Amazon – Page 5

Quantum computing progress: Higher temps, better error correction

Amazon, Computer science, ibm, Physics, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Science / Kelly Newman / March 27, 2024

conceptual graphic of symbols representing quantum states floating above a stylized computer chip.

There’s a strong consensus that tackling most useful problems with a quantum computer will require that the computer be capable of error correction. There is absolutely no consensus, however, about what technology will allow us to get there. A large number of companies, including major players like Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, and IBM, have all committed to different technologies to get there, while a collection of startups are exploring an even wider range of potential solutions.

We probably won’t have a clearer picture of what’s likely to work for a few years. But there’s going to be lots of interesting research and development work between now and then, some of which may ultimately represent key milestones in the development of quantum computing. To give you a sense of that work, we’re going to look at three papers that were published within the last couple of weeks, each of which tackles a different aspect of quantum computing technology.

Hot stuff

Error correction will require connecting multiple hardware qubits to act as a single unit termed a logical qubit. This spreads a single bit of quantum information across multiple hardware qubits, making it more robust. Additional qubits are used to monitor the behavior of the ones holding the data and perform corrections as needed. Some error correction schemes require over a hundred hardware qubits for each logical qubit, meaning we’d need tens of thousands of hardware qubits before we could do anything practical.

A number of companies have looked at that problem and decided we already know how to create hardware on that scale—just look at any silicon chip. So, if we could etch useful qubits through the same processes we use to make current processors, then scaling wouldn’t be an issue. Typically, this has meant fabricating quantum dots on the surface of silicon chips and using these to store single electrons that can hold a qubit in their spin. The rest of the chip holds more traditional circuitry that performs the initiation, control, and readout of the qubit.

This creates a notable problem. Like many other qubit technologies, quantum dots need to be kept below one Kelvin in order to keep the environment from interfering with the qubit. And, as anyone who’s ever owned an x86-based laptop knows, all the other circuitry on the silicon generates heat. So, there’s the very real prospect that trying to control the qubits will raise the temperature to the point that the qubits can’t hold onto their state.

That might not be the problem that we thought, according to some work published in Wednesday’s Nature. A large international team that includes people from the startup Diraq have shown that a silicon quantum dot processor can work well at the relatively toasty temperature of 1 Kelvin, up from the usual milliKelvin that these processors normally operate at.

The work was done on a two-qubit prototype made with materials that were specifically chosen to improve noise tolerance; the experimental procedure was also optimized to limit errors. The team then performed normal operations starting at 0.1 K, and gradually ramped up the temperatures to 1.5 K, checking performance as they did so. They found that a major source of errors, state preparation and measurement (SPAM), didn’t change dramatically in this temperature range: “SPAM around 1 K is comparable to that at millikelvin temperatures and remains workable at least until 1.4 K.”

The error rates they did see depended on the state they were preparing. One particular state (both spin-up) had a fidelity of over 99 percent, while the rest were less constrained, at somewhere above 95 percent. States had a lifetime of over a millisecond, which qualifies as long-lived int he quantum world.

All of which is pretty good, and suggests that the chips can tolerate reasonable operating temperatures, meaning on-chip control circuitry can be used without causing problems. The error rates of the hardware qubits are still well above those that would be needed for error correction to work. However, the researchers suggest that they’ve identified error processes that can potentially be compensated for. They expect that the ability to do industrial-scale manufacturing will ultimately lead to working hardware.

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Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

Amazon, anticompetitive behavior, Antitrust law, facebook, Google, Instagram, mark zuckerberg, Meta, online advertising, Policy, Snapchat, social media ads, youtube / Kelly Newman / March 27, 2024

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay” —

Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.

Ashley Belanger – Mar 27, 2024 8: 25 pm UTC

Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called “Ghostbusters,” designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.

The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them,” Zuckerberg continued. “Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”

At the time, Olivan was Facebook’s head of growth, but now he’s Meta’s chief operating officer. He responded to Zuckerberg’s email saying that he would have the team from Onavo—a controversial traffic-analysis app acquired by Facebook in 2013—look into it.

Olivan told the Onavo team that he needed “out of the box thinking” to satisfy Zuckerberg’s request. He “suggested potentially paying users to ‘let us install a really heavy piece of software'” to intercept users’ Snapchat data, a court document shows.

What the Onavo team eventually came up with was a project internally known as “Ghostbusters,” an obvious reference to Snapchat’s logo featuring a white ghost. Later, as the project grew to include other Facebook rivals, including YouTube and Amazon, the project was called the “In-App Action Panel” (IAAP).

The IAAP program’s purpose was to gather granular insights into users’ engagement with rival apps to help Facebook develop products as needed to stay ahead of competitors. For example, two months after Zuckerberg’s 2016 email, Meta launched Stories, a Snapchat copycat feature, on Instagram, which the Motley Fool noted rapidly became a key ad revenue source for Meta.

In an email to Olivan, the Onavo team described the “technical solution” devised to help Zuckerberg figure out how to get reliable analytics about Snapchat users. It worked by “develop[ing] ‘kits’ that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” the Onavo team said.

Olivan was told that these so-called “kits” used a “man-in-the-middle” attack typically employed by hackers to secretly intercept data passed between two parties. Users were recruited by third parties who distributed the kits “under their own branding” so that they wouldn’t connect the kits to Onavo unless they used a specialized tool like Wireshark to analyze the kits. TechCrunch reported in 2019 that sometimes teens were paid to install these kits. After that report, Facebook promptly shut down the project.

This “man-in-the-middle” tactic, consumers and advertisers suing Meta have alleged, “was not merely anticompetitive, but criminal,” seemingly violating the Wiretap Act. It was used to snoop on Snapchat starting in 2016, on YouTube from 2017 to 2018, and on Amazon in 2018, relying on creating “fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis.”

