à raccourcir la semaine de travail pour attirer les travailleurs.

De plus en plus d’employeurs songent à raccourcir la semaine de travail pour attirer les travailleurs. Le mouvement est déjà amorcé en Europe, alors que les résultats de chercheurs américains sont très encourageants, souligne-t-on dans le livre. « Il y a des tests qui se font et qui témoignent qu’on peut décrocher du travail un petit peu plus et être plus productif le temps qu’on est au bureau, et tout le monde gagne. C’est un peu ça, les effets constatés dans les projets pilotes des dernières années, souligne Alain McKenna. On parle sans arrêt de pénurie de main-d’œuvre… Ce n’est pas toutes les entreprises qui peuvent se permettre un horaire plus flexible, évidemment, mais les travailleurs ont plus de leviers pour négocier leurs conditions d’emploi. »

« Carey Price pourrait te souhaiter bonne fête »

Aux États-Unis, la popularité de l’application Cameo — qui permet de recevoir une vidéo personnalisée de la part d’une célébrité — ne se dément pas. « C’est extrêmement populaire dans l’anglosphère en ce moment. Je pense qu’on s’en va vers ça quand on regarde comment TikTok évolue. Veut, veut pas, les réseaux sociaux nous poussent vers des gens qui sont des pôles, qui ont une certaine attraction plus grande que d’autres, et ce croisement de personnalités publiques et de sportifs avec les réseaux sociaux mène à ce genre de situation où les gens sont prêts à payer pour se faire envoyer un message vidéo par une star du hockey. »

« Tu seras téléporté dans une salle près de chez toi »

La réalité mixte, vous connaissez ? « Tu mets des lunettes qui projettent de l’information et qui ont des capteurs de mouvement qui te permettent de savoir où tu es dans l’environnement physique. Ça crée une réalité où tu as à la fois du virtuel et du réel, et ça s’en vient très fort », explique Alain McKenna. Le journaliste détaille dans son livre le projet de Guy Laliberté, Hanai World, qui permettrait aux spectateurs d’assister — à distance — à un événement en direct comme s’ils étaient assis dans la salle, grâce à des caméras installées sur place à des postes stratégiques. « Microsoft, Facebook, Apple ont des projets, les grosses technos sont là-dedans ; il y a des milliards de dollars qui vont être investis dans la recherche et le développement. »

« Tu auras chaud (ou froid) à volonté »

Avec le bracelet Embr Wave, qui vient d’arriver sur le marché, on peut maintenant leurrer son cerveau pour ajuster sa température corporelle. « C’est comme un thermostat personnel ; ça joue avec les sensations, mais ça ne changera pas la température dans la pièce !

Il y a plein de choses qu’on n’a pas encore découvertes, précise Alain McKenna. Les montres connectées détectent le rythme cardiaque en temps réel, la température de la peau…

Pour l’instant, on utilise beaucoup les capteurs pour pousser les données sur son état de santé vers une application, mais la prochaine étape, c’est d’utiliser ces capteurs pour interagir ou envoyer à notre corps des informations ou des signaux qui permettent d’être en meilleure condition. » À quand un bracelet qui favoriserait le sommeil ?

100 choses à savoir absolument en 2022 d'Alain McKenna.




Paul Emison pour DayNewsWorld

META OR THE DANGER OF TRANSHUMANISM

Mark Zuckerberg's company now intends to become a metaverse company, even going so far as to rename itself "Meta" to mark its ambitions.

During an online conference, the Facebook boss unveiled his vision for a technology that could transform the Internet as we know it today.

Inspired by science fiction, and in particular the novel "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson or "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline, the metaverse presents itself as a virtual and immersive online world. Everyone can live part of their life there, in the form of an avatar or a hologram.

For Meta, this universe promises more social contact without traveling, whether it's organizing a business meeting, participating in a fitness class or strolling through a pixel store.

The "metavers" are in short the equivalent of the OASIS of Steven Spielberg's film: a kind of lining of the physical world, accessible by Internet and connected interfaces, and in which we should be able to exist in the form of avatars.

This extension of the Internet is made possible by the convergence of different technologies, so that an individual can experience a world in virtual reality, by engaging his body, living emotions and sensations. “Gradually, screens, holograms, VR headsets and augmented reality glasses are supposed to allow fluid movements of virtual universes in physical places, such as teleportations,” Mark Zuckerberg explained on his Facebook profile.

The Oculus Quest headset developed by Meta completely immerses the user's gaze in a 3D setting. To move, you must also equip yourself with hand controllers. To get around, some imagine a treadmill system. Besides Meta, HTC, Sony already have their headsets.

According to information from Bloomberg, Apple's will be released in 2022.

Being able to truly move around in a virtual environment today requires a combination equipped with lots of sensors in order to faithfully reproduce your every gesture.

The technologies necessary for the proper functioning of the metaverse are not yet there ...

Towards transhumanism ?

Meta will invest $ 10 billion in 2021 alone to complete its project, but although it strikes a blow, Meta will have to come to an agreement or force to abandon a number of competitors such as Fortnite or Roblox. The war of the virtual worlds has begun.

And if it is Facebook that wins the market, we have everything to fear from the metaverse. Indeed. " Today Marc Zuckerberg intends to create a parallel universe by using for that the technology allowing to manufacture a virtual reality which must replace reality. It is not in science fiction but in transhumanism.

Transhumanism, which intends to increase mankind thanks to new technologies, considers that man who currently exists must disappear. With regard to reality, he intends to make it disappear in order to replace it with an augmented reality ”, according to the philosopher and theologian Bertrand Vergely, author in particular of La temptation de l'Homme-Dieu (Le Passeur Editeur, 2015)

"The metaverse according to Zuckerberg intends to be a fact-fiction and not a science-fiction", continues the philosopher. What to wonder....



Joanne Courbet for DayNewsWorld

THE FACEBOOK GROUP WILL CHANGE NAME

TO BE CALLED META

The parent company of the social network Facebook will change its name to Meta, announced Thursday, October 28, 2021, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, at an event entitled Facebook Connect.

Mr. Zuckerberg also unveiled the new logo:

an icon reminiscent of an infinite symbol and the Oculus virtual reality glasses, which belongs to the group.

The objective is to highlight the metaverse contraction of “meta” (“beyond”, in ancient Greek), to show that there is “always more to build”, and “universe”, his project of Internet of the future, supposed to reach a billion people.

No changes are made to the structure of the group, which includes Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Oculus and Portal, among others.

According to the founder, the metaverse represents the future of the internet, after computers and mobile phones, to which the public will have access to interact, work or be entertained via technologies (augmented reality glasses, virtual reality headsets, etc. .).

Still according to Zuckerberg, the project should create "millions" of jobs over the next decade, including 10,000 in Europe.

In the midst of the “Facebook Files” affair, this name change appears to be a distraction by critics of the Californian group, entangled in scandals and controversies, from disinformation to data confidentiality, including respect for competition law. .

The firm "thinks that a new brand can help it change the subject", already reacted last week an NGO of anti-Facebook activists, ironically baptized "the real supervisory board of Facebook" (The Real Facebook Oversight Board ), when rumors of a name change were circulating.




Abby Shelcore for DayNewsWorld

RECORD PROFITS FOR GOOGLE

WITH ADVERTISING

At a time when part of the world is partly frozen by the Covid-19 pandemic, advertising, Google's real engine, has been running at full speed, with a "titanic quarter" from January to March 2021, according to experts .

Google therefore records record profits thanks to advertising.

Also thanks to its ability to capitalize on the new habits of its users, the search engine seems to ensure an equally favorable exit from the health crisis.

The online search giant thus achieved

55.31 billion in turnover from January to March, or 34% more than a year ago, when the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic had caused drop the spending of some advertisers, particularly in the travel sector, at the end of the first quarter.

On the search engine, advertising revenue rose from $ 25 billion to $ 32 billion in one year, well beyond expectations, and it grew 50% on YouTube, to $ 6 billion.

In 2020, as consumers deserted physical stores, Google and Facebook accelerated the development of ad formats that make shopping easier, with buttons directly in ads or videos to redirect users to brands.

"Google makes money"

"The line between digital and physical is blurring and we are innovating on all channels" of distribution, detailed Mr. Schindler. “It's not just online, it's not just offline. It's a mix. And that is our strong point, at the conjunction of Search (the search engine), Maps and YouTube. "

The Californian group manages in any case to ride the wave of recovery. It is "well on its way to generating 130.15 billion in net advertising revenue in 2021, an increase of 25% over one year", estimates the firm E-Marketer, which attributes 28.6% of the market share to it, just ahead of Facebook.

“Basically Google makes money, the company is pretty much all about ads,” commented analyst Rob Enderle. "There is no risk of declining revenues unless regulators intervene."

Abuse of dominant position

It seems it is the only cloud on the horizon for Alphabet, the parent company.

The current year could indeed be marked by developments in the fight against certain practices of technological leaders, deemed anti-competitive by more and more governments, including that of Joe Biden in the United States.

Facebook and Google are already facing lawsuits from the authorities on the competition law front. Several digital platforms, such as Amazon, TripAdvisor or Yelp, complain that Google promotes its own offers in search results.

And the judicial committee of the House of Representatives recently approved a report which advocates splits within the Gafa (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), accused of abuse of a dominant position.



Britney Delsey for DayNewsWorld

MICROSOFT DECLARES THAT CHINA

HACKED HIS SERVER PROGRAM

EXCHANGE MESSAGING

United States issue a warning after Microsoft said that China had hacked its Exchange mail server program

All federal government agencies have until Friday March 5 at noon to download the latest software update to block the attacker!

Microsoft has said that a group of hackers who work for the Chinese government are found to be the perpetrator and that the latter mainly spies on US targets.

The latest software update for Exchange blocks hackers, prompting the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to issue a rare emergency directive that forces all government networks to do so.

CISA, the leading defensive cybersecurity agency in the United States, rarely exercises its authority to ask the entire US government to take protective measures to protect its cybersecurity.

The move was necessary, the agency said, because Exchange hackers are able "to gain permanent access to the system."

Additionally, Microsoft Vice President Tom Burt wrote that hackers recently spied on a wide range of US targets, including disease researchers, law firms and defense contractors.

Contacted by email, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington referred to recent comments by spokesman Wang Wenbin.

"China has repeatedly reiterated that given the virtual nature of cyberspace and the fact that there are all kinds of actors online that are difficult to trace, pinpointing the source of cyber attacks is a complex technical issue," Wang said. .

"We hope that the media and businesses concerned will adopt a professional and responsible attitude and stress the importance of having sufficient evidence when identifying incidents of cybercrime, rather than making baseless accusations."

We remember that recently the Navajo Nation Hospital was the victim of a brutal wave of ransomware attacks.

There is no immediate indication that the hack led to significant exploitation of US government computer networks. But the announcement marks the second time in recent months that the United States has rushed to tackle a widespread hacking campaign seen as the work of foreign government spies.

The United States is still assessing the damage after suspected Russian hackers broke into a software management company, SolarWinds, and used the breach to stage hacks that hit nine federal agencies and about 100 private companies, according to White House comments.

As the developer of the world's most popular Windows operating system, Microsoft is regarded by Western cybersecurity experts as having exceptional insight into global hacking campaigns.

The campaign not only allowed hackers to access victims' emails and calendar invitations, but their entire network, Microsoft said. The hackers used four separate zero-day exploits, which are rare digital tools that get their name from the fact that software developers don't know about them, leaving them with no time to prepare a fix.

ESET, a Slovak cybersecurity company, said on Twitter that its researchers saw several groups of hackers, not just the one Microsoft named in its announcement.

Hackers would also exploit some vulnerabilities in older versions of Exchange.




Luc T. for DayNewsWorld
There are no translations available.

LE CLIP DELIRANT DE XAVIER NIEL POUR PROMOUVOIR LA 5G

Free Mobile vient de dégainer son offre 5G, en frappant très fort : le nouveau réseau mobile est intégré automatiquement et sans surcoût au forfait à 19,99 euros par mois.

Et le buzz de ce mardi 15 décembre est signé Xavier Niel, qui fait parler de lui dans un clip délirant pour la 5G avec un spot publicitaire unique en son genre. Partagé par Free sur son compte Twitter, ce dernier met en scène le PDG dans un décor qui rappelle celui du documentaire controversé « Hold-Up », long-métrage sur le coronavirus .

Se moquant des complotistes et des préjugés liés à la 5G, qui se développe actuellement en France, Xavier Niel fait toute la vérité sur la 5G (« la 5G fait pousser un cinquième téton », « la 5G rend les chauves impuissants ») et n’hésite pas à mouiller le costume en se prenant une douche froide. Avant de conclure avec une seule vérité : chez Free, le forfait 5G ne sera pas plus cher que celui de la 4G.

L’opérateur de Xavier Niel revendique également aujourd’hui disposer du plus grand réseau de France. Free met ainsi en ligne sa nouvelle carte officielle de couverture. Transparente, celle-ci permet de se rendre compte précisément des zones couvertes en 5G par l’opérateur dans la bande 3,5GHz (en bleu) et 700 MHz (en vert).

Reste désormais à différencier le niveau de débit disponible, pour le moment manquant. Pour l’heure, l’opérateur de Xavier Niel, dispose 5 255 sites activés, dont 220 sites 3,5 GHz répartis sur tout le territoire, soit une couverture de 40% de la population.

Free le précise :

« Les zones couvertes sont simulées de manière informatique, il est donc possible que certaines imprécisions existent. La couverture peut varier dans le temps, en raison de nombreux facteurs : la saison, les conditions météorologiques, le nombre d’utilisateurs, l’apparition d’un obstacle… ».

