An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Among the first AI companies that the Federal Trade Commission has exposed as deceiving consumers is DoNotPay -- which initially was advertised as "the world's first robot lawyer" with the ability to "sue anyone with the click of a button." On Wednesday, the FTC announced that it took action to stop DoNotPay from making bogus claims after learning that the AI startup conducted no testing "to determine whether its AI chatbot's output was equal to the level of a human lawyer." DoNotPay also did not "hire or retain any attorneys" to help verify AI outputs or validate DoNotPay's legal claims. DoNotPay accepted no liability. But to settle the charges that DoNotPay violated the FTC Act, the AI startup agreed to pay $193,000, if the FTC's consent agreement is confirmed following a 30-day public comment period. Additionally, DoNotPay agreed to warn "consumers who subscribed to the service between 2021 and 2023" about the "limitations of law-related features on the service," the FTC said. Moving forward, DoNotPay would also be prohibited under the settlement from making baseless claims that any of its features can be substituted for any professional service. "The complaint relates to the usage of a few hundred customers some years ago (out of millions of people), with services that have long been discontinued," DoNotPay's spokesperson said. The company "is pleased to have worked constructively with the FTC to settle this case and fully resolve these issues, without admitting liability."

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While that "extra" hour of sunlight in the evenings can be exhilarating, it comes with significant health trade-offs.

#Cyclists and #Urbanists in #Oklahoma needed to comment on the OKDOT’s 2023 Strategic Highway 🚙 Safety Plan, a statewide initiative to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on public roads.

Submit comments online before Nov. 6: https://www.news9.com/story/6537fc6f6cfd100665ee5e4e/oklahoma-department-of-transportation-asking-for-public-input

#OK #AutofreiOK #Tulsa #NormanOK #OklahomaCity #OKC #Muskogee #Muskogeeok #TulsaOK #FuckCars #WarOnCars #TheWarOnCars #autofrei #Urbanism #CarBrain #BikeTooter #cycling #WalkableCities #StrongTowns #TaylorSwift #ClimateCrisis #PublicTransit

Warning: do not use Hive Social:

We found a number of critical vulnerabilities, which we confidentially reported to the company. After multiple attempts to contact the company we finally reached them by phone and they acknowledged the report. After multiple days and multiple reminders by us, they claimed to have fixed all issues. However multiple vulnerabilities we reported still exist at the time of writing.

The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages. This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login.

Attackers can also overwrite data such as posts owned by other users.

TheHIVE_Social:

The Hive team has become aware of security issues that affect the stability of our application and the safety of our users. Fixing these issues will require temporarily turning off our servers for a couple of days while we fix this for a better and safer experience

To their credit, it sounds like pulling the plug entirely was the right move, and most companies would not have done that. Even if they only did it not when they found out, but only after someone created a PR disaster to force their hand. One takes what one can get.

However, that does not change the fact that (as I said earlier this week) they are yet another data silo whose lock-in design is antithetical to the principles of openness and interoperability that are the good things that the Internet and the World Wide Web brought to the world.

Previously, previously, previously.

Using anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids to relieve pain could increase the chances of developing chronic pain, according to researchers from McGill University and colleagues in Italy. Neuroscience News reports: Their research puts into question conventional practices used to alleviate pain. Normal recovery from a painful injury involves inflammation and blocking that inflammation with drugs could lead to harder-to-treat pain. [...] In the study published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers examined the mechanisms of pain in both humans and mice. They found that neutrophils -- a type of white blood cell that helps the body fight infection -- play a key role in resolving pain. Experimentally blocking neutrophils in mice prolonged the pain up to ten times the normal duration. Treating the pain with anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids like dexamethasone and diclofenac also produced the same result, although they were effective against pain early on. These findings are also supported by a separate analysis of 500,000 people in the United Kingdom that showed that those taking anti-inflammatory drugs to treat their pain were more likely to have pain two to ten years later, an effect not seen in people taking acetaminophen or anti-depressants. "Our findings suggest it may be time to reconsider the way we treat acute pain. Luckily pain can be killed in other ways that don't involve interfering with inflammation," says Massimo Allegri, a Physician at the Policlinico of Monza Hospital in Italy and Ensemble Hospitalier de la Cote in Switzerland.

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