Ars could not reach Snapchat, Google, or Amazon for comment.

Facebook allegedly sought to confuse advertisers

Not everyone at Facebook supported the IAAP program. “The company’s highest-level engineering executives thought the IAAP Program was a legal, technical, and security nightmare,” another court document said.

Pedro Canahuati, then-head of security engineering, warned that incentivizing users to install the kits did not necessarily mean that users understood what they were consenting to.

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay,” Canahuati said. “No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works.”

Mike Schroepfer, then-chief technology officer, argued that Facebook wouldn’t want rivals to employ a similar program analyzing their encrypted user data.

“If we ever found out that someone had figured out a way to break encryption on [WhatsApp] we would be really upset,” Schroepfer said.

While the unsealed emails detailing the project have recently raised eyebrows, Meta’s spokesperson told Ars that “there is nothing new here—this issue was reported on years ago. The plaintiffs’ claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.”

According to Business Insider, advertisers suing said that Meta never disclosed its use of Onavo “kits” to “intercept rivals’ analytics traffic.” This is seemingly relevant to their case alleging anticompetitive behavior in the social media ads market, because Facebook’s conduct, allegedly breaking wiretapping laws, afforded Facebook an opportunity to raise its ad rates “beyond what it could have charged in a competitive market.”

Since the documents were unsealed, Meta has responded with a court filing that said: “Snapchat’s own witness on advertising confirmed that Snap cannot ‘identify a single ad sale that [it] lost from Meta’s use of user research products,’ does not know whether other competitors collected similar information, and does not know whether any of Meta’s research provided Meta with a competitive advantage.”

This conflicts with testimony from a Snapchat executive, who alleged that the project “hamper[ed] Snap’s ability to sell ads” by causing “advertisers to not have a clear narrative differentiating Snapchat from Facebook and Instagram.” Both internally and externally, “the intelligence Meta gleaned from this project was described” as “devastating to Snapchat’s ads business,” a court filing said.

Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say Read More »

$30 doorbell cameras have multiple serious security flaws, says Consumer Reports

Amazon, doorbell camera, doorbell cameras, eken, Security, Tech, tuck, video doorbell, walmart / Shannon Garcia / February 29, 2024

Video doorbell security —

Models still widely available on e-commerce sites after issues reported.

Kevin Purdy – Feb 29, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

Image showing a delivery person saying — Enlarge / Consumer Reports’ investigation suggests that, should this delivery person press and hold the bell button and then pair using Eken’s app, he could see if other delivery people get such a perfunctory response.

Eken

Video doorbell cameras have been commoditized to the point where they’re available for $30–$40 on marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Temu, and Shein. The true cost of owning one might be much greater, however.

Consumer Reports (CR) has released the findings of a security investigation into two budget-minded doorbell brands, Eken and Tuck, which are largely the same hardware produced by the Eken Group in China, according to CR. The cameras are further resold under at least 10 more brands. The cameras are set up through a common mobile app, Aiwit. And the cameras share something else, CR claims: “troubling security vulnerabilities.”

The pairing procedure for one of Eken's doorbell cameras, which allows a malicious actor quite a bit of leeway. — Enlarge / The pairing procedure for one of Eken’s doorbell cameras, which allows a malicious actor quite a bit of leeway.

Eken

Among the camera’s vulnerabilities cited by CR:

Sending public IP addresses and Wi-Fi SSIDs (names) over the Internet without encryption
Takeover of the cameras by putting them into pairing mode (which you can do from a front-facing button on some models) and connecting through the Aiwit app
Access to still images from the video feed and other information by knowing the camera’s serial number.

CR also noted that Eken cameras lacked an FCC registration code. More than 4,200 were sold in January 2024, according to CR, and often held an Amazon “Overall Pick” label (as one model did when an Ars writer looked on Wednesday).

“These video doorbells from little known manufacturers have serious security and privacy vulnerabilities, and now they’ve found their way onto major digital marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart,” said Justin Brookman, director of tech policy at Consumer Reports, in a statement. “Both the manufacturers and platforms that sell the doorbells have a responsibility to ensure that these products are not putting consumers in harm’s way.”

CR noted that it contacted vendors where it found the doorbells for sale. Temu told CR that it would halt sales of the doorbells, but “similar-looking if not identical doorbells remained on the site,” CR noted.

A Walmart representative told Ars that all cameras mentioned by Consumer Reports, sold by third parties, have been removed from Walmart by now. The representative added that customers may be eligible for refunds and that Walmart prohibits the selling of devices that require an FCC ID and lack one.

Ars contacted Amazon for comment and will update this post with new information. An email sent to the sole address that could be found on Eken’s website was returned undeliverable. The company’s social media accounts were last updated at least three years prior.

Consumer Reports' researchers claim to have found JPEG file references passed in plaintext over the network, which could later be viewed without authentication in a browser. — Consumer Reports’ researchers claim to have found JPEG file references passed in plaintext over the network, which could later be viewed without authentication in a browser.

Consumer Reports

CR issued vulnerability disclosures to Eken and Tuck regarding its findings. The disclosures note the amount of data that is sent over the network without authentication, including JPEG files, the local SSID, and external IP address. It notes that after a malicious user has re-paired a doorbell with a QR code generated by the Aiwit app, they have complete control over the device until a user sees an email from Eken and reclaims the doorbell.

With a few exceptions, video doorbells and other IoT cameras tend to rely on cloud connections to stream and store footage, as well as notify their owners about events. This has led to some notable privacy and security concerns. Ring doorbells were found to be pushing Wi-Fi credentials in plaintext in late 2019. Eufy, a company that marketed its “No clouds” offerings, was found to be uploading facial thumbnails to cloud servers to send push alerts and later apologized for that and other vulnerabilities. Camera provider Wyze recently disclosed that, for the second time in five months, images and video feeds were accidentally available to the wrong customers following a lengthy outage.

