Despite many questions going unanswered, a startup called Rabbit sold out of its pocket AI companion a day after it was debuted at CES 2024 last week. Now, the company finally shared more details about which large language model (LLM) will be powering the device. According to Engadget, the provider in question is Perplexity, "a San Francisco-based startup with ambitions to overtake Google in the AI space." From the report: Perplexity will be providing up-to-date search results via Rabbit's $199 orange brick -- without the need of any subscription. That said, the first 100,000 R1 buyers will receive one year of Perplexity Pro subscription -- normally costing $200 -- for free. This advanced service adds file upload support, a daily quota of over 300 complex queries and the ability to switch to other AI models (GPT-4, Claude 2.1 or Gemini), though these don't necessarily apply to the R1's use case.

An anonymous reader shares a report: These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn't been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring. Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as "authentic," an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere "authentic" to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds. In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. "AirSpace" was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner's personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me -- who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram -- toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map. To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn't just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.

China's Huawei will not support Android apps on the latest iteration of its in-house Harmony operating system, domestic financial media Caixin reported, as the company looks to bolster its own software ecosystem. From a report: The company plans to roll out a developer version of its HarmonyOS Next platform in the second quarter of this year followed by a full commercial version in the fourth quarter, it said in a company statement highlighting the launch event for the platform in its home city of Shenzhen on Thursday.

Huawei first unveiled its proprietary Harmony system in 2019 and prepared to launch it on some smartphones a year later after U.S. restrictions cut its access to Google's technical support for its Android mobile OS. However, earlier versions of Harmony allowed apps built for Android to be used on the system, which will no longer be possible, according to Caixin.

According to StatCounter, Bing's market share grew less than 1% since launching Bing Chat (now known as Copilot) roughly a year ago. From a report: Bloomberg reported (paywalled) on the StatCounter data, saying, "But Microsoft's search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, up less than 1 percentage point since the ChatGPT announcement." Google still dominates the global search market with a 91.6% market share, followed by Bing's 3.4%, Yandex's 1.6% and Yahoo's 1.1%. "Other" search engines accounted for a total of just 2.2% of the global search market.

You can view the raw chart and data from StatCounter here.

Google announced today that it will invest $1 billion building a data center near London. Reuters reports: The data centre, located on a 33-acre (13-hectare) site bought by Google in 2020, will be located in the town of Waltham Cross, about 15 miles north of central London, the Alphabet-owned company said in a statement. The British government, which is pushing for investment by businesses to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like technology and artificial intelligence, described Google's investment as a "huge vote of confidence" in the UK.

"Google's $1 billion investment is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth," Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the Google statement. The investment follows Google's $1 billion purchase of a central London office building in 2022, close to Covent Garden, and another site in nearby King's Cross, where it is building a new office and where its AI company DeepMind is also based. In November, Microsoft announced plans to pump $3.2 billion into Britain over the next three years.

In a blog post today, Google announced that WebGPU is "now enabled by default in Chrome 121 on devices running Android 12 and greater powered by Qualcomm and ARM GPUs," with support for more Android devices rolling out gradually. Previously, the API was only available on Windows PCs that support Direct3D 12, macOS, and ChromeOS devices that support Vulkan.

Google says WebGPU "offers significant benefits such as greatly reduced JavaScript workload for the same graphics and more than three times improvements in machine learning model inferences." With lower-level access to a device's GPU, developers are able to enable richer and more complex visual content in web applications. This will be especially apparent with games, as you can see in this demo.

Next up: WebGPU for Chrome on Linux.

U.S. edutech platform Coursera added a new user every minute on average for its AI courses in 2023, CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said on Thursday, in a clear sign of people upskilling to tap a potential boom in generative AI. Reuters: The technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by a storm and sparked a race among companies to roll out their own versions of the viral chatbot. "I'd say the real hotspot is generative AI because it affects so many people," he told Reuters in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Coursera is looking to offer AI courses along with companies that are the frontrunners in the AI race, including OpenAI and Google's DeepMind, Maggioncalda said. Investors had earlier feared that apps based on generative AI might replace ed-tech firms, but on the contrary the technology has encouraged more people to upskill, benefiting companies such as Coursera. The company has more than 800 AI courses and saw more than 7.4 million enrollments last year. Every student on the platform gets access to a ChatGPT-like AI assistant called "Coach" that provides personalized tutoring.

