Buzzwords of the Day 12-06-2023
*Special Note from the Author - This week's issue was written entirely in Vim!
#This Week's Buzzwords:
declare -a Buzzword = { "Licensing", "AI/LLM", "Breach" }
$Buzzword{0}= "Licensing" - You don't own anything anymore
There was a time when purchasing digital media meant you owned the media to consume on your own terms forever. Remember DVD/CD libraries? The model was simple: consumers purchase digital media, and receive a copy of that media to watch whenever/however often they wanted. The shift from physical media to digital streaming services has improved a lot about media consumption; most notably being the lack of need for a Blu-Ray player or massive rack of discs. It comes with a big downside; unless users have access to an *offline* copy of the media, their consumption of that media is entirely in the hands of the provider (Netflix, Peacock, Hulu, etc.), and their reliance on an internet connection. The implied assumption with subscription services like these is that the user agrees to a "rotation" of content as a part of their paid service.
This week, Sony made a suprising announcement regarding content *purchased* by their users: due to licensing agreement 'disputes' with HBO, any users who purchased Discovery Channel content on the Playstation Network will no longer have access to it moving forward. Sony claims that users will see the content removed from their libraries at the end of 2023, with no further access in the forseeable future, and no refunds for any purchased content. Why no refunds? Sony claims they never sold the media itself, instead licensing it to users on a revocable basis. At the time of publication, Sony offers no option for users who "own" this content to download or store an offline copy, meaning these users, who were "sold" products will lose access to them forever and forced to subscribe to other services in order to watch content they have already paid for (until *that* provider decides to remove it from offer as well).
Source Context:
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$Buzzword{1}= "AI/LLM" - Bing is getting smarter, and it's listening...
Microsoft announced this week plans to integrate GPT 4.0 into BingChat (the copilot tool built into Windows 11). This is big news for the likely dozens of users, whom will be able to leverage the vast upgrades (and more current dataset), hopefully increasing copilot's usefulness to end-users. Some of the more substantial changes are to the base training data; initially, ChatGPT was trained on data up to 2021. The new model will include base data up to 2023 as well as the capacity to search the web for additional information it does not already have on-hand. It also features an increased cache size, allowing users to "train" each conversation on a larger set of request/responses, in the interest of allowing the model more 'time' and context to flesh out its responses. With that in mind, it is more important than ever to remember that most AI developers train their models on real-world inquiries on top of their acquired data. Users' interactions with chatbots should not be considered private by any means, and caution is best exercised in bulk.
Source Context:
https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-copilot-assistant-openai-gpt4-turbo-boost-1851074275 (Microsoft adding GPT 4 to CoPilot)
https://gizmodo.com/openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-4-turbo-devday-1850995722 (GPT 4 updates)
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$Buzzword{2}= "Breach" - 23andMe and you and your cousin and your cousin's dogsitter...
Back in October of this year, popular genealogy site 23andMe experienced a data breach, the severity of which was woefully misrepresented. Initial reports & acknowledgements from 23andMe indicated the impacted users made up less than 1% of their user base, but further analysis of the compromised data shows that number to be much higher. Thanks to 23andMe's "Relatives" feature, the initially compromised accounts include PII (Personal Identifying Information) on approximately 6.9 million people. While 23andMe has implemented two-factor authentication going forward, the damage is largely done in this instance. Any users on the site should at this point consider their password for 23andMe compromised and update it.
Source Context:
https://gizmodo.com/23andme-dna-test-hackers-stolen-data-6-million-users-1851071432
