Starting July 13, Valorant will begin listening and recording in-game voice communication with the goal of training a language model to help it identify toxic chat. This system will only work in North American/English-only servers. The goal is to launch the language model later this year in an effort to clamp down on toxicity in the first-person shooter.

Like in any first person shooter that lets players talk to each other, the voice chat in Riot Games’ Valorant can be toxic. It’s also incredibly hard to moderate. When someone drops a racial slur in text chat, a clear log is maintained that mods can look through later. But the processing and storage power required to do the same for voice chat just isn’t possible. “Voice chat abuse is significantly harder to detect compared to text (and often involves a more manual process),” Riot Games said in a February 2022 blog post.

Riot first indicated it would do something about abusive voice chat in February 2022. “Last year Riot updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate voice comms when a report for disruptive behavior is submitted, starting with Valorant,” it said at the time. “Please note that this will be an initial attempt at piloting a new idea leveraging brand new tech that is being developed, so the feature may take some time to bake and become an effective tool to use in our arsenal. We’ll update you with concrete plans about how it’ll work well before we start collecting voice data in any form.”

Now we know what that brand-new tech is: some kind of language model that automatically detects toxic voice chat and stores it for later evaluation. The updated terms of service applied to all of Riot’s games, but it said its current plan was to use Valorant to test the software solution before rolling it out to other games.

The ability to detect keywords from live conversations is not new, however. Federal and state governments have been using similar systems to monitor phone calls from prisons and jails for at least several years—sometimes with the ability to automatically disconnect and report calls when certain words or phrases are detected.

Riot Games did not share details of the language model and did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. According to a post announcing the training of the language model, this is all part of “a larger effort to combat disruptive behavior,” that will allow Riot Games to “record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted.”

The updated terms of service had some more specifics. “When a player submits a report for disruptive or offensive behavior in voice comms, the relevant audio data will be stored in your account’s registered region and evaluated to see if our behavior agreement was violated,” the TOS said. “If a violation is detected, we’ll take action. After the data has been made available to the player in violation (and is no longer needed for reviews) the data will be deleted, similar to how we currently handle text-based chat reports. If no violation is detected, or if no report is filed in a timely manner, the data will be deleted.”

Riot Games said it would only “monitor” voice chats if a report had been submitted. “We won’t actively monitor your live game comms. We’ll only potentially listen to and review voice logs when disruptive voice behavior is reported,” it said in a Q&A about the changes. That is still monitoring, though, even if it’s not active. What this probably means is that a human won’t listen to it unless there’s a report—but that doesn’t mean a computer isn’t always listening.

The only way to avoid this, Riot Games said, was to not use its in-game voice chat systems. Monitoring starts on July 13. “Voice evaluation during this period will not be used for disruptive behavior reports,” Riot Games said in the post announcing the project. “This is brand new tech and there will for sure be growing pains. But the promise of a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone who chooses to play is worth it.”

Potential drama? We all know GME apes still hold a grudge against Robinhood.

Orange site discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881238

Random Brazil sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/vlam2d/the_fall_of_reddit_why_its_quickly_declining_into/

Reddit is dead.

At least artistically and creatively speaking.

What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.

“It’s true, both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier because they have no constitution to answer to, they’re not elected really — all the protections we’ve built up against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny.

— Aaron Swartz, co-Founder of Reddit

There are three fundamental problems with Reddit:

1. Censorship

2. Moderator Abuse

3. Corporate Greed

But first, you should understand that the history of Reddit doomed it from the start.

The Secret History of Reddit

Reddit was launched in June 2005 by two 22-year-old graduates from the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The site was so small that the two co-founders had to spam links just to make Reddit seem active.

Later that year the Reddit team made arguably the most important decision of their lives: they hired a new co-founder, Aaron Swartz.

If you don’t know who Aaron Swartz was, he was a young prodigy and computer genius who, among other things, helped create RSS.

He was also an outspoken activist for free speech and open information, which made him a lot of enemies in high places.

Eventually, Aaron left Reddit after they were bought by Conde Nast (owner of Wired Magazine), but this is when he became a complete revolutionary.

Aaron became something of a Wiki Leaks-style journ*list leaking high-level secrets against corporate power. He released countless documents including the most damaging that law professors at Stanford were receiving lobbying money from oil companies such as Exxon Mobile.

Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online.

SHOW MORE

https://archive.ph/aJ3EV

Microsoft said farewell to Internet Explorer on June 16, stirring a sense of panic among many businesses and government agencies in Japan that waited to update their websites until the last minute.

Since April, Tokyo-based software developer Computer Engineering & Consulting (CEC) has been inundated with requests for help.

Those customers are mostly government agencies, financial institutions and manufacturing and logistics companies that operate websites that are only compatible with Internet Explorer.

“Could you please do something so we won’t have any problems?” one customer pleaded.

“They have known [about the phaseout] for a long time, but they must have postponed taking actions,” said a CEC official, who expects the chaos among the procrastinated customers to last for “a few months”.

Microsoft officially halted support for Internet Explorer on June 15 after 27 years of service. Many users are transitioning to Google Chrome.

A March survey by information technology resource provider Keyman’s Net revealed a large number of organisations in Japan relied on Internet Explorer, with 49 per cent of respondents saying they used the browser for work.

They said the browser was used for employee attendance management, expenses settlement and other internal cowtools. In some cases, they had no choice but to use Internet Explorer because of clients’ systems used to handle orders. More than 20 per cent of these respondents did not know or had not figured out how to transition to other browsers after Internet Explorer’s retirement.

Government agencies are particularly slow to respond. The portal site for information on government procurement and bidding switched its recommended browsers to Microsoft’s new Edge and Google Chrome on June 16. But for Japan Pension Service, notices concerning online applications must be viewed in Edge’s Internet Explorer mode. The website of a government-backed mutual aid corporation for private schools still listed Internet Explorer as its only recommended browser.

The Information Technology Promotion Agency has been urging Internet Explorer users to transition to other browsers and revise content promptly.

Released in 1995, Internet Explorer became the global standard after beating Netscape in the browser wars and enjoyed a 65 per cent market share as recently as January 2009. But its share began to steadily slide in the late 2000s, plummeting to less than 1 per cent recently, according to web analytics company StatCounter.

One reason for the decline is that Internet Explorer did not follow the international standards for web technologies.

“It didn’t work well with JavaScript and other programming languages that are necessary for creating interactive websites,” said Yota Egusa, chief information security officer at computing service provider Sakura Internet.

The demise of Internet Explorer coincided with Chrome’s rapid rise. Launched in 2008 with Google’s open-source project as its base, Chrome attracted users with applications such as maps and email that run on the web and dominates the market today with a 65 per cent share.

Chrome “is fast, and its frequent software updates mean security holes and bugs are addressed quickly”, said Masato Saito of ExaWizards, a developer of AI-enabled services.

Frogs that are too small to have working vestibular systems but jump anyway, results as expected.

Orange site discussion

Holy frick i am wheezing.

In this video, he starts of by typing semi-legitimate code and then goes to straight up nonsense. None of this is real Javascript and hes just typing nothing.

The entire youtube channel is like this, sir jeets does it for views and monetization

https://youtube.com/c/Iballdesigningdeveloper/featured

At the end of the videos, he shows off someone elses website; in this case, twitter.com

All the github repos are completely empty lmao

nekobitttt signing out

HN discussion