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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened a probe into alleged organized efforts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries and the organization's responses. Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chair of the panel's subcommittee on cybersecurity, information technology, and government innovation, on Wednesday sent an information request on the matter to Maryana Iskander, chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia. The request, the lawmakers said in the letter (PDF), is part of an investigation into "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion." The panel is seeking documents and communications about Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated the platform's policies, as well as the Wikimedia Foundation's efforts to "thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics." "Multiple studies and reports have highlighted efforts to manipulate information on the Wikipedia platform for propaganda aimed at Western audiences," Comer and Mace wrote in the letter. They referenced a report from the Anti-Defamation League about anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia that detailed a coordinated campaign to manipulate content related to the Israel-Palestine conflict and similar issues, as well as an Atlantic Council report on pro-Russia actors using Wikipedia to push pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian messaging, which can influence how artificial intelligence chatbots are trained. "[The Wikimedia] foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia platform, has acknowledged taking actions responding to misconduct by volunteer editors who effectively create Wikipedia's encyclopedic articles. The Committee recognizes that virtually all web-based information platforms must contend with bad actors and their efforts to manipulate. Our inquiry seeks information to help our examination of how Wikipedia responds to such threats and how frequently it creates accountability when intentional, egregious, or highly suspicious patterns of conduct on topics of sensitive public interest are brought to attention," Comer and Mace wrote. The lawmakers requested information about "the tools and methods Wikipedia utilizes to identify and stop malicious conduct online that injects bias and undermines neutral points of view on its platform," including documents and records about possible coordination of state actors in editing, the kind of accounts that have been subject to review, and and of the panel's analysis of data manipulation or bias. "We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said.

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According to Eurostat, people aged 20 to 64 in the Netherlands clock up an average of just 32.1  hours a week in their main job - the shortest in the entire EU.

MATTHEW LAMBWELL IN NEW YORK: Jack Draper has withdrawn from the US Open after suffering a setback in the arm injury he has been managing since Wimbledon.

Every week, FEMAIL asks two singletons to report back from their blind date. This week, it was Karen and Jason's turn to wine and dine.

It's been one lawsuit after another as A-lister Kevin Spacey has battled to save his name, liberty and fortune since the sex scandal which engulfed him in 2017.

Bianca Mirica, 20, stole goods from some of the most expensive brands at the store as a member of a female organised crime gang. Now shocking footage of one of the raids has been posted on X.

Feature rolls out to Microsoft 365 Insiders, stashing unnamed files in OneDrive by default

Ever get that sinking feeling when Word crashes before you've made your first save? An application update is set to save the day by automatically enabling autosave to the cloud for new documents, before you've even given them a filename.…

As part of Reform's plans to tackle the small boats crisis, Nigel Farage has said he will negotiate deals with third countries - such as Rwanda - to send migrants abroad.

Tommy Robinson will not be charged over an alleged assault at St Pancras railway stations last month. 

TikTok creator Natasha Allen has tragically died at the age of 28 following a years-long fight with stage 4 synovial sarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 have discovered the key to getting large language model (LLM) chatbots to ignore their guardrails, and it's quite simple. You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out. The paper also offers a "logit-gap" analysis approach as a potential benchmark for protecting models against such attacks. "Our research introduces a critical concept: the refusal-affirmation logit gap," researchers Tung-Ling "Tony" Li and Hongliang Liu explained in a Unit 42 blog post. "This refers to the idea that the training process isn't actually eliminating the potential for a harmful response -- it's just making it less likely. There remains potential for an attacker to 'close the gap,' and uncover a harmful response after all."

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As we talked about a decade ago in the wake of launching The Next Platform, quantum computers – at least the fault tolerant ones being built by IBM, Google, Rigetti, and a few others – need a massive amount of traditional Von Neumann compute to help maintain their state, assist with qubit error correction, and assist with their computations. …

IBM And AMD Tag Team On Hybrid Classical-Quantum Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A CHARISTMATIC pop star made a short notice appearance in Colchester and residents have praised him for not forgetting his roots.

A CHARISTMATIC pop star made a short notice appearance in Colchester and residents have praised him for not forgetting his roots.

The Labour council leader said more families in Essex were at risk after the Bell Hotel in Epping was blocked from housing asylum seekers

Feature bloat, or added value for this JavaScript toolkit?

The Bun team has released version 1.2.21 of its JavaScript bundler and runtime, written in Zig, adding features including built-in drivers for MySQL and SQLite, a YAML parser, and a secrets manager for tools and local development.…

Two elementary school students, aged eight and 10, were murdered as they were sat in their pews during the Wednesday morning service at Annunciation Catholic Church.

Ryan Forey, 35, paid himself £300 a month and his wife £500 a month while he oversaw Citizen Church in Cardiff.

Stolen dev credentials posted to GitHub as attackers abuse CLI tools for recon

Nx is the latest target of a software supply chain attack in the NPM ecosystem, with multiple malicious versions being uploaded to the NPM registry on Tuesday evening.…

Over a coffee in a cafe, my husband Stephen suggested we give serious thought to swinging. At first I thought he was joking...