Par ailleurs, la couverture à l’intérieur des bâtiments peut être altérée en fonction des matériaux de construction utilisés, la présence de fenêtres et la localisation du téléphone à l’intérieur du bâtiment.

Les cartes de couverture 5G des opérateurs seront suivies de près par l’Arcep. Le régulateur a révélé d’ailleurs fin octobre ses recommandations pour rester dans les clous et surtout éviter les plaintes des consommateurs.




Britney Delsey pour DayNewsWorld
There are no translations available.

L' IMPLANT CEREBRAL POUR LE CERVEAU HUMAIN D'ELON MUSK

Elon Musk a tenu une conférence pour présenter les avancées de Neuralink, sa start-up œuvrant sur un implant cérébral. Le milliardaire tourné vers le futur (Tesla, Space X) a présenté vendredi 28 août les dernières avancées de son projet de « cerveau connecté ».

En un an, de nombreux progrès ont été réalisés et de nouvelles pistes sont désormais privilégiées. Neuralink, l'une des sociétés appartenant à Elon Musk, s'était fait discrète depuis la présentation de ses travaux en 2019. Pour rappel, cette start-up développe un implant cérébral qui pourrait être installé par un robot en chirurgie ambulatoire. Un implant dont les fonctions restent à définir, mais son objectif principal à long terme serait de proposer une nouvelle interface entre l'humain et la machine.

Lors de la conférence Elon Musk accompagné par de nombreux scientifiques et ingénieurs a présentait son projet. L'occasion pour Neuralink de présenter ses progrès en s'appuyant sur un groupe de cochons déjà équipés de la version « 0.9 » de ce fameux implant.

L'étape suivante sera la mise en route de tests humains en ciblant une population de tétraplégiques.

Nouvel implant de la taille d'une petite pièce de monnaie

On retiendra l'adoption d'une nouvelle approche pour l'implant. Plutôt qu'implanter le module au plus près des neurones et s'appuyer sur un réseau de fils connectés à un transmetteur positionné derrière l'oreille, Neuralink travaille désormais sur une version qui réduirait la complexité chirurgicale en se focalisant sur la surface du cortex cérébral, à l'avant du cerveau. Un neurochirurgien a expliqué qu'il est déjà possible de cibler énormément de fonctions cognitives en privilégiant cette partie du cerveau, y compris la vision et l'audition.La nouvelle version de l'implant présentée par Elon Musk éliminerait ainsi la présence d'un module externe derrière l'oreille : le millier d'électrodes insérés dans les neurones interagiraient uniquement via un module (23 mm de diamètre et 8 mm d'épaisseur) inséré dans le crâne, le tout étant mis en place en limitant au maximum les fils et en raccourcissant les connexions. La charge de l'implant s'effectuerait par induction et son autonomie serait suffisante pour assurer une journée d'utilisation, tandis que le Bluetooth serait supporté comme moyen de connexion. Les recherches vont continuer pour sécuriser le dispositif : la puce connectée doit être protégée contre d'éventuelles perturbations externes et internes et sa communication avec un ordinateur (ou un smartphone) doit être inviolable.

Nouveau robot

Le fonctionnement de cet implant cérébral devrait être basé sur la lecture des pics électriques représentant l'activité neuronale, les électrodes captant ces informations et l'implant les confrontant aux modèles enregistrés pour analyser les « commandes » envoyées (ou reçues) par le cerveau. L'implantation en elle-même s'appuierait toujours sur l'aide chirurgicale d'un robot pour éviter les vaisseaux sanguins et positionner très précisément les électrodes.

Là aussi, le robot présenté en 2019 a évolué vers du matériel qui ressemble beaucoup plus à un équipement médical. C'est ce robot qui sera chargé de creuser la boîte crânienne devant accueillir le module Neuralink — les ingénieurs tentent actuellement de lui permettre d'atteindre des zones plus profondes du cerveau. En l'état du projet, il serait déjà parfaitement capable d'implanter le matériel actuel sur le cortex. L'opération ne prendrait qu'une heure, selon Elon Musk, et ne nécessiterait pas d'anesthésie générale.

Une « symbiose avec l'IA »

Si cette technologie doit servir dans un premier temps à traiter les maladies neurologiques, l'objectif à long terme est d'élargir les fonctions de ces implants. Car rien ne refroidit les ardeurs du milliardaire, qui veut coloniser Mars et craint que les technologies d'intelligence artificielle (IA) ne transforment les humains en « chats domestiques » des ordinateurs. La puce est ainsi censée nous permettre d'arriver à une « symbiose avec l'IA »..II s’agit rien moins que de permettre à l’homme de « fusionner » avec l’intelligence artificielle, au lieu d’en devenir l’esclave comme le milliardaire le craint. « En fin de compte, nous pouvons concevoir une interface cerveau-machine complète, ce qui permettra de réaliser une symbiose avec l’intelligence artificielle », déclarait-il l’an dernier. On en est encore très loin, mais Neuralink a posé de nouveaux jalons. La puce connectée pensée par Elon Musk devrait permettre de créer une « symbiose avec l'IA ». L'équipe de Neuralink rêve ainsi, entre autres, de soulager des douleurs extrêmes, guérir des addictions et créer une forme de télépathie. Ces avancées pourraient également permettre à des personnes fortunées de doter leur cerveau d'une puissance nouvelle, informatique.

Elon Musk a aussi affirmé qu'il serait possible, à terme, de stocker ses souvenirs sous forme numérisée, dans une référence à un épisode de la série futuristeBlack Mirror. « Vous pourrez sauvegarder vos souvenirs, et aussi potentiellement les télécharger dans un autre corps ou dans un robot », a-t-il affirmé.

« Le futur va être bizarre ».

Non, tout ceci n'est pas de la science-fiction ! Bien sûr, il reste encore énormément de travail à Neuralink pour présenter urbi et orbi un premier produit finalisé, sans oublier les autorisations nécessaires des autorités sanitaires.

La Food and Drug Administration (FDA), qui régule, entre autres, la commercialisation des médicaments aux Etats-Unis, a désigné cette nouvelle technologie comme un « dispositif révolutionnaire », rapporte le site américain The Verge




Paul Emison pour DayNewsWorld
There are no translations available.

ELON MUSK PRESENTE LA PUCE CONNECTEE

DANS LE CERVEAU POUR TRAITER

 LES MALADIES NEUROLOGIQUES

Elon Musk a vanté sur YouTube les avancées de son projet d'implant cérébral. Neuralink : la nouvelle version d’une interface homme-machine révolutionnaire.

Une fusion entre une puce connectée et un animal pour faire avancer la science ? C’est le projet mis au point par la start-up d’Elon Musk, Neuralink, qui a implanté une puce connectée dans le cerveau d’un cochon. Le but ? Relier l’animal à un ordinateur

Gertrude participe à une expérience de science-fiction: la start-up d'Elon Musk, Neuralink, a implanté une puce connectée dans le cerveau de ce cochon cobaye, un prototype en vue de fabriquer la version pour les humains qui redonnera la parole et la mobilité aux personnes paralysées.

« C'est comme une Fitbit (montre connectée) dans votre crâne », s'est enthousiasmé Elon Musk vendredi, lors d'une conférence en ligne sur les progrès de son projet d'interface reliant le cerveau aux ordinateurs, qui suscite beaucoup de scepticisme dans la communauté scientifique.

Un Link dans le squelette

L'entrepreneur futuriste (Tesla, SpaceX) a présenté il y a un an une puce dotée de fils ultra-fins, pouvant être implantés dans le cerveau par un robot, une sorte de machine à coudre ultra-précise.

Le nouveau modèle, sans-fil grâce à la technologie bluetooth, se recharge la nuit et mesure 23 mm de diamètre (comme une petite pièce de monnaie) sur 8 mm d'épaisseur. En théorie, la puce ronde sera implantée dans le cerveau, sans qu'il y ait besoin de passer une nuit à l'hôpital, et sans laisser de trace, si ce n'est une petite cicatrice sous les cheveux.

Traiter des maladies neurologiques et dégénératives

Pour faire la démonstration de cette technologie, Elon Musk a présenté trois cobayes porcins : Joyce, le cochon « témoin » sans Link ni électrodes, Dorothy qui a subi la chirurgie mais dont l’implant a été retiré, et Gertrude sur laquelle l’implant est toujours en place dans une partie du cerveau liée au museau. Dorothy illustre le fait que le Link n’est pas permanent et qu’on peut le remplacer pour le mettre à jour. Quant à Gertrude, dès qu’elle sent quelque chose de bon à manger, le Link capte le signal et le transmet.À l’heure actuelle, l’implant n’a été installé dans aucun être humain. Mais la technologie a été testée sur un singe qui a pu « prendre le contrôle d’un ordinateur », assurait Elon Musk en 2019 lors de la première présentation des travaux de Neuralink. Rien ne dit évidemment que ce qui fonctionne chez les animaux marchera sur les hommes.

Pour l'instant, dans les laboratoires de Neuralink, le cochon Gertrude marche sur un tapis roulant, le groin dans une mangeoire accrochée devant elle, pendant que la puce retransmet ses signaux neurologiques. A partir de ces informations, l'ordinateur est capable de prédire à tout instant où se trouvent chacun de ses membres. De quoi donner l'espoir de rendre la mobilité aux personnes paraplégiques.

Cette technologie servirait d'abord à traiter les maladies neurologiques. Mais l'objectif à long terme est de rendre les implants si sûrs, fiables et simples qu'ils relèveraient de la chirurgie élective (de confort). Des personnes pourraient alors débourser quelques milliers de dollars pour doter leur cerveau d'une puissance informatique.

Objectif séduction

L'objectif du fantasque patron, avec cette présentation sur YouTube, était avant tout de séduire et recruter de nombreux ingénieurs, chirurgiens, chimistes, spécialistes de la robotique et autres. La start-up ne compte qu'une centaine de salariés, mais en espère 10.000 aussi vite que possible, pour relever une montagne de défis.

Comme pour les voitures autonomes de Tesla, en retard sur les annonces ambitieuses du patron, la puce dépend des feux verts des régulateurs. Elon Musk a annoncé que Neuralink venait d'obtenir l'approbation des autorités sanitaires américaines pour des tests, sans préciser d'horizon pour les premières implantations humaines. En juillet 2019, il les promettait pour 2020.

« Le futur va être bizarre »

Mais rien ne refroidit les ardeurs du milliardaire, qui veut coloniser Mars et craint que les technologies d'intelligence artificielle (IA) ne transforment les humains en « chats domestiques » des ordinateurs. La puce est ainsi censée nous permettre d'arriver à une « symbiose avec l'IA »..II s’agit rien moins que de permettre à l’homme de « fusionner » avec l’intelligence artificielle, au lieu d’en devenir l’esclave comme le milliardaire le craint. « En fin de compte, nous pouvons concevoir une interface cerveau-machine complète, ce qui permettra de réaliser une symbiose avec l’intelligence artificielle », déclarait-il l’an dernier. On en est encore très loin, mais Neuralink a posé de nouveaux jalons.

Il a aussi évoqué la possibilité de communiquer des pensées brutes, non limitées par les langues humaines -de la « télépathie non linguistique consensuelle et conceptuelle ». Son équipe rêve, entre autres, de mettre fin aux douleurs extrêmes, de guérir les dépressions et addictions ou encore de percer les mystères de la conscience.

D’autres projets liés au cerveau

De nombreuses entreprises travaillent sur le contrôle des ordinateurs par la pensée, et d’autres d’interfaces cerveau-machine sont en cours de développement. Facebook finance ainsi un projet pour traduire en mots l’activité du cerveau, via des algorithmes, afin de rendre la parole aux personnes rendues muettes à cause de maladies neurodégénératives.

De nombreux scientifiques rappellent cependant que le cerveau n’est pas aussi compartimenté qu’on aimerait le croire.

« Chaque cerveau a une structure unique, massivement interconnectée », a commenté Dean Burnett, chercheur de l’université de Cardiff, en amont de la conférence.




Paul Emison pour DayNewsWorld


There are no translations available.

LA GUERRE DE WASHINGTON CONTRE HUAWEI

L’administration Trump cherche à tout prix à empêcher le géant chinois des télécoms d’acquérir des technologies «made in USA» indispensables à ses téléphones.Les États-Unis ont annoncé lundi durcir leurs sanctions contre le géant chinois des télécoms Huawei, en les étendant à 38 de ses filiales, afin de limiter leur accès aux technologies américaines, selon un communiqué du département américain au Commerce.

L’administration de Donald Trump reproche à Huawei et ses filiales d’avoir «accentué leurs efforts pour obtenir des semi-conducteurs de pointe développés ou produits à partir de logiciels et de technologies américaines afin d’atteindre les objectifs politiques du Parti communiste chinois», selon le secrétaire au Commerce Wilbur Ross, cité dans le communiqué.

Le groupe chinois est devenu au 2e trimestre le premier vendeur de téléphones portables dans le monde.

Et ce, malgré l’opposition des USA à ce que Huawei déploie sa 5G.Au sommet malgré les pressions: Huawei est devenu au deuxième trimestre le premier vendeur mondial de smartphones, au moment où le groupe chinois lutte contre Washington pour déployer dans le monde sa technologie 5G.

Huawei se retrouve au centre de la rivalité sino-américaine, sur fond de guerre commerciale et technologique et de soupçons d’espionnage.




Paul Emison pour DayNewsWorld

TIKTOK BANNED SOON IN THE USA

" As far as TikTok is concerned, we are banning it in the United States," Trump told reporters aboard the Presidential Air Force One plane.

