Integrity breaches are on track to be regulated if things like this keep happening.

Nearly 2,000 UK flights were cancelled affecting around a quarter-million passengers. Software error is being blamed.

Very annoyed British reporters are very annoyed with British air travel systems lacking more capable integrity controls that would prevent this availability failure.

Several sources told me that a French airline filed a dodgy flight plan that made no digital sense. Later on Tuesday, the Nats chief executive, Martin Rolfe, appeared to confirm reports that a rogue submission was responsible for the calamitous shutdown.

In a statement, the CEO indicated the organisation’s complex IT system defaulted to fail-safe mode when presented with anomalous data.

Mr Rolfe said: “Our systems, both primary and the back-ups, responded by suspending automatic processing to ensure that no incorrect safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or impact the rest of the air traffic system.”

Surely the Nats system should automatically have identified an anomaly and spat out the plan, saying “try again”? Yet instead, the flight plan was ingested and set in train a shutdown of the entire system.

Surely.

I love that odd phrase “no digital sense”.

As in: this analog record of Paris cool jazz is so good, yo daddy oh, but you cats can’t have it online in London because it makes no digital sense. Yeah, man. Not even on CD. Do woo be boo bop. It will set in train a shutdown of your entire listening system. You dig?

Would the UK even exist if it didn’t have a history of accepting dodgy things from France?

But I digress… In actual fact, French passengers are constantly screened by the Brits to be safe and are allegedly rejected based on dodgy anomaly, why not French flight plans?

Easy, right?

And on that blue note, I wonder how the reporter would feel if flight plan capacity suddenly was halved by onerous screening requirements, or massive amounts of flights were shutdown by screening errors.

Yet another brand new Tesla in yet another “veered” head-on collision.

ISP says the crash occurred when a 2022 Tesla driven by a 46-year-old Mantua, Utah woman heading eastbound on State Highway 33 just west of Driggs crossed the center line and collided head-on with a 2007 Kenworth commercial vehicle…

All four passengers in the Tesla including a child were killed.

Instead of software suicide by “veering” into a tree, or under a truck, this Tesla ran the head-on-into-opposite-lane routine. Who can forget just a year ago…

Capt. Steve Biakanja’s children — his 14-year-old twin daughters Leigh and Lucy, and his 12-year-old son Ben — and his ex-wife, 53-year-old Lisa Biakanja, were returning home after a day at Casa de Fruta, KSBW reported. They were all killed at the scene when the vehicle swerved from the westbound lane of Highway 156 into the eastbound lane over solid double yellow lines, colliding with a tractor-trailer, the California Highway Patrol said.

And there have been many more similar cases since, such as tragedy in Tahoe the NHTSA has just highlighted, or this guy’s story.

Fred Lambert, a noted Tesla enthusiast and editor-in-chief of the electric vehicle blog Electrek… submitted a bug report to Tesla: “Autopilot just tried to kill me, so please fix it.” He seems to think this is a problem arising from FSD’s latest updates, what he describes as a “new aggressive bug.” That may be true, as Tesla has had to roll back crash-causing updates in the past…

Crash-causing aggressive bugs. New and worse. As in DO NOT get in or be around a Tesla. The NHTSA has just sent a letter demanding to know exactly where and when the cars ignore basic safety rules by design.

A Tesla officer has to respond to the letter under oath by Aug. 25 or the agency will refer the matter to the Justice Department, which can seek a maximum penalty of more than $131 million.

Let that sink in for a minute. $131 million sounds big but no amount of penalty money will bring back all the people killed by a “veered” Tesla.

An abrupt “veer” across yellow lines at night into the headlights of a giant truck immediately suggests “Autopilot” fraud let alone a “FSD” fraud expansion, as described by those who dare to enable the software. It’s especially suspect on a clear and dry (0.08″ precipitation, 50F low) Idaho highway at 10pm, given it fits the pattern.

While it is still early to say whether hardware, software or both are to blame, police reports ponder over yet another middle-aged woman in a Tesla suddenly “veering” at high speed with children to sudden death. There seems here to be more tragic evidence of Tesla’s fatally defective designs.

It’s getting hard to keep up with all the reports filed about AI companies that operate as predatory criminal enterprises desperate to maximize rapid growth at others’ expense.

VentureBeat

…LLM companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere and even Meta — traditionally the most open source-focused of the Big Tech companies, but which declined to release the details of how LLaMA 2 was trained — have become less transparent and more secretive about what datasets are used to train their models. […] …there is no longer any doubt that copyright infringement is rampant. As companies seeking commercial success get ever-hungrier for data to feed their models, there may be ongoing temptation to grab all the data they can.

Shout out to Anthropic as indistinguishable from OpenAI, after it was founded by OpenAI staff to be distinguishable.

Vox

…the bloom is coming off the AI-generated rose. Governments are ramping up efforts to regulate the technology, creators are suing over alleged intellectual property and copyright violations, people are balking at the privacy invasions (both real and perceived) that these products enable, and there are plenty of reasons to question how accurate AI-powered chatbots really are and how much people should depend on them. Assuming, that is, they’re still using them. Recent reports suggest that consumers are starting to lose interest.

Washington Post

Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’ … In the Philippines, one of the world’s biggest destinations for outsourced digital work, former employees say that at least 10,000 of these workers do this labor on a platform called Remotasks, which is owned by the $7 billion San Francisco start-up Scale AI. Scale AI has paid workers at extremely low rates, routinely delayed or withheld payments and provided few channels for workers to seek recourse, according to interviews with workers, internal company messages and payment records, and financial statements. Rights groups and labor researchers say Scale AI is among a number of American AI companies that have not abided by basic labor standards for their workers abroad.

New York Magazine in collaboration with The Verge

This tangled supply chain is deliberately hard to map. According to people in the industry, the companies buying the data demand strict confidentiality. (This is the reason Scale cited to explain why Remotasks has a different name.) Annotation reveals too much about the systems being developed, and the huge number of workers required makes leaks difficult to prevent. Annotators are warned repeatedly not to tell anyone about their jobs, not even their friends and co-workers, but corporate aliases, project code names, and, crucially, the extreme division of labor ensure they don’t have enough information about them to talk even if they wanted to. (Most workers requested pseudonyms for fear of being booted from the platforms.) Consequently, there are no granular estimates of the number of people who work in annotation, but it is a lot, and it is growing. A recent Google Research paper gave an order-of-magnitude figure of “millions” with the potential to become “billions.”

Pay extremely low rates, routinely delay or withhold payments, and illegally redirect wealth from everyone to a few.

Digital dictatorships.