The Download: The Merge arrives, and China’s AI image censorship

What’s happened: “The Merge”, a large upgrade to the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform, was yet completed aboriginal this greeting aft a six-year buildup. Ethereum present uses impervious of stake, a mode to o.k. caller transactions that promises to chopped the blockchain’s vigor requirements by 99.9% and usher successful a caller epoch for the second-largest cryptocurrency. 

Why it matters: It would beryllium hard to overstate however overmuch manufacture excitement determination has been astir this shift. Many anticipation it tin some rehabilitate the estimation of crypto for skeptics and amended the ratio of Ethereum’s tremendous ecosystem of businesses and developers, cutting fees and helping it to scale.

What’s next?: We won’t cognize close distant whether the Merge lives up to its transformative promise. Power dynamics are inactive a concern, and immoderate of the scaling efficiencies that supporters are astir excited astir whitethorn not get until good into 2023. But there’s nary doubting the information that 1 of crypto’s biggest players investing successful a little destructive, much businesslike ecosystem is, successful itself, a immense achievement. Read the afloat story.

With ERNIE-ViLG, a caller AI developed by the Chinese tech institution Baidu, you tin make images that seizure the taste specificity of China.

But determination are galore things—like Tiananmen Square, the country’s second-largest metropolis quadrate and a symbolic governmental center—that the AI refuses to amusement you. 

It’s not uncommon for akin AIs to bounds users from generating definite types of content. Open AI’s DALL-E 2 prohibits intersexual content, faces of nationalist figures, oregon aesculapian attraction images. But the lawsuit of ERNIE-ViLG underlines the question of wherever precisely the enactment betwixt moderation and governmental censorship lies. Read the afloat story.

1 Social media’s biggest companies appeared earlier the US Senate
Past and contiguous Meta, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube employees answered questions connected societal media's interaction connected homeland security. (TechCrunch)
+ Retaining idiosyncratic attraction is their algorithms’ superior purpose. (Protocol)
+ TikTok’s typical avoided committing to cutting disconnected China’s entree to US data. (Bloomberg $)

2 China wants to trim its reliance connected Western tech
Investing heavy successful autochthonal firms is conscionable 1 portion of its multi-year plan. (FT $)
+ Cybercriminals are progressively funny successful Chinese citizens’ idiosyncratic data. (Bloomberg $)
+ The FBI accused him of spying for China. It ruined his life. (MIT Technology Review)

3 California is suing Amazon
Accusing it of triggering terms rises crossed the state. (WSJ $)
+ The two-year combat to halt Amazon from selling look designation to the police. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Russia is waging a surveillance warfare connected its ain citizens 
Its authorities are progressively targeting mean people, not known dissidents oregon journalists. (Slate $)
+ Russian troops are inactive fleeing bluish Ukraine. (The Guardian) 

5 Dozens of AIs debated 100 years of clime negotiations successful seconds
They’re evaluating which policies are astir apt to beryllium well-received globally. (New Scientist $)
+ Patagonia’s proprietor has fixed the institution distant to combat clime change. (The Guardian) 

6 Iranian hackers hijacked their victims’ printers to present ransom notes
The 3 men person been accused of targeting radical successful the US, UK and Iran. (Motherboard)

7 DARPA’s tiny level could spy from astir anywhere
The unmanned conveyance could besides transportation tiny bombs. (WP $)
+ The Taliban person crashed a chopper near down by the US military. (Motherboard)

8 Listening to stars helps astronomers to measure what’s wrong them
The spooky-sounding acoustic waves transmit a batch of data. (Economist $)
+ The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted newborn stars. (Space)
+ The adjacent Space Force main thinks the US needs a outer constellation to combat China.  (Nikkei Asia)

9 We’ll ne'er beryllium capable to flip and crook similar a cat
But the champion divers and gymnasts are the closest we tin get. (The Atlantic $)
+ The champion robotic jumpers are inspired by nature. (Quanta)

December 2021

About 2,300 miles long, the Volga—sometimes referred to arsenic “Mother Volga”—is the longest stream successful Europe and the biggest by h2o flow. The past of the Big Volga task is, successful a sense, the past of Soviet industrialization. It is besides a past of rivalry with the US, which for decades raced the Soviets to physique bigger, much awesome dams.

But the task tried to bash excessively much. The stream has go polluted, silted up, and overwhelmed by invasive species. Water flows astatine a tenth of the velocity it did earlier the dams were constructed, and wide toxic algal blooms are present common. 

And present that the Volga basin has been identified arsenic 1 of the regions astir astatine hazard of clime change-induced drought, it’s not an exaggeration to accidental that Russia’s parent stream is broken. Read the afloat story.