Listing image by Amazon/Eken

$30 doorbell cameras have multiple serious security flaws, says Consumer Reports Read More »

Lawsuit against Prime Video ads shows perils of annual streaming subscriptions

Amazon, amazon prime video, culture, streaming, Tech / Kelly Newman / February 15, 2024

Priyanka CHopra (left) and Richard Madden (right) in the AMazon Prime Video original series Citadel. — Enlarge / Priyanka Chopra (left) and Richard Madden (right) in the Prime Video original series *Citadel*.

Streaming services like Amazon Prime Video promote annual subscriptions as a way to save money. But long-term commitments to streaming companies that are in the throes of trying to determine how to maintain or achieve growth typically end up biting subscribers in the butt—and they’re getting fed up.

As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, a lawsuit seeking class-action certification [PDF] hit Amazon on February 9. The complaint centers on Amazon showing ads with Prime Video streams, which it started doing for US subscribers in January unless customers paid an extra $2.99/month. This approach differed from how other streaming services previously introduced ads: by launching a new subscription plan with ads and lower prices and encouraging subscribers to switch.

A problem with this approach, though, as per the lawsuit, is that it meant that people who signed up for an annual subscription to Prime Video before Amazon’s September 2023 announcement about ads already paid for a service that’s different from what they expected.

And that’s not the only risk people face when opting-in to a yearlong relationship with streaming services these days.

Paying extra “for something they already paid for”

The lawsuit recently filed against Prime Video names California resident Wilbert Napoleon as a plaintiff and argues that Amazon’s advertisements for Prime Video made “reasonable consumers” think that they would get ad-free movie and TV-show streaming for the duration of their subscription.

The lawsuit reads:

Reasonable consumers expect that, if you purchase a subscription with ad-free streaming of movies and tv shows, that the ad-free streaming for movies and tv shows is available for the duration of the purchased subscription.

… however, Plaintiff and class members’ reasonable expectations were not met. Instead of receiving a subscription that included ad-free streaming of [TV] shows and movies, they received something worth less.

Napoleon bought an annual subscription to Prime Video in June 2023, per the court filings. The lawsuit accuses Amazon of falsely advertising Prime Video.

“Subscribers must now pay extra to get something that they already paid for,” the lawsuit says.

The idea of expectations not being met is common for streaming customers. That said, the lawsuit hasn’t gotten far enough yet where we should expect big changes to Prime Video or financial penalties for Amazon. Changing the user experience mid-deal is aggravating for customers, but Prime Video’s terms of use claim that Amazon maintains the right to diminish the value of Prime Video:

Offers and pricing for subscriptions (also referred to at times as memberships), the subscription services, the extent of available Subscription Digital Content, and the specific titles available through subscription services, may change over time and by location without notice (except as may be required by applicable law).

But there’s still a broader point to be made around streaming services trying to lure people into yearlong commitments knowing that the product they offer today might drastically change over the next 12 months.

Amazon, for example, announced that it would bring commercials to Prime Video in September and didn’t confirm when it would introduce ads until December, about a month ahead of the changes. Yet, Amazon reportedly had plans to bring ads to the service as early as June, per a report from The Wall Street Journal that cited anonymous “people familiar with the situation.” Despite these reported plans to alter the user experience significantly, Amazon continued to sell annual subscriptions to Prime Video. For months, people were committing to something that they expected would include commercial-free viewing, which used to be a popular draw of Prime Video compared to rival streaming services.

Prime Video also seemingly didn’t give a heads-up that it was removing Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support unless subscribers agreed to pay $2.99 more per month for an ad-free plan.

Amazon declined to comment on this story. Lawyers for the lawsuit filed against Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lawsuit against Prime Video ads shows perils of annual streaming subscriptions Read More »

Prime Video cuts Dolby Vision, Atmos support from ad tier—and didn’t tell subs

Amazon, amazon prime video, culture, dolby atmos, dolby vision, streaming, Tech / Kelly Newman / February 13, 2024

Surprise —

To get them back, you must pay an extra $2.99/month for the ad-free tier.

Scharon Harding – Feb 12, 2024 8: 47 pm UTC

High King Gil-galad and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — Enlarge / The Rings of Power… now in HDR10+ for ad-tier users.

On January 29, Amazon started showing ads to Prime Video subscribers in the US unless they pay an additional $2.99 per month. But this wasn’t the only change to the service. Those who don’t pay up also lose features; their accounts no longer support Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos.

As noticed by German tech outlet 4K Filme on Sunday, Prime Video users who choose to sit through ads can no longer use Dolby Vision or Atmos while streaming. Ad-tier subscribers are limited to HDR10+ and Dolby Digital 5.1.

4K Filme confirmed that this was the case on TVs from both LG and Sony; Forbes also confirmed the news using a TCL TV.

“In the ads-free account, the TV throws up its own confirmation boxes to say that the show is playing in Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos. In the basic, with-ads account, however, the TV’s Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos pop-up boxes remain stubbornly absent,” Forbes said.

Amazon hasn’t explained its reasoning for the feature removal, but it may be trying to cut back on licensing fees paid to Dolby Laboratories. Amazon may also hope to push HDR10+, a Dolby Vision competitor that’s free and open. It also remains possible that we could one day see the return of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos to the ad tier through a refreshed licensing agreement.

Amazon has had a back-and-forth history with supporting Dolby features. In 2016, it first made Dolby Vision available on Prime Video. In 2017, though, Prime Video stopped supporting the format in favor of HDR10+. Amazon announced the HDR10+ format alongside Samsung, and it subsequently made the entire Prime Video library available in HDR10+. But in 2022, Prime Video started offering content like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in Dolby Vision once again.

