Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. 'Deepfakes' are cute tricks -- but they could change pop for ever. From a report: "It's Christmas time! It's hot tub time!" sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice -- that rich tone once described as "all legato and regrets" -- is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool. The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by "research and deployment company" OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they've done what are known as "deepfakes" of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Celine Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you'll get an approximation out the other end. "As a piece of engineering, it's really impressive," says Dr Matthew Yee-King, an electronic musician, researcher and academic at Goldsmiths. (OpenAI declined to be interviewed.) "They break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music -- a dictionary if you like -- at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in. The algorithm can then rearrange these fragments, based on the stimulus you input. So, give it some Ella Fitzgerald for example, and it will find and piece together the relevant bits of the 'dictionary' to create something in her musical space." Admirable as the technical achievement is, there's something horrifying about some of the samples, particularly those of artists who have long since died -- sad ghosts lost in the machine, mumbling banal cliches. "The screams of the damned" reads one comment below that Sinatra sample; "SOUNDS FUCKING DEMONIC" reads another. We're down in the Uncanny Valley. Deepfake music is set to have wide-ranging ramifications for the music industry as more companies apply algorithms to music. Google's Magenta Project -- billed as "exploring machine learning as a tool in the creative process" -- has developed several open source APIs that allow composition using entirely new, machine-generated sounds, or human-AI co-creations. Numerous startups, such as Amper Music, produce custom, AI-generated music for media content, complete with global copyright. Even Spotify is dabbling; its AI research group is led by Francois Pachet, former head of Sony Music's computer science lab.

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European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform. From a report: The EU's executive commission, the bloc's top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company. The commission said it takes issue with Amazon's systematic use of non-public business data to avoid "the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance" for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company's two biggest markets in the EU. The EU started looking into Amazon in 2018 and has been focusing on its dual role as a marketplace and retailer. In addition to selling its own products, the U.S. company allows third-party retailers to sell their own goods through its site. Last year, more than half of the items sold on Amazon worldwide were from these outside merchants. Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition, said it's not a problem that Amazon is a successful business but "our concern is very specific business conduct which appears to distort genuine competition." Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

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fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: A team of physicists at a university in the Netherlands have 3D-printed a microscopic version of the USS Voyager, an Intrepid-class starship from Star Trek. The miniature Voyager, which measures 15 micrometers (0.015 millimeters) long, is part of a project researchers at Leiden University conducted to understand how shape affects the motion and interactions of microswimmers. Microswimmers are small particles that can move through liquid on their own by interacting with their environment through chemical reactions. The platinum coating on the microswimmers reacts to a hydrogen peroxide solution they are placed in, and that propels them through the liquid. "By studying synthetic microswimmers, we would like to understand biological microswimmers," Samia Ouhajji, one of the study's authors, told CNN. "This understanding could aid in developing new drug delivery vehicles; for example, microrobots that swim autonomously and deliver drugs at the desired location in the human body." In their project, the physicists also printed shapes like boats, trimers and helices, with each object's shape affecting their swimming behaviors.

