Daily Archives: January 27, 2024

FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel On Trump Broadcast License Threats: First Amendment Guides Us. – Insideradio.com

Posted: January 27, 2024 at 3:52 am

An election year is hard to avoid in Washington, even at the Federal Communications Commission.

Chair Jessica Rosenworcel is playing down the prospect that former President Donald Trump could make good on his recent threats to go after some TV networks that he views as hostile to his candidacy. The First Amendment is something that we take seriously, Rosenworcel said Thursday. It stands for the proposition that we cannot prohibit speech. The thing that is clearest to me is that we have licensing authority over broadcast stations, and its something that needs to be understood more widely and certainly in some of our candidate circles.

When reporters put the same question to Commissioner Brendan Carr, he declined to comment. As we move into election season, I'm not going to be making comments on every statement from candidates as they're working through this process, he said.

It is not the first time Trump has blown off steam toward his adversaries by suggesting the FCC should yank their licenses. He made similar comments in 2017. It drew a critical response from the National Association of Broadcasters, the Radio Television Digital News Association, and some in Congress, but ultimately little came of it.

In other FCC news, Commissioner Anna Gmez has made some staff changes, including those who are advising her on media issues. Deena Shetler will serve as Chief of Staff and advise Gomez on media and international matters. And Harsha Mudaliar will serve as Policy Advisor, focusing on media and technology issues.

Shetler most recently worked on Capitol Hill where she served as a research assistant for the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband. Previously, she interned at the FCC in the Office of Legislative Affairs.

Mudaliar joins Gmezs staff from Rosenworcels office, where she served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration. She has held numerous leadership roles at the FCC since taking her first job at the agency in 1996, including Deputy Chief of the Office of Economics and Analytics, Deputy Managing Director, Associate Chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau, and as a Legal Advisor to Commissioner Gloria Tristani. Mudaliar has also stepped away from the FCC on two occasions, to work at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2010 to 2011 and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division from 2016-2017.

Gmez also announced Edyael Casaperalta will serve as Legal Advisor for Wireless, Public Safety and Consumer Protection. Hayley Steffen will serve as Legal Advisor for Wireline and Space. And Anna Holland will serve as Executive Assistant in her office.

I am pleased to announce that members of my acting staff have agreed to join my office long term Gmez said. They bring years of communications legal and policy experience along with a longstanding commitment to public service and a can-do attitude.

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Letter writer reminds others about intent behind the First Amendment – Call Newspapers

Posted: at 3:52 am

I dont quite understand how anyone could misinterpret the First Amendment, as many people seem to do. It specifically states the following: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Our forefathers came to America to escape religious bigotry and to practice their religious beliefs without fear of retribution. So when people say we need to put religion into the government, they are defying the intent of the First Amendment.

Choosing to believe or not believe in a particular religion is a very personal decision. When someone says, I cant do that, its against my religion, thats perfectly acceptable. But when someone says, You cant do that, its against my religion. This is unacceptable for the obvious reason that it takes away the freedom to choose to believe differently than you.

When anyone imposes their beliefs on others, it diminishes the right of other people to think for themselves. Let us respect each others personal choices when it comes to religion. Isnt that what true freedom really means?

Kae Luppens

Lemay

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Letter writer reminds others about intent behind the First Amendment - Call Newspapers

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Faith-based school chaplains would test First Amendment – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

Posted: at 3:52 am

Indianas student-to-counselor ratio ranks worst in the nation, according to the 2023 State of the Indiana Girl Report published in September.

Two bills introduced in the General Assembly one in the House, the other in the Senate seek to fill the counselor void, but critics say their solution is unconstitutional and could end up further harming some childrens emotional and mental health.

House Bill 1192 and Senate Bill 50 would allow public and charter schools to employ chaplains, or approve them as volunteers, to counsel students and staff. Though school chaplains wouldnt be required to divulge privileged or confidential communications, the bills are written to invite skepticism as to the ultimate goal of allowing pastoral care.

The Senate version, authored by Sen. Stacey Donato, R-Logansport, says a chaplain may only provide secular assistance, unless the student (or their parent or guardian) gives consent for religious advice, guidance and support services. The House proposal of Rep. Doug Miller, R-Elkhart, does not include such language.

The primary role of chaplains is to provide pastoral or religious counseling to people in spiritual need, the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana said in a statement. Allowing them to assume official positions whether paid or voluntary in public schools will create an environment ripe for religious coercion and indoctrination of students.

