A hot potato: A controversial proposal to strengthen international cooperation against cybercrime has gained US support. The Biden Administration is interested in signing the treaty, while politicians are still warning about its potential for misuse and human rights abuse. Senior US government officials have confirmed that the Biden Administration is ready to support a United Nations treaty on cybercrime. The legally binding agreement would be a first and could help shape the UN's future legal initiatives and cooperation in fighting and investigating cyber threats.The treaty pushes for a global criminalization of child sexual abuse material and non-consensual online sharing of intimate imagery. Officials said that the treaty could also help the United States gain more comprehensive access to cybercrime-related digital evidence, while novel extradition rules would help with arrests and investigations.The US, Europe, and other nations initially opposed the treaty. According to an Electronic Frontier Foundation timeline, the Russian Federation presented a letter with the original draft in 2017. The resolution asking for a new international treaty against cybercrime was also sponsored by Belarus, Cambodia, China, Iran, Syria, and other "rogue nations" with no particular interest in defending people's rights to fair and impartial trials.Human rights organizations opposed the draft, urging the UN General Assembly to vote against the resolution. Yet, the ruling body created an Ad Hoc Committee (AHC) to draft a new convention to fight the use of communication technologies for criminal purposes, which seemed more palatable.Earlier this year, the AHC reached an agreement on the new draft, which is now awaiting formal adoption. The treaty will likely pass a General Assembly vote. However, human rights advocates and NGOs still describe the convention as a severe threat to privacy, security, freedom of expression, and AI safety. // Related StoriesA recent letter by six US Democratic senators said that Russia, China, and other authoritarian regimes could exploit the treaty to increase their censorship efforts, infringe online privacy, and abuse human rights. Washington said that it would enforce safeguards against human rights abuses, with the Department of Justice refusing cooperation in blatantly abuse attempts."While the executive branch's efforts to steer this treaty in a less-harmful direction are commendable, more must be done to keep the convention from being used to justify such actions," the Democrats' letter said.Unnamed officials told Bloomberg that the Biden Administration would not support any UN resolution if it did not implement proper safeguards in the new treaty.

Building a PC from scratch can be a lot of fun, and with the upcoming Black Friday on November 29, its a perfect time for you to pick up hardware. One of the most fun bits of any build is picking the parts, and for that, graphics cards are probably the most fun to pick between. That said, GPUs also tend to be the most expensive pieces of hardware that go into a desktop, especially if youre trying to aim for something in the mid-to-high-end range that can easily reach $500 or even $1,000. Thats why weve gone out and collected some of our favorite early Black Friday GPU deals for you below.Contents$350 17% offGIGABYTEThis RTX 3060 is a great starter card for those who want to be on a budget and will handle most slightly older games pretty well at 1080p and 60Hz, potentially up to 100. It may struggle a bit with newer titles without compromises, but thats fine given the reduced $290 price point.$320 6% offZOTACWhile this Zotax RTX 4060 doesnt have as much cooling, its a bit more powerful than the RTX 3060; plus, its a lot smaller, so it can fit more cases, and with the $20 discount, its well worth picking up. Plus, you get access to the newest DLS 3.0 that is exclusive to the RTX 40-series.Related$430 14% offXFXIf youre interested in 2K gaming, then this RX6800 is a good entry-level option, and much like the RTX 3060, it may struggle a little with newer titles but should handle older titles just fine. It also has a massive 16GB of RAM making it a lot more future-proof, all for just $370 instead of the usual $430.$750 11% offXFXThe RX 7900XT is the second highest-end card from AMD and is probably the cheapest way youre going to get true 4K performance out of a GPU, especially at $670 instead of the usual $750. Granted, it wont compete or match the RTX 4090, but it comes as close as you can at nearly half the price.$1,050 5% offPNYAnother great option for 4K and higher-end 2K gaming is the RTX 4080 Super, which our lead reporter, Jacob Roach, said that it offers a great balance of price and performance. You get access to the newer DLSS 3.0 with this card, and the card comes with a tidy 5% discount.When it comes to picking a GPU, the thing youre really looking at is high-end performance and upscaling. Both Nvidia and AMD have upscalers in the form of DLSS and FSR, with Nvidias DLSS being a bit more advanced and mature. That said, FSR has been catching up recently, and more importantly, not all games out there use this tech, so if you dont run any of them, then its not really worth worrying over which of the two to pick. If youre still not sure, you should absolutely take a look at our breakdown between FSR vs. DLSS.As for performance, if youre truly looking for the best in terms of pure power, then theres nothing that can beat the RTX 4090 on the market. That said, the RTX 4090 is very, very expensive, and it may not be worth it if you dont plan to run 4K at around 