Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a huge pillar upholding the internet as we know it. This piece of US legislation gives companies operating on the internet freedom to do things without worrying about how their users act. It allows them to make a comments section on a website without the fear of being sued for it, or in the case of this latest example, TikTok gets to host videos of kids doing the "Blackout Challenge" with no legal consequences - until now. The USA's Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit let loose that TikTok's algorithm is an "editorial judgement" because it decides what to show you, and becomes TikTok's own speech, not that of its users, so Section 230 doesn't apply. This is at odds with a number of cases involving Section 230 taken to court in the past, particularly a Supreme Court decision just last year.
A press release from the USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explains that their AI Safety Institute entered "agreements that enable formal collaboration on AI safety research, testing and evaluation with both Anthropic and OpenAI". NIST will receive "access to major new models from each company prior to and following their public release. The agreements will enable collaborative research on how to evaluate capabilities and safety risks, as well as methods to mitigate those risks". I don't know enough about AI development to say if this is good or bad, but NIST has a history of being a pretty fair government department, so I hope they apply the same rigor to their AI investigations. Will it make a practical difference considering other LLMs/AI like Google's, Meta's and the wide array of open source ones floating around?
A Silicon Valley bloke called Eron Wolf started FUTO in 2021 after getting pissed off with Big Tech and wanting to do something about it, as he feels "the free market nor the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement have been able to stop these trends, nor even arrest their rapid acceleration". FUTO pledges to "never sell out", "never abuse our customers" and "always be transparently devoted to making delightful software". What is FUTO doing? Funding and supporting software projects themselves. Immich - a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos - is probably the highest profile project FUTO supports, along with FUTO Keyboard - a good Android keyboard with privacy in mind. FUTO also managed to enlist YouTuber Louis Rossman to be their director of community outreach. It all sounds very promising, fingers crossed it doesn't go to shit.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
Apple Marketing ToolKit November 1996 (Sketch the Cow / Internet Archive)
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