Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The Dutch Data Protection Authority is fining Uber €825 million (around $966 million) — the second largest penalty issued so far under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, according to Reuters. The Dutch regulator was investigating complaints that Uber had deactivated driver accounts through an automated process without sufficient warning or human oversight. In a statement, deputy chair Monique Verdier said that the company had “committed serious infringements.” “A computer should not make decisions on its own that have [such] major consequences,” Verdier said. Uber, however, argued that most driver suspensions are brief, that no permanent deactivations take place without human…

Harvey has released Harvey Tenet, its first post-trained model, as a research preview as of today. Tenet is a Kimi K3 base post-trained with Fireworks through asynchronous reinforcement learning on long-horizon legal work. The training corpus combined synthetic data, publicly available legal data, and human expert data. Harvey states no customer data was used. Against the base K3 model, Tenet completes almost twice as many held-out tasks on Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB) and 20% more on LAB: Contracts, raising all-pass rate by 9 and 2 percentage points respectively. Harvey reports state-of-the-art on LAB: Contracts and second place on LAB.…

In brief Originality.ai flagged 1,272 of 2,034 religious books analyzed on Amazon, or 63%, as likely AI-written. Witchcraft had the highest rate at 78%, followed by Hinduism at 76% and Taoism at 74%. The study flagged 53% of fact-checkable claims in witchcraft books as potentially false. Nearly two-thirds of religious books sampled on Amazon were likely written by artificial intelligence, according to a new study of more than 2,000 recently published titles.In a report released Wednesday, AI detection firm Originality.ai flagged 1,272 of 2,034 books, or 63%, as likely AI-written across 14 religious and belief categories.Myriad: How many days will…

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have recreated the primordial state of matter believed to have filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, using collisions between atomic nuclei far smaller than scientists once thought possible. These microscopic versions of the early Universe could help researchers understand both the first moments of cosmic history and some of the deepest questions in nuclear physics. What was the Universe like before stars, planets, atoms, and the other familiar forms of matter existed? At CERN in Switzerland, physicists are trying to answer that question by reproducing some of the extreme conditions that existed…

More than 2,500 people have died in an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the fastest-spreading outbreak of the virus ever recorded, according to health officials.The outbreak, Congo’s 17th in recent decades, has tested the country’s resources. Aid cuts, including the closure last year of the U.S. Agency for International Development, have hampered the international response. Early surveillance and testing failed to identify the outbreak, and fighting in eastern Congo has displaced millions of people, making the virus even harder to trace.The Congolese health ministry said on Saturday that the death toll had reached 2,557, as health officials…

That has not stopped the pictures and videos from spreading online – along with unverified claims posted without evidence that the Cat in the Hat has been involved in violent assaults.”I low-key wanna go meet him…” says 14-year-old Lily, who heard that the Cat in the Hat had arranged a “meet and greet”, inviting local TikTok followers to come to the woods in Galashiels, a small town in the Scottish Borders.Her mother was horrified by the prospect.”You are not going to meet anyone in the woods in the middle of the night!” she told her.There is a point at which…

Donald Trump is facing a domestic backlash over the collapse of trade talks between the US and Canada, as the countries’ deteriorating relationship risks more financial pain for Americans ahead of midterm elections.US lawmakers, governors and business leaders warned that Washington’s new tariffs on Canadian goods would increase costs for American households and companies, while a Federal Reserve official said that protracted sparring between the trading partners could help keep inflation stubbornly high.Trump’s tariffs targeting $20bn worth of Canadian goods went into effect on Saturday on top of existing levies on steel, aluminium, lumber and vehicles, after talks between Washington…

Electrons travel across the bulb to a collector plate, which creates the output current. Now, it might seem like a silly way to do that. But if we add another wire (a grid) between the filament and the collector, we can control this output current. A negative voltage on the control will push the electrons back away from the collector to reduce the output current. Putting a positive voltage on the grid increases the flow of output current.So this is again a current switch, and just like the relay, it’s controlled by a different wire. But there are two big…

Bitari Inc., a Bitcoin mining host pursuing a planned Bitcoin mining IPO and Nasdaq listing, is asking public buyers to provide nearly all of the consideration shown in its prospectus table while receiving about 10% of the company after the deal.The company’s preliminary S-1 proposes selling 4,285,715 shares at an expected $7 each, producing $30,000,005 of gross proceeds. The table counts that payment as 99.8% of total consideration and gives the new investors 10% of the 43,085,715 shares expected to be outstanding after the base offering.The 99.8% figure compares consideration paid with shares owned rather than assigning enterprise value.Existing stockholders…

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have developed a technology that could make it possible for dentists to produce permanent 3D-printed zirconia restorations in a single day. Zirconia is considered the gold-standard material for permanent dental work because of its strength and durability. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers are now working toward commercializing the technology for use in crowns, bridges, veneers and other dental restorations. “We are excited to be advancing the commercialization of chair-side 3D-printed, all-ceramic zirconia permanent dental restorations,” said Dr. Majid Minary, professor of mechanical engineering in the Erik Jonsson…