Amazon wasn’t upfront about removals

Amazon announced in September 2023 that it would run ads on Prime Video accounts in 2024; in December, Amazon confirmed that the ads would start running on January 29 unless subscribers paid extra. In the interim, Amazon failed to mention that it was also removing support for Dolby Vision and Atmos from the ad-supported tier.

Forbes first reported on Prime Video’s ad-based tier not supporting Dolby Vision and Atmos by assuming that it was a technical error. Not until after Forbes published its article did Amazon officially confirm the changes. That’s not how people subscribing to a tech giant’s service expect to learn about a diminishing of their current plan.

It also seems that Amazon’s removal of the Dolby features has been done in such a way that it could lead some users to think they’re getting Dolby Vision and Atmos support even when they’re not.

As Forbes’ John Archer reported, “To add a bit of confusion to the mix, on the TCL TV I used, the Prime Video header information for the Jack Ryan show that appears on the with-ads basic account shows Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos among the supported technical features—yet when you start to play the episode, neither feature is delivered to the TV.”

As streaming services overtake traditional media, many customers are growing increasingly discouraged by how the industry seems to be evolving into something strongly reminiscent of cable. While there are some aspects of old-school TV worth emulating, others—like confusing plans that don’t make it clear what you get with each package—are not.

Amazon didn’t respond to questions Ars Technica sent in time for publication, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Prime Video cuts Dolby Vision, Atmos support from ad tier—and didn’t tell subs Read More »

Amazon hides cheaper items with faster delivery, lawsuit alleges

Amazon, antitrust, Antitrust law, European Commission, online marketplace, Policy / Kelly Newman / February 13, 2024

A game of hide-and-seek —

Hundreds of millions of Amazon’s US customers have overpaid, class action says.

Ashley Belanger – Feb 12, 2024 6: 59 pm UTC

Amazon rigged its platform to “routinely” push an overwhelming majority of customers to pay more for items that could’ve been purchased at lower costs with equal or faster delivery times, a class-action lawsuit has alleged.

The lawsuit claims that a biased algorithm drives Amazon’s “Buy Box,” which appears on an item’s page and prompts shoppers to “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart.” According to customers suing, nearly 98 percent of Amazon sales are of items featured in the Buy Box, because customers allegedly “reasonably” believe that featured items offer the best deal on the platform.

“But they are often wrong,” the complaint said, claiming that instead, Amazon features items from its own retailers and sellers that participate in Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), both of which pay Amazon higher fees and gain secret perks like appearing in the Buy Box.

“The result is that consumers routinely overpay for items that are available at lower prices from other sellers on Amazon—not because consumers don’t care about price, or because they’re making informed purchasing decisions, but because Amazon has chosen to display the offers for which it will earn the highest fees,” the complaint said.

Authorities in the US and the European Union have investigated Amazon’s allegedly anticompetitive Buy Box algorithm, confirming that it’s “favored FBA sellers since at least 2016,” the complaint said. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than $1 billion by the Italian Competition Authority over these unfair practices, and in 2022, the European Commission ordered Amazon to “apply equal treatment to all sellers when deciding what to feature in the Buy Box.”

These investigations served as the first public notice that Amazon’s Buy Box couldn’t be trusted, customers suing said. Amazon claimed that the algorithm was fixed in 2020, but so far, Amazon does not appear to have addressed all concerns over its Buy Box algorithm. As of 2023, European regulators have continued pushing Amazon “to take further action to remedy its Buy Box bias in their respective jurisdictions,” the customers’ complaint said.

The class action was filed by two California-based long-time Amazon customers, Jeffrey Taylor and Robert Selway. Both feel that Amazon “willfully” and “deceptively” tricked them and hundreds of millions of US customers into purchasing the featured item in the Buy Box when better deals existed.

Taylor and Selway’s lawyer, Steve Berman, told Reuters that Amazon has placed “a great burden” on its customers, who must invest more time on the platform to identify the best deals. Unlike other lawsuits over Amazon’s Buy Box, this is the first lawsuit to seek compensation over harms to consumers, not over antitrust concerns or harms to sellers, Reuters noted.

The lawsuit has been filed on behalf of “all persons who made a purchase using the Buy Box from 2016 to the present.” Because Amazon supposedly “frequently” features more expensive items in the Buy Box and most sales result from Buy Box placements, they’ve alleged that “the chances that any Class member was unharmed by one or more purchases is virtually non-existent.”

“Our team expects the class to include hundreds of millions of Amazon consumers because virtually all purchases are made from the Buy Box,” a spokesperson for plaintiffs’ lawyers told Ars.

Customers suing are hoping that a jury will decide that Amazon continues to “deliberately steer” customers to purchase higher-priced items in the Buy Box to spike its own profits. They’ve asked a US district court in Washington, where Amazon is based, to permanently stop Amazon from using allegedly biased algorithms to drive sales through its Buy Box.

The extent of damages that Amazon could owe are currently unknown but appear significant. It’s estimated that 80 percent of Amazon’s 300 million userbase is comprised of US subscribers, each allegedly overpaying on most of their purchases over the past seven years. Last year, Amazon’s US sales exceeded $574 billion.

“Amazon claims to be a ‘customer-centric’ company that works to offer the lowest prices to its customers, but in violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, Amazon employs a deceptive scheme to keep its profits—and consumer prices—high,” customer’s lawsuit alleged.

Amazon hides cheaper items with faster delivery, lawsuit alleges Read More »

Amazon Ring stops letting police request footage in Neighbors app after outcry

Amazon, amazon ring, doorbell camera, home security, home surveillance, Online Privacy, police surveillance, Policy, racial profiling, ring doorbell camera / Mike M. / January 24, 2024

Neighborhood watch —

Warrantless access may still be granted during vaguely defined “emergencies.”