Without any oversight to prevent chaplains from imposing their own religious viewpoint on the children they counsel, HB 1192 and SB 50 could undermine the religious freedom of students of all faiths and no faith.

For a transgender student experiencing mental health concerns, especially in light of Senate Enrolled Act 480 that banned childrens gender-affirming care last year, having a chaplain provide counsel could be harmful.

The Indiana Youth Institute and Girl Coalition of Indiana examined mental health data and surveys completed by school-age children and found schools statewide employed just 1,494 counselors for more than 1 million students.

Proponents of HB 1192 and SB 50 likely will tout the proposals as remedies to the mental health needs of Hoosier students.

Chaplains are trained and certified to provide spiritual and emotional support. Lawmakers should leave mental health care services to the professional school counselors qualified to do that job.

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Faith-based school chaplains would test First Amendment - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

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No, There Is No First Amendment Right to Block a Roadway – AOL

Posted: at 3:52 am

On January 20, the official Twitter account for Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) warned that passengers might be delayed due to a group in vehicles exercising first amendment rights in roadway, prompting a backlash from readers and a Community Note.

The delays were caused by at least six vehicles driving slowly on the roads approaching the airport, many of which flew Palestinian flags out of windows and sunroofs.

The blocking of public roadways is not protected by the First Amendment, however, and restrictions on such activity by state and federal authorities is generally considered constitutional.

While the First Amendment protects a wide range of free speech activities, including the rights to assemble and protest, the Supreme Court has long recognized the governments right to restrict speech in certain circumstances. Generally speaking, the government may impose content-neutral restrictions on the time, place, and manner of expression, so long as they are narrowly tailored to a substantial government interest, Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA and First Amendment expert, told The Dispatch Fact Check.

So, while the state of Virginia, where DCA is located, could not constitutionally restrict demonstrations in roadways only for pro-Palestinian protests, it is fully constitutional for it to restrict the blocking of roadways in general. In fact, Virginia does just this: The state has laws against both purposefully impeding the progress of vehicles on highways and the obstruction of free passage of others.

Courts have consistently found that theres a substantial interest in allowing people to get around from place to place and to use the U.S. roadways for the purpose they were designed for, which is to have people go from place A to place B, Volokh explained. The government is entitled to protect that and limitsin fact has basically a presumptive prohibition ondemonstrations on public streets.

Arrest is a common outcome across the U.S. for individuals protesting in public roadways. On January 9, 2024, more than 300 people were arrested for blocking roads and bridges in New York City during a pro-Palestinian protest, and three climate protesters were arrested for blocking lanes on the George Washington Memorial Parkway in April 2023. Nobody has a right to block other peoples ability to get where theyre going, Volokh said.

If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com.

Google Lumiere – How to use the AI video generator – PC Guide – For The Latest PC Hardware & Tech News

Posted: at 3:52 am

Last Updated on January 26, 2024

The search giant has unveiled its newest AI model and its really good. Google Lumiere is a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion. In some respects, its better than Runway and Pika Labs AI video! Heres how to use Google Lumiere.

There is no way to access or download Lumiere at this time. We predict that Lumiere will enhance the multimodal capabilities of Google Bard in the near future. Get ready to use it at release by following these steps:

To use Google Lumiere, youll need access to Google Bard. Visit the chatbot website here.

There has been no official acknowledgement that the video model has been integrated yet. However, its fair to predict that Bard will be the place to use it in the near future.

Google Workspace accounts will need admin access to use Google Bard.

If Google Lumiere becomes open-source, we will explain how to download and install it here.

Google Lumiere is a new video diffusion model. It generates coherent, high-quality videos using simple text prompts and is great for stylization. Its also multimodal, with text-to-video and image-to-video modalities. You can also use it to produce cinemagraphs and for video inpainting!

Lumiere achieves better temporal consistency than other models due to a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution.

This new AI model represents a summation of previously released Google AI tools.

Style Drop, introduced on Dember 15th, 2023, is Googles own text-to-image generator. Its USP is that it uses one or more style reference images that describe the style for text-to-image generation. By doing so, StyleDrop enables the generation of images in a style consistent with the reference, while effectively circumventing the burden of text prompt engineering. As a result, StyleDrop already features the computer vision research that went into Google Lumiere.