The New York Times indicates that Donald Trump could issue an executive order based on the “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” to force American app stores to remove TikTok from their catalog. “I have that authority. I can do it with a decree, ”hammered Donald Trump on Friday. He added that he would act on Saturday.

TikTok would serve Chinese interests

TikTok belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance. It has almost a billion users worldwide and is very popular with young people.

For several weeks, the social network has been suspected of serving the interests of the Chinese government, between censoring content and spying on the data of American users.

The social network has often had to defend itself from its links with China, where ByteDance has a similar application, under another name. He has always denied sharing data with the Chinese authorities and assured that he does not intend to accept requests in this direction. The company was under investigation by CFIUS, the US agency responsible for ensuring that foreign investments do not pose a risk to national security.

Banning the app as it currently exists could also go through a roundabout route. Because the US administration also plans to force the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, to sell the platform to an American group. Here too, it is the argument of the protection of national security that would be put forward. Negotiations are already open with Microsoft, according to the Washington Post. According to information from Reuters unveiled this Saturday afternoon, the Chinese group would indeed be ready, under pressure, to sell the American branch of TikTok to the company founded by Bill Gates.

Precedents exist, as the American daily points out. In March, a Chinese company was forced to sell its stake in an American hotel software company. Last year, the Trump administration forced the Chinese owners of the gay dating app Grindr to relinquish control of the company.

"We are not political"

A few days ago, TikTok made a commitment to have a high level of transparency and in particular to allow checks on its algorithms, to reassure users and regulators.

“We are not political, we do not accept political advertising and we have no agenda. Our only objective is to remain a lively and dynamic platform appreciated by all, declared Wednesday in a blog post the boss of TikTok, Kevin Mayer. “The whole industry is under scrutiny, and with good reason. Due to the company's Chinese origins, we are examined even more closely. We accept it and take up the challenge, ”he explained.

James Lewis, head of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes that the security risk involved in using TikTok is "close to zero." In contrast, "it looks like ByteDance could be put under pressure from Beijing," Lewis said.

The social network is also disputed elsewhere than in the United States. He has been banned since June 30 in India, where he was placed at the head of the list of 59 Chinese applications blocked by New Delhi on its territory to "ensure the security and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace". Pakistan, a very conservative Muslim country , for its part recently launched "a final warning" to TikTok so that content deemed "immoral, obscene and vulgar" be removed from its platform.

The American decision could also push other countries to do the same.




Boby Dean for DayNewsWorld

FACING THE BOYCOTT ADVERTISING AND A LOSS OF 7.2 BILLION FACEBOOK STRENGTHENS

 THE RULES OF MODERATION

For almost a week, Facebook has been the subject of an unprecedented advertising boycott campaign. Initiated by a handful of socially committed brands, this movement, entitled “Stop Hate for Profit”, now brings together nearly 200 brands such as Unilever, The North Face, Patagonia, Levi's, Ben & Jerry's or Coca-Cola.

They have stopped their advertising campaigns on Facebook or Instagram in the name of the fight against hatred on the networks. Patagonia and North Face were the first to position themselves by canceling advertising campaigns planned on Facebook and Instagram for the month of July. Coca-cola followed very quickly, before the Mozilla browser, Starbucks cafes or Dockers clothes got into gear. The arrival of large groups like Unilever alongside brands already committed to the boycott has established the movement over time.

Movement Against Systemic Racism in the United States

In the context of the vast movement against systemic racism in the United States, which resurfaced after the death of Georges Floyd, associations, including the NAACP, the large organization for the defense of the civil rights of African-Americans and an organization fighting against anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League, as well as the Sleeping Giants collective called on companies not to buy ad space on Facebook in July. Facebook is seen as overly tolerant of racist, insulting, or advocating speeches - including comments made by US President Donald Trump.

"Stop Hate for Profit"

In a long plea posted on the “Stop Hate for Profit” site, the organizers detail their approach. “Social networks have allowed hatred and extremism to spread faster than ever (…). Every day, our organizations are alerted to numerous examples of hate and disinformation messages disseminated on Facebook and supported by paid advertising ”, we can read.

“There was a domino effect in a context of very strong social tensions in the United States. Brand neutrality on subjects such as racism or the defense of civil rights is no longer tolerated. Those who have been silent in recent weeks have been strongly criticized, ”explains Stéphanie Laporte, director of the“ social media ”program at Inseec.

New digital activism

"We have entered a new era of digital activism," notes Greg Sterling, an analyst specializing in online marketing. “NGOs call on advertisers to clean up social networks, because of their reluctance, or even their refusal, to do it themselves. Whose act: all social platforms will be forced to review their regulations, adjust them or adopt new measures that prevent hatred and racism from proliferating. "

“The networks will have to take this problem seriously, otherwise their revenues will be directly affected,” says Michelle Amazeen, professor of communication at Boston University. The pressure is mounting, "finally, to make platforms responsible hosts that do not promote hatred and violence to generate profits."

Tightening of moderation rules

The “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign has already tarnished the image of the firm. Last Friday, Facebook's share price fell more than 8%, causing losses estimated at $ 7.2 billion by the Bloomberg site.

If Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the planetary social network, has been defending for months his a priori approach more lax than Twitter or YouTube in the name of freedom of expression, he was however obliged to present concessions last Friday . The platform will now remove more types of hate advertisements, and problematic messages from politicians can be masked and flagged as such, much like its competitor Twitter. From now on, Facebook will thus withdraw all advertisements which affirm in particular that people of certain origins, ethnicities, nationalities, gender or sexual orientation represent a threat to the safety or health of others.

Heavy reliance of brands on Facebook and Instagram

But the degree of reliance of brands on Facebook is enormous. The audience that we find on Facebook and Instagram - which belongs to Facebook - cannot be found elsewhere. Facebook has 2.6 billion users and over 7 million advertisers on its family of applications, the majority of which are SMEs.

Advertisers may therefore not resist for very long the appeal of such an audience, targeted and personalized on a very large scale.




Joanne Courbet for DayNewsWorld

TOWARDS STRENGTHENING SECURITY

ONLINE PAYMENTS

The validation of online payments with a simple SMS code will soon be complete: by 2021, the way of paying for online purchases will evolve.

As of Saturday, new standards intended to reinforce the security of transactions will apply to counter fraud, according to the indications of the French Observatory for the security of means of payment.

These new measures are provided for by a European directive (known as "DSP 2"). Adopted in mid-January 2018, it provides a new layer of security, called “strong authentication” on online banking transactions and operations in order to further lower the fraud rate.

According to the Observatory for the security of means of payment, in 2018, the rate of fraud by authenticated payment was 0.07%, compared to 0.21% for unauthenticated transactions.

To do this, issuers of bank cards and banks, payment operators, online merchants, etc. are required to deploy a so-called “strong authentication” device for the customer during electronic payments or sensitive banking operations.

Concretely, the use of a single code received by SMS to secure a transaction will no longer be considered sufficient and will have to be gradually reinforced by means of new solutions, such as biometric recognition (fingerprint, facial recognition), the issuance of a personal code sent by mail or compulsory connection to the mobile banking application.

Access to bank accounts will also require stronger authentication at least every 90 days. Measures that many establishments have already implemented with their customers.

However, this strong authentication will be dispensed with, all distance purchases of less than 30 euros, payments to automatic transport and parking machines, transfers between accounts of the same person within the same banking establishment or transfers. to people registered as "trusted beneficiaries" by the client with his bank.

In addition, the responsibility for this authentication rests with the banks and no longer with online merchants. In addition, this directive defines the legal status of account aggregation services and payment initiators. From now on, these two activities will have to be carried out by approved service providers.

The directive establishes their conditions of exercise and the manner in which they must operate with the banks of their customers.

The aim is to protect consumers, who until now were not legally covered, and to stimulate competition in payment services.




Kelly Donaldson for DayNewsWorld

VIRTUAL REALITY IMAGE

LUNGS REACHED BY THE CORONAVRUS

"There is such a contrast between the abnormal infected lung and the adjacent healthy lung tissue." You don't have to be a doctor to understand these images, ”says Dr. Keith Mortman, chief of thoracic surgery at GW University Hospital.


As soon as the first patient with Covid-19 arrived on March 18, doctors at the George Washington University Hospital found a very visual way of realizing the state of the lungs of a patient infected with the virus. They used Surgical Theater software which converts health data, such as medical imagery, into virtual reality images. And this in order to model the lungs of the patient in 3D and to examine precisely their state.

The severity of the infection highlighted

The patient, close to sixty, was already in intensive care and required the help of a respirator. To better understand the degree of progress of the disease. In the video healthy tissues are represented in blue, the infected parts appear in green and yellow.

The disease is diffuse and causes serious damage to both lungs. For the doctor, it is likely that long-term lung damage will remain in very seriously ill patients who may have survived the virus.

About 20% of Covid-19 patients develop severe symptoms and some of them require mechanical assistance to breathe. No age class is spared.




Andrew Preston for DayNewsWorld

MEETING APPS ADAPT AT CONTAINMENT

How to overcome this period of confinement without preventing encounters ?

Your apps have redoubled their inventiveness for you.

No more meetings, but a multitude of meetings and video chat to wait and be desired.

A world tour 2.0

Tinder will provide one of its Premium features for free, until April 30, and the dating app offers a gift to its users.

To meet people across the globe, Match Group will offer access to the Passport, usually reserved for Premium subscribers.

In a press release, the firm explains that it wants to bring Internet users together for new international adventures.

This week, users will be able to swipe profiles from around the world and thus share this moment with Internet users across the globe.

Without paying a penny, Tinder users will enjoy Tinder Gold or Plus functionality.

The CEO explains that he wants to give his community the opportunity to "share thanks to technology, to learn and listen to all those who live the same situation as you, in different geographic areas, during a period of unprecedented isolation" .

Video chat to wait

Once, nicknamed "the anti-Tinder" because it only subjects the user to four profiles per day, has put the small dishes in the big ones.

The application created for the occasion a completely new function, "live-video".

In practice, as soon as two users indicate that they like each other, they can talk to each other in writing and now, on video.

Once is not a pioneer of the genre: its competitor Bumble had already launched this function six months ago.

"Without the possibility of meeting right away, video is an option that intends to respond to the exceptional situation we live in, while protecting users who do not have to share their number or email address to chat live via a third-party tool, ”explains Once in its press release.

Nothing more fulfilling than sharing all over the world and live!




Boby Dean for DayNewsWorld

FACEBOOK WOULD LIKE TO GET A VIRGINITY BACK

Facebook, used by more than 2 billion people worldwide, is stepping up initiatives to restore the confidence of the authorities and its users after a series of scandals related to hate content or disinformation campaigns.

In a press release entitled "Start the decade by helping you better control your privacy", Mark Zuckerberg takes advantage of the day of data protection to return to the tool "activity outside of Facebook"

Facebook has indeed launched a tool allowing internet users to limit the tracking it operates across the web. An announcement that goes in the direction of the position for the protection of privacy that the company is trying to strengthen.

Announced almost two years ago, just after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the tool "Your activity outside of Facebook" allows you to see third-party sites and applications that share data with the social network. Because many services resell their data to Facebook without necessarily clearly informing Internet users. “Companies send us information about your activities on their sites and we use this information to show you relevant advertisements. Now you can see a summary of this information and log it out of your account if you wish, ”writes Mark Zuckerberg.

Indeed it is not necessary to be connected via Facebook to the sites in question, the web is full of little cookies that will allow web pages to link your browsing history to your Facebook profile.

Concretely, the new tool therefore allows you to prevent a particular service from sharing your data with Facebook, or outright to prohibit all sites and applications in the future from sharing your personal data with the company.

Be aware, however, as Facebook indicates, that the site will continue to receive "your activity on the companies or organizations you visit", but the information will simply no longer be linked to your account and will be used "for measurement purposes and to make improvements to our system. " And you will not escape advertising however, warns the site: "You will always see the same amount of advertising, but they may be less personalized. "

In the next few weeks, a message redirecting you to the Confidentiality Assistance tool should appear on your news feed.

In addition, the social network seeks to prevent the publication and sharing of articles and images considered inappropriate according to its own charter, while taking care to respect freedom of expression. He recently confirmed that political advertisements, even false ones, would not be censored, attracting a new salvo of convictions in the middle of the American presidential campaign.

It is therefore necessary to take a step back on Facebook ads...




Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

98% OF OUR PLANET COVERED BY GOOGLE

Loved in 2004, Google's service has come a long way, literally. Google is proud to announce the extent of the area covered for 15 years in the world with Google Street View and Google Earth. It has covered 98% of the surface of the blue planet and has implemented it in its various mapping apps.

According to his figures, this represents nearly 10 million miles with his Street View service, which represents almost 16 million kilometers of paths or roads taken in photos, from all angles. A distance which represents, for indication, 400 times the circumference of the Earth. The firm also revealed that its other mapping service, Google Earth, now covers 98% of the world's population, for 58 million square kilometers.

The Mountain View firm returned to the process that allowed it to map every corner of the planet. Places accessible by road are thus photographed from all angles by “a fleet of Street View cars, each equipped with nine cameras which capture high definition images from all possible points of view. With regard to the areas not accessible by vehicle, Google explains that it has fixed its 360 ° image device for hikers, called a Street View trekker, but also for sheep and dromedaries. The American giant would therefore have succeeded in immortalizing all possible corners.

Even with the most unusual images of naked people, car accidents, fleeing prisoners or a flying rabbit in Poland.

Finally, for satellite images, Google also announces that it will store 36 million square miles (93,239,571 km2) of satellite photos for appropriate rendering and, above all, put one of its historic applications to use for Google Earth.