OpenAI's stated mission is to create the artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google's AI efforts, has the same goal. Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is entering the race. From a report: While he doesn't have a timeline for when AGI will be reached, or even an exact definition for it, he wants to build it. At the same time, he's shaking things up by moving Meta's AI research group, FAIR, to the same part of the company as the team building generative AI products across Meta's apps. The goal is for Meta's AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its billions of users. "We've come to this view that, in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence," Zuckerberg tells me in an exclusive interview. "I think that's important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems."

[...] No one working on AI, including Zuckerberg, seems to have a clear definition for AGI or an idea of when it will arrive. "I don't have a one-sentence, pithy definition," he tells me. "You can quibble about if general intelligence is akin to human level intelligence, or is it like human-plus, or is it some far-future super intelligence. But to me, the important part is actually the breadth of it, which is that intelligence has all these different capabilities where you have to be able to reason and have intuition." He sees its eventual arrival as being a gradual process, rather than a single moment. "I'm not actually that sure that some specific threshold will feel that profound." As Zuckerberg explains it, Meta's new, broader focus on AGI was influenced by the release of Llama 2, its latest large language model, last year. The company didn't think that the ability for it to generate code made sense for how people would use a LLM in Meta's apps. But it's still an important skill to develop for building smarter AI, so Meta built it anyway. External research has pegged Meta's H100 shipments for 2023 at 150,000, a number that is tied only with Microsoft's shipments and at least three times larger than everyone else's. When its Nvidia A100s and other AI chips are accounted for, Meta will have a stockpile of almost 600,000 GPUs by the end of 2024, according to Zuckerberg.

Google News is sometimes boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content, 404 Media claims: From the report: Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News. The presence of AI-generated content on Google News signals two things: first, the black box nature of Google News, with entry into Google News' rankings in the first place an opaque, but apparently gameable, system. Second, is how Google may not be ready for moderating its News service in the age of consumer-access AI, where essentially anyone is able to churn out a mass of content with little to no regard for its quality or originality.
UPDATE: Engadget argues that "to find such stories required heavily manipulating the search results in Google News," noting that in the cited case, 404 Media's search parameters "are essentially set so that the original stories don't appear."

Engadget got this rebuke from Google. "Claiming that these sites were featured prominently in Google News is not accurate - the sites in question only appeared for artificially narrow queries, including queries that explicitly filtered out the date of an original article.

"We take the quality of our results extremely seriously and have clear policies against content created for the primary purpose of ranking well on News and we remove sites that violate it."

Engadget then wrote, "We apologize for overstating the issue and are including a slightly modified version of the original story that has been corrected for accuracy, and we've updated the headline to make it more accurate."

Google researchers say they have evidence that a notorious Russian-linked hacking group -- tracked as "Cold River" -- is evolving its tactics beyond phishing to target victims with data-stealing malware. From a report: Cold River, also known as "Callisto Group" and "Star Blizzard," is known for conducting long-running espionage campaigns against NATO countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Researchers believe the group's activities, which typically target high-profile individuals and organizations involved in international affairs and defense, suggest close ties to the Russian state. U.S. prosecutors in December indicted two Russian nationals linked to the group.

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said in new research this week that it has observed Cold River ramping up its activity in recent months and using new tactics capable of causing more disruption to its victims, predominantly targets in Ukraine and its NATO allies, academic institutions and non-government organizations. These latest findings come soon after Microsoft researchers reported that the Russia-aligned hacking group had improved its ability to evade detection. In research shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication on Thursday, TAG researchers say that Cold River has continued to shift beyond its usual tactic of phishing for credentials to delivering malware via campaigns using PDF documents as lures.

Google has laid off over a thousand employees across various departments since January 10th. CEO Sundar Pichai's message is to brace for more cuts. The Verge: "We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year," Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo that was shared with me. "The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices." So far, those "tough choices" have included layoffs and reorganizations in Google's hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams.

"These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year's reductions, and will not touch every team," Pichai wrote in his memo -- a reference to when Google cut 12,000 jobs this time last year. "But I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted." Pichai said the layoffs this year were about "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas." He confirmed what many inside Google have been fearing: that more "role eliminations" are to come. "Many of these changes are already announced, though to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted," he wrote.

When Microsoft announced it was baking ChatGPT into its Bing search engine last February, bullish analysts declared the move an "iPhone moment" that could upend the search market and chip away at Google's dominance. "The entire search category is now going through a sea change," Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said at the time. "That opportunity comes very few times." Almost a year later, the sea has yet to change. Bloomberg: The new Bing -- powered by OpenAI's generative AI technology -- dazzled internet users with conversational replies to queries asked in a natural way. But Microsoft's search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, up less than 1 percentage point since the ChatGPT announcement.

