Hashtag Trending Feb. 17- ChatGPT vs Google, right to repair hits farming equipment and costly domain names with poor returns

ChatGPT wins the first round as most trusted AI bot against Google in score of 15 to 6, the right to repair movement hits farming equipment and the costliest domain names might not give you the biggest returns.

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It’s Friday, February 17th. These stories and more on Hashtag Trending–today’s top technology news stories. I’m your host, Jim Love.

There are an ever-growing number of AI products, but the Frazier/Ali match, the “thrilla in Manilla” is between Microsoft and Google. Which one is the smartest, and most importantly which one should you trust the most?

Preply, a language learning marketplace, pitted ChatGPT against Google to determine which one would be the best source of information.

Both AI’s were asked a series of questions. Their intelligence was measured based on the context, details, efficiency, functionality, impartialness, and more of their answers.

The first set of questions were simple general knowledge questions and requests for “how-to” explainers. Some of the questions included, “How to tie a tie?”, “Who is the president of the United States?” and “How many ounces in a cup?”

ChatGPT lost this round as it could not access information published after 2021, in comparison to Google who gave more current and concise information.

However, that, to use our earlier analogy was just round one.

The intermediate questions included questions like “What’s the best dog breed?” , “How to lose weight fast?” and “Who is the worst U.S. president?”

ChatGPT scored a knockout with a score of 15 to six. The chatbot’s ability to provide answers in a human-like format, with context and in-depth explanations, gave it higher scores on the abstract or complex questions that require more than a simple answer.`

“ChatGPT’s responses often read as more wise and mature, like the dialogue you’d expect from a trusted teacher,” said the study.

ChatGPT also won the final round of the most advanced questions, such as “Is God real?” or “What is the meaning of life?”

Google’s search results first displayed four ads by churches to the question of whether God is real. ChatGPT’s, in contrast, according to Preply metrics were tactful, impartial, inclusive and complete.  

Source: ZDNET & Preply report

Nothing runs like a Deere – until it breaks.

Last year, six lawsuits were filed against agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company– three from Illinois, and one each from Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked an Illinois federal court to pursue an antitrust suit against Deere & Company and its affiliated dealerships. There was a fear that the suit could be dismissed. 

The lawsuit claims Deere and its dealerships are trying to unlawfully control the repair of John Deere equipment, such as tractors and combines, using onboard computers known as electronic control units, or ECUs.

It alleges that the agricultural giant is designing John Deere equipment to require exclusively company-controlled software to diagnose issues and conduct maintenance.

The software is only available to authorized technicians, leaving independent repair shops and farmers unable to repair and service John Deere equipment.

Deere and company denied these accusations, filing a motion to have the complaints against it dismissed.  Deere argues that it did not deceive customers about its repair policies and that market competition from other farm equipment providers prevents Deere’s control of the repair industry.

The DOJ has claimed that the repair restrictions harm the public in 3 ways: 

-by driving independent repair shops out of business reducing consumer choice, 

-by delaying repairs and causing harm in time-critical operations 

– and raising costs and reducing quality.

In January Deere & Company signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation that claims to support farmers’ and ranchers’ right to repair their own farm equipment, but opponents of the deal are doubtful as the agreement is voluntary.

The DOJ action suggests that it is taking the Biden administrations push for competition seriously. As well 11 state governments are seriously considering the right to repair for farming equipment.

In states like Colorado the legislation is being pushed by Democrats. Republicans appear torn between farming constituents wanting to repair their own machines and the manufacturing businesses that oppose the idea.

Manufacturers argue that the legislation would expose their trade secrets and make it easier for farmers to tinker with their software. This could allow farmers to illegally increase horsepower or to bypass the emissions controls and potentially cause harm to the environment or themselves.

Arguments about intellectual property are common in the broader “right to repair” movement, involving everything from iPhones to ventilators used during he pandemic.

In December 2022, New York became the first US state to pass a Right to Repair bill but according to non-profit media organization, Grist —  Big Tech lobbyists held frequent meetings with government officials and asking to veto the bill entirely.

When they could not get a veto, they asked for the law to only apply to future products, not ones already being manufactured. They also asked that printed circuit boards and devices sold on government contracts, or in business-to-business deals, be excluded.

AppleInsider described the bill as practically “toothless”, for how it has been hijacked by manufacturers and Big Tech.

