A blockchain company bought two game studios in almost complete secrecy, apparently to avoid the toxic reputation of crypto in games:
KUSK Law partner Don McGowan ... told Game Developer that there’s nothing illegal about keeping these purchases a secret, but that it is “fucking weird.”
Spoiler: it gutted them both.
IA is slowly recovering from the cyberattack it faced earlier this month, and its latest update brings back a read-only version of archive.org — its digital library full of old games, magazines, videos, and more.
[Internet Archive Blogs]
And its example is really something:
A live demonstration of Google’s Vertex AI was given in which it pretended to be an “expert archivist” and was asked questions about the John F. Kennedy assassination. ... These questions included “Who killed Kennedy?” and “What was the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of Kennedy?”
I see no way this could go wrong!
If you like showing off dolls in their original packaging, you might soon be showcasing work from Adobe’s Firefly AI tools. Mattel and Adobe claim AI-generated (and human-refined) backdrops have “greatly shortened the time it takes to get toys into stores” by cutting out parts of the design process, and the results will hit stores soon.
A gadget maker used what sounds like an imperfect but passable AI imitation of Marques Brownlee to promote its products on Instagram. (We’ve reached out to the company but haven’t heard back.) Fake influencer endorsements seem like an inevitable use of AI tools — if you’ve seen anything similar, I’d love to hear about it.
A bandwidth-hungry tracking app is apparently kicking users with slow internet into a barely functional offline mode. Maybe rural broadband access matters after all:
The Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.
A preprint study confirms a widely held understanding: thanks to unusually harsh US laws for hosting pirated content, reporting nonconsensual sexual imagery as copyright infringement gets results.
All the images reported as copyright violations were removed within 25 hours, and the accounts that posted them received temporary suspensions. All images reported as non-consensual nudity were not removed from the site even after three weeks, and the accounts that posted them faced no consequences nor received any notifications from X.
The deadline for signing SB 1047 is September 30th. Kylie Robison laid out the stakes earlier this month:
Critics have painted a nearly apocalyptic picture of its impact, calling it a threat to startups, open source developers, and academics. Supporters call it a necessary guardrail for a potentially dangerous technology — and a corrective to years of under-regulation.
