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Daily Archives: January 12, 2025

Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database

Wired – [unpaywalled] Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal – One of the most important AI copyright legal battles just took a major turn : “Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models. The case, Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, was one of the earliest copyright lawsuits filed against a tech company over its AI training practices. Its outcome, along with those of dozens of similar cases working their way through courts in the United States, will determine whether technology companies can legally use creative works to train AI moving forward and could either entrench AI’s most powerful players or derail them. Vince Chhabria, a judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ordered both Meta and the plaintiffs on Wednesday to file full versions of a batch of documents after calling Meta’s approach to redacting them “preposterous,” adding that, for the most part, “there is not a single thing in those briefs that should be sealed.” Chhabria ruled that Meta was not pushing to redact the materials in order to protect its business interests but instead to “avoid negative publicity.” The documents were originally filed late last year remained publicly unavailable in unredacted form until now…”

Before these documents were made public, Meta previously disclosed in a research paper that it had trained its Llama large language model on portions of Books3, a dataset of around 196,000 books scraped from the internet. It had not previously publicly indicated, however, that it had torrented data directly from LibGen…”

NATO Phonetic Alphabet Converter

This tool converts letters and numbers into the NATO phonetic alphabet, which is used to clearly communicate spelling over radio, phone, or in any situation where clarity is crucial. For example, “BAT” becomes “Bravo Alpha Tango”. This helps avoid confusion between similar-sounding letters like ‘B’ and ‘P’ or ‘M’ and ‘N’.  Important: This is an… Continue Reading

Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

Scientific American [unpaywalled] – The Supreme Court majority’s recent decisions about homelessness, public health and regulatory power, among others, undermine the role of evidence, expertise and honesty in American democracy. “When the Supreme Court’s Ohio v. EPA decision blocked Environmental Protection Agency limits on Midwestern states polluting their downwind neighbors, a sad but telling coda… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 11, 2025

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 11, 202 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading

Wallace & Gromit Return

Beloved duo Wallace & Gromit returned to our screens at Christmas, 34 years after their first appearance, in their second feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl (Fanfare thread). Group blog (-slash-arts-magazine) It’s Nice That recently interviewed creator and director Nick Park, co-director Merlin Crossingham and supervising animator Will Becher about the plasticine pair’s legacy and creating… Continue Reading

FOIA Fellows as Freedom Fighters

Jack Wroldsen, FOIA Fellows as Freedom Fighters: An Independent and Privately Funded FOIA Commission of Rotating Professionals (Oct. 31, 2024). 108 Marquette L. Rev. (forthcoming 2025), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5043146 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5043146. “The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a hallmark of U.S. democracy, designed as an outsider element that foists transparency on a government… Continue Reading