100FPS, which also brings its own costs since gaming monitors that can handle that are very expensive too. On the other hand, AMD offers very strong performance in the low-to-mid range for a significantly lower price than Nvidia, so if you dont care about DLSS, then AMD is usually the way to go at those tiers.Because the market is mostly dominated by AMD and Nvidia, and there is a pretty solid understanding of where each card lies in terms of performance, the majority of the work is trying to find the best deal from various brands. After all, everybody from Gigabyte to MSI makes their own versions of these GPUs with minor variations here and there. So, ultimately, we rely on our experience as reviewers and deal hunters to not only find you the deals that will offer you the best bang for your buck, but also to give you a great selection of cards for you to pick from.Editors Recommendations

Weve still got some time until Black Friday deals officially arrive, but now is a good time to start your shopping, as there are a lot of early Black Friday deals worth grabbing. Among them are devices from Googles Pixel lineup, which is great news of youve got your eye on Black Friday phone deals, Black Friday smartwatch deals, Black Friday tablet deals, or Black Friday headphone deals. Weve tracked down all of the best early Black Friday Google Pixel deals available in the lead-up to the sales event, so read onward for all of the details on how to land some savings right now.Contents$200 32% offGoogleIf youre looking for some of the best headphone deals during these early Black Friday offerings, you definitely want to pounce on this deal. The Google Pixel Buds Pro are seeing a $64 price drop and a Black Friday price of $136. The newer Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 are also on the market, but they arent seeing any Black Friday deals, and this first generation model of the popular earbuds will provide plenty of audio quality for most people.$250 9% offJoe Maring / Digital TrendsThe Google Pixel Watch 2 is currently among the best smartwatches on the market, so any discount is worth taking advantage of. Here youl save close to 10%, as the Pixel Watch 2 is marked down from $250 to $228 for Black Friday. Its the perfect watch for Android users to track their fitness and health stats, as it can keep on eye on your heart rate and stress levels, and it even has some safety features built in.Related$399 20% offGoogle / GoogleThe Google Pixel Tablet is both powerful and affordable, and its a regular contender to be among the best tablets. Here you can add the 128GB model to your device lineup for $80 off its regular price of $399. This is an 11-inch tablet that can contribute a lot to your productivity and creativity, and it even features Google AI. Google has integrated its artificial intelligence into the Pixel Tablet in a number of different ways, and it can help with things that range from photo editing to providing high-quality video calls.$699 29%Andy Boxall / Digital TrendsSo far the Google Pixel 8 is one of the best Black Friday phone deals weve come across, with Google former flagship seeing a price drop of nearly 30%. This is good for $200 in savings and a $499 Black Friday price. The Pixel 8 is barely a generation old at this point, so you can purchase knowing youre getting a phone that still holds up with current features. Its known for its 6.2-inch Actua display, and the Pixel 8 can go up to 24 hours before needing to charge back up.$799 8% offAndy Boxall / Digital TrendsAny time you can get a recently released phone at a discount its worth taking a look at. This Black Friday deal sees the 128GB model of the brand new Google Pixel 9 discounted $63. This brings its price down to $736, and Amazon is even including one-day shipping for Prime members. With the Pixel 9 being among the newest generation of smartphones it includes AI integrations, and one of its other main features is a 50-megapixel camera that produces amazing video quality and a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera for macro focusing photography.Google has a lot of different devices in its Pixel lineup, and you cant really go wrong with any of them. This may remove a little stress from the shopping experience, as you can shop initially for just about anything. If youre looking for some of the best wireless earbuds there are some great options among the Google Pixel Buds lineup, and the Pixel lineup also has several phones to choose from. The Google Pixel Tablet is a great Android tablet and a great alternative to several different iPad models, and youll even find several smartwatches among what the Google Pixel Watch has to offer.Once youve decided what kind of device you want to take home during these Black Friday deals, we recommend you go straight for the most savings. Thats what Black Friday is all about, after all, and while we do see some modest discounts across the Pixel lineup throughout the year, its likely to see some pretty substantial savings available both during Black Friday and during the early Black Friday deals that precede it. If you see a Google Pixel device that suits your needs and you see it at a price that works for you, make a purchase and start putting it to use.With the Google Pixel lineup having so many great devices to choose from, our first consideration in choosing the best Black Friday Google Pixel deals was newness. New releases get top priority here, as it can be difficult to find a discount at all on something thats recently been released. The Google Pixel 9 is an example of this, and even though some Google