Enlarge/ Michael Jackson in concert, 1986. Sony Music owns a large portion of publishing rights to Jackson's music. (credit: Getty Images)
Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Records have sued AI music-synthesis companies Udio and Suno for allegedly committing mass copyright infringement by using recordings owned by the labels to train music-generating AI models, reports Reuters. Udio and Suno can generate novel song recordings based on text-based descriptions of music (i.e., "a dubstep song about Linus Torvalds").
The lawsuits, filed in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts, claim that the AI companies' use of copyrighted material to train their systems could lead to AI-generated music that directly competes with and potentially devalues the work of human artists.
Like other generative AI models, both Udio and Suno (which we coveredseparately in April) rely on a broad selection of existing human-created artworks that teach a neural network the relationship between words in a written prompt and styles of music. The record labels correctly note that these companies have been deliberately vague about the sources of their training data.
The Deep Ark is an eight hour plus mix of 1990's Warp Records "Electronic Listening Music" and related beats.
There's an interview with the Arkiteket and book of photos and poetry for sale. The site includes a download link, or you can listen to the entire mix on YouTube.Via blissblog.
The post title is a nod to the time Mad Magazine did one better than this post - one issue came with a flexidisc record with EIGHT spiral grooves, each with the same song but a different ending. Here's all eight versions - in full or just the intro followed by each ending.
Enlarge/ So much depends upon a red puzzle cube, pinned by servo motors, inside Mitsubishi. (credit: Mitsubishi)
The last time a human set the world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, it was Max Park, at 3.13 seconds for a standard 3×3×3 cube, set in June 2023. It is going to be very difficult for any human to pull off a John Henry-like usurping of the new machine record, which is more than 10 times faster, at 0.305 seconds. That's within the accepted time frame for human eye blinking, which averages out to one-third of a second.
TOKUFASTbot, built by Mitsubishi Electric, can actually pull off a solve in as little as 0.204 seconds on video, but not when Guinness World Records judges were measuring. The previous mechanical record was 0.38 seconds.
Mitsubishi Electric's TOKUFASTbot, solving a Rubik's-like puzzle on May 7, two weeks before judges showed up to verify its world-record speed.
There are a few footnotes and caveats to what would otherwise be an incremental gain and nifty slow-motion video. The first thing is that the world record reported is for "fastest robot to solve a rotating puzzle cube." That intriguingly sidesteps the much better-known "Rubik's Cube" identifier. Rubik's notably lost its trademark on any rotating 3×3×3 cube puzzle game in Europe. Perhaps Mitsubishi and Guinness simply wished to avoid touching a trademark registered to a company with a known litigation history.
June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven't exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record have all occurred within the last 15 years. And monthly records have often occurred in years that are otherwise unexceptional; at the time, the warmest July on record had occurred in 2019, a year that doesn't stand out much from the rest of the past decade.
But July 2023 set another monthly record, easily eclipsing 2019's high temperatures. Then August set yet another monthly record. And so has every single month since, a string of records that propelled 2023 to the warmest year since we started keeping track.
Yesterday, the European Union's Copernicus Earth-monitoring service announced that we've now gone a full year where every single month has been the warmest version of that month since we've had enough instruments in place to track global temperatures.
Although simply taking a picture of a picture might do a decent job of digitizing an image, Google’s PhotoScan app directs you to capture the picture in multiple shots before it combines everything together to remove glare and enhance the finished file. This can be especially useful for old tintypes like this one or faded photo prints.
N.I.H. officials suggested federal record keepers helped them hide emails. If so, “that’s really damaging to trust in all of government,” one expert said.
For two weeks at the 140-hospital system, doctors and nurses have had little access to digital records for patient histories, resorting to paper and faxes to treat people.
Ascension, one of the nation’s largest medical systems with 140 hospitals in 19 states, has yet to recover from a large-scale cyberattack earlier this month.
A cybercriminal going by the names of EquationCorp and USDoD has released an enormous database containing the criminal records of millions of Americans. The database is said to contain 70 million rows of data.
Post by USDoD on a breach forum
The leaked database is said to include full names, dates of birth, known aliases, addresses, arrest and conviction dates, sentences, and much more. Dates reportedly range from 2020 to 2024.
The exact source of the database is as yet unknown.
USDoD is a high-profile player in this field, closely associated with “Pompompurin”, the operator of the first iteration of data leak site BreachForums. USDoD is said to have plans to set up a successor to the second iteration of BreachForums which was recently seized by law enforcement. Releasing this database may be USDoD’s way to round up some interested users.
USDoD is also believed to be involved in a breach at TransUnion, the data of which was (partly) dumped in September, 2023.
Needless to say, having the criminal information leaked could have a tremendous impact, not only for the listed individuals but also for the justice system. We’ll keep you updated.
Protecting yourself after a data breach
There are some actions you can take if you are, or suspect you may have been, the victim of a data breach.
Check the vendor’s advice. Every breach is different, so check with the vendor to find out what’s happened, and follow any specific advice they offer.
Change your password. You can make a stolen password useless to thieves by changing it. Choose a strong password that you don’t use for anything else. Better yet, let a password manager choose one for you.
Enable two-factor authentication (2FA). If you can, use a FIDO2-compliant hardware key, laptop or phone as your second factor. Some forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) can be phished just as easily as a password. 2FA that relies on a FIDO2 device can’t be phished.
Watch out for fake vendors. The thieves may contact you posing as the vendor. Check the vendor website to see if they are contacting victims, and verify the identity of anyone who contacts you using a different communication channel.
Take your time. Phishing attacks often impersonate people or brands you know, and use themes that require urgent attention, such as missed deliveries, account suspensions, and security alerts.
Consider not storing your card details. It’s definitely more convenient to get sites to remember your card details for you, but we highly recommend not storing that information on websites.
Set up identity monitoring.Identity monitoring alerts you if your personal information is found being traded illegally online, and helps you recover after.
Check your digital footprint
If you want to find out how much of your own data has been exposed online, including your criminal record data, you can try our free Digital Footprint scan. Fill in the email address you’re curious about (it’s best to submit the one you most frequently use) and we’ll give you a free report, along with tips on what to do next.
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