House photogrammetry

For a rendering close to reality possible, Google uses several methods of image processing including photogrammetry. A technique more than a century old which consists in associating, grafting, several images together so that it forms only one with the least possible distortions.

Google has taken 10 years to perfect its homemade photogrammetry using AI in particular. The process can now aggregate photos taken on the ground, in the air or from space to form just one.

It is even possible to have different view modes, from simple satellite view to Street View mode with directions, street number, or even restaurant menus etc. affixed in augmented reality .

" Image is at the heart of everything we do, " said Ethan Russel, product manager at Google Maps. We see it as the basis of our entire card making process.

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld
There are no translations available.

LES NOBEL DE LA MEDECINE

Avec la médecine, c'est la saison des Nobel qui s'ouvre.

Le comité Nobel a décerné depuis Stockholm (Suède) cette distinction à trois chercheurs mondialement reconnus dans leur domaine :

les deux Américains Gregg Semenza et William Kaelin, ainsi que le Britannique Peter Ratcliffe.

Ils ont révélé les mécanismes de base qui permettent aux cellules de détecter et gérer un apport variable d'oxygène.

Leurs travaux, axés sur une protéine clé, ont ouvert de nouvelles perspectives pour traiter l'anémie, les maladies cardio-vasculaires et certains cancers.

« L'importance fondamentale de l'oxygène est connue depuis des siècles, mais le processus d'adaptation des cellules aux variations de niveau d'oxygène est longtemps resté un mystère », a indiqué l'Assemblée Nobel de l'Institut Karolinska à Stockholm dans ses attendus.

« Des efforts intenses en cours dans les laboratoires universitaires et les entreprises pharmaceutiques se concentrent maintenant sur le développement de médicaments capables d'interférer à différents stades d'une pathologie soit en activant ou en bloquant le mécanisme de captation de l'oxygène », selon le jury Nobel.

L'an dernier, l'Américain James Allison et le Japonais Tasuku Honjo avaient été récompensés pour leurs recherches sur l'immunothérapie efficaces dans le traitement de cancers virulents.

Boby Dean pour DayNewsWorld

LEAK IN THE PRESS

ON INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS ABOUT FACEBOOK

Dismantling of Facebook, moderation, future of social networks. The American site The Verge recorded an audio recording of Mark Zuckerberg during a likely question-and-answer session with his employees. The CEO of the company expresses his point of view. The discussion, which should have remained private, took place in July according to The Verge, which does not specify how they remained these recordings, nor what was the precise framework of the discussion.

"You go to the carpet and you fight"

The issue of dismantling Facebook has become a campaign issue in the United States. Elisabeth Warren, Democratic senator in the race for the Democratic nomination for the presidential election of 2020, calls for the dismantling of the big companies of Tech. It is joined by two thirds of Americans. The federal government has opened an investigation, and even former Mark Zuckerberg employees are actively working to dismantle Facebook. "The dismantling of Facebook, Google or Amazon, will not really solve the problems (...) and will not reduce the risk of electoral interference," says Zuckerberg to his employees, before reassuring his troops:

"You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks the right answer is to dismantle the companies ... If she gets elected president, well I'd bet we'd have something to challenge her [her project] legally, and I'd also bet we would have enough to win. Is this afraid for Facebook? Yeah. I do not want, in the absolute, that we are caught in a big lawsuit against our own government ... But, in the end, if someone tries to threaten something so existential, you go to the carpet and you you fight. "

Elizabeth Warren immediately reacted on her Twitter account, after publication of The Verge's article:

"What would really" be afraid "would be failing to repair a corrupt system that leaves huge companies like Facebook engaging in illegal anti-competitive practices, trampling on the privacy rights of its customers, and repeatedly to fail in their duty to protect our democracy. "

"Somewhat dramatic reports"

Another area addressed by Mark Zuckerberg is that of moderation platforms. Several moderators of the social network entrusted, in investigations conducted by the Verge or the Gardian in particular on these little hands responsible for cleaning the social network, that their working conditions were difficult and that the contents, sometimes very violent, endangered their mental health. And it's true that contractors are not treated as well as Facebook employees. Timed work day, less pay, no job security. The company would still have a lot of work to do on the subject, even if Zuckerberg explains that these "reports are a bit dramatic".

"Some of these investigations are, I think, presented too dramatically," Mark Zuckerberg reacts to Facebook employees.

"Most people do not look at horrible things all day long. (...) I think there are more than 30,000 people dedicated to moderating content. It's a huge effort. (...) With 30,000 people working on this topic, there is a variety of experiences for these employees. He says again.

Non-invasive technologies

Finally, on the future of technology and social networks, Mark Zuckerberg returned to the launch of Libra, his new home-grown cryptocurrency, as well as the human-machine interface projects that are currently driving his company since the acquisition. of the start-up CTRL-Labs. In July, the governments of developed countries expressed their fears and reluctance to the cryptocurrency Libra, which Facebook intends to launch in the coming months.

The boss of Facebook was particularly reassuring, explaining that unlike Elon Musk and his projects Neuralink, he intended to focus exclusively on non-invasive technologies: "You found that the launch of Libra was complicated, imagine the headlines "Facebook is embarking on brain operations". I do not prefer to think of congressional hearings on this subject. (...) What we hope to do is simply pick up some signals. It will be possible for example to click with your brain while looking at something in augmented reality ... It's exciting (...) It will be possible to write with your brain without having to use the hands or the eyes ".

Facebook had been so far spared by such a leak while in 2018, Google had seen the entirety of an internal conference of its leaders reacting to the election of Donald Trump be published by the site Breitbart ultraconservative.

The full audio recording of Mark Zuckerberg can be found on The Verge's website.

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

VENERATION OF AN ANDROID BY

BUDDHIST MONKS IN JAPAN

"The big difference between a monk and a robot is that we are going to die, while he will meet a lot of people and store a lot of information that will make it evolve to infinity," says the administrator of the temple Tensho Goto.

Kyoto, the former capital of Japan, is considered the birthplace of the Japanese tradition. They are more than 53 million tourists to visit the shrines and temples of the archipelago each year. Built in 1605, Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto is one of the most important Japanese cultural heritages for its Buddhist worship.

But the temple built by his wife in tribute to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, powerful lord of the sixteenth century, now has an Android Kannon for his preaching to the public. Kannon is the Japanese name of one of the Bodhisattvas - a Buddha before he attained enlightenment - the most famous and most revered in the world. In its Android version, the deity began to officiate in May. It also projects versions translated into English and Chinese on the screen. The android can also move his arms, his chest and his head. And some of its mechanical parts are visible!

The robot in question is called Mindar, it was programmed to deliver a sermon in Japanese Heart Sutra, a founding Buddhist text frequently recited mechanically by monks.

The temple administrator Tensho Goto wants to recreate the link between the younger generation and Buddhism. He sought the help of Hiroshi Ishiguro, head of intelligent robotics Ulyces at Osaka University. "We hope this Android Kannon will help bring the teachings of Buddhism into the hearts of people today," said Tensho Goto, one of the temple's priests.

This ultra-modern Kannon, costing 100 million yen (€ 790,000), can it replace the flesh-and-blood priests still there at the Kodaiji Temple ?

Jaimie Potts for DayNewsWorld

FACEBOOK LAUCH  ITS CRYTOCURRENCY LIBRA

Facebook formalized mid-June the launch of its cryptocurrency.

From next year, Libra will indeed pay for its purchases or send money with a simple smartphone, without bank account. A small revolution that could finally democratize virtual currencies, too often likened to speculation or dubious practices.

What is the purpose of a cryptocurrency?

Like any currency, a cryptocurrency makes payments. The big difference with the bank money we use every day is that these payments "are made directly from one party to another without going through a financial intermediary". The quote is from Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency launched in January 2009. Totally independent, it only needs the internet to work.

Cryptocurrencies allow an entire population that does not have access to banking services to exchange money. Which would represent, according to Facebook, "half of the adults in the world". Serving as a safe haven, they are also widely used in some countries hit by inflation.

Apart from these situations, their use to make routine purchases remains limited. A few years ago, a few shops still accepted payment in bitcoin: most have given up, because of the enormous fluctuations of its course.

A virtual currency for everyone

This is the point that Facebook wants to correct with Libra, a virtual currency that is easy to use and in common use, backed by traditional currencies to avoid excessive price variations. In the jargon of cryptocurrency, we speak of stablecoin. With Libra, Facebook could democratize cryptocurrency: it will be available on WhatsApp and Messenger, two services whose number of users exceeds one billion.

To manage its cryptocurrency, Facebook will rely on a hundred "nodes", each allocated ten million dollars. Twenty have already found takers [list in English], grouped together. Their owners are exclusively consortia or companies: Visa, Mastercard, Uber, Booking, Paypal, Ebay, Spotify ... What goods or services can we buy with libras? They can be used outside the Facebook group, since 27 companies have joined the project. The use of libra as a means of payment will be free.

End of the excesses of cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrencies have often hit the headlines for bad reasons: rampant speculation (especially on bitcoin), platform piracy, relative anonymity of transactions, accusations of money laundering ... Drifts are all marginal, and increasingly rare. The bursting of the bubble in early 2018 calmed the speculators' ardor, and the trading platforms now require ID at registration.

The arrival of Libra should reassure the general public. We can imagine that Facebook, which has been working on this project for more than two years, has made the security of its system a priority. The US giant is targeting 2.7 billion users.

The price of Libra should be relatively stable, since it will be indexed to the four largest currencies in the world (the euro, the dollar, the pound and the yen)

Facebook also wants to reassure governments. Before using the service, users will have to prove their identity via an official document.

"Sending money should be as simple as sending a photo," says Mark Zuckerberg at the annual Facebook conference in California. Successful bet, it seems for this alternative economy and 100% electronic for everyone.

Garett Skyport for DayNewsWorld

AMAZON SPYING YOU ? !

You are "spied on" and you did not know it. This article is for you if you have at home voice assistants from Amazon. Did you know that some conversations with your Amazon connected speakers are indeed recorded to be studied by very human employees !!

It's a Bloomberg survey that reveals it, and it's cold in the back. According to a survey by the US site Bloomberg , Amazon "pays thousands of people around the planet to help improve the way that the digital assistant Alexa responds to requests. "

The company created by Jeff Bezos would have developed this strategy to improve the understanding of human language by the Alexa software.

A veritable commercial success across the Atlantic, Amazon Echo connected speakers recently arrived in France. Equipped with Alexa, the voice assistant imagined by the company, connected objects interact with the user to answer simple questions or commands.

Private interactions, at least in theory. Bloomberg explains in his survey that some conversations between users and their assistant Alexa are directly sent to Costa Rica, India or Romania, where thousands of Amazon employees listen to up to nine hours a day.

Of course for Amazon, it is simply a matter of studying user requests to Alexa to "train the speech recognition and natural language comprehension systems" while ensuring compliance with the rules of ethics.

"We take the security and privacy of our customers very seriously. We use a very small sample of Alexa's records to improve the user experience, "said Amazon. However, the ecommerce giant does not specify that to carry this out, thousands of employees are responsible for annotating conversations to then improve the efficiency of the algorithms.

Allow us to doubt the sincerity of the company !! This information comes in anyway taint a little more image of the American giant Amazon.

Because, unlike Siri or Google Assistant, who ensure completely anonymize user records collected by their services, Amazon would allow its employees to access certain private information related to the user!

What the survey points out is that these employees, who work nine hours a day, inevitably fall on everyday scenes and private conversations. What the Bloomberg survey reveals is that recordings of certain conversations are sometimes ridiculed by employees

And even worse: according to Bloomberg, two Romanian employees reportedly witnessed a "sexual assault". They made it go back to Amazon, who did not want to interfere.......

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

IKEA THE NETFLIX OF FURNITURE

Ikea France will soon offer its furniture for rent.

Ikea is accelerating in the circular economy. The Swedish furniture kit specialist announced Wednesday, April 3, 2019 the launch of an offer of furniture for rent.

This new marketing model will affect some 30 countries, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland. This new service should be implemented in 2020.

In Switzerland, where several experiments are already in progress, Ikea is testing rental furniture for small businesses. Similar tests will also be conducted in Sweden for private companies, but also for public partners. In the Netherlands, students are at the center of Ikea's strategy.

Customer behavior changes. They want to be less wasteful and seek help to extend the life of their products. With this service Ingka Group (the parent company of Ikea France) wants to return a more responsible image and stick to the expectations of consumers who are increasingly demanding on the impact that their purchases have on the environment. In 2017, Ikea opened its first "sustainable" store in western Germany.

This project is therefore part of Ikea's goal to become a circular company with a positive impact on the climate by 2030. That year, all IKEA products will be made from renewable and recycled materials, they will be designed according to circular design principles to be reused, repaired, upgraded and recycled.

Ikea would indeed consume 1% of all the wood used on the planet according to the Pacific Standard website. Society seems to be aware of its ecological footprint.

If the approach is commendable, is the rental system of real interest to consumers ?

This new track explored by Ikea is part of a more global transformation of the company.

The visionary Ingvar Kamprad anticipated in the last century the major trends of the time such as the rise of the car, the emergence of life in the suburbs or the growing demand of the middle class for cheap furniture.

But in recent years, the Amazon threat hangs over Ikea, his boss Jeff Bezos does not hide his ambition for the furniture market ... At the Swedish brand not to miss the new trend of e-commerce.

In 2018 the group's website saw its attendance increase by 8.7%, with 2.5 billion online visits.

Boby Dean for DayNewsWorld

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AT MCDONALD'S MENU

You are spoiled for choice and do not know what to choose.