Pixel devices may have been supplanted by a more recent release, we kept them toward the top of the list simply because new generations are being released every year now. A phone thats a year old may not be the newest on the market, but if it can still hold its own it still feels like a recent release come Black Friday.Price drops are the second main thing we looked at when narrowing down the best Black Friday Google Pixel deals. Devices that are a generation or two old are the main candidates here, and while some may think of these devices as ancient tech, they present incredible value when their price is dropped significantly enough. Black Friday is when we tend to see these more unique, more substantial price drops, so we didnt hesitate to include devices like the Google Pixel Buds Pro and Google Pixel 8.Editors Recommendations

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An elephant never forgets This elephant figured out how to use a hose to shower A younger rival may have learned how to sabotage those showers by disrupting water flow. Jennifer Ouellette Nov 12, 2024 6:06 pm | 15 An elephant named Mary has been filmed using a hose to shower herself. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology An elephant named Mary has been filmed using a hose to shower herself. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn more Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology An Asian elephant named Mary living at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers by figuring out how to use a hose to take her morning showers, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. Elephants are amazing with hoses, said co-author Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin. As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.Tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins have been observed using sea sponges to protect their beaks while foraging for food, and sea otters will break open shellfish like abalone with rocks. Several species of fish also use tools to hunt and crack open shellfish, as well as to clear a spot for nesting. And the coconut octopus collects coconut shells, stacking them and transporting them before reassembling them as shelter.Birds have also been observed using tools in the wild, although this behavior was limited to corvids (crows, ravens, and jays), although woodpecker finches have been known to insert twigs into trees to impale passing larvae for food. Parrots, by contrast, have mostly been noted for their linguistic skills, and there has only been limited evidence that they use anything resembling a tool in the wild. Primarily, they seem to use external objects to position nuts while feeding.And then there's Figaro, a precociousmale Goffin's cockatoo kept in captivity and cared for by scientists in the "Goffin lab" at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Figaro showed a surprising ability to manipulate single tools to maneuver a tasty nut out of a box. Other cockatoos who repeatedly watched Figaro's performance were also able to do so. Figaro and his cockatoo cronies even learned how to combine toolsa stick and a ballto play a rudimentary form of "golf."Shower timeBoth captive and wild elephants are known to use and modify branches for fly switching. Brecht's Humboldt colleague, Lina Kaufman, is the one who first observed Mary using a hose to shower at the Berlin Zoo and told Brecht about it. They proceeded to undertake a more formal study of the behavior not just of Mary, but two other elephants at the zoo, Pang Pha and her daughter Anchali. Mary was born in the wild in Vietnam, while Pang Pha was a gift from Thailand; Anchali was born at the Berlin Zoo, where she was hand-raised by zookeepers. Showering was part of the elephants' morning routine, and all had been trained not to step on the hoses. Mary's rival Anchali blocking the flow of water. Urban et al./Current Biology All the elephants used their trunks to spray themselves with water, but Mary was the only one who also used the hose, picking it up with her trunk. Her hose showers lasted about seven minutes, and she dropped the hose when the water was turned off. Where she gripped the hose depended on which body part she was showering: she grasped it further from the end when spraying her back than when showering the left side of her body, for instance. This is a form of tool modification that has also been observed in New Caledonian crows.And the hose-showering behavior was "lateralized," that is, Mary preferred targeting her left body side more than her right. (Yes, Mary is a "left-trunker.") Mary even adapted her showering behavior depending on the diameter of the hose: she preferred showering with a 24-mm hose over a 13-mm hose and preferred to use her trunk to shower rather than a 32-mm hose.It's not known where Mary learned to use a hose, but the authors suggest that elephants might have an intuitive understanding of how hoses work because of the similarity to their trunks. "Bathing and spraying themselves with water, mud, or dust are very common behaviors in elephants and important for body temperature regulation as well as skin care," they wrote. "Mary's behavior fits with other instances of tool use in elephants related to body care."Perhaps even more intriguing was Anchali's behavior. While Anchali did not use the hose to shower, she nonetheless exhibited complex behavior in manipulating the hose: lifting it, kinking the hose, regrasping the kink, and compressing the kink. The latter, in particular, often resulted in reduced water flow while Mary was showering. Anchali