Lifeboat Foundation

Earlier this month, Reddit published a Public Content Policy stating: Unfortunately, we see more and more commercial entities using unauthorized access or misusing authorized access to collect public data in bulk, including Reddit public content. Worse, these entities perceive they have no limitation on their usage of that data, and they do so with no regard for user rights or privacy, ignoring reasonable legal, safety, and user removal requests.

In its blog post on Thursday, Reddit said that deals like OpenAI’s are part of an open Internet. It added that part of being open means Reddit content needs to be accessible to those fostering human learning and researching ways to build community, belonging, and empowerment online.

Reddit has been vocal about its interest in pursuing data licensing deals as a core part of its business. Its building of AI partnerships sparks discourse around the use of user-generated content to fuel AI models without users being compensated and some potentially not considering that their social media posts would be used this way. OpenAI and Stack Overflow faced pushback earlier this month when integrating Stack Overflow content with ChatGPT. Some of Stack Overflow’s user community responded by sabotaging their own posts.

Experiments generate quantum entanglement over optical fibres across three real cities, marking progress towards networks that could have revolutionary applications.

The quest for perfect connectivity has taken a giant leap forward.

If you use the web for more than just browsing (that’s pretty much everyone), chances are you’ve had your fair share of “CAPTCHA rage,” the frustration stemming from trying to discern a marginally legible string of letters aimed at verifying that you are a human. CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” was introduced to the Internet a decade ago and has seen widespread adoption in various forms — whether using letters, sounds, math equations, or images — even as complaints about their use continue.

A large-scale Stanford study a few years ago concluded that “CAPTCHAs are often difficult for humans.” It has also been reported that around 1 in 5 visitors will leave a website rather than complete a CAPTCHA.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Will Defeat CAPTCHA — How Will We Prove We’re Human Then?” »

From a new AI challenger to Google search to an nearly indestructible robot hand, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

A quantum internet would essentially be unhackable. In the future, sensitive information—financial or national security data, for instance, as opposed to memes and cat pictures—would travel through such a network in parallel to a more traditional internet.

Of course, building and scaling systems for quantum communications is no easy task. Scientists have been steadily chipping away at the problem for years. A Harvard team recently took another noteworthy step in the right direction. In a paper published this week in Nature, the team says they’ve sent entangled photons between two quantum memory nodes 22 miles (35 kilometers) apart on existing fiber optic infrastructure under the busy streets of Boston.

“Showing that quantum network nodes can be entangled in the real-world environment of a very busy urban area is an important step toward practical networking between quantum computers,” Mikhail Lukin, who led the project and is a physics professor at Harvard, said in a press release.

Researchers aiming to create a secure quantum version of the internet need a device called a quantum repeater, which doesn’t yet exist — but now two teams say they are well on the way to building one.

By Alex Wilkins

In a first for communications, researchers in Sweden 3D printed silica glass micro-optics on the tips of optic fibers—surfaces as small as the cross section of a human hair. The advance could enable faster internet and improved connectivity, as well as innovations like smaller sensors and imaging systems.

It’s one thing to dream up a quantum internet that could send hacker-proof information around the world via photons superimposed in different quantum states. It’s quite another to physically show it’s possible.