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Adobe’s Firefly seems to be following in the woke footsteps of Google’s failed Gemini AI image producer — generating photos of black Nazis and black and female founding fathers. In a test of the product conducted by The Post on Thursday, Firefly produced an image of two smiling black men standing in front of an American flag when prompted to create a photo of the “founding fathers of the USA.” Searches for the 1787 Constitutional Convention also produced images of both black men and white women standing in front of the historic State House in Philadelphia, Penn., and a search...

Adobe’s AI image creation tool, Firefly, has stumbled into the same pitfalls as Google’s Gemini AI by creating woke revisions of history, raising concerns about the limitations and biases inherent in generative AI systems. Semafor reports that as tech giants race to develop cutting-edge generative AI tools, the potential for these systems to perpetuate harmful biases and spread misinformation has become a growing concern. Adobe’s recently launched Firefly, an AI image creation tool, has found itself embroiled in a controversy reminiscent of Google’s Gemini AI, highlighting the challenges companies face in controlling these powerful yet imperfect technologies. Like Gemini before...

Citing what they describe as a “hostile” political climate, hundreds of Adobe workers are protesting the company’s decision to hold its flagship MAX conference in Miami Beach in October, according to a Wednesday report from Business Insider. The outlet secured a 10-page petition sent to company leadership, signed by more than 500 employees of the San Jose tech giant. The petition said workers were “shocked and dismayed” by MAX’s move to Florida, and called out the state’s history of “egregious policies,” BI reported. “We sincerely hope that the overwhelming evidence that Florida is a hostile environment for Adobe’s employees, partners,...

"The Middle East looks set for a path of escalation on multiple fronts as Israeli forces close in on what is left of southern Gaza, and as Yemen’s Houthi rebels launch their most damaging strike yet on a ship in the Red Sea.The crew of the British-owned, Belize-flagged bulk carrier MV Rubymar were forced to abandon ship in the Gulf of Aden on Monday, receiving help from a nearby merchant vessel and coalition warship to reach a nearby port after “two anti-ship ballistic missiles were launched from Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen,” according to U.S. Central Command." (snip) Twenty-six...

The generative AI will change the way economy functions and businesses are run; it will be a game changer for in many verticals In a world driven by unprecedented technological advancements, there emerges a groundbreaking force that promises to reshape the very fabric of innovation: generative artificial intelligence. With its awe-inspiring ability to create, compose, and imagine, generative AI has surged to the forefront of scientific exploration, capturing the imaginations of researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists alike. From generating realistic images and synthesising music to aiding in drug discovery and revolutionising customer experiences, this cutting-edge technology possesses the potential to revolutionise...

John Warnock, who invented the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died. He was 82. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist died Saturday surrounded by family, Adobe said in a statement. The company didn't give a cause of death or say where Warnock died.“John’s brilliance and innovations left an indelible mark on Adobe, the technology industry and the world,” Adobe said. Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke created a company around a rejected idea in 1982. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format, or PDF, transforming the way...

Programmers can never leave well enough alone. (Think of all the once-great applications programs that had great features that were deprecated.) I don't think it was greed that caused this deprecation of a very usable feature. (When on Bookmark panel, you used to be able to Ctrl-Shift-Tab to go to Page Thumbnails, panel, an essential keyboard shortcut when processing a large volume of pages.) I think it is simply programmers who know nothing about users, who are marketing morons, who have too much time on their hands, on an application that was perfected 20 years ago, so they have to...

Okta, the $25 billion market cap company that handles logins for more than 100 million users, today confirmed it suffered a breach in January via a third party customer support provider. But for some customers who spoke to Forbes, the disclosure was too late and too scant with information. Okta’s admittance came after a hacking crew called LAPSUS$, which extorts its targets after stealing their data and often leaks victims’ information in public forums, claimed it had breached the company. LAPSUS$ had previously claimed to have stolen data from major security companies including NVIDIA and Microsoft, leading both to investigate...

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...

The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

The railroad system in Dalian, northern China, collapsed citywide on Tuesday for up to 20 hours after the Adobe Flash programing software stopped running. Adobe had announced as early as 2017 that it would cease support for the multimedia software on Dec. 30 last year. The American software company eventually ended the operation of all Flash content on Tuesday. Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting...