Bing has long struggled for relevance and attracted more mockery than recognition over the years as a serious alternative to Google. Multiple rebrandings and redesigns since its 2009 debut did little to boost Bing's popularity. A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier, according to SensorTower. The ChatGPT reboot at least helped reverse those declines. In the second quarter of 2023, US monthly active users more than doubled year over year to 3.1 million, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of SensorTower mobile app data. Overall, users were spending 84% more time on the search engine, the data show. By year-end, Bing's monthly active users had increased steadily to 4.4 million, according to SensorTower.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As more companies ramp up development of artificial intelligence systems, they are increasingly turning to graphics processing unit (GPU) chips for the computing power they need to run large language models (LLMs) and to crunch data quickly at massive scale. Between video game processing and AI, demand for GPUs has never been higher, and chipmakers are rushing to bolster supply. In new findings released today, though, researchers are highlighting a vulnerability in multiple brands and models of mainstream GPUs -- including Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD chips -- that could allow an attacker to steal large quantities of data from a GPU's memory. The silicon industry has spent years refining the security of central processing units, or CPUs, so they don't leak data in memory even when they are built to optimize for speed. However, since GPUs were designed for raw graphics processing power, they haven't been architected to the same degree with data privacy as a priority. As generative AI and other machine learning applications expand the uses of these chips, though, researchers from New York -- based security firm Trail of Bits say that vulnerabilities in GPUs are an increasingly urgent concern. "There is a broader security concern about these GPUs not being as secure as they should be and leaking a significant amount of data," Heidy Khlaaf, Trail of Bits' engineering director for AI and machine learning assurance, tells WIRED. "We're looking at anywhere from 5 megabytes to 180 megabytes. In the CPU world, even a bit is too much to reveal."

To exploit the vulnerability, which the researchers call LeftoverLocals, attackers would need to already have established some amount of operating system access on a target's device. Modern computers and servers are specifically designed to silo data so multiple users can share the same processing resources without being able to access each others' data. But a LeftoverLocals attack breaks down these walls. Exploiting the vulnerability would allow a hacker to exfiltrate data they shouldn't be able to access from the local memory of vulnerable GPUs, exposing whatever data happens to be there for the taking, which could include queries and responses generated by LLMs as well as the weights driving the response. In their proof of concept, as seen in the GIF below, the researchers demonstrate an attack where a target -- shown on the left -- asks the open source LLM Llama.cpp to provide details about WIRED magazine. Within seconds, the attacker's device -- shown on the right -- collects the majority of the response provided by the LLM by carrying out a LeftoverLocals attack on vulnerable GPU memory. The attack program the researchers created uses less than 10 lines of code. [...] Though exploiting the vulnerability would require some amount of existing access to targets' devices, the potential implications are significant given that it is common for highly motivated attackers to carry out hacks by chaining multiple vulnerabilities together. Furthermore, establishing "initial access" to a device is already necessary for many common types of digital attacks. The researchers did not find evidence that Nvidia, Intel, or Arm GPUs contain the LeftoverLocals vulnerability, but Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD all confirmed to WIRED that they are impacted. Here's what each of the affected companies had to say about the vulnerability, as reported by Wired:

Apple: An Apple spokesperson acknowledged LeftoverLocals and noted that the company shipped fixes with its latest M3 and A17 processors, which it unveiled at the end of 2023. This means that the vulnerability is seemingly still present in millions of existing iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks that depend on previous generations of Apple silicon. On January 10, the Trail of Bits researchers retested the vulnerability on a number of Apple devices. They found that Apple's M2 MacBook Air was still vulnerable, but the iPad Air 3rd generation A12 appeared to have been patched.
Qualcomm: A Qualcomm spokesperson told WIRED that the company is "in the process" of providing security updates to its customers, adding, "We encourage end users to apply security updates as they become available from their device makers." The Trail of Bits researchers say Qualcomm confirmed it has released firmware patches for the vulnerability.
AMD: AMD released a security advisory on Wednesday detailing its plans to offer fixes for LeftoverLocals. The protections will be "optional mitigations" released in March.
Google: For its part, Google says in a statement that it "is aware of this vulnerability impacting AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm GPUs. Google has released fixes for ChromeOS devices with impacted AMD and Qualcomm GPUs."