Do not worry McDonald's aims to better customize purchases through AI, artificial intelligence.

The fast-fooder could have decided to improve its revenue, expand its ranges by acquiring the company Dynamic Yield.

But no.

He prefers to simply guide you in your choices according to your preferences. A customization of your palace.

A customized drive-in menu taking into account elements such as the weather (hot drink in cold weather, ice during hot weather ...) or the most requested products ...

The AI ​​will be used to offer additional products to customers

Dynamic Yield is a provider of e-commerce, travel, finance and media companies valued by TechCrunch "several hundred million dollars.

The company, based in New York and Tel Aviv, would work with 300 global brands.

She says her artificial intelligence-based personalization technology could increase revenue by 10 to 15 percent because the system will offer additional items depending on what you started buying.

This unpleasant sensation that you force your hand ...

Fast-fooder I hate you !

Boby Dean for DayNewsWorld

TOWARDS AGREEMENT FOR GAFA TAXATION

US Finance Minister Stephen Mnuchin said on Wednesday that the United States wanted to reach an agreement with France in the OECD on taxation of Internet giants. He also declared his support for the French initiative of a minimum tax on companies.

"We hope to solve this problem together this year," said the US official Wednesday, questioned on the taxation of digital giants at a joint press conference with his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire.

If Steven Muchin is not in favor of the French project of taxation of the digital giants on their turnover, which should be presented next week in the Council of Ministers, he however "rejoiced in the French intention of 'repeal if a global agreement was found within the OECD'.

The United States and France have both "instructed their teams at the OECD to try to solve this problem this year," added the Treasury Secretary.

Bruno Le Maire recalled that France would apply its own tax while hoping that the OECD will once and for all get its members to agree on the taxation of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon).

"We believe that we must reach as quickly as possible at the OECD level to a global, multilateral solution that would, of course, be the best solution," admitted the French minister.

Boby Dean for DayNewsWorld

UNPRECEDENTED INTERNET ATTACK

The global Internet is currently undergoing a wave of computer attacks of an unprecedented scale, which is to change the addresses of websites to hack, said Friday the international body that assigns Internet addresses (ICANN).

According to experts outside ICANN, hackers target governments as well as intelligence or police services, airlines or the oil industry in the Middle East or Europe. One of them believes that these attacks originated in Iran.

Essentially, these attacks consist of "replacing server addresses" authorized "by addresses of machines controlled by attackers," said the organization. This allows hackers to delve into the data (passwords, email addresses ...) on the way or to completely capture the traffic to their servers.

Based in California, ICANN manages the online domain name system that the general public knows in the form of .com or .fr site addresses, for example. It is precisely the system of domain names ("Domain Name System", DNS) - which allows to connect a computer to a website - that attack the hackers, unidentified.

These names work a little like the telephone operators of yesteryear, who connected the interlocutors to each other by connecting cables to a circuit. DNS attacks, nicknamed "DNSpionnage", "are basically like someone who goes to the post office, places it on your address, reads your mail and then puts it in your mailbox", The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also recently explained the attacks, the first of which would be at least 2017.

ICANN advocates deploying a protection protocol called Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). But the miracle solution does not seem to exist yet to counter these attacks. "There is no single tool to solve this," warned David Conrad of ICANN. "We need to improve the overall security of the DNS if we want to have any hope of preventing such attacks," he added.

Indeed, computer attacks, of any size and of any kind, have multiplied at an exponential rate in recent years. According to experts, hackers most often belong to two main categories: individuals or groups of "hackers" who want to earn money or states, who want to spy on other countries.

According to experts and authorities, many countries, the United States, China, Russia, Iran or North Korea are particularly active in piracy, which deny the interested parties.

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

DISAPPEARANCE OF PAUL ALLEN

A co-founder of Microsoft with his friend Bill Gates in 1975, Paul Allen died on Monday of cancer at age 65. A billionaire and philanthropist Paul Allen, co-founder in 1975 with Bill Gates of the American giant Microsoft, had survived cancer twice before succumbing on Monday to a recurrence, at the age of 65. years.

" It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our founder Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft" , said earlier the company Vulcan, founded and owned by the billionaire, stating that he had died "Monday afternoon, October 15, 2018 complications of a non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in Seattle" (northwest), his hometown.

"My brother was a remarkable person in all respects," said his sister Jody in the Vulcan Communiqué, praising "tech man and philanthropist".

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, with whom he had quit when he left the group in the 1980s, praised a "close friend" who "deserved more time." ,

Mr. Gates felt that "personal computing would never have existed without him".

Paul Allen had announced in early October that this disease, treated for the first time in 2009, had recurred, but that doctors were "optimistic" .

He had also survived another form of cancer, Hodgkin's Disease, diagnosed in 1982.

"Pioneer", "visionary"

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975 before slamming the door in 1983, angry at with his former partner, whom he later accused of attempting to "rip him off" as he thought of his departure and was recovering from his first cancer.

In the absence of agreement on the redemption price of his shares, Paul Allen had retained his shares, which will make his fortune when he sells them around the year 2000. A fortune estimated Monday evening to 20.3 billion dollars by the magazine "Forbes".

The world of sport has also paid tribute to him, including the president of the National Football League (NFL), Roger Goodell, who wrote in a statement that "his passion for the game, combined with his quiet determination, led to a model organization, both on and off the field " .

NBA (Basketball) Adam Silver praised the "vision" and "generosity" of the missing.

"He has worked tirelessly with our medical advisors to identify new ways to make gambling safer," said Goodell. "We miss you. We thank you. We love you, " the Trail Blazers team wrote on Twitter.

Paul Allen also founded Stratolaunch, a company that has built a giant space-launching aircraft that is currently being tested in California. The company hailed him as a "visionary".

Change the world.

In 2010, Paul Allen joins the creation of The Giving Pledge, a movement launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

They are billionaires who, throughout the world, promise to donate a large part of their wealth in the hope of changing the world.

In 2018, there are 184 to have answered this call, like Tim Cooke (Apple), Elon Musk (Space X), Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan (Facebook), Richard Branson (Virgin) and many others ...

Like his former partner Bill Gates, he decided to give the majority of his fortune to charity in hopes of changing the world..

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

 

FRAMASOFT FREE SOFTWARE

TO CONTRACT GOOGLE

F ace to the omnipotence of Google, Apple and other Facebook, an association called Framasoft has created equivalent services but with a clear and noble will:

services that are decentralized and respectful of users' privacy. A snub to the five global giants of the Internet!

Six employees and thirty volunteers in twenty-eight cities in France for this association Framasoft that intends to change the face of cyberspace.

An ambitious challenge! With a motto " Degogate Internet . "

Thanks to their computer expertise they intend to counter what they call " Gafam ": Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, all Americans!

Where did this daring team take these neighborhoods?

Framasoft is located in an associative building in the center of Lyon, in a very small local. Its general delegate, Pierre-Yves Gosset , 42, economist by training:

"Our ambition is not to replace the Gafam, but to propose concrete alternatives. We will show that their economic, technical and cultural domination is not inevitable. Other choices are possible, we are not obliged to resign ourselves to the normalization of the global village by the Americans. "

Hope that these online services equivalent to those of Gafam, except that they are located in Europe respect the privacy of users will be a great success!



Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld.

SYSTRAM A SMALL JEWEL OF TRANSLATION

THE TRANSCODER of "Star The transTrek", allowing to converse orally in any language, would be a reality in less than five years. The French company SYSTRAM believes it hard.

The solution can even boast about 30 different languages ​​in writing. And it would give a translation of the idioms much more relevant than that of Google Translate.

How does Systran achieve such feats?

To become Systrmente François Massemin, vice-president of the EMEA sector of Systran.

It is a solution that is very much in demand by the States and the multinationals to do without translators much less efficient in speed of translation.

The army, the secret services and some organizations rely on "deep learning" , the algorithms of his system to learn in the manner of a human brain.

"We have developed a neural translation engine, which we learn to understand the basics of a language to improve its knowledge through texts translated by professionals (corpus)", European coanisms, appeal to him to translate in a neutral and non-subjective way sensitive or legal texts.

Even the general public can use as a free Systran service on its website . oral translations that will make our life easier abroad.

Other applications are ongoing such as oral translation and research for the robotics industry. "The famous law of Moore has exploded, says François Massemin. It is therefore not unthinkable to imagine the arrival of a universal voice to voice translator within five years . "

The Transcoder of "Star Trek", allowing to converse orally in any language would be a reality in less than five years. The French company SYSTRAM believes it hard.

The solution can even boast about thirty different languages ​​in writing. And it gives a translation of the idioms much more relevant than that proposed by Google Translation.

It is a solution that is very much in demand by the States and the multinationals to do without translators much less efficient in speed of translation.

The army, secret services and some orgam relies on "deep learning", the algorithms of his system to learn in the manner of a human brain.

"We have developed a neural translation engine, which we learn to understand the basics of a language to perfect its knowledge through texts translated by professionals (corpora)", European, call on him for to translate in a neutral and non-subjective way sensitive or legal texts.

Even the general public can use as a free Systran service on its website. oral translations that will make our life easier abroad.

Other applications are ongoing such as oral translation and research for the robotics industry. "The famous law of Moore has exploded, says François Massemin. It is therefore not unthinkable to imagine the arrival of a universal voice to voice translator within five years. "

The transcript of "Star Trek", allowing to converse orally in any language, would be a reality in less than five years. The French company SYSTRAM believes it hard.

The solution can even boast about thirty different languages ​​in writing. And it gives a translation of the idioms much more relevant than that proposed by Google Translation.

How does Systram achieve such feats?

It is a solution that is very much in demand by the States and the multinationals to do without translators much less efficient in speed of translation.

The army, secret services and some orgam relies on "deep learning", the algorithms of his system to learn in the manner of a human brain.

"We have developed a neural translation engine, which we learn to understand the basics of a language to improve its knowledge through texts translated by professionals (corpus)", European coanisms, appeal to him to translate in a neutral and non-subjective way sensitive or legal texts.

Even the general public can use as a free Systran service on its website. oral translations that will make our life easier abroad.

Other applications are ongoing such as oral translation and research for the robotics industry. "The famous law of Moore has exploded, says François Massemin. It is therefore not unthinkable to imagine the arrival of a universal voice-to-voice translator within five years. "

Paul Emison pour DayNewsWorld.

IMPLANTS IN OUR BRAIN

TO BECOME MORE INTELLIGENT ?


Connecting the brain with machines Here is Elon Musk's new project that seems to come straight out of a sci-fi scenario.

The ambitious entrepreneur does not want man to be overtaken by artificial intelligence. "If we simply remain human, we will soon become simple pets for artificial intelligences.

" Elon Musk said a little over a year ago. So offers himself for him only one possibility:

the amplification of brain power through the development of a "neural network".

"Today, the fundamental limitation between us and the machines is the entry and exit of information, and we are going to merge symbiotically with the artificial intelligence that will take us beyond our limits, using a direction interface, a kind of neural lace. "

Elon Musk is not the first boss of high-tech to embark on the challenge of the augmented human . Microsoft and Google have been looking for integrated devices for years to live longer.

But this entrepreneur of genius never ceases to amaze us: creator of the electric car Tesla and boss of SpaceX Elon Musk, it is launched in a new adventure more risky however. It is, it seems, aware by creating his new company Neuralink as revealed by his tweet:

"A long article on Neuralink will be published on (the blog) @waitbutwhy in a week or so.

Difficult to devote time but the existential risk is too high.

Because it is indeed implant in the brain to become more intelligent, to make the human more intelligent and strong in the face of artificial intelligence. "Chips" directly connected to the neurons and able to read their "code" and send back.

We can not ignore the philosophical and ethical questions raised by this project. Connect the brain to the computer does not pose the question of the risk of hacking or formatting human minds by computer ?

In short, control of the brain to be more explicit? Cyborgs straight out of Terminator.

Currently brain implants are used for neuroscience.

The rare "chips" inserted in a brain have a pure medical aim for vision, Parkinson's disease, paralysis or epilepsy ...

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

OFF-STANDARD OPERATION OR DISMANTLING

A DARKWEB PLATFORM

The first operation of its kind in France.

One of the largest illegal platforms active in France on the "dark web" was dismantled after a large operation led by Customs, the first of its kind, announced Saturday the Minister of Public Accounts Gerald Darmanin.

Qualified as "exceptional", this operation, "the first of its kind in France" mobilized more than forty officers of the National Directorate of Intelligence and Customs Investigations (DNRED), the handlers of the customs and several technical experts. It took place simultaneously in several cities of France.

The investigation, which continues, has been entrusted to the Central Office of the fight against crime related to information and communication technologies (OCLCTIC).

Narcotics, weapons and false papers.

The forum "Black Hand" ("Black Hand"), active in the part of the Internet not referenced by search engines, had been selling for over two years many illegal products and services (narcotics, weapons, false papers, stolen bank details ...), according to the minister's press release.

A darknet is a layered network (or network overlay) that uses specific protocols integrating functions of anonymization. Some darknets are limited to the exchange of files, others allow the construction of a complete anonymous ecosystem (web, blog, mail, irc). Sharing is anonymous users can communicate without much fear of interference from the share of governments or companies. For these reasons, darknets are often associated with political dissent type communication and illegal activities as in the case of the "Backhand" forum.

Many data entered.

The investigators seized nearly 4,000 euros in cash and around 25,000 euros in various virtual currencies. They were also able to access the content of the "Black Hand" server and proceed with the massive data entry. After 48 hours of police custody, four suspects were brought Friday to magistrates of the public prosecutor's office of Lille, after the dismantling occurred Tuesday.The main administrator of the site and "several other people were arrested".