Ashley Belanger – Jan 24, 2024 9: 28 pm UTC

Amazon Ring has shut down a controversial feature in its community safety app Neighbors that has allowed police to contact homeowners and request doorbell and surveillance camera footage without a warrant for years.

In a blog, head of the Neighbors app Eric Kuhn confirmed that “public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events,” but the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool will be disabled.

“They will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app,” Kuhn wrote.

Kuhn did not explain why Neighbors chose to “sunset” the RFA tool, but privacy advocates and lawmakers have long criticized Ring for helping to expand police surveillance in communities, seemingly threatening privacy and enabling racial profiling, CNBC reported. Among the staunchest critics of Ring’s seemingly tight relationship with law enforcement is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has long advocated for Ring and its users to stop sharing footage with police without a warrant.

In a statement provided to Ars, EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia noted that Ring had launched the RFA tool after EFF and other organizations had criticized Ring for allowing police to privately email warrantless requests for footage in the Neighbors app. Rather than end requests through the app entirely, Ring appeared to see the RFA tool as a middle ground, providing transparency about how many requests were being made, without ending police access to community members readily sharing footage on the app.

“Now, Ring hopefully will altogether be out of the business of platforming casual and warrantless police requests for footage to its users,” Guariglia said.

Moving forward, police and public safety agencies with warrants will still be able to request footage, which Amazon documents in transparency reports published every six months. These reports show thousands of search warrant requests and even more “preservation requests,” which allow government agencies to request to preserve user information for up to 90 days, “pending the receipt of a legally valid and binding order.”

“If we are legally required to comply, we will provide information responsive to the government demand,” Ring’s website says.

Ring rebrand embraces “hope and joy”

Guariglia said that Ring sunsetting the RFA tool “is a step in the right direction,” but it has “come after years of cozy relationships with police and irresponsible handling of data” that has, for many, damaged trust in Ring.

In 2022, EFF reported that Ring admitted that “there are ’emergency’ instances when police can get warrantless access to Ring personal devices without the owner’s permission.” And last year, Ring reached a $5.8 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, refunding customers for what the FTC described as “compromising its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos.”

Because of this history, Guariglia said that EFF is “still deeply skeptical about law enforcement’s and Ring’s ability to determine what is, or is not, an emergency that requires the company to hand over footage without a warrant or user consent.”

EFF recommends additional steps that Ring could take to enhance user privacy, like enabling end-to-end encryption by default and turning off default audio collection, Guariglia said.

Bloomberg noted that this change to the Neighbors app comes after a new CEO, Liz Hamren, came on board, announcing that last year “Ring was rethinking its mission statement.” Because Ring was adding indoor and backyard home monitoring and business services, the company’s initial mission statement—”to reduce crime in neighborhoods”—was no longer, as founding Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff had promoted it, “at the core” of what Ring does.

In Kuhn’s blog, barely any attention is given to ending the RFA tool. A Ring spokesperson declined to tell Ars how many users had volunteered to use the tool, so it remains unclear how popular it was.

Rather than clarifying the RFA tool controversy, Kuhn’s blog primarily focused on describing how much Ring users loved “heartwarming or silly” footage like a “bear relaxing in a pool.” Under Hamren and Kuhn’s guidance, it appears that the Neighbors app is embracing a new mission of connecting communities to find “hope and joy” in their areas by adding new features to Neighbors like Moments and Best of Ring.

By contrast, when Ring introduced the RFA tool, it said that its mission was “to make neighborhoods safer for everyone.” On a help page, Ring bragged that police had used Neighbors to recover stolen guns and medical supplies. Because of these selling points, Ring’s community safety features may still be priorities for some users. So, while Ring may be ready to move on from highlighting its partnership with law enforcement as a “core” part of its service, its users may still be used to seeing their cameras as tools that should be readily accessible to police.

As law enforcement agencies lose access to Neighbors’ RFA tool, Guariglia said that it’s important to raise awareness among Ring owners that police can’t demand access to footage without a warrant.

“This announcement will not stop police from trying to get Ring footage directly from device owners without a warrant,” Guariglia said. “Ring users should also know that when police knock on their door, they have the right to, and should, request that police get a warrant before handing over footage.”

Amazon Ring stops letting police request footage in Neighbors app after outcry Read More »

“Alexa is in trouble”: Paid-for Alexa gives inaccurate answers in early demos

AI, Amazon, amazon alexa, generative ai, Tech, voice assistant / DJ Henderson / January 18, 2024

Amazon Echo Show 8 with Alexa — Enlarge / Amazon demoed future generative AI capabilties for Alexa in September.

“If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble.”

A quote from an anonymous Amazon employee in a Wednesday Business Insider report paints a dire picture. Amazon needs its upcoming subscription version of Alexa to drive revenue in ways that its voice assistant never has before.

Amazon declined Ars’ request for comment on the report. But the opening quote in this article could have been uttered by anyone following voice assistants for the past year-plus. All voice assistants have struggled to drive revenue since people tend to use voice assistants for basic queries, like checking the weather, rather than transactions.

Amazon announced plans to drive usage and interest in Alexa by releasing a generative AI version that it said would one day require a subscription.

This leads to the question: Would you pay to use Alexa? Amazon will be challenged to convince people to change how they use Alexa while suddenly paying a monthly rate to enable that unprecedented behavior.

Workers within Amazon seemingly see this obstacle. Insider, citing an anonymous Amazon employee, reported that “some were questioning the entire premise of charging for Alexa. For example, people who already pay for an existing Amazon service, such as Amazon Music, might not be willing to pay additional money to get access to the newer version of Alexa.”