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, American journalist and author John R. MacArthur discusses the alarming decline in reading skills among American youth, highlighted by a Department of Education survey showing significant drops in text comprehension since 2019-2020, with the situation worsening since 2012. While remote learning during the pandemic and other factors like screen-based reading are blamed, a new study by Columbia University suggests that reading on paper is more effective for comprehension than reading on screens, a finding not yet widely adopted in digital-focused educational approaches. From the report: What if the principal culprit behind the fall of middle-school literacy is neither a virus, nor a union leader, nor "remote learning"? Until recently there has been no scientific answer to this urgent question, but a soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University's Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for "deeper reading" there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where "shallow reading was observed." [...] [Dr Karen Froud] and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: "We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices ... in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print."

I would go even further than Froud in delineating what's at stake. For more than a decade, social scientists, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. As Froud's team says in its article: "Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning" across the full range of social scientific literature. But the work of Mangen and others hasn't influenced local school boards, such as Houston's, which keep throwing out printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the "digital revolution," school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment when rigorous scientific research is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.

Indeed, for the tech boosters, Covid really wasn't all bad for public-school education: "As much as the pandemic was an awful time period," says Todd Winch, the Levittown, Long Island, school superintendent, "one silver lining was it pushed us forward to quickly add tech supports." Newsday enthusiastically reports: "Island schools are going all-in on high tech, with teachers saying they are using computer programs such as Google Classroom, I-Ready, and Canvas to deliver tests and assignments and to grade papers." Terrific, especially for Google, which was slated to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and which since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.

If only Winch and his colleagues had attended the Teachers College symposium that presented the Froud study last September. The star panelist was the nation's leading expert on reading and the brain, John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: "I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues," he told the New York audience. "How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? ... It's like people just say, "Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we'll make a bunch of money.' And that's OK; that's our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students ... It's all been product and not purpose." I'll only take issue with the notion that it's "OK" to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales -- before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Google DeepMind has created an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems. It's a significant step towards machines with more human-like reasoning skills, experts say. Geometry, and mathematics more broadly, have challenged AI researchers for some time. Compared with text-based AI models, there is significantly less training data for mathematics because it is symbol driven and domain specific, says Thang Wang, a coauthor of the research, which is published in Nature today. Solving mathematics problems requires logical reasoning, something that most current AI models aren't great at. This demand for reasoning is why mathematics serves as an important benchmark to gauge progress in AI intelligence, says Wang.

DeepMind's program, named AlphaGeometry, combines a language model with a type of AI called a symbolic engine, which uses symbols and logical rules to make deductions. Language models excel at recognizing patterns and predicting subsequent steps in a process. However, their reasoning lacks the rigor required for mathematical problem-solving. The symbolic engine, on the other hand, is based purely on formal logic and strict rules, which allows it to guide the language model toward rational decisions. These two approaches, responsible for creative thinking and logical reasoning respectively, work together to solve difficult mathematical problems. This closely mimics how humans work through geometry problems, combining their existing understanding with explorative experimentation.

DeepMind says it tested AlphaGeometry on 30 geometry problems at the same level of difficulty found at the International Mathematical Olympiad, a competition for top high school mathematics students. It completed 25 within the time limit. The previous state-of-the-art system, developed by the Chinese mathematician Wen-Tsun Wu in 1978, completed only 10. "This is a really impressive result," says Floris van Doorn, a mathematics professor at the University of Bonn, who was not involved in the research. "I expected this to still be multiple years away." DeepMind says this system demonstrates AI's ability to reason and discover new mathematical knowledge. "This is another example that reinforces how AI can help us advance science and better understand the underlying processes that determine how the world works," said Quoc V. Le, a scientist at Google DeepMind and one of the authors of the research, at a press conference.

Samsung announced its new flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone lineup today, with loads of new artificial intelligence features. CNBC reports: For Samsung's top-tier S24 Ultra, which is the company's biggest of the three devices and comes with punchier specs and features, Samsung is using a version of Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 3 optimized for Galaxy. The company is using a mix of Qualcomm systems-on-chips (SoCs) and its own Exynos chipset for its S24 and S24+ models. [...] The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is the main event for most tech gadget enthusiasts -- and, for the most part, it isn't a whole lot different to the Galaxy S23 Ultra looks-wise. That's because Samsung isn't changing an awful lot with the hardware. It still comes in the same size as its predecessor -- the display is 6.8 inches, measured diagonally, though the phone is flatter this time round. The S23 Ultra had more curvature to it. The big upgrade to the external hardware with this model is that it's cased in titanium, so it's a lot sturdier than the S23 Ultra.