According to the first elements of the survey, more than 3,000 people were registered on this forum, "thus confirming the very active character of this French forum".

"I congratulate DNRED's agents for this extraordinary operation, and the dismantling of this platform is a first at the national level and illustrates the mobilization of customs," said Gerald Darmanin in a statement.




Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

CONFERENCE GOOGLE I / O EDITION 2018

The technology giant will introduce innovations in its leading products for the home, artificial intelligence and mobile devices. The details.

The Google I / O Developer Conference is meeting at its annual meeting in San Francisco, United States, and should receive, as of Tuesday, May 8, 2018, announcements related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) on Android and other products and services of the internet giant

Although there has been no official advance of what will happen in the meeting, Google should prioritize developments related to certain products, among the large number of services that have in the technology industries, and over 7,000 million Internet products that he owns and operates.

This year's poster will feature stars such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, big data, and the most important of all: Machine Learning.

Android, smartphone and accessories

Among the topics of discussion, it will probably be the future version of Android (although in this case, before you can really try it, you will have to wait for more than "a few months").

With Android P behind the scenes, Google is expected to unveil some new features as well as new development guidelines around Android P and API 28.

The company will showcase advances in artificial intelligence from Android and Google and news on its new portable platform, Wear OS, and Google Assistant for Android TV, Google Home, Google Play and Search, shipped The Verge.

Waze presented a program that allows for more accurate and real data on traffic

The conference will also revolve around the latest version of Android, which this year will be P. After reviewing the structure of last year's Android with Oreo, which has modernized and simplified notifications of smartphones update , the latest approach The Internet giant for mobile software is more visual and focuses on interface design improvements.

With regard to artificial intelligence, Sundar Pichai used different presentations, talking about software, that he could see and understand the world, identify objects and analyze natural language, which will contribute to almost all Google products improve in the coming years.

This process has already begun, with products such as the Google Assistant software based on voice and text, Google Translate and Google Lens and the image recognition platform.

The conference, which runs until Thursday, May 10, 2018, will be held once again in scenic Mountain View, California

For information it will be possible to follow live the conference on the web by going on the following link:

https://events.google.com/io/

Good conference to all

To be continued ….

Steven Colton  for DayNewsWorld

MARK ZUCKERBERG'S PIROUETTES

BEFORE THE AMERICAN SENATE

"We are listening, America is listening, and the world is also listening to us," said a congressman.


The founder of the social network was heard by members of several US Senate committees for three hours on Tuesday night. All the members of the US Senate's trade and justice committees are very much aware of the issue of the hearing. was going to start reminded Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that " America is listening and the world is also listening to us"

The CEO of Facebook was summoned to explain the cases of invasion of privacy of its users, but also political manipulation and foreign interference in the US presidential election.

The 44 elected officials were a little upset by the scandal of Cambridge Analytica from the beginning of the audition. "Cambridge Analytica used the data collected through Facebook to influence the US presidential election , " Democrat Dianne Feinstein told a destabilized Mark Zuckerberg.

"The tech industry has an obligation to answer questions about the use of personal data, and the status quo can not work," said Grassley.

The founder of Facebook did not hesitate to take responsibility for not having understood in time how Facebook could be diverted in many ways. "I'm responsible for what's going on" going so far as to renew his personal apology. " It is clear now that we have not done enough to protect these (Facebook) tools from mischievous uses such as fake news, interference in elections or hate speech. It was a big mistake. I am sorry. I created Facebook, I run it, I'm responsible for what happens, " he said. "It was my mistake, I'm sorry." "It will take time to complete all the changes needed to limit these misuses," he added.

He then recapitulated past or future measures to rectify the problems. So about hate speech published on the social network, Mark Zuckerberg explained that he was betting on artificial intelligence. "We are developing artificial intelligence software that can better detect this content," he said. He also said that Facebook is hiring more and more people to work on the security of its social network, which is expected to have 20,000 people by the end of 2018, focusing specifically on security issues.

He also praised the "positive" uses of Facebook and social networks, such as the platform they recently offered to women as part of the #metoo movement, or the opportunity for small businesses to advertise and " It's our mission to connect people all over the world and bring them closer together, and to do that, we believe we need to provide a service that everyone can afford," he said. added.

Mark Zuckerberg also said he has engaged "an arms race" against "people in Russia whose job is to operate our systems and other internet systems" . He also confirmed that Facebook was cooperating with the team of the special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential campaign.

But it is clear that the young boss of 33 years has tended to avoid embarrassing questions by hiding behind his team. "I do not know" , " I do not know" or " My team can come back to you about it" are undoubtedly the most pronounced sentences

Democrat Maria Cantweel questioning her about the possibility that Palantir, another data analysis company, was able to retrieve information in the manner of Cambridge Analytica came up against a dry wall "Ok". To Senator Roger Wicker who asked him about tracking user activity off Facebook. "You do not know ?" finally ended up letting go of the furious Republican.

"Would you agree to tell us what hotel you stayed in yesterday?" Asked Senator Dick Durbin. An embarrassed response from Facebook's founder: "Uh ... no" And the Democrat to bid: "If you sent messages this week, would you agree to tell us who?" "No, I would not agree to do it here publicly," Zuckerberg admits. " That's what we're talking about today: your right to privacy - it's about your right and whether you're willing to give up on it, so to speak, to connect the world. the world should be able to control how its data is used, " concluded the elected Illinois, facing a destabilized Mark Zuckerberg.

Several elected officials have mentioned the possibility of a stricter law to regulate the activity of the giants of the web, which would be inspired by the European regulation on data protection.

On several occasions, Mark Zuckerberg has evaded the simple but sensitive questions of elected officials annoyed: " Facebook traces surfing data of users, even when they are not connected? Or " Could other applications have recovered large amounts of data?" How long do you keep the data of users who delete their account?

"I do not know," "my teams will keep you informed," "I'll come back to you," Mark Zuckerberg said. The CEO of Facebook has promised several times to provide additional answers to senators, but many elected officials have expressed their " skepticism" in response to his unconvincing responses.

Mark Zuckerberg nevertheless gave some tips on the management of personal data. Asked about the possibility of offering a paid version of Facebook that does not exploit the data of its users, the founder did not oppose adding however that there would be "always a free version . "

This is just the beginning of a long test for Mark Zuckerberg. Indeed the Congress will audition again the young founder of Facebook, but this time to the room, from Wednesday for a new audition. Then will come the results of the current audit on applications that access a large volume of data.

"We need to become more aware of our responsibilities, to make sure that Facebook is used wisely, and in the end, people will come to see a real difference," assured Zuckerberg confidently.


Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

FACEBOOK MAKES CHANGES

TO KEEP THE CONFIDENCE OF ITS INTERNET


Facebook hit the headlines with the Cambridge Analytica case, which reminded many of the extent of online monitoring by the social network, for advertising purposes and more! The social network has been accused of allowing a private British communications company to use data from 50 million social network users for political purposes without having obtained their explicit consent !!

Facebook has more than 2 billion users worldwide. In France, no less than 34 million people connect to it at least once a month. Facebook and its application gallery (WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger) certainly facilitates communication with our loved ones, sharing photos of our holidays ... but also uses our personal data to be able to maltreat them.

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, reminded loudly that new technologies. "Many of us accept that our data is collected for free services, but we do not know a trick," he wrote.

"We lock them in silos away from our eyes, and we lose the potential benefits of direct control over our own personal information . " A truth good to remember.

Users to compel the company that has achieved nearly 40 billion in revenue in 2017, thanks to their personal information to better protect their data.

Besides, Zuckerberg must explain this data leak in London.

And on Monday, the US Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it will review the group's private data practices. The boss of Facebook must therefore appear before the Congress for an audition in the coming weeks.

Faced with the slingshot of Internet users through the campaign #DeleteFacebook force is to react to not lose the trust of the latter.

While we promise Facebook to better protect personal data?

Facebook will allow you to erase your data more easily

In the grip of an unprecedented scandal, the social network announced Wednesday, March 28, new measures to allow Internet users to better control their personal data.

The company announced in a statement its intention to offer "a simplified and maximum control of their privacy settings" to its members.

All settings in the same space on mobile

The first step is to centralize the privacy settings of the mobile application in a single interface while until now the settings for advertising preferences, privacy or security were scattered over twenty different screens . The grouping will be done in the same space entitled "Shortcuts of confidentiality" . This will facilitate the control and visibility respectively of their personal data and their publications.

Tools to more easily delete data

The management of the tracks left by users on the platform will also be simplified by allowing its members to access all their publications faster (comment, like, photo or status). By grouping in one place all this information the user will have the possibility of the latter

The speaker connected to voice assistance, able to collect many personal information in the heart of the home of its owners for later ....


Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

FAILURES OF SAFETY IN

AMD PROCESSORS

 

The specialists identified thirteen problems in the AMD components that are the processors that equip businesses, individuals, burnouts, whether they are professionals or consumer devices.

One of the largest computer security companies would have even claimed that some microprocessors of the American AMD had major security breaches, while the industry is still struggling with the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

"A security audit of CTS Labs revealed several important security vulnerabilities (...) in AMD's latest processors, (called models) EPYC, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro and Ryzen Mobile"

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) reported

"To be reviewing this study, which we have just received, to understand the methodology and relevance"

By allowing hackers to penetrate the systems, they will be able to "expose AMD's customers to industrial espionage," notes CTS.

CTS Labs claims that the Ryzen model, manufactured by the Taiwanese ASMedia, contains "back doors" inserted by the manufacturer that can be used by hackers.

These "back doors" are secret access routes to a computer system sometimes inserted voluntarily to facilitate remote intervention on the systems.

"Networks with computers (with components) AMD present a considerable risk , " says CTS, noting that the flaws survive the restart of computers and the reinstallation of operating systems.

This, CTS insists, makes possible "a permanent and virtually undetectable spying, buried deep in the system".

After the discovery of major flaws called Spectrum and Meltdown, affecting microprocessors and chips that run the electronic and computer systems of Intel, ARM and AMD the entire technology sector is worried and embarked on the development and the security patching to mitigate risks.

The firm EnSilo, also specialized in computer security, even considered that the revealed faults were undoubtedly worse than Specter and Meltdown, notably because of their resistance to resettlement.

AMD indicates that it makes every effort to solve the problems as soon as possible !!

Luc T. for DayNewsWorld

FACEBOOK IN THE COLLIMATOR

DATA LEAKAGE FOR THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

This is not the first time that Facebook has been in the spotlight. The social network, which has more than 2 billion users worldwide, is currently facing one of the worst crises in its history.

Indeed Cambridge Analytica is a data analysis company for electoral purposes and worked on the digital strategy of the candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 US elections.

According to The Guardian, the company was led by Steve Bannon, a close adviser to Donald Trump before he was ousted from the White House in the summer of 2017.

And the billionaire Robert Mercer, ultra conservative and important donor of the Republican Party, would have financed Cambridge Analytica up to 15 million dollars.

The company reportedly collected private data from nearly 50 million Facebook users without their consent. The data collected would have made it possible to develop a software capable of predicting and influencing the vote of the voters. It was to provide Steve Bannon, director of the Donald Trump campaign, with software tools able to identify potential supporters of the campaign. Republican candidate, and target them precisely through online election advertisements, report the American daily The New York Times and British The Guardian. Donald Trump's campaign also reportedly used the data to simulate voter turnout or identify areas where Trump's travel would be most effective.

This company maintains links with the American Republican Party and claims to have information on more than 230 million American voters ...

This case was revealed by a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, in the columns of the Guardian and the New York Times.

Since then, political reactions have raged to ask Facebook for more details on how personal data of voters could be used for electoral purposes. Several members of Congress expressed concern about a possible violation of privacy. On Monday, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden wrote to Facebook's founder asking for details about sharing social network users' data with third parties.

Britain's private data protection regulator on Tuesday called for permission to search Cambridge Analytica's offices for illegally acquiring data from Facebook users.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is now called to appear before a parliamentary committee. Parliamentarians want an answer from Mark Zuckerberg by Monday. "We are asking for a mandate so that, as a regulator, we can search the servers, perform a data check , " BBC Radio 4 Elizabeth Denham, head of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) told BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday. ), an independent authority responsible for regulating the sector and protecting personal data.

Facebook has announced that it has "suspended" its activities with Cambridge Analytica.

This new business is tarnishing the image of Facebook.


Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

AMAZON GO FIRST SUPERMARKET WITHOUT BOX

The first supermarket without boxes finally opens to the public

A one-year test for the company's employees alone was enough to open the first Amazon Go store for everyone in the city of Seattle.

Buy a bottle of water, for example, take only one minute watch in hand.

It is located on the ground floor of Amazon's new headquarters on Seventh Avenue in Seattle, Washington.

Although the opening was planned almost a year ago but Amazon has applied to retail its usual method, certainly far removed from the practices of distributors: put on the market in beta or, in this case, in private beta, a "minimum viable product " and proceed by iterations to improve it in contact with reality.

A paragon of a test and learn without taboos that has always succeeded, Amazon has not hesitated to postpone for several months the opening to the public, the time to develop its technology "Just Walk Out" .

After one-click shopping, drone delivery or the order button, this is the first physical store without a queue or cash register.

The Inteon Recode, the store looks like a classic 7-Eleven, a supermarket very common in the United States.

There are salads, sandwiches, drinks or some prepared dishes. The only difference: simple gantries that replace the boxes at the exit of the store

The operation is simple. You enter, take the item of your choice and come out. All without going to checkout or having to steal the product.

