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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Samsung QN90D 98-inch review: solid and classy,...
Samsung QN90D 98-inch QLED TV “The QN90D series is excellent, but the 98-inch model fell apart for us.” Excellent color accuracy Deep blacks, impressive contrast Solid on-board sound Sparkling HDR brightness Intermittent processing anomalies Too expensive When you look at TV ads from 1998, a 56-inch Panasonic rear-projection TV — in 4:3 format, no less — cost $5,500. Adjusted for inflation, that is about $10,500 today. We’ve come a long way. You can now get a 98-inch TV for...

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Get ready for AI-dubbed YouTube videos
Google YouTube has reportedly started rolling out a new AI-empowered translation feature for its content creators, one that will automatically redub a video’s contents into one of nine languages without changing the speaker’s voice. According to a post from X user @levelsio, “YouTube will now auto dub videos in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese” and “will use AI to take the original voice but change the language.” Recommended Videos The new feature will arrive...

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Nvidia warns gamers of an incoming GPU...
Get ready for yet another GPU shortage, as Nvidia has warned about potential shortages in the current quarter. Although the company’s third-quarter revenue saw a healthy growth, in its recent earnings call, company Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that the fourth-quarter revenue is expected to decline sequentially due to supply constraints. The anticipated GPU shortage could potentially stem from a strategic shift in production to prepare for the next-generation RTX 50-series “Blackwell” GPUs, slated for release in 2025....

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Laifen Black Friday: A guide on which...
With so many early Black Friday deals floating around, it’s easy to get lost in the noise. By that, I mean it can be challenging to figure out what to buy, where to spend your money, and more importantly, what items would be best for you and your family. Sometimes, it just helps to have a guide that directs you one way or another. That’s precisely what we’re going to do here. Laifen has some excellent Black Friday deals...

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If you don’t have a car battery...
Avapow You won’t always need a car battery jump starter, but it’s much better to buy one now than to miss it when you need it. You don’t have to spend a lot of cash on one too, because there are offers like Walmart’s $187 discount for the Avapow W68 car battery jump starter. From its original price of $320, it’s all the way down to an affordable $133. We’re not sure how much time is remaining for you...

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Should you invest in a smart washer...
LG Two of the most expensive gadgets you can add to your smart home are a smart washer and a smart dryer. Unlike smart bulbs or smart speakers, which are highly affordable, these gadgets typically cost well over $1,000. Smart washers and dryers are designed to streamline the tedious process of washing your clothes — and they do so by offering a bunch of cool features you won’t find on a standard set. But are smart washers and dryers...

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How OpenAI stress-tests its large language models
OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful large language models to try to identify potential harmful or otherwise unwanted behavior, an approach known as red-teaming.  Large language models are now being...

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Meta Finally Breaks Its Silence on Pig...
Years into the escalating, multibillion-dollar global crisis of pig butchering scams, social media giant Meta released information for the first time on Thursday about its approach to combating the forced-labor compounds that fuel scam activity on its platforms and across the web. The company says that for more than two years it has been focused on collaborating with global law enforcement and other tech companies to address the underlying problem of organized crime syndicates driving scam activity in Southeast...

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The Download: AI replicas, and China’s climate...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI can now create a replica of your personality Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to...

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China’s Surveillance State Is Selling Citizen Data...
China has long been a billion-plus-person experiment in total state surveillance, with virtually no legal checks on the government’s ability to physically and digitally monitor its citizens. When so much control of citizens’ private data amasses within a few government agencies, however, it doesn’t stay there. Instead, that bounty of private info has also leaked onto a lively black market—one where insiders sell off their own access to any scammer or stalker willing to pay. At the Cyberwarcon security...

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China’s complicated role in climate change
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. “Well, what about China?” This is a comment I get all the time on the topic of climate change, both in conversations and on whatever social media site is currently en vogue. Usually, it comes in response to some statement about how the US and Europe are addressing the issue (or how they need to be)....

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Four ways to protect your art from...
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Since the start of the generative AI boom, artists have been worried about losing their livelihoods to AI tools. There have been plenty of examples of companies’ replacing human labor with computer programs. Most recently, Coca-Cola sparked controversy by creating a new Christmas ad with generative AI.  Artists and writers have launched several lawsuits against AI companies, arguing that their work has been scraped into databases for training...

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AI can now create a replica of...
Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy. That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on...

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Shortlisted Images for the 2024 Close-Up Photographer...
The Close-up Photographer of the Year competition is now in its sixth year, and recently released its shortlisted picks, with the winners set to be announced in January. The contest “celebrates close-up, macro, and micro photography,” among 11 separate categories. Competition organizers were once again kind enough to share some of these amazing images with us here. To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

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The Problem With Boycotting Israel
When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati? A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in...

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