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Greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants, manufacturing sites and other large facilities declined nearly 5% from 2018 to 2019, according to data released Monday. Bloomberg reports: The drop is consistent with a decade-long downward trend in greenhouse gas releases from large stationary sources, partly propelled by the power sector's ongoing shift away from coal to renewable sources and cleaner-burning natural gas. The new data reflect emissions from nearly 8,000 large, stationary facilities -- including cement plants, steel mills, oil refineries and landfills. The numbers do not cover small stationary sources that emit fewer than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually. Nor do they cover the transportation sector, now the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Large facilities in the reporting program emitted 2.85 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in 2019, down from 2.99 billion metric tons in 2018. Overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been on a downward trend since 2005, a commonly used baseline. However, they increased 2.9% in 2018 over 2017 levels, after three years of annual declines, according to a separate EPA inventory, the last year for which data is available.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last month, as students at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, Canada, began studying for their midterm exams, many of them had to memorize not just the content on their tests, but a complex set of instructions for how to take them. The school has a student body of nearly 18,500 undergraduates, and is one of many universities that have increasingly turned to exam proctoring software to catch supposed cheaters. It has a contract with Respondus, one of the many exam proctoring companies offering software designed to monitor students while they take tests by tracking head and eye movements, mouse clicks, and more. This type of surveillance has become the new norm for tens of thousands of students around the world, who -- forced to study remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, often while paying full tuition -- are subjected to programs that a growing body of critics say are discriminatory and highly invasive. Like its competitors in the exam surveillance industry, Respondus uses a combination of facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure "anomalies" in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm. These programs also often require students to do 360-degree webcam scans of the rooms in which they're testing to ensure they don't have any illicit learning material in sight. Some of the requirements for Wilfrid Laurier students went even further. In exam instructions distributed to students, one WLU professor wrote that anyone who wished to use foam noise-cancelling ear plugs must "in plain view of your webcam place the ear plugs on your desk and use a hard object to hit each ear plug before putting it in your ear -- if they are indeed just foam ear plugs they will not be harmed." Other instructors required students to buy hand mirrors and hold them up to their webcams prior to beginning a test to ensure they hadn't written anything on the webcam. Another professor told students, "DO NOT allow others in your home to use the internet while you are completing your test," presumably because proctoring software can be a nightmare for students without reliable high-speed internet access. That same exam guide also said that students should not sit in front of pictures or posters that contain animal faces because the software might flag them as suspicious for having another person in the room -- not a reassuring requirement, given that one of the chief criticisms of exam proctoring software is that they often fail to recognize students with darker skin tones. One of the main reasons why this is such an issue is because most universities have chosen not to set standards for how instructors should use proctoring software. "As a result, campuses that use the programs are increasingly seeing students voice their anger not just with the programs themselves, but with how individual professors use them," reports Motherboard. Students also aren't accepting the excuse universities and proctoring software companies often make: that professors decide how to use the tools, so they're the ones responsible for the harms they cause.

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Sony confirmed today that the existing PS4 will soon let you access your other PlayStation consoles remotely, including the PS5: "We're updating PS4's Remote Play feature. Now, in addition to being able to access your PS4 from a PC or a mobile device, your PS4 can access other consoles via Remote Play too, right on your TV. This includes the ability to connect to your PS5 and stream a PS5 game to your PS4 so you can play it there." The Verge reports: VGC and Eurogamer reported today that a "PS5 Remote Play" app has already popped up on the PS4, offering up to a 1080p stream from your new console to your existing one. Perhaps you'll hook up your PS4 to the bedroom TV -- or the living room if you keep your primary console in the den? You don't necessarily need a PS4 to stream a PS5 to another room of your house, though, since the PS Remote Play app is getting updated on other platforms as well. The Windows version not only adds PS5 support at 1080p but also HDR. Sony's PS Remote Play apps for Android and iOS have been updated for the PS5, and we'd be surprised if the Mac version wasn't ready as well.

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says its government is now on track to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet by 2026. CBC.ca reports: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a handful of cabinet ministers held a news conference in Ottawa to launch the $1.75 billion universal broadband fund -- a program unveiled in the federal government's 2019 budget and highlighted on the campaign trail and in September's throne speech. Most of the money was announced in last year's budget. "We were ready to go in March with the new Universal Broadband Fund and then the pandemic hit," Rural Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef told reporters. The prime minister said the government is now on track to connect 98 per cent of Canadians to high-speed by 2026 -- an increase over the previously promised 95 per cent benchmark -- and to link up the rest by 2030. About $150 million from the fund will be freed up to fund projects aimed at getting communities connected by next fall. Senior officials with the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until Jan. 15, 2021, with a goal of having projects completed by mid-November, 2021. Deciding who gets upgraded connectivity first will depend on the service providers applying, they said. The prime minister said the government also has reached a $600 million agreement with Telesat for satellite capacity to improve broadband service in remote areas and in the North.