But for such a "miracle" to come true you get the app Amazon Go that you have previously loaded and you will be able to beep to access the first physical supermarket of the famous online merchant. Hundreds of cameras, painted in matte black to blend in with the ceiling, and sensors on the shelves will have seen the products seized and added to the virtual basket of the customer's app that, when going back through the porticoes, will be charged and debited , way "zero click".

"Five years ago we wondered if we could create (...) a store where customers could simply take what they want and pay, we've created the most advanced purchasing technology in the world so that you never have to queue again, " Amazon proudly explained on his site.

This opening to the public is to be seen as extending the test to a more varied sample of users and not as the beginning of a deployment.

It seems that this technology works only on a small assortment and is not developed for a hyper of tens of thousands of references currently;

Indeed, only products of fixed size and weight are marketed. No fruit or vegetable in sight, the sandwiches are in plastic trays, and each product exists only in a format and price. The computational power required to interpret the sensor data and the filmed images is probably already significant.




Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

MASSIVE PIRACY AT UBER OR THE SILENCE OF HACKERS PURCHASED

The data of 57 million users, customers or drivers, were hacked in 2016, the company announced.

"None of this should have happened, and I will not look for excuses." On Tuesday, November 21, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi revealed that data from 57 million users around the world had been hacked in 2016.

These are the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million Uber users that have been stolen by hackers . Among them, 600,000 American drivers, whose driver's license numbers are also included in the stolen data.

On the other hand, Uber asserts that no banking information has been leaked, nor are birth dates, travel histories, or social security numbers (important in the United States).

The management says it has found "no evidence of fraud or fraudulent use related to this incident", and "monitors the affected accounts".

At the moment, there is no information on the nationalities of the affected users.

But according to Uber, these data have not been exploited, sold or published online ... especially since Dara Khosrowshahi explains that she "identified the individuals" responsible for the piracy and "obtained the assurance that the pirated data had been destroyed. ".

And the Bloomberg chain, to reveal the bottom of the case . The US media claims that Uber paid a ransom of 100,000 dollars (85,000 euros) to hackers in exchange for the removal of these data and their silence!

For Uber users would not have to take any specific steps related to this hacking. However, it is still better to "regularly check their bank accounts and Uber" , to ensure that there is no abnormal activity. The American drivers concerned will be warned individually.

According to Bloomberg, the two hackers had access to files used by Uber engineers and stored on GitHub - a major online platform used by developers around the world to share their work.

According to US laws companies are obliged to inform their users and the authorities, in case of leakage of sensitive information. However, Uber waited more than a year before revealing this piracy.

The New York public prosecutor and the British data protection authority have opened investigations. Uber's announcement "raises serious concerns about how it protects its data and its ethics," the British authority said in a statement. "Deliberately hiding security loopholes in the eyes of regulators and citizens may require larger fines for businesses. "

However, some experts say hackers who have names, e-mails and phone numbers can mount phishing campaigns by creating fake emails from Uber, which invite victims to "confirm" their contact details. We are in fact more or less doomed to trust applications. We must therefore avoid giving our contact information to those we do not use and / or who do not inspire confidence. At the very least, use an alternative email address for this kind of service, different from the main address.

Let's not forget that cyberattacks are a new form of economic warfare !! Massive hackers of corporate data are proliferating in the United States. But most of the companies involved choose to inform their users to change their passwords and notify the authorities.

The biggest cyberattack in history touched in 2013 Yahoo! with 3 billion user accounts affected. Revealed in December 2016, the scale of piracy, initially estimated at 1 billion accounts, was revised upwards last month. But it did not concern passwords or bank details, assured the American group.

What risk Uber? Fines , no doubt, especially since there is obviously concealment. To Donald Trump's team could be more conciliatory than the previous administration would have been.

And in Europe, the General Regulation for Data Protection (GDPR) is expected in May, which will expose companies that have lost personal data to fines of up to 4% of their turnover. That's about 260 million dollars in the case of Uber.

However, the reputation of Uber already tarnished by several scandals (use of software to make his cars invisible to the eyes of the police) can not get out of it.

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

CONSUMER ELECTRONIC SHOW

FRENCH START-UP AND CONNECTED HOUSE

A few weeks before the Consumer Electronic Show CES, the high-mass high-tech companies in Las Vegas, which will be held from January 9 to 12, several start-ups presented their innovations at the Palais Brongniart.

Many are still confined to the connected objects sector, the largest high-tech fair in the world. 5,000 French people went to the 2017 edition, and more than 250 companies showed their innovations (including 200 start-ups), three times more than four years ago.

And this year, no doubt, the French are banking on the connected home. On the occasion of the big show in Las Vegas, start-ups will present their latest innovations, sometimes just marketed.

This time again, the French elegance should play security by carrying projects around connected objects for the home or health .

A segment on which emerged a real "French Touch." This is a real glimpse of the house of tomorrow.

This will be the case, for example, of Eric Denoyer, former CEO of Numericable and SFR, who came to unveil the objects designed by his start-up, Otodo.

At this little game, the technology of Otodo is particularly interesting.

The start-up has developed a small box to connect to its Internet box, as a hub, able to control connected objects, such as bulbs, but also objects that are simply radio controlled.

If someone uses shutters or a gate for example, the small case of Otodo will be able to manage them.

Ween has developed a location system on the smartphones of its users : according to its location, if it approaches or moves away from its home, Ween activates or not the heating, shutters, etc.

She has developed a smart thermostat, already unveiled at CES in Las Vegas. But this tool incorporates an unexpected feature, managing the location of users.

However, no question of going to buy the system of Ween, or that of Otodo. Both start-ups sell their solutions directly to home builders or operators.

To enter the connected home of tomorrow, the start-up Ween has retained the same mode of distribution, selling its solution directly to operators and home builders

Other French manufacturers, such as Legrand, Somfy and Valeo , are joined by newcomers: the automotive supplier Faurecia (which was exhibiting in Detroit earlier), or Navya , the manufacturer of autonomous shuttles.

We do not yet know if Renault, L'Oréal, Pernod Ricard and other CAC 40 companies will present new products and services at CES 2018 as they have been able to do.

They will be able to exhibit in new thematic sections of the show, dedicated to smart city, sports and artificial intelligence.

The CES 2018 will take place from January 9 to 12 in Las Vegas. 170,000 visitors from around the world will discover the innovations of nearly 4,000 exhibitors

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

CONDEMNATION OF THE HERITIER

DE SAMSUNG M.LEE

FIVE YEARS OF PRISON

In a context of economic and social frustrations , the protesters demanded and obtained Ms. Park's departure.

Ms. Parka's successor , Moon Jae-In promised to eradicate corruption between political and economic powers.

Samsung, which weighs one-fifth of GDP, is by far the first of these chaebol-s Korean conglomerates- of the fourth economy in Asia, which have always maintained unhealthy links with political power.

That is why Mr. Lee, 49, was found guilty of corruption, abuse of social good, perjury and sentenced to five years in prison in connection with payments to Park's shadow confidante, Choi Soon- Sil.

For the South Korean justice the heir to the empire Samsung paid a total of 8.9 million won (6.6 million euros) for the support of the government during the generational handover at the top of the group following his father's heart attack in 2014.

"He offered bribes in response to the insistent demands of the president," the court said despite the denials of the accused. Regarding another 22 million won to foundations controlled by Ms. Choi, it was relaxed to the extent that the judges felt that Samsung had been obliged to obey the wishes of the presidency.

Two other senior executives were also sentenced.

Mr. Lee's advice will appeal the decision.

Boby Dean for DayNewsWorld

WORLD CYBERWATCH

«WITHOUT PREVIOUS» according to EUROPOL

"The recent attack is unprecedented and will require a complex international investigation to identify the perpetrators," said the European Police Office Europol "whose European Cybercrime Center (EC3)" is working with cybercrime units Of affected countries.

During the night, the list of victims of the global cyber attack detected Friday by the American and British authorities has massively extended:

About 100 countries have been hit by a global cyber attack.

On Saturday morning, there were about a hundred countries targeted by hackers and many companies or public services acknowledged being hit or attacked. In the UK, about forty hospitals saw a demand for ransom appear on their screens.

Prime Minister Theresa May said in the early evening on SkyNews that

"This is not the NHS, it is an international attack and several countries and organizations have been affected."

In France Renault had to stop the production of certain sites. The Sunderland plant in the Japanese manufacturer Nissan, a Renault partner, was also hit, a Nissan spokesman confirmed.

Public organizations and companies have been affected in the United States. The FedEx package giant has admitted to being infected. And in the United Kingdom, but also in Spain, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, China, Ukraine and Taiwan. Telefonica in Spain but also the German railways, the Deutsche Bahn, said they were the target of its attacks.


"About 1,000 computers from the Russian Interior Ministry have been affected by a massive cyb er attack," a spokesman for the ministry told Interfax on the evening of 12 May. The Russian banking system has been affected.

A spokeswoman for the ministry, Irina Volk, told agencies that the virus was attacking Windows-based PCs.

"The virus has been located and the technical operations are underway to destroy it and to revive anti-virus programs," she said.

The list of affected countries is particularly long and there is little doubt among experts:

For them all incidents are linked.

And this is all the more so because in many cases, the same messages, containing a ransom demand of 300 dollars payable in bitcoins appeared on the screens of the victims.

"We have seen more than 75,000 attacks in 99 countries,

"Said Jakub Kroustek of Avast IT security company on his blog. Another computer security company mentioned "a major campaign to spread infected emails", with some 5 million emails sent every hour spreading the malware called WCry

, WannaCry, WanaCrypt0r, WannaCrypt or Wana Decrypt0r.

How did the hackers proceed?

A ransom software exploited a flaw in Windows systems, leaked into pirated documents from the US security agency NSA.

This flaw in Windows had been discovered by the American intelligence services (NSA).

The pirates apparently exploited it.

Edward Snowden took the opportunity to give a new lesson to his former employer.

"If the NSA had privately discussed this flaw used to attack hospitals when they" discovered "it, rather than when it was stolen from them, it could have been avoided," says Edward on Twitter Snowden, the former cons

ultant to the US security agency who had unveiled the extent of surveillance of the NSA in 2013.

The virus, which exploits a flaw in the Windows operating system, encrypts the data and demands a ransom against the decoding key. The software used by hackers locks users' files and forces them to pay a sum of money in form Bitcoins to recover its use.

A practice, called "ransomwares" becoming more and more common.

"This ransom software can spread without anyone opening an email or clicking on a link. Unlike normal viruses, this virus spreads directly from computer to computer on local servers, rather than by email, "said Lance Cottrell, scientific director of the US technology group Ntrepid.

The social networks shared images with NHS computer screens requesting the payment of 300 dollars in bitcoins with the mention:

Oops, your files were encrypted."

The payment must occur within three days, or the price double, and if the money is not paid within seven days the pirated files will be erased, the message clarifies.

"Individuals and organizations are encouraged not to pay the ransom as this does not guarantee that access to the data will be restored," the US Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Soon after this flaw was made public, Microsoft released a fix to prevent attacks, but a plethora of systems were obviously not updated by their users. The pirates took advantage of this by writing their ransom request - which appears on the victims' screen and blocks it - in 17 languages.

Few users have used the patch released in the spring by Microsoft.

And to the US computer giant to publish Friday a long note to explain how to protect more specifically attacks related to WannaCrypt. He highlighted in particular the provision of an update of Windows Defender, the home system against malware..

Paul Emison for DayNewsWorld

 

Limite de caractères dépassée
5000/5000
Limite de caractères (5000) dépassée de 838 :
», a écrit le ministère américain de la Sécurité intérieure dans un communiqué. Peu après que cette faille a été rendue publique, Microsoft a publié une correction afin que soient évitées les attaques, mais une pléiade de systèmes n'ont visiblement pas été mis à jour par leurs utilisateurs. Les pirates en ont profité en rédigeant leur demande de rançon -celle qui apparaît sur l'écran des victimes et le bloque- en 17 langues. Peu d'utilisateurs ont donc utilisé le correctif publié au printemps par Microsoft. Et au géant informatique américain de publier dès vendredi une longue note destinée à expliquer comment se protéger plus particulièrement des attaques liées à WannaCrypt. Y soulignant notamment la mise à disposition d'une mise à jour de Windows Defender, le système maison de protection contre les logiciels malveillants.
WORLD CYBERWATCH
«WITHOUT PREVIOUS» according to EUROPOL
"The recent attack is unprecedented and will require a complex international investigation to identify the perpetrators," said the European Police Office Europol "whose European Cybercrime Center (EC3)" is working with cybercrime units Of affected countries.

