New Report Confirms Israeli Army Is Using Big Tech’s Help To Commit More War Crimes In Gaza

A recent investigation by +972 Magazine, published on August 5, reveals troubling insights into the collaboration between the Israeli military and major technology firms. The report alleges that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are utilizing cloud storage and artificial intelligence services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to support military operations in the Gaza Strip. This usage has raised significant concerns about potential war crimes.

Colonel Racheli Dembinsky of the IDF publicly confirmed on July 10 that the military relies on these tech giants for cloud storage and AI capabilities. At a conference titled “IT for IDF” in Rishon Lezion, Dembinsky outlined how Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the IDF with substantial storage capacity, enabling the retention of extensive intelligence data on individuals in Gaza.

This intelligence is reportedly used in targeting operations, including airstrikes and assassinations, which have led to numerous civilian casualties. Since October 7, Israeli airstrikes have reportedly claimed tens of thousands of lives in Gaza, with a significant portion being women and children.

The need for advanced cloud services emerged as the conflict intensified. Initially, the IDF managed intelligence through its own servers. However, the scale of recent operations required greater storage and processing power, driving the military to adopt cloud-based solutions to handle the growing volume of data, including billions of audio files.

The partnership between Israel and the tech companies began in 2021 with the initiation of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Google and Amazon. This agreement allowed various Israeli government agencies to migrate non-classified data to the cloud and benefit from the sophisticated services offered by these companies. Data centers established by Google and Amazon in Israel in 2022 and 2023 further facilitated secure information storage during ongoing military operations.

Since October 2023, the collaboration under Project Nimbus has expanded. The tech companies now provide data storage and AI services to military units managing classified information, reflecting an increased reliance on these technologies during wartime.

The flexibility of cloud services has proven invaluable for the military. By leveraging these technologies, the IDF can rapidly scale its storage and processing capabilities to meet operational demands. This scalability allows for the quick collection and analysis of extensive data, which is crucial for effective targeting and intelligence gathering.

One application used by the military, known as MapIt, enables real-time tracking and marking of targets. This tool overlays potential targets on interactive maps, illustrating the breadth of surveillance and targeting efforts.

Critics, such as Tariq Kenney-Shawa from the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, have raised concerns about the involvement of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They argue that the tech companies are not merely facilitators but are actively participating in the military operations by providing the tools used in these genocidal actions.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

New Blow For OpenAI As Top News Publishers Block Newly Launched SearchGPT

It has only been one week since we saw the launch of SearchGPT from OpenAI.

However, things don’t seem to be going as planned. The company is facing a huge blow after some major news publishing websites have opted to block the tool from crawling their web pages.

The list entails 13 top news sites including the New York Times who have taken part in this block of the company’s web crawler (AKA OAI-SearchBot). Furthermore, the latter is designed to index data so that OpenAI can retrieve it and display accurate results linked to its users having SearchGPT.

OriginalityAI tracks all of the related materials and found that 14 out of the top 1000 publishers blocked OAI-SearchBot. Meanwhile, other publications present on the list included Wired, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, and The New Yorker.

It’s all quite head-scratching, as per the CEO of Originalityai. Why would a publisher end up blocking it when, at the end of the day, publishers need traffic?

As revealed by OpenAI, SearchGPT stressed that the OAI-SearchBot doesn’t crawl for data collection on the web to train AI models. Instead, it’s designed for website owners to enable them to try the latest bot and ensure the page pops up across search results.

Without access to crawlers on websites, the SearchGPT offering from OpenAI risks its competence. After all, it’s competing with the likes of Google. There’s a complete lack of trust and more doubts related to search traffic here, it appears.

Meanwhile, another web crawler such as OpenAI ends up scooping online data for the sake of training AI. Many websites end up blocking the bot. And when we think about it, this makes sense. You want more traffic coming from top search engines but you don’t wish to give away any data for AI training of models that would compete against you.

For so long, OpenAI has been busy taking part in user data collection without attaining consent. It might be that publishers don’t trust the company when it claims that it won’t suck up their written material for the sake of training data.

Search results don’t always direct users to the websites used for creating the original content. A giant chunk of the goal is related to these latest AI search engines keeping users glued for a while by displaying summaries. If the publisher isn’t seeing a huge figure for traffic from search engines, then why bother enabling these web crawlers in the first place?

Experts also note how the ChatGPT maker has been busy cutting out deals related to publishers using content archives. It almost looks like this was done intentionally: first, get close to publishers by signing partnership deals, and then roll out the massive SearchGPT initiative.

We must add that seeing The New York Times here is a little astonishing. The latter has already rolled out a few lawsuits against OpenAI and its biggest software giant investor Microsoft. They have gone on to allege that the tech giants are working illegally to use their content to produce competing products.