I have been getting on-screen reminders lately that Flash Player support will end on December 31st 2020. Without getting too technical, can some kind FReepers tell me what, if anything, I need to install in order to do what Flash Player once did?

**SNIP** Users have until 28 October to download content, after which accounts will be deactivated, Adobe said. It is unclear whether other technology firms will follow suit. On a help page, the firm explained: "The US government issued executive order 13884, the practical effect of which is to prohibit almost all transactions and services between US companies, entities and individuals to Venezuela. To remain compliant with this order, Adobe is deactivating all accounts in Venezuela." It said it had no idea how long the sanctions would be in effect but added: "We will continue to monitor developments closely and will...

Salon Media says they have reached an 11th hour deal to sell the company and its flagship property Salon.com for $5 million. In an SEC filing, Salon also revealed its position was dire and that it would face imminent “bankruptcy and liquidation” if the deal should fall through. “We have agreed to sell substantially all of our assets (the “Asset Sale”), including all pertinent intellectual property rights comprising the Company’s business of owning, operating and publishing the website known as Salon.com,” the filing read. The company buying Salon was named only as Salon.com LLC and appeared to be getting an...

Earlier this year, Sara Law of the Carbon Disclosure Project raised her hand at a conference in New York on government and private sector initiatives to address climate change. She politely asked the panel, which had been assembled to discuss opportunities for investing in low-carbon infrastructure, whether they knew how much cement each project might require. The panel members shifted uncomfortably in their seats and chuckled; no one jumped in immediately to respond. The problem is that many of these projects require concrete. A lot of concrete. This worries Law and her colleagues at the Carbon Disclosure Project, a non-profit...

Trying to find an unused retail version (on eBay, etc.) of older versions of Creative Suite is next to impossible, unless you've got a lot of $$. I read that, if a person has a Creative Cloud subscription, he can download legacy versions of Creative Suite from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/other-downloads.html I have two questions about things that aren't clear: 1. Does the user have to own a previous license for CS6 (or other legacy version), or does the CC license qualify to use both CC and the legacy version? 2. If a user stops the CC subscription after a year, is he...

Adobe released yesterday Acrobat Reader DC 15.023.20053 that included fixes for 29 security issues. Along with the security fixes, this update package also silently installs the Adobe Acrobat extension into the user's Chrome web browser. The installation process is covert, but the next time users open their Chrome browser, they'll be notified by Chrome's security systems that a new extension has been added. The extensions name is Adobe Acrobat and is the same extension available through the Chrome Web Store. This extension allows users to save any web page they're on as a PDF file and share it or download...

Ever wanted to make Natalie Portman yell obscenities at your neighbors? What if Garey Busey could leave your mother a sexy voicemail on her birthday? Wanted to prank your little brother by forcing him to call his crush and profess his love? Adobe has you covered. When Adobe released photoshop in 1990, it dreamed of a world where movie studios and photo editors could do in minutes what once took hours. It never dreamed the world would take the digital editor and use it to put celebrity heads on porn star bodies, distort women’s bodies in magazine cover, and create...

A study from GeoEdge, an ad scanning vendor, reveals that Flash has been wrongly accused as the root cause of today's malvertising campaigns, but in reality, switching to HTML5 ads won't safeguard users from attacks because the vulnerabilities are in the ad platforms and advertising standards themselves. The evidence exists to proclaim Flash as one of today's most vulnerable and insecure software applications. Targeted in cyber-espionage and malvertising campaigns, Flash has gotten a bad reputation, and for a good reason. HTML5 ads are replacing Flash ads in the industry Security researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in Flash almost every month, and...

Adobe’s Flash plug-in has a big target painted on it. A recent leak shows there’s another Flash Player 0-day that allows attackers to compromise your computer, and that it’s been for sale for the last four years. Flash is going away, and everyone should uninstall it at some point in the future. Here’s how to get rid of Flash, whether you’re using a browser’s built-in plug-in or a system-wide plug-in on Windows, Mac OS X, Chrome OS, or Linux. Can You Live Without Flash? Flash is much less necessary than it’s ever been. Modern mobile platforms like Android and Apple’s...