“There is tension over whether people will pay for Alexa or not,” one of the anonymous Amazon workers reportedly said.

Subscription-based Alexa originally planned for June release

Amazon hasn’t publicly confirmed a release date for generative AI Alexa. But Insider’s report, citing “internal documents and people familiar with the matter,” said Amazon has been planning to release its subscription plan on June 30. However, plans for what Insider said will be called “Alexa Plus” and built on “Remarkable Alexa” technology could be delayed due to numerous development challenges.

According to the report, the Remarkable Alexa tech has been being demoed by 15,000 customers and currently succeeds in being conversational but is “deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses.”

In September, then-SVP of devices and services at Amazon David Limp demoed Alexa understanding more complex commands, including Alexa not requiring the “Hey Alexa” prompt and being able to understand multiple demands for multiple apps through a single spoken phrase.

Insider reported: “The new Alexa still didn’t meet the quality standards expected for Alexa Plus, these people added, noting the technical challenges and complexity of redesigning Alexa.”

“Legacy constraints”

According to the report, people working on the original Alexa insisted on using what they had already built for the standard voice assistant with the paid-for version, resulting in a bloated technology and “internal politics.”

However, the original Alexa is based on a natural language model with multiple parts doing multiple things, compared to the colossal large language model of generative AI Alexa.

Now, generative AI Alexa is reportedly moving to a new technological stack to avoid the “legacy constraints” of today’s Alexa but potentially delaying things.

“Alexa is in trouble”: Paid-for Alexa gives inaccurate answers in early demos Read More »

Would Luddites find the gig economy familiar?

Amazon, Tech, technology, Uber / Kelly Newman / January 13, 2024

Machine Breakers Unite! —

Luddites were hardly the anti-tech dullards historians have painted them to be.

Diana Gitig – Jan 13, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

Woman about to swing a hammer at a laptop.

The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how factory owners were using machinery to supplant them, and highly targeted in their destruction of that machinery.

Their pitiable reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by elites in their own time who (successfully, as it turned out) tried to discredit their coherent and justified movement. In his book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Merchant memorializes the Luddites not as the hapless dolts with their heads in the sand that they’ve become synonymous with, but rather as the first labor organizers. Longing for the halcyon days of yore when we were more in touch with nature isn’t Luddism, Merchant writes; that’s pastoralism—totally different thing.

OG Luddites

Weavers used to work at home, using hand-powered looms (i.e., machines). The whole family pitched in to make cloth; they worked on their own schedules and spent their leisure time and meals together. Master weavers apprenticed for seven years to learn their trade. It worked this way in the north of England for hundreds of years.

In 1786 Edmund Cartwright invented the power-loom. Now, instead of a master weaver being required to make cloth, an unschooled child could work a loom. Anyone who could afford these “automated” looms (they did still need some human supervision) could cram a bunch of them into a factory and bring in orphans from the poorhouse to oversee them all day long. The orphans could churn out a lot more cloth much faster than before, and owners didn’t have to pay the 7-year-olds what they had been paying the master weavers. By the beginning of the 19th century, that is exactly what the factory owners did.

The weavers, centered in Nottinghamshire—Robin Hood country—obviously did not appreciate factory owners using these automated looms to obviate their jobs, their training—their entire way of life, really. They tried to negotiate with the factory owners for fair wages and to get protective legislation enacted to limit the impacts of the automated looms and protect their rights and products. But Parliament was having none of it; instead, Parliament—somewhat freaked out by the French Revolution—passed the Combination Acts in 1801, which made unionizing illegal. So, the workers took what they saw as their only remaining avenue of recourse; they started smashing the automated looms.

The aristocrats in the House of Lords told them they didn’t understand, that this automation would make things better for everyone. But it wasn’t improving things for anyone the Luddites knew or saw. They watched factory owners get richer and richer, their own families get thinner and thinner, and markets get flooded with inferior cloth made by child slaves working in unsafe conditions. So they continued breaking the machines, even after the House of Lords made it a capital crime in 1812.

Merchant tells his story through the experience of selected individuals. One is Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose memoir of mistreatment in his 10 years of factory work is thought to have inspired Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Another is Lord Byron, who, like other Romantic poets, sympathized with the Luddites and who spoke (beautifully but futilely) in the House of Lords on their behalf. George Mellor, another figure Merchant spends time with, is one of the primary candidates for a real-life General Ludd.

Edward Ludd himself doesn’t qualify, as he was mythical. Supposedly an apprentice in the cloth trade who smashed his master’s device with a hammer in 1799, he became the movement’s figurehead, with the disparate raiders breaking machines all over northern England, leaving notes signed with his name. George Mellor, by contrast, was one of the best writers and organizers the Luddites had. He’d spent the requisite seven years to learn his cloth finishing job and in 1811 was ready to get to work. The West Riding of York, where he lived, had been home to wool weavers for centuries. But now greedy factory owners were using machines and children to do the work he had spent his adolescence mastering. After over a year of pleading with the owners and the government, and then resorting to machine breaking, there was no change and no hope in sight.

Finally, Mellor led a raid in which a friend was killed, and he snapped. He murdered a factory owner and was hanged, along with 14 of his fellows (only four were involved in the murder; the rest were killed for other Luddite activities).

Even as their bodies were still practically swinging on the gallows, the aristocracy and press were already undermining and reshaping the Luddite story, depicting them as deluded and small-minded men who smashed machines they couldn’t understand—not the strategic, grassroots labor activists they were. That misrepresentation is largely how they are still remembered.

Would Luddites find the gig economy familiar? Read More »

Lazy use of AI leads to Amazon products called “I cannot fulfill that request”

AI, Amazon, openai, spam / DJ Henderson / January 12, 2024

FILE NOT FOUND —

The telltale error messages are a sign of AI-generated pablum all over the Internet.

