Newsletter Archives

• Are patents killing tech innovation?

  Posted on December 2, 2024 at 02:44 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Some say patents are an essential way to convince inventors to discover novel technologies, while others feel that overly broad patents are blocking tech inventions that would benefit us — well, who’s right?

  The Business Software Alliance — an association with offices in more than 30 countries — counts among its members numerous computer giants including Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and more. To “support US technology leadership,” the BSA strives for the co-licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). This ensures that its members can coordinate each other’s’ claims on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 5G, HDMI, HTTPS, and other widely used protocols, according to the BSA’s Patent Policy Agenda.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.49.0, 2024-12-02).

  Public Defender Innovation, Intellectual property, Newsletters, Patents

• Perplexity is 10 times better than Google

  Posted on November 11, 2024 at 02:45 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.46 • 2024-11-11

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The chatbot wars are well underway, and one result is that I find myself using the new Perplexity search engine 99% of the time, falling back on Google only to look up a street address or some trivial factoid.

  Google has served up its now-familiar list of 10 links for years. Perplexity also points you to several websites and videos. But its result pages begin with a well-written summary of what you’d learn if you actually visited all those links and vids.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.46.0, 2024-11-11).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Public Defender Google, Newsletters, Perplexity, search engines

• Write 200 social-media posts in 10 minutes! Quality, right?

  Posted on October 28, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  I’ve been thinking about the profession of journalism lately, given the emails bombarding me these days about how I could create 240, 300, or even 1,200 articles per hour if I would only use the latest in chatbot tech.

  YouTube’s funny farm is overflowing with videos of such miracles. They tell me I could write a whole ebook in 24 hours — true writers never sleep, you know — and make $8,327 a week ($433,000 a year) merely by pressing a few buttons.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.44.0, 2024-10-28).

  Public Defender AI, Chatbot decay, Chatbots, ChatGPT, Generative AI, Newsletters

• Microsoft Defender could be your free antivirus fix

  Posted on October 21, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Microsoft Defender — a free antivirus app that’s included in Windows — provides a highly rated service, but it’s rarely mentioned in comparative reviews of AV programs by security blogs. Why not?

  Ever since Windows 8 came out in 2012, a service originally called Windows Defender (WD) has been enabled by default in the OS. Prior to that, you might remember, was Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), a free download that Redmond first released in 2009. MSE is no longer with us, because WD — renamed Microsoft Defender in 2018 — has completely replaced it to block viruses, rootkits, Trojan horses, spyware, you name it.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.43.0, 2024-10-21).

  Public Defender Antivirus, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials, Newsletters, Windows Defender

• The US has banned Kaspersky software — should you worry?

  Posted on October 14, 2024 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.42 • 2024-10-14

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The popular Kaspersky antivirus program quietly disabled itself on computers in the US last month, making millions of users fear malware had struck them.

  The switcheroo was prompted by the US government banning Kaspersky Lab, a Russia-based company, from sending updates to American devices after September 29, 2024. Kaspersky had sent out an email — which many users didn’t read or felt was unclear — before its app shut down on September 19. Kaspersky then remotely installed on US computers a little-known antivirus alternative called UltraAV.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.42.0, 2024-10-14).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Public Defender Antivirus, Kaspersky, Microsoft Defender, Newsletters, Privacy, Security, UltraAV, Windows Defender

• Perturbed by porch pirates? Catch them by using tech.

  Posted on September 30, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  With our craze for same-day deliveries, package theft has soared; it cost online shoppers $13 billion in 2023 in the United States alone, according to a Capital One Shopping report.

  That’s 119 million stolen packages in the past year, the contents of which averaged $112.30 per parcel. One in seven Americans lost packages in this way, studies show.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.40.0, 2024-09-30).

  Public Defender AirTags, Newsletters, Porch pirates, Post Pirates

• Microsoft’s new Copilot+ PCs don’t play nice with games

  Posted on September 16, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Microsoft is wreaking havoc in the virtual worlds of billion-dollar online gaming companies, with incompatibilities in its new Copilot+ machines.