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theodp writes: The upcoming "Hack the Classroom: STEM Edition," Microsoft explains, "is a [3-day] free virtual event series designed for K-12 educators, parents, and guardians. The sessions will feature resources and tutorials to help educators support students in learning future-ready skills. These lessons can be easily incorporated into classroom curriculum while preparing for this year's Hour of Code event -- a global effort to teach and demystify coding, during Computer Science Education Week, December 7-13." Microsoft has boasted that the Hour of Code enabled it to reach tens of millions of schoolchildren each year with its drag-and-drop Minecraft-themed tutorials. New for middle and high schoolers this year is the Minecraft Python Hour of Code, which presumably taps into the just-released Python Content for Minecraft: Education Edition (sample Python 101 Lesson). The Hour of Code is run by Microsoft-funded Code.org, whose Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has reprimanded one of its largest manufacturers after a Financial Times investigation found that thousands of student interns had worked overtime to assemble iPhones, in breach of Chinese law. After being contacted by the FT, Apple said it had stopped giving "new business" to Pegatron, its second-largest iPhone assembler after Foxconn. However, workers there said the factory was still manufacturing new products ahead of the holidays. Pegatron, which has headquarters in Taiwan but has operations in China, is one of Apple's largest manufacturers, producing iPhones, Macs, iPads and other components for several years. It has also faced recurring allegations about working conditions from campaign groups such as China Labor Watch. Until last month, thousands of student interns had assembled iPhones at Pegatron's Kunshan plant and illegally worked overtime and night shifts, according to former interns and workers at the plant. Chinese government regulations prevent students from interning in factories if the work is unrelated to their studies. The alleged coercive use of students during the factory's peak production periods mirrors the abuses previously found by the FT at Foxconn. Schools and local governments often collaborate to ensure labor supply for big companies in China. The latest disclosures follow the death last month of a worker in his mid-thirties after falling unconscious in a Pegatron dormitory. Apple said: "We have a rigorous review and approval process for any student worker program, which ensures the intern's work is related to their major and prohibits overtime or night shifts. Pegatron misclassified the student workers in their program and falsified paperwork to disguise violations." Pegatron said: "During [a] recent monitoring program conducted by our customer, some student workers at Pegatron Shanghai and Kunshan campus were identified working night shifts, overtime and in positions unrelated to their majors, which were not in compliance with local rules and regulations."

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According to USA Today, McDonald's has developed a new plant-based platform dubbed McPlant that will debut in markets around the world early next year. From the report: "McPlant is crafted exclusively for McDonald's, by McDonald's," Ian Borden, McDonald's international president, said at the investor meeting. "In the future, McPlant could extend across a line of plant-based products including burgers, chicken substitutes and breakfast sandwiches." The plant-based and chicken sandwich announcements were part of the company's new growth strategy called "Accelerating the Arches." The strategy includes a commitment to the core menu. "There are other plant-based burgers out there, but the McPlant delivers our iconic taste in a sink-your-teeth-in (and wipe-your-mouth) kind of sandwich," McDonald's said in a blog post Monday. "It's made with a juicy, plant-based patty and served on a warm, sesame seed bun with all the classic toppings." Borden said some markets will test the burger next year. Whether or not the vegan-friendly burger will arrive in the U.S. and a potential timeline was not immediately known. "We are excited about the opportunity because we believe we have a proven, delicious-tasting product," Borden said. "When customers are ready for it, we will be ready for them." Beyond Meat, a pioneer of plant-based meat substitutes, said it co-created the plant-based patty that will be part of the McPlant platform with McDonald's.