Kyle Orland – Jan 12, 2024 8: 56 pm UTC

Enlarge / I know naming new products can be hard, but these Amazon sellers made some particularly odd naming choices.

Amazon

Amazon users are at this point used to search results filled with products that are fraudulent, scams, or quite literally garbage. These days, though, they also may have to pick through obviously shady products, with names like “I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy.”

As of press time, some version of that telltale OpenAI error message appears in Amazon products ranging from lawn chairs to office furniture to Chinese religious tracts. A few similarly named products that were available as of this morning have been taken down as word of the listings spreads across social media (one such example is Archived here).

Enlarge / ProTip: Don’t ask OpenAI to integrate a trademarked brand name when generating a name for your weird length of rubber tubing.

Other Amazon product names don’t mention OpenAI specifically but feature apparent AI-related error messages, such as “Sorry but I can’t generate a response to that request” or “Sorry but I can’t provide the information you’re looking for,” (available in a variety of colors). Sometimes, the product names even highlight the specific reason why the apparent AI-generation request failed, noting that OpenAI can’t provide content that “requires using trademarked brand names” or “promotes a specific religious institution” or in one case “encourage unethical behavior.”

Enlarge / The repeated invocation of a “commitment to providing reliable and trustworthy product descriptions” cited in this description is particularly ironic.

The descriptions for these oddly named products are also riddled with obvious AI error messages like, “Apologies, but I am unable to provide the information you’re seeking.” One product description for a set of tables and chairs (which has since been taken down) hilariously noted: “Our [product] can be used for a variety of tasks, such [task 1], [task 2], and [task 3]].” Another set of product descriptions, seemingly for tattoo ink guns, repeatedly apologizes that it can’t provide more information because: “We prioritize accuracy and reliability by only offering verified product details to our customers.”

Spam spam spam spam

Using large language models to help generate product names or descriptions isn’t against Amazon policy. On the contrary, in September Amazon launched its own generative AI tool to help sellers “create more thorough and captivating product descriptions, titles, and listing details.” And we could only find a small handful of Amazon products slipping through with the telltale error messages in their names or descriptions as of press time.

Still, these error-message-filled listings highlight the lack of care or even basic editing many Amazon scammers are exercising when putting their spammy product listings on the Amazon marketplace. For every seller that can be easily caught accidentally posting an OpenAI error, there are likely countless others using the technology to create product names and descriptions that only seem like they were written by a human that has actual experience with the product in question.

Enlarge / A set of clearly real people conversing on Twitter / X.

Amazon isn’t the only online platform where these AI bots are outing themselves, either. A quick search for “goes against OpenAI policy” or “as an AI language model” can find a whole lot of artificial posts on Twitter / X or Threads or LinkedIn, for example. Security engineer Dan Feldman noted a similar problem on Amazon back in April, though searching with the phrase “as an AI language model” doesn’t seem to generate any obviously AI-generated search results these days.

As fun as it is to call out these obvious mishaps for AI-generated content mills, a flood of harder-to-detect AI content is threatening to overwhelm everyone from art communities to sci-fi magazines to Amazon’s own ebook marketplace. Pretty much any platform that accepts user submissions that involve text or visual art now has to worry about being flooded with wave after wave of AI-generated work trying to crowd out the human community they were created for. It’s a problem that’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

Listing image by Getty Images | Leon Neal

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AI firms’ pledges to defend customers from IP issues have real limits

AI, Amazon, copyright, Google, indemnity, microsoft, syndication / DJ Henderson / January 8, 2024

Read the fine print —

Indemnities offered by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are narrow.

Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times – Jan 8, 2024 3: 05 pm UTC

Enlarge / The Big Tech groups are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI

FT

The world’s biggest cloud computing companies that have pushed new artificial intelligence tools to their business customers are offering only limited protections against potential copyright lawsuits over the technology.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI—systems that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds.

AI models are “trained” on data, such as photographs and text found on the internet. This has led to concern that rights holders, from media companies to image libraries, will make legal claims against third parties who use the AI tools trained on their copyrighted data.

The big three cloud computing providers have pledged to defend business customers from such intellectual property claims. But an analysis of the indemnity clauses published by the cloud computing companies show that the legal protections only extend to the use of models developed by or with oversight from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

“The indemnities are quite a smart bit of business . . . and make people think ‘I can use this without worrying’,” said Matthew Sag, professor of law at Emory University.

But Brenda Leong, a partner at Luminos Law, said it was “important for companies to understand that [the indemnities] are very narrowly focused and defined.”

Google, Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment.

The indemnities provided to customers do not cover use of third-party models, such as those developed by AI start-up Anthropic, which counts Amazon and Google as investors, even if these tools are available for use on the cloud companies’ platforms.

In the case of Amazon, only content produced by its own models, such as Titan, as well as a range of the company’s AI applications, are covered.

Similarly, Microsoft only provides protection for the use of tools that run on its in-house models and those developed by OpenAI, the startup with which it has a multibillion-dollar alliance.

“People needed those assurances to buy, because they were hyper aware of [the legal] risk,” said one IP lawyer working on the issues.

The three cloud providers, meanwhile, have been adding safety filters to their tools that aim to screen out any potentially problematic content that is generated. The tech groups had become “more satisfied that instances of infringements would be very low,” but did not want to provide “unbounded” protection, the lawyer said.

While the indemnification policies announced by Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are similar, their customers may want to negotiate more specific indemnities in contracts tailored to their needs, though that is not yet common practice, people close to the cloud companies said.

OpenAI and Meta are among the companies fighting the first generative AI test cases brought by prominent authors and the comedian Sarah Silverman. They have focused in large part on allegations that the companies developing models unlawfully used copyrighted content to train them.

