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Apple's Smart Glasses Delayed, As Engineers Consider Privacy Concerns

2 weeks 3 days ago
Digital Trends reports: Apple could unveil its first smart glasses at WWDC in June 2027, followed by a consumer release toward the end of the year, according to Bloomberg... Part of the delay reportedly stems from Apple's engineering and marketing teams spending more time refining the product and deciding how to address the privacy concerns... Apple has reportedly considered glasses without cameras, as well as a version where the cameras can analyse the surroundings but cannot record photos or video. Such an approach could still support object recognition, navigation, Siri, calls, and music playback. The company is also expected to favor on-device processing, avoid facial recognition, keep recordings away from AI training, and use a more visible light around the camera.

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EditorDavid

Google's Anti-search-scraping Lawsuit Dismissed

2 weeks 3 days ago
A U.S. district court "has dismissed Google's case against SerpApi over that company's scraping of search results to train AI models," reports Computerworld. Google had claimed that it was protecting copyright holders — and that SerpApi's actions breached America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): [Google] made two claims: first, that no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title, and second that no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, or component protected by the Act. SerpApi claimed that the URLs and other links that were being served by Google did not in themselves entail copyright and the judge agreed. In her judgment, she said that there was no indication that the copyright holders had authorized Google to take action against SerpApi. The case is not completely over as the judge has given Google 21 days to amend its complaint to demonstrate that it was acting on behalf of the copyright owners. SerpApi's CEO reacted to the court's ruling as "a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We're pleased that the court rejected Google's attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet's founding principle — open access to usable information — is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data. SerpApi will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses that rely on access to public search information." Some analysis from Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber: I've come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google's search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I've come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It's all just scraping publicly accessible web pages. This December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind. In fact, Masnick wrote, Google "built its entire business on scraping the web without asking permission first. And now it wants to use one of the most abused provisions in copyright law to stop others from doing something functionally similar to what made Google a tech giant in the first place." Now Google is even getting heckled about the decision on social media. "If Google wants to refile the suit within the allowed 21 days, it has to admit that site owners have copyright protection of their work and THAT would open the door to them suing Google for scraping their content for AI Overviews."

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EditorDavid

Wildfires, Evacuations, and Smoke Hit Europe and North America

2 weeks 3 days ago
270,000 people have been displaced by wildfires in France and Spain, reports the Guardian. A wildfire even forced evacuations in Scotland. And wildfires "have now scorched four million acres of land in the U.S.," reports NPR, as tens of millions of people in North America "are continuing to endure hazardous smoke from out of control wildfires burning across Canada and the Western U.S." At America's National Interagency Fire Center, NPR's wildfire correspondent says all of America's firefighting resources have now been deployed across the country. "So if we get another big fire, we're in trouble... International aid could be harder to come by if the situation in Southern Europe gets worse and firefighters are going to be needed there." Meanwhile Toronto was blanketed this week "with eye-watering, cough-inducing soot," writes a climate-change reporter for the Toronto Star newspaper, "briefly giving us the worst air quality in the world." But looking to the future after a wildfire that's 50% larger than any in Ontario's history (315,000 hectares or 778,331 acres), he had this to say about the eye-watering smoke. "It will be back." The article's headline warned of "Our smoke-filled future" and how Canada "must prepare for bigger wildfires, every summer — forever." Even if global carbon emissions were cut dramatically, so long as any greenhouse gases are being put into the atmosphere, climate scientists say the world will continue to get hotter. And as the temperature rises, the forests dry out and the wildfires will get bigger, stronger and more frequent. "It's not going to get better. It's going to get worse," said Edward Struzik, a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University and the author of Dark Days at Noon: the Future of Fire . "These fires aren't going away. Toronto is going to get smoke every summer...." The best solution would have been to dramatically cut emissions years ago. The harsh scientific reality is there's nothing we can do to stop wildfire smoke from blanketing cities for a few days every summer — and it's going to continue for decades to come. We're all going to need to buy air purifiers and masks and get used to it.... "The idea that we can thin our way through the boreal forest boggles the mind," [says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an independent non-profit research organization]. "There aren't enough people in Canada to do that." The boreal forest in Canada is an enormous and largely roadless expanse bigger than the entire European Union. In comparison, America's much smaller forests are criss-crossed by roads, making firefighter access much quicker and easier. And the nature of the forests is fundamentally different as well, said Hausfather, who wrote an article summarizing research on the subject. "Western U.S. forests have evolved for frequent low-level fires that burn out the undergrowth — usually every five to 30 years," he said. "Historically, before fire suppression, fires would burn through, and they wouldn't actually kill the trees. They'd just kill smaller trees and clear out the brush." "The boreal forest is a fundamentally different beast," he said. "It's an ecosystem designed to burn." With smaller, more densely packed trees, the boreal is wetter and colder and doesn't burn anywhere near as often — every 100 to 200 years on average, Hausfather said. But when fire does erupt, it's often much more intense, burning up into the canopy and levelling everything in its path... Clearing out the dead wood on the ground wouldn't prevent, or even slow, the canopy fires that sweep the boreal, said Hausfather.

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EditorDavid