The main difference this time round is what's inside: Samsung is going big on artificial intelligence. A key focus for Samsung, like other smartphone makers, now is on "on-demand" AI -- or, the ability to carry out AI workloads directly on a device, rather than over the cloud. Samsung said its new Galaxy S24 Ultra will come with a bunch of new AI features, a lot of which is being powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset for mobile, which is tailored for AI devices. One feature Samsung's loading into the Galaxy S24 range is the ability to circle locations or items a user is directing their camera at, or on a picture they've taken, and then look up results on what those things are. So, for instance, if you see a landmark or a shoe you want to buy, you can make a circle around that object and then the AI shows you appropriate results on Google.

Another feature Samsung touted is the ability to use AI to edit photos. So users can edit reflections out of pictures they've taken, for instance if you took a picture of yourself in front of a window. Or you can move a person from one side of the room to another by dragging them from left to right. Samsung also showcased live transcription features with its latest smartphones. When calling someone who's speaking in French, for instance, a user can pull up a transcription that's being fed through to them in real time. You can also record a conversation between two people and get it transcribed, while the AI assigns a label to each person speaking, similar to transcription products like Otter AI. Samsung is also incorporating AI watermarking into these features, helping to combat misinformation and copyright infringement. "So when a Galaxy S24 user uses AI to modify a photo, Samsung will keep a log of what was changed with AI and store it in the metadata," reports CNBC. "It'll also have an icon in the bottom left corner to show that the image has been edited using AI, kind of like a watermark."

It's hard to think of a more self-explanatory feature than Circle to Search: it does exactly what it sounds like it does. You circle something on your phone screen, tap a button, and voila! A page full of Google search results telling you about the thing you circled. The Verge: The new feature is launching on five phones to start -- the three members of Samsung's brand-new Galaxy S24 series, as well as Google's Pixel 8 and 8 Pro -- before it comes to other "select, premium" Android phones. Well, maybe it does need a little explaining. If the feature sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Google Lens, which is similar. But instead of opening up the Google app, you can use Circle to Search anywhere on your device. Just long-press the home button if you're using three-button navigation -- or the navigation handle if you're using gesture nav -- and it will appear on top of whatever app or screen you're currently using. You can circle, highlight, or tap a subject, including text as well as images.

Google will tweak online search results to give comparison sites more prominence, the company said in a blogpost on Wednesday, as it outlined efforts to comply with new EU tech rules that could hit revenues for some companies. Reuters: Under the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which the company will have to comply with by March 7, Google is obligated to treat rival services and products the same way as it treats its own when it ranks them in search results. It is also required to allow business users to access the data that they generate when using Google's platform.

Speaking of cyber attacks, JPMorgan Chase is targeted by hackers trying to infiltrate its systems 45 billion times a day (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) -- twice the rate at which it was attacked a year earlier -- the bank's head of asset and wealth management has said. FT: Speaking at Davos on Wednesday, Mary Erdoes said the bank spent $15bn on technology every year and employed 62,000 technologists, with many focused solely on combating the rise in cyber crime. "We have more engineers than Google or Amazon. Why? Because we have to," she said. "The fraudsters get smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious, more mischievous."

Western lenders have suffered a surge in cyber attacks in the past two years, which has been partly blamed on Russian hackers acting in response to sanctions placed on the country and its banks following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But the use of artificial intelligence by cyber criminals has also increased the number of incidents and level of sophistication of attacks. UPDATE 1/18/24: In a statement provided to Slashdot, a JPMorgan spokesperson said: "The 45 billion per day figure measures numerous activities, not just hacking attempts. As updated by Bloomberg, 'Examples of activity can include user log ins like employee virtual desktops, and scanning activity, which are often highly automated and not targeted.'" Bloomberg and FT have updated their articles accordingly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers (PDF). The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question "Is Google Getting Worse?" by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year. They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality ... we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do."

They also found that spam sites are in a constant war with Google over the rankings, and that spam sites will regularly find ways to game the system, rise to the top of Google's rankings, and then will be knocked down. "SEO is a constant battle and we see repeated patterns of review spam entering and leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take turns adjusting their parameters," they wrote. They note that Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are regularly tweaking their algorithms and taking down content that is outright spam, but that, overall, this leads only to "a temporary positive effect."

"Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam," they write. Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures. The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry -- a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."