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The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is finalizing a plan to become a citizen of the island of Cyprus, Recode has learned, becoming one of the highest-profile Americans to take advantage of one of the world's most controversial "passport-for-sale" programs. From the report: Schmidt, one of America's wealthiest people, and his family have won approval to become citizens of the Mediterranean nation, according to a previously unreported notice in a Cypriot publication in October. While it is not clear why exactly Schmidt has pursued this foreign citizenship, the new passport gives him the ability to travel to the European Union, along with a potentially favorable personal tax regime. The move is a window into how the world's billionaires can maximize their freedoms and finances by relying on the permissive laws of countries where they do not live. The Cyprus program is one of about a half-dozen programs in the world where foreigners can effectively purchase citizenship rights, skirting residency requirements or lengthy lines by making a payment or an investment in the host country. They have become the latest way for billionaires around the world to go "borderless" and take advantage of foreign countries' laws, moving themselves offshore just like they might move their assets offshore, a phenomenon documented by the journalist Oliver Bullough in the recent book Moneyland. [...] The way the program works is that once a foreigner lays down between $2 million and $3 million worth of investment in Cyprus, typically through a real estate purchase, they can apply to what is technically called the "Citizenship by Investment" program. After the government reviews the applicant's background, conducts a security check, and hosts a visit from the foreigner, their application can be approved.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Earthlings are lucky to live near a relatively stable Sun, which has enabled life on our planet to emerge and thrive over the past four billion years. While many worlds in our galaxy might contain the right ingredients to support life, though, a lot of them could be stuck with a more volatile star that prevents them from becoming -- or remaining -- habitable. To get a better grip on which types of star systems might be most likely to host aliens, a pair of scientists at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Center for Space Science have observed space weather around nearly 500 stars, according to a study published on Sunday in the journal Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. The results suggest that planets subjected to occasional but intense flares are probably more hospitable to life than worlds that receive a constant flux of radiation and low-energy flares, which blows their protective atmospheres away. Planetary habitability "is one of the most important concepts in exoplanet science" and "is defined as the zone around a star in which a planet is able to sustain liquid water on its surface," said research scientist Dimitra Atri and graduate student Shane Carberry Mogan, both at NYUAD, in the study. "While this approach is useful to identify potentially hospitable planets around stars, it fails to take into account the damaging aspect of stellar activity on such planets," the pair added. "The main goal of this paper is to understand how stellar luminosity and flares can lead to atmospheric escape on [habitable zone] planets on long time-scales and how these losses impact planetary habitability."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: Voters in both Denver and Chicago have overwhelmingly thrown their support behind local community broadband projects, joining the hundreds of U.S. communities that have embraced home-grown alternatives to entrenched telecom monopolies. In Chicago, roughly 90 percent of voters approved a non-binding referendum question that asked: "should the city of Chicago act to ensure that all the city's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" The vote opens the door to the city treating broadband more like an essential utility, potentially in the form of community-run fiber networks. In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city's electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives. [...] "I think the margin in Chicago and Denver is remarkable," [said Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.] "When we work with communities where half the residents have a cable monopoly and the other half don't have any broadband, the demand for something better is strong among both populations."

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Advertisers entering the burgeoning medium of streaming TV say they want better measurement and targeting capabilities than they are finding there. But a shadow looms over any efforts to give them what they want: the privacy backlash that has recently put other digital media on the defensive. From a report: That means obtaining viewers' consent to use information on what they watch will be essential for whatever tools emerge as the best way to measure and reach streaming audiences. Online advertising has long relied on technology like tracking cookies and tactics such as retargeting -- following people from website to website to repeatedly show them the same ad for a shirt or a trip they may have briefly considered online. The industry's pervasive monitoring and targeting regime ultimately fueled the rise of ad blockers among consumers, new privacy regulations in Europe and California, and efforts by Apple and Alphabet's Google to weaken some tools on which advertisers, publishers and ad-technology companies have come to rely. Players in streaming TV don't want to provoke the same outcome. "The industry as a whole cannot take the privacy of consumers for granted and make the same mistakes that were made on the internet decades ago," said David Spencer, assistant manager of audience buying strategy for General Motors Co. The risk is growing as more people stream TV over the internet, however, including on television sets that can tell what they are watching.

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Parler, which calls itself a "viewpoint-neutral" social network and is growing popular among conservatives who feel mainstream social platforms are censoring them, is now topping the free app download charts, according to both Apple and Sensor Tower. From a report: With Twitter and other mainstream social media apps more strictly enforcing rules against election-related falsehoods, more permissive, often right-leaning platforms have seen a surge of interest. The app for Newsmax, a right-leaning news network, also began surging on the download charts after all the major networks, including Fox News, called the election for Biden. It remains to be seen if the gains are more than temporary, but the shift has certainly raised eyebrows.