Indemnities were being offered as an added layer of “security” to users who might be worried about the prospect of more lawsuits, especially since the test cases could “take significant time to resolve,” which created a period of “uncertainty,” said Angela Dunning, a partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb.

However, Google’s indemnity does not extend to models that have been “fine-tuned” by customers using their internal company data—a practice that allows businesses to train general models to produce more relevant and specific results—while Microsoft’s does.

Amazon’s covers Titan models that have been customized in this way, but if the alleged infringement is due to the fine-tuning, the protection is voided.

Legal claims brought against the users—rather than the makers—of generative AI tools may be challenging to win, however.

When dismissing part of a claim brought by three artists a year ago against AI companies Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, US Judge William Orrick said one “problem” was that it was “not plausible” that every image generated by the tools had relied on “copyrighted training images.”

For copyright infringement to apply, the AI-generated images must be shown to be “substantially similar” to the copyrighted images, Orrick said.

AI firms’ pledges to defend customers from IP issues have real limits Read More »

Amazon marketplace crackdown has sellers searching for legal help

Amazon, counterfeit, Policy, syndication / Shannon Garcia / January 3, 2024

Legit or not —

Clean-up drive has led to some small businesses having their accounts suspended.

Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times – Jan 3, 2024 3: 38 pm UTC

Merchants who have been suspended from selling goods on Amazon’s marketplace are turning to a cottage industry of lawyers to regain access to their accounts and money, amid growing scrutiny of how the retailer treats independents.

Millions of accounts on the leading ecommerce platform have been prevented from engaging in sales for alleged violations of Amazon’s broad range of policies and other bad behavior. Even temporary suspensions can be a critical blow to the small business owners who rely on online sales.

Four ecommerce-focused US law firms told the Financial Times that the majority of the cases they took on were complaints brought by aggrieved Amazon sellers, with each handling hundreds or thousands of cases every year.

About a dozen sellers also said they had grown worried about Amazon’s power to suspend their accounts or product listings, as it was not always clear what had triggered the suspension and Amazon’s seller support services did not always help to sort out the issue.

Account suspension was “a big fear of mine,” said one seller, who declined to be named. “At the end of the day, it’s not really your business. One day you can wake up and it’s all gone.”

Amazon’s recent efforts to crack down on issues such as fake product reviews have come as US and European regulators have upped their scrutiny of the online harms facing shoppers.

But critics said the existence of a growing army of lawyers and consultants to deal with the fallout from Amazon’s actions pointed to a problem with the way the retailer treats its sellers.

“If you’re a seller and you need help to navigate the system, that’s a real vulnerability for the marketplace. If you’re operating a business where the people you’re deriving revenue from feel that they’re being treated in an arbitrary way without due process, that is a problem,” said Marianne Rowden, chief executive of the E-Merchants Trade Council.

“The fact that there are entire law firms dedicated to dealing with Amazon says a lot,” said one seller, who like many who spoke to the FT asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Amazon declined to comment in detail but said its selling partners were “incredibly important” and the company worked hard to “protect and help them grow their business.” The company worked to “eliminate mistakes and ‘false positive’ enforcements” and had an appeal process for sellers in place.

Sellers on Amazon’s marketplace account for more than 60 percent of sales in its store. In the nine months to September 30, Amazon recorded $96bn in commissions and fees paid by sellers, a jump of nearly 20 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

As the marketplace has grown, Amazon has had to do more to police it. During the first half of 2023 in its EU store, Amazon took 274mn “actions” in response to potential policy violations and other suspected problems, which included the removal of content and 4.2mn account suspensions. Amazon revealed the numbers as part of its first European transparency report newly required by EU law.

Amazon typically withholds any money in the account of a seller it has suspended for alleged fraudulent or abusive practices, which it may keep permanently if the account is not reinstated and the merchant is deemed to have been a bad actor.

Figuring out what caused a suspension and how to reverse it can be difficult. “We had a listing shut down during Prime Big Deals Days with no warning, no cause, no explanation,” said one kitchenware seller who has been selling on Amazon.com since 2014. “That’s pretty common.”

Amazon gave no further information when the listing was reinstated days later, the seller said.

Such confusion drives some sellers towards lawyers and consultants who advise on underlying problems, such as intellectual property disputes.

Amazon-focused US firms said they typically charged flat fees of between $1,300 and $3,500 per case.

CJ Rosenbaum, founding partner of the Amazon and ecommerce-focused law firm Rosenbaum Famularo, said the practice experienced a “big jump” in demand during the pandemic.

Many cases related to IP complaints from bigger brands “trying to control who sells their products” and making “a baseless counterfeit complaint” against a smaller Amazon seller, he added.

Lawyers said some sellers had been wrongly accused by the company’s automated systems that identify breaches of rules and policies. They added though that others had broken Amazon’s rules.

The retailer has become “more draconian” in the enforcement of its policies in recent years, said attorney Jeff Schick.

“Clients will say Amazon is unfair,” he said, but added that if the company did not strictly enforce its rules “then the platform becomes the next [US classified advertisements website] Craigslist.”

As part of escalated disputes, lawyers might steer merchants through a costly arbitration process that the company requires US sellers to use for most issues, rather than filing lawsuits against it.

Sellers were subject to “forced” arbitration clauses that required them to “sign away the right to their day in court if a dispute with Amazon arises,” said a 2022 US government report.

The details of arbitrations are not public, and decisions do not typically set binding precedents. They can also be hugely expensive: the up to three arbitrators that preside over a case can charge hundreds of dollars an hour.

“Quickly, you’re at $25,000 of costs or more,” said sole practitioner Leo Vaisburg, who left firm Wilson Elser in 2022 to pursue Amazon-related work full time. For many small businesses the high costs were “a barrier to entry,” he added. “Very few cases are worth that kind of money.”

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