For those who might not be aware, The New York Times does not authorize using its content for Generative Search or training of AI models without any form of consent being taken. This is even though we do or don’t block any bot from carrying out crawling of content online.

As part of its complaints against the company, the NYT says it’s noticing how many search engine giants are turning out to be more powerful in regards to AI and siphoning traffic that comes from these publishing sites.

Other mentions in the complaint include how defendants continue to make use of Microsoft’s Bing Search Index, which categorizes online material to produce responses that entail excerpts and a detailed summary of the Times articles that are much longer and detailed than those returned by classic search engines.

By giving out Times content without any permission taken, the defendant's tools undermine and cause damage to the relationship with its reader and deprive them of licenses, subscriptions, and ads, not to mention revenue attained through affiliates.

Read next:

• OpenAI Creates New Tool That Catches Students Cheating On Assignments With ChatGPT

• Elon Musk Called Out For Pushing False Narratives About X’s Success Again
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Report Shows Many Businesses Are Quick in Implementing AI But They Are Struggling to Scale It

Cognizant, an IT consultancy, and Oxford Economics released a survey that found that even though many businesses want to implement generative AI as soon as possible, they are struggling to scale it. The survey shows that 70% of companies are worried that they are not implementing AI as fast as they should while 82% of companies believe that if they delay in implementing AI, they will not be able to compete with other companies which have already implemented AI.

The survey was a part of a report released earlier this year which was about the spread of generative AI and its effects on jobs. The report predicted that 13% of businesses are going to adopt AI in the next three to four years with 46% businesses doing so in the next decade. Many businesses and companies are already investing big on AI infrastructure. Cognizant itself invested $1 billion on AI tech which will be spent in the upcoming three years.

SVP and global practice head of AI and analytics at Cognizant, Naveen Sharma says that companies are already facing hurdles in scaling AI. If they want to ensure the correct implementation of AI, it is important that they know their data foundation and which tech stack is needed for it. Many businesses are just thinking of adding a chatbot as an AI tool for their employees but for most companies, this isn't going to work. They should re-imagine business processes to make the impact of AI implementation faster.

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• 100 Million Americans to Use Generative AI by End of 2024: New Report
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Elon Musk Called Out For Pushing False Narratives About X’s Success Again

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is back to his usual tactics and that entails pushing out false narratives related to his X app again.

Musk is all praise for the platform, adding how it’s achieving great success. However, experts are raising concerns about his conclusions because they feel the opposite is taking place in the social media domain.

In the past week, we’ve seen Elon Musk and his crew amplify reports linked to X and how it continues to edge out others in the race, going as far as to refer to it as the best news app we have today.

While we’re not saying that his claims are all false the way he’s framing it all is really raising eyebrows. His post from July 31st has Musk hailing the app as the best social media platform today.

He quoted stats from SimliarWeb that are used for measuring web traffic and giving more insights about how top webpages happen to be performing. What’s interesting is how such pages only measure web traffic and that means this is only taking visits to X into consideration and nothing else.

Why is all of this so important? Well, that’s because as per the app, just 88% of all users on X log into the platform through mobile phones.

Out of X’s reported 250 million DAU, just 29 million are logging into the webpage. Therefore, the usage chart only measures the usage being a fraction of the entire user base. As far as total usage is concerned, X isn’t even trailing where Meta’s Facebook stands, and neither is it close to Instagram’s reigning position.

Today. Facebook has nearly 2 billion DAU and most of them access it through the webpage and not the app. Instagram has a completely different picture where most people log in through their mobile phone and the number of daily active users stands at one billion.

In raw figures, Facebook has nearly eight times the daily user count that X has while Instagram has four times that. Therefore, the data is only a measure of the fracture of every platform’s usage.

So what Musk is saying about X isn’t indicative of anything really. X argues that it’s seeing more people log into the app than Facebook and Instagram as it’s being done through the desktop.

Many have time and time again questioned Musk’s claims on this front and how his stats about traffic doubling between May and June have taken place.

It might be doing great in the News apps category but to claim that it’s a news-related platform would simply be dubious for obvious reasons. The link is related to the past where Twitter was once thought of as your go-to news platform. Today, that’s not the case as most of the context has to do with user-generated content.

As per experts’ opinions, the fact that X hasn’t added many new users for a long time is clear how it’s not doing great. The interest is increasing yes but that’s about it.

Read next: OpenAI Creates New Tool That Catches Students Cheating On Assignments With ChatGPT
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

OpenAI Creates New Tool That Catches Students Cheating On Assignments With ChatGPT

Tech giant OpenAI has found a new solution to combat cheating on assignment concerns with ChatGPT.

For months, many have debated how useful ChatGPT really is, considering the drawbacks it comes with. This includes using the popular chatbot to cheat in assignments but as per new reports linked to the Wall Street Journal, the company has developed a new tool that could detect writings done through AI.