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NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine says he plans to leave his position at the space agency under the new Joe Biden administration, even if he's asked to stay, according to an interview he did with Aviation Week. Bridenstine said the decision would be to ensure NASA has the right leader who connects with the new president. From a report: "What you need is somebody who has a close relationship with the president of the United States," Bridenstine told Aviation Week. "You need somebody who is trusted by the administration... including the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], the National Space Council and the National Security Council, and I think that I would not be the right person for that in a new administration." President Trump nominated Bridenstine, then a Republican representative from Oklahoma, to lead NASA in 2017. Bridenstine's confirmation became a contentious one, with many lawmakers decrying the idea of a politician running a scientific agency like NASA. "NASA is one of the last refuges from partisan politics," former Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said during Bridenstine's confirmation hearing in November 2017. "NASA needs a leader who will unite us, not divide us. Respectfully, Congressman Bridenstine, I don't think you're that leader." Eventually, the Senate did narrowly confirm him in April 2018, with lawmakers voting along party lines.

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Emil Protalinski, reporting for VentureBeat: For more than a decade, I've used Net Applications' NetMarketShare tool to track the desktop browser and operating system markets. The monthly reports have been critical in gauging which browsers and new versions of operating systems are gaining or losing market share. Last week, Net Applications released its final NetMarketShare report. The loss could not come at a worse time. After Chrome cemented its spot as the world's de facto browser, there hasn't been a lot of movement. But that might be about to change. Chrome's creator, Google, is facing the biggest U.S. antitrust case in a generation. Mozilla, which depends on Google for almost all its revenue, is rightly worried about becoming "collateral damage." [...] So why is Net Applications killing off NetMarketShare? Don't act surprised when I tell you the undisputed market leader has something to do with it. In January, Google proposed deprecating the User-Agent string (used to identify which browser and operating system is being used) as part of its war on fingerprinting. Net Applications says the change will break NetMarketShare's device detection technology and "cause inaccuracies for a long period of time." Add the ongoing problem of filtering out bots to prevent skewing of the result, and Net Applications decided it was best to throw in the towel after 14 years. Net Applications provided its reports based on data captured from 100 million sessions each month over thousands of websites.

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India's antitrust watchdog has opened an investigation into Google for allegedly abusing the dominant position of its app store to promote its payments service in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: In its Monday announcement about opening an antitrust case against Google, Indian watchdog Competition Commission of India (CCI) said it would review claims of whether the Android maker prominently promotes Google Pay during the setup of an Android smartphone (and whether phone vendors have a choice to avoid this); and if Play Store's billing system is designed "to the disadvantage of both i.e. apps facilitating payment through UPI, as well as users." The informant, who has not been identified, alleged that in addition to Google Play Store's billing system favoring Google Pay app, in-app purchases for apps downloaded through Play Store are also mandated to support Google Pay service "if they want to be listed on the Play Store" and they are required to pay a "high commission" for that. The informant also alleged that Google "unfairly" skews the search results on the Play Store in favor of Google Pay app over others -- though CCI is not investigating this claim citing not enough evidence to support them.

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A single shot given every two months has proved to be more effective than a daily pill at preventing H.I.V. in women, researchers reported on Monday, an advance that medical experts hailed as groundbreaking in the fight against the deadly virus that causes AIDS. From a report: The finding that the long-acting drug would prevent H.I.V. in six doses taken over a year instead of the 365 required for the prevention pill currently on the market was so convincing the researchers decided to end their clinical trial of the drug early. "It's a game changer for women," said Dr. Sigal Yawetz, an expert on women with H.I.V. at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the trial. Women and girls accounted for about half of all new H.I.V. infections in 2019, according to Unaids, a United Nations organization that leads the global fight against H.I.V. and AIDS. In sub-Saharan Africa, five in six new infections among adolescents ages 15 to 19 are among girls. "If we're going to get to the end of the epidemic, we have to do something to stem the tide of infection in those women," said Dr. Kimberly Smith, head of research and development at ViiV Healthcare, which manufactures the injection. "That is why this study is so important. It gives a new, incredibly effective option for women." Women have had only one approved option for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a course of drugs taken to prevent contracting H.I.V.: the daily pill Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences. (A second pill also made by Gilead, called Descovy, was approved in October 2019, but only for men and transgender women.)

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Zoom will implement new security practices as part of a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the agency announced on Monday. From a report: "Zoom has agreed to a requirement to establish and implement a comprehensive security program, a prohibition on privacy and security misrepresentations, and other detailed and specific relief to protect its user base, which has skyrocketed from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic," the FTC said in a press release.

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