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Yale Suspends Palestine Activist After AI Article Linked Her To Terrorism

3 months 2 weeks ago
Yale University has suspended a law scholar and pro-Palestinian activist after an AI-generated article from Jewish Onliner falsely linked her to a terrorist group. Gizmodo reports: Helyeh Doutaghi, the scholar at Yale Law School, told the New York Times that she is a "loud and proud" supporter of Palestinian rights. "I am not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of U.S. law." The article that led to her suspension was published in Jewish Onliner, a Substack that says it is "empowered by A.I. capabilities." The website does not publish the names of its authors out of fear of harassment. Ironically, Doutaghi and Yale were reportedly the subject of intense harassment after Jewish Onliner published the article linking Doutaghi to terrorism by citing appearances she made at events sponsored by Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group. [...] Jewish Onliner is vague about how it uses AI to produce its articles, but the technology is known for making lots of mistakes and hallucinating information that is not true. It is quite possible that Jewish Onliner relied on AI to source information it used to write the article. That could open it up to liability if it did not perform fact-checking and due diligence on its writing. Besides the fact that Doutaghi says she is not a member of Samidoun, she attended events it sponsored that support Palestinian causes, Yale Law School said the allegations against her reflect "potential unlawful conduct."

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As Chromecast Outage Drags On, Fix Could Be Days To Weeks Away

3 months 2 weeks ago
On March 9, older Chromecast and Chromecast Audio devices stopped working due to an expired device authentication certificate authority that made them untrusted by Google's apps. While unofficial apps like VLC continue to function, Google's fix will require either updating client apps to bypass the issue or replacing the expired certificates, a process that could take weeks; however, Google has since announced it is beginning a gradual rollout of a fix. The Register reports: Tom Hebb, a former Meta software engineer and Chromecast hacker, has published a detailed analysis of the issue and suggests a fix could take more than a month to prepare. He's also provided workarounds here for folks to try in the meantime. We spoke to Hebb, and he says the problem is this expired device authentication certificate authority. [...] The fix is not simple. It's either going to involve a bit of a hack with updated client apps to accept or workaround the situation, or somehow someone will need to replace all the key pairs shipped with the devices with ones that use a new valid certificate authority. And getting the new keys onto devices will be a pain as, for instance, some have been factory reset and can't be initialized by a Google application because the bundled cert is untrusted, meaning the client software needs to be updated anyway. Given that the product family has been discontinued, teams will need to be pulled together to address this blunder. And it does appear to be a blunder rather than planned or remotely triggered obsolescence; earlier Chromecasts have a longer certificate validity, of 20 years rather than 10. "Google will either need to put in over a month of effort to build and test a new Chromecast update to renew the expired certificates, or they will have to coordinate internally between what's left of the Chromecast team, the Android team, the Chrome team, the Google Home team, and iOS app developers to push out new releases, which almost always take several days to build and test," Hebb explained. "I expect them to do the latter. A server-side fix is not possible." So either a week or so to rush out app-side updates to tackle the problem, or much longer to fix the problem with replaced certs. Polish security researcher Maciej Mensfeld also believes the outage is most likely due to an expired device authentication certificate authority. He's proposed a workaround that has helped some users, at least. Hebb, meanwhile, warns more certificate authority expiry pain is looming, with the Chromecast Ultra and Google Home running out in March next year, and the Google Home Mini in January 2027.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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