During the night, the list of victims of the global cyber attack detected Friday by the American and British authorities has massively extended:
About 100 countries have been hit by a global cyber attack.
On Saturday morning, there were about a hundred countries targeted by hackers and many companies or public services acknowledged being hit or attacked. In the UK, about forty hospitals saw a demand for ransom appear on their screens.
Prime Minister Theresa May said in the early evening on SkyNews that
"This is not the NHS, it is an international attack and several countries and organizations have been affected."
In France Renault had to stop the production of certain sites. The Sunderland plant in the Japanese manufacturer Nissan, a Renault partner, was also hit, a Nissan spokesman confirmed.
Public organizations and companies have been affected in the United States. The FedEx package giant has admitted to being infected. And in the United Kingdom, but also in Spain, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, China, Ukraine and Taiwan. Telefonica in Spain but also the German railways, the Deutsche Bahn, said they were the target of its attacks.
"About 1,000 computers from the Russian Interior Ministry have been affected by a massive cyber attack," a spokesman for the ministry told Interfax on the evening of 12 May. The Russian banking system has been affected.
A spokeswoman for the ministry, Irina Volk, told agencies that the virus was attacking Windows-based PCs.
"The virus has been located and the technical operations are underway to destroy it and to revive anti-virus programs," she said.
The list of affected countries is particularly long and there is little doubt among experts:
For them all incidents are linked.
And this is all the more so because in many cases, the same messages, containing a ransom demand of 300 dollars payable in bitcoins appeared on the screens of the victims.
"We have seen more than 75,000 attacks in 99 countries,
"Said Jakub Kroustek of Avast IT security company on his blog. Another computer security company mentioned "a major campaign to spread infected emails", with some 5 million emails sent every hour spreading the malware called WCry, WannaCry, WanaCrypt0r, WannaCrypt or Wana Decrypt0r.
How did the hackers proceed?
A ransom software exploited a flaw in Windows systems, leaked into pirated documents from the US security agency NSA.
This flaw in Windows had been discovered by the American intelligence services (NSA).
The pirates apparently exploited it.
Edward Snowden took the opportunity to give a new lesson to his former employer.
"If the NSA had privately discussed this flaw used to attack hospitals when they" discovered "it, rather than when it was stolen from them, it could have been avoided," says Edward on Twitter Snowden, the former consultant to the US security agency who had unveiled the extent of surveillance of the NSA in 2013.
The virus, which exploits a flaw in the Windows operating system, encrypts the data and demands a ransom against the decoding key. The software used by hackers locks users' files and forces them to pay a sum of money in form Bitcoins to recover its use.
A practice, called "ransomwares" becoming more and more common.

"This ransom software can spread without anyone opening an email or clicking on a link. Unlike normal viruses, this virus spreads directly from computer to computer on local servers, rather than by email, "said Lance Cottrell, scientific director of the US technology group Ntrepid.
The social networks shared images with NHS computer screens requesting the payment of 300 dollars in bitcoins with the mention:
"Oops, your files were encrypted."
The payment must occur within three days, or the price double, and if the money is not paid within seven days the pirated files will be erased, the message clarifies.
"Individuals and organizations are encouraged not to pay the ransom as this does not guarantee that access to the data will be restored

THE APPLE PARK IMAGINE BY STEVE JOBS

"For Steve, the California landscape, its light and immensity, was a source of excitement and inspiration. It was in this context that he liked to think. Apple Park captures this spirit particularly well, "said Laurene Powell Jobs, who was the wife of Steve Jobspple Park

The complex, titanic, was the last big project of the late Steve Jobs. .

Apple Park is the largest project of the company in recent times, but also the last major project launched by Steve Jobs, more than ten years ago. In June 2011 the construction of this campus was strongly defended by the co-founder of Apple before the city council of the city where he had established in 1977 .

This groundbreaking Apple brand campus will open next April, according to the US firm. In total, more than 12,000 people will take possession of the premises over a six-month period.

At the start of the project in 2013, its cost was estimated at $ 5 billion.

The future headquarters of Apple will be located in a huge green space spanning 70 hectares . Designed by Steve Jobs and designed in collaboration with the British architecture firm "Foster and Partners" this building of 260,000 square meters takes the form of a ring

It is "entirely covered with the largest curved glass panels in the world," says Apple. Powered entirely by renewable energies, it will require "neither heating nor air conditioning nine months out of twelve". In the center of this ring will be a huge green space for employees to enjoy more than three kilometers of walking and walking trails.

There will even be an orchard, meadows and a pond.

Green fields planted with more than 9,000 native drought-resistant trees will replace asphalt and concrete.

This circular building has been designed to encourage the collaboration of Apple employees.

It should include workspaces and research and development laboratories.

This "spacecraft" as Jobs called it will be the showcase of choice to bring future engineers and employees to the brand.

But this revolutionary campus was also conceived as a full attraction.

It will include a welcome area for visitors, and an Apple Store and a café.

Its amphitheater, with a capacity of 1000 people, will accommodate future conferences and presentation of the brand's products.

It was named "Steve Jobs Theater" .Perched at the top of a hill and offering views of the meadows and the main building this auditorium, flagship project of Steve Jobs is expected to open before the end of 2017.

Its very design entrance will have the shape of a glass cylinder with a height of more than six meters and a diameter of 50 meters.

She will be wearing a metal carbon fiber roof.

Tim Cook pays tribute to Steve Jobs.

"Steve's vision for Apple extended well beyond the time he spent with us. He wanted Apple Park to be a hotbed of innovation for generations to come "

Paul Emison pour DayNewsWorld

THE MESSAGE OF THE FOUNDER FACEBOOK

MARK ZUCKERBERG

"BUILDING A GLOBAL COMMUNITY"

"Our greatest opportunities are now global, such as spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.Our biggest problems also need global responses, such as ending to terrorism, fight against climate change and prevent pandemics ".

In a manifesto published on his personal profile, Mark Zuckerberg details his new ambitions for the future of Facebook and the big challenges for the next ten years. It responds to the rise of criticism against its society, accused of contributing to misinformation and violence online. He also gave interviews to several media outlets such as Buzzfeed or the New York Times, while Facebook press teams prepared all the necessary tools for journalists to handle the subject.

The entrepreneur acknowledges his mistakes while apologizing. He is aware of the different challenges the world is currently facing. His speech highlights five priority actions: self-help communities, security, information, civic engagement and cultural inclusion. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg therefore gives the social network a mission to "bring humanity together." It is also a long manifesto anti-isolationism and pro-globalization.

This is why the leader thinks that Facebook must have a mission other than that of simple vector of social link in society: "The best thing we can do with Facebook is to develop a social infrastructure to give the opportunity to people to build a global community that works for all of us. The formation of groups would constitute the links of this "global community. And currently, according to him, more than 100 million Facebook users have joined "very significant" groups. »» Which allows the latter to exchange with peers at some point in their lives. For Facebook it is important to further promote these groups.

The commitment to safety comes by IA for Mark Zuckerberg evoking the success of Facebook with its Safety Check feature. Indeed this feature is active during disasters and allows to quickly notify his friends that we are safe.It is his ambition to further this option Safety Check, to allow to ask or propose the help and extend its reach over time, for example in conflict zones.

But Mark Zuckreberg also hopes to develop artificial intelligence capable of analyzing the billions of posts posted on Facebook to detect illegal or dangerous content. For him it is a matter of working hard so that AI can make the difference between the articles on terrorism and those of terrorist propaganda.

Thus Zuckerberg also intends to tackle the phenomenon of misinformation present on its platform He insists on the porosity of the boundaries between opinion, satire and lies and undertakes to diversify the sources of information offered to members.

And to bring other points of view - by integrating a work of verification of facts, without practicing censorship. To do this, Facebook intends to offer a greater diversity of opinions instead of censoring certain content. In September, Facebook was accused of censorship for suppressing a famous photo of the Vietnam War as it showed a naked girl burned with napalm. Zuckerberg acknowledges his mistakes: Facebook could - wrongly - "delete accounts and content that should have stayed online and maintain hateful content that should have been deleted". Mark Zuckerberg announces that in order for these problems not to happen again each user will be able to adapt his profile according to his sensitivity. The moderation settings will now be customizable according to its personal tolerance threshold or that of geographical areas. As far as nudity is concerned, there will now be differences of opinion between European countries and Asian or Middle Eastern countries.

The founder of Facebook also remains committed to connecting the entire planet so that people can become more involved in their society. The American entrepreneur puts globalization at the heart of his manifesto, crucial for the development of a company that has nearly 2 billion users worldwide. "When we started Facebook, the idea of ​​connecting the world was not controversial, "he told the New York Times. "Progress requires that humanity not come together around cities or nations, but rather with a global community," said the American without making explicit reference to the news, such as the arrival of Donald Trump with its will to fall back on America or Brexit.

Finally for Zuckerberg it is necessary to keep an inclusive community. For this new tools will be developed for the detection of content that does not respect its charter of use. Artificial intelligence technology could be part of the solution for better management of Facebook's daily content flow.

Why such statements?

Would Mark Zuckerberg have presidential ambitions?

The founder of the social network defends himself ... while wanting in 2017 to visit each US state by the end of the year.


Joanne Courbet for DayNewsWorld

 

SCANDALE WITH REBOUND: INCULAPATION OF THE PATRON OF SAMSUNG SOUTH KOREA

The scandal of this vast case of trading in influence has already led to the dismissal of South Korean President Park Geun-hye. December 9th.

He continues to make heads fall in Seoul. And not least. Samsung group heir Lee Jae-yong was formally charged on Tuesday (February 28th) with charges of bribery, embezzlement, concealment of assets abroad and perjury in the "Choigate" scandal.

Samsung is definitely in the dark after the recent failure of the Galaxy Note 7 explosive batteries ...

A first for South Korea : never a leader of South Korean conglomerate found himself behind bars. Mr. Lee is the Vice President of Samsung Electronics, the flagship of the group, the son of its president and the grandson of its founder.

This is a huge scandal with twists and turns that has shaken South Korea in recent months.

The omnipresent shadow of Choi Soon-Sil hovers over this sordid affair of corruption. A woman, Choi Soon-sil, daughter of the former president's guru and alleged heiress of her "shamanic" powers, reportedly took a very large ancestry on Park Geung-hye until she became her closest confidante. Once Park Geung-hye became president in 2012, Choi Soon, without an official position, follows her to the Blue House. But "Mrs. Choi would have formed a group, 'the eight fairies', bringing together eight women with exclusive access to the president," wrote Le Monde about it.

Choi Soon is therefore suspected of having minted privileged access to the presidency. Thus large industrial groups would have been obliged to pay nearly 70 million dollars (66 million euros) to foundations controlled by the "South Korean Rasputin" president. She was arrested on September 21, 2016.

What do we really blame the vice president of Samsung?

He is accused of having made donations to various organizations related to Choi Soon-Sil, including for example a "horse and money" as an aid to the equestrian career of the daughter of the latter. In all Samsung would have paid a million dollars estimated at 40 million (37 million).

Of course with a counterpart: Lee Jae-Yong's funds would actually have allowed the latter to obtain the support of the government in the restructuring of his company. Thus the controversial merger in 2015 of Samsung C & T and Cheil Industries could have the green light of the government. Fusion deemed "vital" to facilitate the process of succession at the head of the company while Lee Kun-hee, chairman of the group, was in a coma since a heart attack in May 2014.

Indicted with four other leaders, three of whom resigned on Tuesday,

Lee Jae-yong, de facto boss of Samsung after the heart attack of his father in 2014, will most likely be sent to court likely to be sentenced to a very heavy prison sentence. Mr. Lee, however, denies all charges against him.

Lobbying or corruption?

Anyway, the arrest of Lee Jae-yong creates a big void at the head of Samsung.

Other conglomerates could be targeted by the survey:

in the viewfinder of investigators from other groups like Hyundai Motor or the retail giant Lotte.

Joanne Courbet for DayNewsWorld

 

There are no translations available.

BLACK-OUT SUR LE SITE PIRATE

ZONE-TELECHARGEMENT.

Black-out sur le portail pirate français Zone Téléchargement et DLP.

Depuis la fermeture subite, lundi 28 novembre 2016, du site de téléchargement illégal Zone Téléchargement et DLP par la Gendarmerie la toile s'affole.

A l’origine de cette fermeture, une plainte est déposée en novembre 2014 par des membres de l’Association de lutte contre la piraterie audiovisuelle (Alpa) et de la Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (Sacem). Puis une enquête des gendarmes du Centre de lutte contre les criminalités numériques conduit aux administrateurs des sites.

Zone Téléchargement était classé par la plateforme de statistiques Alexa à la onzième place des sites les plus consultés de France, devant Twitter et DLP 29ème.

Pourquoi une telle popularité ?

Le succès s'explique en partie par l'offre du catalogue du site de téléchargement illégal de films, de jeux vidéo ou d'albums de musique : sa catégorie "films" proposait par exemple plus de 40 000 fichiers différents.

L'exhaustivité et l'exigence technique comme la proposition de fichiers en HD-Light faisaient que ces deux sites se démarquaient des autres sites du genre. Ce choix considérable était financé par ses nombreuses publicités intrusives.

« La pratique du téléchargement illégal est tellement entrée dans les mœurs que les utilisateurs de Zone Téléchargement n'avaient plus vraiment conscience de l'illégalité de leur comportement. »

analyse un spécialiste du numérique.

De plus l'offre légale "ne correspond pas à notre économie de l'impatience" : un film 4 mois en salle, puis seulement après il passe en vidéo.

Les criminalités numériques sont-elles sévèrement punies ?

Selon la gendarmerie nationale, le préjudice causé par Zone Téléchargement est estimé à 75 millions d'euros pour les ayants-droits.

Les risques encourus peuvent être élevés. Pour preuve la condamnation En septembre, a été condamné à 5 millions d’euros de dommages et intérêts et à un an de prison dont huit mois ferme pour la diffusion illégale à grande échelle de films et musiques.l’administrateur du site pirate Omgtorrent (2008- 2015)

Et quatre clients du site, identifiés grâce à l'adresse IP de leur ordinateur, ont aussi été condamnés à un mois de prison avec sursis chacun.

Les deux sites concernés permettaient à « un clan familial » de bien vivre. Ce business rapportait 1,5 million d’euros par an, grâce aux pubs affichés sur les deux sites .

Ces administrateurs risquent jusqu’à trois ans de prison et 300.000 euros d’amende pour contrefaçon. Si les charges de contrefaçon en bande organisée sont retenues, ces peines peuvent monter à 7 ans de prison et 750.000 euros d’amende.


Joanne Courbet pour DayNewsWorld.