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By Kate Abnett LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) -European Union countries failed on Monday to agree on planned new rules for the bloc's

A group of Indian academics wants their names to be removed from textbooks they helped write - why?

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Reddit has been filled with images of John Oliver, as user’s protests against the site’s management take a bizarre new turn. In recent weeks, controversy has been brewing on Reddit after the site announced that it would be charging new fees to developers who wanted to get access to its data. The company said that the change was required to offset the costs incurred by running the site. Third-party developers said that the site’s prices were too high, and many developers – including those behind the most popular apps, such as Apollo – said they would instead shut down. That prompted outcry from the moderators who run the site. In protest, thousands of the site’s forums, or subreddits, went “dark” earlier this month. Administrators turned the forums private so that users were unable to see them, in a protest that ran from 12 to 14 June. That protest led to no change from Reddit. Its chief executive, Steve Huffman, said instead that users would get over the changes and staff suggested those administrators could be removed from their posts. Since then, many of the site’s biggest forums have been discussing how to continue the protest, given that their demands had not been met. And many – including its “aww”, “pics” and “gifs” subreddits, which rank among the site’s most popular – have committed instead to post pictures of TV comedian John Oliver. Oliver appeared to enjoy the attention. On Twitter, he wrote “Dear Reddit, excellent work” and went on to share a large thread of pictures of himself, apparently to ensure that users had enough to post. Other subreddits have continued the protest in their own ways. The subreddit devoted to Apple has filled with posts of its chief executive Tim Cook, for instance. And two of the site’s top 10 most popular forums – those focused on science and music – are no longer dark, but new posts cannot be added. Read More Reddit says people will get over outrage and causes further outrage Reddit hit by outage as fight over its future escalates Reddit just went ‘dark’, and the site is in chaos

Apple’s new iPhone 15 will feature at least one new upgrade aimed at the upcoming Vision Pro headset, according to a report. The new iPhone is due out in September, and Apple has said little about it. But as the release nears, more reports are leaking out from the company’s supply chain that indicate its features. One of those may be a new “ultra wide band” or UWB chip that is looking ahead to Apple’s Vision Pro, according to a new report from reputable analyst Ming-chi Kuo. The chip will allow the phone and the headset to be able to work together, he suggested, as part of a “more competitive ecosystem”. “The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including the integration with other Apple hardware products, and related main hardware specifications are Wi-Fi and UWB,” he wrote on a post on Twitter. “iPhone 15 will likely see an specification upgrade of UWB, with the production process moving from 16nm to more advanced 7nm, allowing for improved performance or reduced power consumption for nearby Interactions.” The U1 chip is used give the iPhone and other devices better spatial awareness, so that they can find other objects more precisely. It is not clear what features that integration may provide for either the iPhone or the Vision Pro. Mr Kuo’s reports tend to focus on leaks from Apple’s hardware pipeline, rather than its software, so tend to reveal more about the physical nature of a product rather than how exactly it will be used. Apple’s U1 UWB chip first arrived in the iPhone 11, and has been in every iPhone since. It has rolled out more widely, to the Watch and HomePod as well as the AirTags and AirPods Pro. Initially, it was somewhat unclear what Apple intended to the U1 chip to do. But over time it released a number of products – such as those AirTags and AirPods Pro – which can be found with the phone, and rely on the UWB for more precise location. Mr Kuo also indicated that next year’s phone, the iPhone 16, will come with a new WiFi chip that will be “more conducive to Apple’s integration of hardware products running on the same local network and provide a better ecosystem experience”. Read More Man locked out of smart home for a week after he was accused of being racist Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Can Apple make us love virtual reality? | You Ask The Questions

Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

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Reddit's month may be going from bad to worse.

Researchers have discovered how to create clean, sustainable fuels using only carbon dioxide captured from the air and energy from the Sun. A team from the University of Cambridge used a solar-powered reactor to transform CO2 from real-world sources into an inexhaustible energy supply. The research took inspiration from carbon capture and storage (CCS), which until now has captured CO2 in order to pump it into underground storage. “Instead of storing CO2 underground, like in CCS, we can capture it from the air and make clean fuel from it,” said Dr Motiar Rahaman. “This way, we can cut out the fossil fuel industry from the process of fuel production, which can hopefully help us avoid climate destruction.” The solar-driven technology is able to actively capture CO2 from either industrial processes, or directly from the air. “This solar-powered system takes two harmful waste products – plastic and carbon emissions – and converts them into something truly useful,” said co-first author Dr Sayan Kar. “The fact that we can effectively take CO2 from air and make something useful from it is special. It’s satisfying to see that we can actually do it using only sunlight.” The research was detailed in a study, titled ‘Integrated Capture and Solar-driven Utilisation of CO2 from Flue Gas and Air’, published in the scientific journal Joule on Monday. Read More ‘Miracle material’ solar panels to finally enter production in China