The U.S. Department of Defense has disabled advertising tracking on troops' phones and computers as part of an effort to protect them from threats that target their locations, according to a letter shared with Senator Ron Wyden. Per a letter shared with the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden said that the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command have all disabled advertising tracking across their government-issued devices. The aim is to prevent adversaries, including hostile governments, from using location data derived from the apps on troops' phones to target them on the battlefield or on their bases. Location data collected from phone apps is commonly shared with third-party companies and data brokers, which then sell the information on the commercial market. Disabling the advertising ID makes the person far more difficult to identify as the location data blends in with everyone else whose advertising ID is also disabled. Wyden raised the issue earlier this year in a letter to U.S. military leaders after finding that unnamed foreign adversaries had targeted U.S. troops in the Middle East using their commercially obtained location data. The senator, a known privacy hawk on Capitol Hill, said that while the move to reduce the advertising tracking was commendable, he warned that the personal devices of troops and contractors brought onto military bases could still expose service members and facilities to attacks....

Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google's cloud platforms. The new model has already proven to be the most accurate among leading contenders tested on Operational WeatherBench, a utility for comparing AI forecasts built by the startup Brightband. It looks at metrics like temperature, windspeed, and humidity. As well as beating out other deep-learning models built by Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), it also beats traditional forecasts from the U.S. National Weather service and the ECMWF. Most weather forecasts come from government-owned supercomputers laboriously churning through mathematical equations written to describe the physics of weather; while these systems have become remarkably accurate, they are expensive and comparatively slow. After the ECMWF released more than half a century of weather data produced by these systems in 2018, deep learning researchers began training models that could make predictions far more quickly and with comparable accuracy to government tools....

If you have handed over your driver's license, passport, or other form of identity document to verify your information in the real world, like at a bar, a weed store, or when booking a car rental, there's a good chance it's now been stolen in a suspected massive data breach. That's according to a jaw-dropping report by independent security journalist Brian Krebs, who says a company used to verify government-issued identity documents in the real world was likely hacked and its vast stores of people's ID cards were exfiltrated. Krebs reports that an identity theft site called Nexus, which launched on the dark web this week, claimed to allow users to search through more than 150 million driver's licenses and passports belonging to people who live in the United States and Canada. A post advertising the site on a known Russian cybercrime forum said Nexus added about half a million new documents daily, sourced from a 'major identity verification company,' implying that the hackers had near real-time access to the identity verification company's systems....

In a lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI, the Trump administration has contributed a 20-page brief in defense of the ChatGPT maker's unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs. 'The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally' As such, it is critical for the United States to 'retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,'' the brief reads, referencing an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year. The LLMs powering chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on incomprehensibly massive databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media that AI companies feed into these databases without permission. Many publishers, including The New York Times in this case, have sought to argue that it is illegal for AI companies like OpenAI to train AI models on their copyrighted material....