Video Poet was the predecessor to Google Lumiere, in that its a large language model for zero-shot video generation. The main difference is the quality. Impressively, Video Poet was already multimodal able to produce audio from video inputs. This is one of the least common avenues of multimodality (the most common being speech-to-text). In fact, this autoregressive language model learns across video, image, audio, and text modalities.

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Samsung’s new phones replace Google AI with Baidu in China – The Verge

Posted: at 3:52 am

The list of AI translation, summarization, and text formatting features on the Chinese version of the Galaxy S24 will be familiar to anyone who kept up with its US-based launch. Theres also real-time call translation like we saw earlier this month, and the phones are even getting a version of Googles Circle to Search feature.

Now featuring Ernies understanding and generation capabilities

Now featuring Ernies understanding and generation capabilities, the upgraded Samsung Note Assistant can translate content and also summarize lengthy content into clear, intelligently organized formats at the click of a button, Samsung Electronics China and Baidu said in a statement published by CNBC.

Samsungs hold on China has waned considerably in the last decade. A report this week from IDC didnt even place it in the top five brands for mobile shipments in 2023. In 2013, the company was the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the country, with a market share of around 20 percent, but its share had fallen to just 1 percent by 2018, where its hovered ever since, Reuters reports, adding that partnerships with local content firms are part of its attempt to rebuild its Chinese business.

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Samsung's new phones replace Google AI with Baidu in China - The Verge

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FTC investigating Microsoft, Amazon, and Google investments into OpenAI and Anthropic – The Verge

Posted: at 3:52 am

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an inquiry into the investments of Big Tech companies that provide cloud services to smaller AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The FTC sent letters to Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, requiring the companies to explain the impact these investments have on the competitive landscape of generative AI. The commission wants to scrutinize corporate partnerships and investments with AI providers to build a better internal understanding of these relationships and their impact on the competitive landscape.

Google and Amazon invested in Anthropic, while Microsoft has a close financial relationship with OpenAI.

The FTC wants information on the specific investment agreements between the companies and how the partnerships influence product releases and oversight rights. It also wants an analysis of how these investments impact the market share, competition, and potential for sales growth in the sector; if there is competition for resources to develop AI products; and any information each company may have given to other government entities.

The companies have 45 days to respond to the agency. The Verge reached out to Anthropic for comment.OpenAI and Amazon declined to comment.

The US has assumed a global AI leadership position because important American companies are working together, Microsoft corporate vice president, competition and market regulation group, Rima Alalily said in a statement sent to The Verge. Partnerships between independent companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as among many others, are promoting competition and accelerating innovation. We look forward to providing the FTC with the information it needs to complete its study.

Google, in a comment sent to The Verge, hopes the FTCs study will shine a bright light on companies that lock in customers.

AI developers often ink partnerships with cloud providers which Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are to get cheaper access to the expensive GPUs and processors needed to train, run, and fine-tune large language models.

The government has been very interested in investigating the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft and has reportedly argued with the Department of Justice over who will start the inquiry.

History shows that new technologies can create new markets and healthy competition. As companies race to develop and monetize AI, we must guard against tactics that foreclose this opportunity, FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition.

The FTC was the first government agency to investigate OpenAI. It requested documents from the ChatGPT maker in July seeking information on possible consumer harm from publishing false information.

UPDATE JANUARY 25 4:36 PM ET: Added statements from Microsoft and Google.

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FTC investigating Microsoft, Amazon, and Google investments into OpenAI and Anthropic - The Verge

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Google announced a 5-second AI video generator that’s scary good – Mashable

Posted: at 3:52 am

Google's new AI video generator is its most advanced yet and that may lead to a rise in more convincing deepfakes.

Google Research just unveiled Lumiere, an AI video generator capable of creating five-second photorealistic videos from simple text prompts. What makes it so advanced, according to the research paper, is a "Space-Time U-Net architecture" that "generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model."

Previous AI models created videos by generating individual images, frame by frame.

Lumiere will in theory make it easier for users to create and edit videos without technical expertise. Prompts such as "panda playing ukulele at home" or "Sunset timelapse at the beach" generate detailed photorealistic videos. It can also generate videos based the style of a single image, such as a child's watercolor painting of flowers.

The editing capabilities are where it gets crazy. Lumiere can animate targeted parts of an image, and fill in blank areas from image prompts with "video inpainting." It can even edit specific parts of the video using follow-up text prompts, like changing a woman's dress or adding accessories to videos of owls and chicks.