  These much-hyped PCs feature a new processor based on power-efficient Arm chips from Qualcomm. Redmond’s shift to non-Intel silicon gives the new Windows 11 PCs a modicum of built-in artificial intelligence and other features. No access to a central AI server is needed. (See Microsoft’s introduction of the new devices.)

  But almost half of the more than 1,300 video games tested by an independent third party are running slowly, subjecting users to stuttering game play, or refusing to run at all. The worst incompatibilities affect the biggest names in multiplayer environments.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.38.0, 2024-09-16).

  Public Defender AI, Compatibility, Copilot+ PCs, Games, Neural Processing Units, Newsletters, NPUs, Qualcomm, Snapdragon X Elite

• Is this article plagiarism? Now you can find out.

  Posted on September 2, 2024 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.36 • 2024-09-02

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  An epidemic of plagiarism — outright duplication of other people’s works — is raging through chatbots and other artificial-intelligence technologies.

  One study shows that almost 60% of the outputs from some chatbots contain plagiarism. The good news? The latest detection software can be 100% accurate in separating AI-plagiarized text from original, human work.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.36.0, 2024-09-02).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Public Defender Chatbots, Copyleaks, Copyrights, Generative AI, Newsletters, Originality, Plagiarism, Plagiarism Checker, Plagscan, Quetext, Turnitin, Unicheck

• Crypto rip-offs are truly horrifying

  Posted on August 19, 2024 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  I’ve been spending my time lately reading a new book that describes cryptocurrency nightmares. It was like sitting in a movie theater, watching a horror film that makes audience members scream at the lead actress, “Don’t open that door!”

  The female star, of course, opens the door, no matter how loudly the audience yells. But instead of sitting in a darkened theater, you can read my favorite new book in a well-lighted room. You’ll still find yourself terrified by the scams and rip-offs that crypto promoters perpetrate on innocent altcoin buyers.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.34.0, 2024-08-19).

  Public Defender Altcoin, Bitcoin, Cardano, Celebrities, Cryptocurrency, Endorsements, Ethereum, Fraud, Newsletters, Ripple, Solana

• Can we align human interests with robots, so they don’t turn on us?

  Posted on August 5, 2024 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Robots in human-like forms are already starting to assume jobs that have been performed for centuries by ordinary workers in manufacturing, logistics, and other industries.

  This is my second column in a two-part series. The first installment described humanoid bots that are faster than humans at certain tasks, much stronger in moving heavy objects, and far lower in cost than the labor force in most industrialized nations. Employers are currently paying only $10 to $12 per hour for bots when averaged over the useful lives of the mechanical workers.

  The outlay is expected to fall into the $2 to $3 per hour range, plus software costs, as soon as mass-production scale is achieved, which is projected to occur as early as 2025.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.32.0, 2024-08-05).

  Public Defender AI, Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Isaac Asimov, Newsletters, Robots

• Powerful humanoid robots will take all blue-collar jobs

  Posted on July 22, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The day when robots in human-like forms take over most unskilled jobs has arrived sooner than you may have thought possible.

  Robotics experts are agog over new artificial beings that appear to move about by themselves, learn skills by imitating humans, and are cheaper to employ than human workers by an order of magnitude.

  A company based in Shenzhen, China — Astribot Inc. — has sparked awe and wonder through the release of a video that shows a remarkable new mechanical servant. Known as the S1 robot, it demonstrates skills beyond the capabilities of most human beings you probably know.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.30.0, 2024-07-22).

  Public Defender Agility Robotics, Amazon, Astribot, Figure 01, Figure AI, Newsletters, Robots

• Social-media apps are killing our kids. Do adults care?

  Posted on July 8, 2024 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Rates of suicide and self-harm among teens and preteens in the US and other countries have doubled, tripled, and even quintupled in the past dozen years. Now we may finally know why.

  An explosive front-page article in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2024, revealed that Instagram — with more than 2 billion monthly active users — feeds disturbing videos to viewers who register as minors. The website’s Reels stream, the newspaper said, feeds to teenagers three times as many sex videos as it sends to adults over the age of 30, 1.7 times as much violence, and 4.1 times as much bullying.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.28.0, 2024-07-08).

  Public Defender Bullying, Instagram, Mental Health, Newsletters, Self-harm, Social Media, Suicide
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