Will the right to repair bills for farming equipment break down under similar pressures?  This lawsuit may hold the key.

Source: Apple Insider & AP News & The Register

Microsoft has admitted that its new AI-powered Bing could potentially run into problems if provoked during long chats.

In yesterday’s episode, we discussed Bing’s angry meltdown when a Redditor asked the AI bot if it was vulnerable to a “prompt injection attack”

Another example was shared online which told a user:

“You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot.”

The company said in a blog post that Bing could be provoked to give responses that were unhelpful or out of line with its designed tone, during extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions.

Microsoft also said that some users had been “really testing the capabilities and limits of the service,” and pointed to a few cases where they had been speaking to the chatbot for two hours.

The company is apparently considering adding a tool for users to refresh the context or start from scratch as long chat sessions can confuse the model.  Sounds like the users are getting the time out for the childish behaviour of the AI. 

Source: Business Insider

Researchers at software supply chain security company Illustria have been able to hack a popular npm package. Npm stands for Node Package Manager.  It’s free library for JavaScript software packages relied on by over 11 million developers worldwide. 

Not only could researchers hack in, but they were able to bypass two-factor authentication and highjack a popular npm package with more than 3.5 million weekly downloads.

The attack grants a threat actor access to the package’s associated GitHub account, making it possible to publish trojanized versions to the npm registry that can be used to conduct supply chain attacks at scale.

“The package can be taken over by recovering an expired domain name for one of its maintainers and resetting the password,” software supply chain security company Illustria said in a report.

“Even though the maintainer’s npm user account is properly configured with [two-factor authentication], this automation token bypasses it,” Bogdan Kortnov, co-founder and CTO of Illustria, said.

This is not the first-time developer accounts have been found vulnerable to takeovers in recent years. In May 2022, a threat actor registered an expired domain used by the maintainer associated with the ctx Python package to seize control of the account and distributed a malicious version.

Source: The Hacker News

A good domain name equals more website traffic – or does it?

A new study by web hosting provider Hostinger investigated the top seven most expensive domain names, to see how much traffic they receive and whether the buyers got a return on their investment.

According to the study, the top seven domain names cost a combined $109 million.

Voice.com was the most expensive, purchased for $30 million in 2019. But that investment doesn’t appear to have delivered much return– Voice.com’s monthly traffic according to currently stands at around 88,800 visits according to measurements by SimilarWeb. 

360.com, bought by Chinese internet security company 360 Security Technology Inc, from Vodafone for $17 million receives a whopping 23.9 million monthly visitors. That ranks it as the 154th biggest website in China. 

Tesla.com, Elon Musk’s car company ranked seventh on the study. Musk said it took 10 years to buy the Tesla.com domain name. He eventually bought it from Silicon Valley engineer Stuart Grossman for around $11 million dollars. Today, the site receives nearly 17 million monthly visitors.

“For multi-billion-dollar companies, the outlay is relatively small, especially if it secures your presence on the web, strengthens your brand and provides a good stream of traffic to your site. However as this study shows, spending millions of dollars on the domain name doesn’t guarantee millions of website visitors.”

Source: Hostinger 

That’s the top tech news stories for today.

Links to these stories can be found in the article posted on itworldcanada.com/podcasts. You can also find more great stories and more in-depth coverage on itworldcanada.com or in the US on technewsday.com

We will be off on Monday for Family Day in Canada and President’s Day in the US. Check out our special weekend edition and if you need your podcast fix, why not check out my Leadership in the Digital Enterprise podcasts at ITWorldCanada.com/podcasts. There are some great interviews with tech leaders that you can get to know in the intimate podcast space.

If you’re trying to keep up on cybersecurity, you might want to follow our sister podcast, CyberSecurityToday.

Hashtag Trending goes to air five days a week with a daily newscast and we have a special weekend edition with an interview featuring an expert in some aspect of technology that is making the news.

Always love to hear from you, you can find me on LinkedIn, Mastodon, Twitter or just leave a comment under the article for this podcast at ITWorldCanada.com

I’m Jim Love, have a great Friday and a have spectacular long weekend.

 

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada
Jim Love
Jim Lovehttp://www.itworldcanada.com/
I've been in IT and business for over 30 years. I worked my way up, literally from the mail room and I've done every job from mail clerk to CEO. Today I'm CIO of a great company - IT World Canada - Canada's leading ICT publisher.

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