
David Zaslav Commencement Address Drowned Out By 'Pay Your Writers' Chant
Zaslav was booed and faced "pay your writers" chants during Boston University commencement address.
2023-05-22 04:49

Heat's confidence not hit by heavy losses to Celtics says Adebayo
The Miami Heat suffered a crushing 110-97 defeat to the Boston Celtics in Game 5, cutting their series lead in the Eastern Conference finals to 3-2, but center Bam Adebayo...
2023-05-27 01:24

Hackers strike Iranian government, releasing presidential documents
A group of hackers working against the Iranian government have struck again, this time with a second trove of documents obtained from the highest levels of the authoritarian regime. Credit for the attack was claimed by the group calling itself “Ghiam ta Sarnegoun”, or “Rise to Overthrow”. The attack follows a similar episode in early May, when the group defaced the website of Iran’s foreign ministry with messages in support of Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran — a politician-in-exile with backing from many in the west, including in Washington. Among the documents posted in the second attack, which were posted online on 29 May, were directives from the office of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi. In one, addressed to a top security chief by Mr Raisi’s chief of staff, the president raises clear concerns about ongoing protests in the country that began last year in response to the killing of a young woman in police custody over her supposedly improper headcovering. “In these incidents, in addition to the initial intelligence surprise of the September 1st, in particular the events of October 26, as well as the strikes and riots on November 15, 16 and 17 no prediction and prevention [options] were [presented], and the analysis were based only on general and imprecise estimates and calls in the social media,” reads one letter in part. “To correct this process and prevent repetition of these surprises in the future what has been done? As the failure and end point of the enemy's project were not included on 7 and 8 of December reports of analyzes and predictions,” that letter continues, adding later: “Unfortunately, in recent months, the reports have mostly [been] describing the events of the streets and waiting to discover the surprising devices of the enemies.” Other documents were equally unflattering. A second letter to an intelligence minister again signed by Mr Raisi’s chief of staff laid out known issues with Iran’s intelligence community including “incompetent and dependent managers”, “infiltration”, as well as “marginalisation and demoralisation of revolutionary forces”. The Independent has not verified the documents in-house, although experts with the Computer Emergency Response Team in Farsi (CERTFA) have called the documents posted on 29 May from the latest hack legitimate. Altogether, the document presents a revealing look at a beleaguered government that found itself largely unable to effectively stamp out demonstrations that swept across the nation in response to a major societal episode — in this case, the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, by so-called “morality police” in the country. The assessment could bode poorly for the Raisi government should similar protests emerge in the near future. The NCRI agreed in a statement to The Independent, arguing that the documents showed “the fragile state” of Iran’s security apparatus and “the fear and vulnerability of the regime”. At the same time, other passages betray the Iranian regime’s continued confidence in its ability to evade or otherwise bear the cost of US sanctions, which were snapped back into place under the Trump administration and remain under the presidency of Joe Biden. If more than bluster, it’s a spark of good news for Iran’s government given the State Department and White House’s lack of success in reaching an agreement to reignite the 2015 nuclear agreement and the resulting low chance of those sanctions being dropped. Mr Biden was heard telling a voter on a ropeline late last year that his administration views the accord signed under the presidency of Barack Obama (and his own vice presidency) to be dead. “It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it,” he said at the time, quipping: “Long story.” Read More Voters think Trump is a criminal, Biden is too old and DeSantis is a fascist, new poll finds Leaving Afghan heroes out in the cold is beyond callous – it shames us all Nikki Haley's husband begins Africa deployment as she campaigns for 2024 GOP nomination Blinken seeks to warm up frosty US-China relations in high-stakes Beijing trip Attorney General Garland keeps poker face as firestorm erupts after Trump charges US, China remain at odds on numerous issues as Blinken finishes first day of meetings in Beijing
2023-06-19 05:47

Munich car show shines spotlight on China competition in EV race
MUNICH European carmakers must prove their ability to compete with new Asian players in the electric age on
2023-09-04 13:21

Target's move to pull some Pride merchandise is 'wrong', New York AG says
(Reuters) -Target's move to pull some LGBTQ-themed merchandise from stores following customer backlash "is wrong," New York Attorney General Letitia
2023-06-15 01:59

Alix Earle confesses to being enigmatically 'gone' on an unforgettable tequila night: 'Jersey shore does it best'
'Jersey shore does it best,' she captioned the post
2023-06-18 16:50

Caratini 8th-inning homer lifts Brewers over Cubs 6-5, overcoming Bellinger's 4 hits, 3 RBIs
Victor Caratini hit a tiebreaking home run off Michael Fulmer in the eighth inning, and the Milwaukee Brewers recovered from a blown three-run lead to beat the Chicago Cubs 6-5 and gain a split of their four-game series
2023-07-07 05:53

Merck Sues US, Calling Move to Cut Drug Prices ‘Extortion’
Merck & Co. is suing the US over a law that will allow the government to negotiate prescription-drug
2023-06-07 01:58

Gwyneth Paltrow recalls kissing late 'Friends' star Matthew Perry in long grass field as they spent 1993's 'magical' Summer together
Gwyneth Paltrow met Matthew Perry in 1993 at the Williamstown Theater Festival
2023-10-30 09:29

Meta reveals new ‘Voicebox’ AI that is too risky to release
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
2023-06-20 01:59

3rd-quarter scoring flurry leads Boilermakers to 44-19 rout over Illinois in battle for The Cannon
Hudson Card threw two touchdown passes, Devin Mockobee and Dylan Downing each scored on TD runs and Purdue used a 21-point third-quarter flurry to run away from Illinois 44-19
2023-10-01 07:48

Hamas attack shocks Israel, but what comes next?
Tensions had recently risen in Gaza - but this attack was unexpected on a Jewish holiday.
2023-10-08 04:56
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