The only issue is that ChatGPT is debating on whether it should release it or not.

A new statement was provided on this front to media outlets where an OpenAI representative mentioned how the firm is currently researching the text watermarking stories published in the Journal. It hopes to take a deliberate step to alter the complexities that could be involved here, not to mention how the decision might end up altering the ecosystem beyond this system.

This method that they developed seems to be promising on a technical level but it does come with a lot of risks for the company which they hope to be weighing while studying different alternatives. Common examples include the susceptibility related to circumvention by threat actors and the ability to impact groups such as those who don’t speak English.

• Also read: How To Use Google Docs Secret Feature to Detect AI Content Writing

It’s going to be a different approach to that witnessed from efforts conducted in the past when detecting AI-based text. It’s been so ineffective. Even the company itself plans to shut down any old AI text detectors that arose due to a lower accuracy rate.

Thanks to text watermarking, the company hopes to focus solely on making detections through writings produced via ChatGPT. This would not apply to other models in use. It’s going to enable this by making small amendments to how the tool makes word selections by producing invisible watermarks seen in writings that might be detected at a later time by another tool.

After the publication was done, we saw the tech giant make updates to one of its own blog posts from May related to a study that had to do with detecting AI-based content. The change says text watermarking is very accurate and could turn out to be very useful when it comes to localized tampering incidents which include paraphrasing.

But it’s still not as effective with global techniques used for tampering including translations or rewording done via a separate generative model. This includes asking the tool to add special characters in between each word and then going about with character deletions later on.

• Also read: Report Reveals Podcasting is Not As Easier to Do as It Used to Be

OpenAI says that such methods turn out to be trivial to evasion by threat actors. The latest update from OpenAi seems to be an echo linked to the representative’s point that has to do with non-English speakers. They added how such a technique would stigmatize the true purpose or use of AI as the most useful tool for writing when non-native English speakers happen to be involved.

Image: DIW

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Report Reveals Podcasting is Not As Easier to Do as It Used to Be

A recent report by WSJ shows that podcasting is getting tougher for those who do not have a large following. The data from WSJ shows that the top 100 podcast shows reach only 60% of US audience while top 25 podcast shows reach half of regular podcast listeners in the USA. Podcasts started getting popular in the early 2000s and Apple made them mainstream after supporting them on iTunes and then synching them with iPod.

Anyone with a microphone and a good story to tell can start a podcast but there's no guarantee if it can reach a large audience. Nowadays only the podcasters who have a large following can earn most of the cash and audience because the brands only reach out to them. According to Podcast Industry Insights, there are about 450,000 active podcast shows but only the top 25 of them are able to reach half of US weekly listeners.

Many top podcasters like Alex Cooper, Trevor Noah and Joe Rogan have millions dollar deals with their respective platforms and even have their own tours and merchandise. Right now, Spotify is on the top podcasting list and earns a great revenue from it. Amazon’s Wondery podcast is also doing good and making big deals.

The podcast named Archetypes with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was a flop and cost Spotify $20 million. The launch of Apple’s iOS 17 was also to be blamed for reduced listeners of podcasts. With the iOS 17 update, podcasts do not download a new episode automatically and this way listeners miss the new episode. One company says that with this new update, they lost $9 million.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

5G Dominates Early 2024 Smartphone Market, CounterPoint Finds

According to CounterPoint, 2 out of 3 smartphones sold in the first half of 2024 were 5G-capable. The first 5G-capable smartphone was introduced in 2019, and since then, OEMs have introduced a number of smartphones capable of 5G networks. In 2023, the shipment of smartphones with 5G capability surpassed 2 billion units. In 2019, the 5G-capable smartphone penetration was just 2%, which increased to 20% after the launch of the 5G-capable iPhone 12 series in 2020.

During 2020-21, the sales of 5G-capable smartphones were slowly increasing, but they were limited to the premium segment because of the high cost of 5G chipsets. In the next two years, 5G smartphones dropped from triple-digit percentage growth to single-digit percentage growth. Mature markets had high shares of mid-range to premium smartphones with 5G contribution, and they crossed 80%.

It is expected that India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa will be emerging markets for 5G-capable smartphone growth. The biggest challenge here is that 5G smartphones should be available in lower price tiers. In the first half of 2024, the ASPs for global 5G smartphones had already dropped by 30% since their release in 2019. This became possible when chipset makers reduced the price difference between 4G and 5G chipsets. Transsion Group, Xiaomi, and Samsung have introduced 5G-capable smartphones at cheaper prices now.

Right now, all 5G-capable smartphones have prices above $400. Smartphones priced between $249-$399 are also getting popular. $100-$249 smartphones are still 4G for now. Many 5G chipset makers are making efforts to bring 5G to lower prices. OEM Xiaomi is going to be the first company to introduce a chipset priced below $100, which will be available by the end of 2024.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World