eventually figured out how to further disrupt the water flow by placing her trunk on the hose and lowering her body onto it. Control experiments were inconclusive about whether Anchali was deliberately sabotaging Mary's shower; the two elephants had been at odds and behaved aggressively toward each other at shower times. But similar cognitively complex behavior has been observed in elephants.When Anchali came up with a second behavior that disrupted water flow to Mary, I became pretty convinced that she is trying to sabotage Mary, Brecht said. Do elephants play tricks on each other in the wild? When I saw Anchali's kink and clamp for the first time, I broke out in laughter. So, I wonder, does Anchali also think this is funny, or is she just being mean?Current Biology, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.017 (About DOIs).Jennifer OuelletteSenior WriterJennifer OuelletteSenior Writer Jennifer is a senior reporter at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 15 Comments Prev story

secret math problems dept. New secret math benchmark stumps AI models and PhDs alike FrontierMath's difficult questions remain unpublished so that AI companies can't train against it. Benj Edwards Nov 12, 2024 5:49 pm | 31 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn Friday, research organization Epoch AI released FrontierMath, a new mathematics benchmark that has been turning heads in the AI world because it contains hundreds of expert-level problems that leading AI models solve less than 2 percent of the time, according to Epoch AI. The benchmark tests AI language models (such as GPT-4o, which powers ChatGPT) against original mathematics problems that typically require hours or days for specialist mathematicians to complete.FrontierMath's performance results, revealed in a preprint research paper, paint a stark picture of current AI model limitations. Even with access to Python environments for testing and verification, top models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini 1.5 Pro scored extremely poorly. This contrasts with their high performance on simpler math benchmarksmany models now score above 90 percent on tests like GSM8K and MATH.The design of FrontierMath differs from many existing AI benchmarks because the problem set remains private and unpublished to prevent data contamination. Many existing AI models are trained on other test problem datasets, allowing the AI models to easily solve the problems and appear more generally capable than they actually are. Many experts cite this as evidence that current large language models (LLMs) are poor generalist learners.Problems spanning multiple disciplinesEpoch AI says it developed FrontierMath through collaboration with over 60 mathematicians from leading institutions. The problems underwent peer review to verify correctness and check for ambiguities. About 1 in 20 problems needed corrections during the review process, a rate comparable to other major machine learning benchmarks.The problems in the new set span multiple mathematical disciplines, from computational number theory to abstract algebraic geometry. And they are reportedly difficult to solve. Really, really difficult.Epoch AI allowed Fields Medal winners Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers to review portions of the benchmark. "These are extremely challenging," Tao said in feedback provided to Epoch. "I think that in the near term basically the only way to solve them, short of having a real domain expert in the area, is by a combination of a semi-expert like a graduate student in a related field, maybe paired with some combination of a modern AI and lots of other algebra packages." A chart showing AI models' limited success on the FrontierMath problems, taken from Epoch AI's research paper. Credit: Epoch AI To aid in the verification of correct answers during testing, the FrontierMath problems must have answers that can be automatically checked through computation, either as exact integers or mathematical objects. The designers made problems "guessproof" by requiring large numerical answers or complex mathematical solutions, with less than a 1 percent chance of correct random guesses.Mathematician Evan Chen, writing on his blog, explained how he thinks that FrontierMath differs from traditional math competitions like the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Problems in that competition typically require creative insight while avoiding complex implementation and specialized knowledge, he says. But for FrontierMath, "they keep the first requirement, but outright invert the second and third requirement," Chen wrote.While IMO problems avoid specialized knowledge and complex calculations, FrontierMath embraces them. "Because an AI system has vastly greater computational power, it's actually possible to design problems with easily verifiable solutions using the same idea that IOI or Project Euler doesbasically, 'write a proof' is replaced by 'implement an algorithm in code,'" Chen explained.The organization plans regular evaluations of AI models against the benchmark while expanding its problem set. They say they will release additional sample problems in the coming months to help the research community test their systems.Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a widely-cited tech historian. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 31 Comments

The company -- taking direct aim at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other incumbents in the GenAI arms race -- plans to use the funding to fuel its agentic AI efforts.