"Our primary goal ... is to enable novice users to generate visual content," the paper concludes. "However, there is a risk of misuse for creating fake or harmful content with our technology, and we believe that it is crucial to develop and apply tools for detecting biases and malicious use cases in order to ensure a safe and fair use."

What the paper doesn't mention is the tools Google has already developed, and supposedly put in place.

At Google I/O last May, the company put its safety and responsibility measures front and center. Google DeepMind launched a beta version of an AI watermarking tool called SynthID in August, and in November, YouTube (owned by Google) announced a policy forcing users to disclose whether videos have been AI-generated.

Lumiere is just research at this point, and there's no mention of how or when it could be used as a consumer-facing tool. But for a company that claims "being bold on AI means being responsible from the start" presuming the start includes research this is a surprising omission from the Lumiere team.

Google has not yet responded to a request for comment.

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Google Chrome is adding support for Windows on Arm – 9to5Google

Posted: at 3:52 am

One of the problems with Arm-based Windows laptops has been a lack of app support, but theres big news this week as Google Chrome has unexpectedly debuted its first Windows on Arm build.

Most Windows machines available today are using CPUs based on the x86 architecture. Slowly, though, Microsoft and others are pushing for Windows to better support Arm CPUs that offer better battery life and fan-less designs. Laptops using Arm CPUs have been available for a few years now, but theyve largely been a niche product due to limited app support and relatively weak power. However, in the face of Apples wild success in Arm-based M-series chips for MacBooks, its been an increasingly important venture.

This week, as first spotted by Pedro Justo on Twitter/X, Google has released its first Chrome build for Windows 11 ARM. The build is available now through Chrome Canary, putting it in its early days.

Google Chrome is not exactly a complete stranger to Arm, with ChromeOS often running on Arm-based chips from MediaTek and Qualcomm. This is the first sign of Google looking to support Arm-based Windows machines, though. The Verge was able to test out this new build on an Arm machine, confirming its ARM64 native.

The timing couldnt be better, either, as theres a big milestone for Windows on Arm just around the corner. Qualcomm last year showed off its new Snapdragon X Elite chip for Windows laptops, with performance similar to Apples M2 chips. No laptops have been announced with this chip thus far, but Qualcomm said theyd start arriving towards the middle of 2024. Microsoft is expected to debut new Surface laptops with this new generation of Qualcomm chips in March.

Notably, the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge has supported Arm for a while, but its a big deal to see Google Chrome adding support. As the worlds biggest browser, having native support is a huge boon to Windows on Arm.

Its unclear when a stable version of Chrome with Windows on Arm support will launch, but the foundation is finally set.

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Google selling Chromecast with Google TV HDMI extension cable – 9to5Google

Posted: at 3:52 am

The nature of the dongle form factor means that those devices are often placed in challenging connectivity environments. For the Chromecast with Google TV, the Google Store is now selling a HDMI Extension Cable.

The HDMI (4K@60Hz) Extension Cable comes in at 2 feet and is made by Cable Matters. It features Made for Google certification, even though a Chromecast category does not yet exist on the official site: This product has been certified by Cable Matters to meet Googles compatibility standards. The brand is also part of the Works with Chromebook program with various cables and adapters.

This shielded cable prevents Bluetooth interference between Chromecast with Google TV and a remote control. You simply plug in the white cable to your TV and your Chromecast to the other end.

This new addition to the (US) Google Store costs $19.99. It joins other accessories like Googles Ethernet Adapter, which is still 10/100 Mbps, and costs the same.

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Daily Archives: January 27, 2024

FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel On Trump Broadcast License Threats: First Amendment Guides Us. – Insideradio.com

Letter writer reminds others about intent behind the First Amendment – Call Newspapers

Faith-based school chaplains would test First Amendment – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

No, There Is No First Amendment Right to Block a Roadway – AOL

Google Lumiere – How to use the AI video generator – PC Guide – For The Latest PC Hardware & Tech News

Samsung’s new phones replace Google AI with Baidu in China – The Verge

FTC investigating Microsoft, Amazon, and Google investments into OpenAI and Anthropic – The Verge

Google announced a 5-second AI video generator that’s scary good – Mashable

Google Chrome is adding support for Windows on Arm – 9to5Google

Google selling Chromecast with Google TV HDMI extension cable – 9to5Google

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