According to the lawsuit, Google intentionally marked "millions" of RNC emails as spam, so the group sought reimbursement for "donations it allegedly lost as a result" of that. As evidence, it cited a study finding that Gmail was more likely than Yahoo and other mail systems to mark Republican emails as spam. (One of the study's authors told the Post last year that its findings were cherry-picked.)

Calling the lawsuit a "close case," US District Court judge Daniel Calabretta said the RNC had "failed to plausibly allege its claims" that Google's spam filtering was done in bad faith. Google said that the emails in questions were likely flagged as spam because of user complaints, and cited RNC domain authentication issues and frequent mailouts as other potential issues.

The court also decided that RNC emails could be deemed "objectionable" based on the CAN-SPAM Act, and the fact that Google flagged them as such was covered by Section 230, which provides immunity to online platforms from civil liability based on third-party content. All that said, the judge said Republicans could still amend the lawsuit to better establish a lack of good faith by Google.

Interestingly, during last year's mid-term US elections, Google created a loophole allowing political campaigns to dodge Gmail spam filters. However, the RNC reportedly didn't take advantage of the program. Google has since ended the experiment, following largely negative feedback from the public.

The post Judge tosses Republican lawsuit against Google over Gmail spam filters appeared first on Best News.

This approach is similar to, if not better than, DeepMind's SynthID for digitally watermark AI-generated images and audio, as part of Google's own election content strategy published last month. Meta's AI image generator also adds an invisible watermark to its content, though the company has yet to share its readiness on tackling election-related misinformation.

OpenAI says it will soon work with journalists, researchers and platforms for feedback on its provenance classifier. Along the same theme, ChatGPT users will start to see real-time news from around the world complete with attribution and links. They'll also be directed to CanIVote.org, the official online source on US voting, when they ask procedural questions like where to vote or how to vote.

Additionally, OpenAI reiterates its current policies on shutting down impersonation attempts in the form of deepfakes and chatbots, as well as content made to distort the voting process or to discourage people from voting. The company also forbids applications built for political campaigning, and when necessary, its new GPTs allow users to report potential violations.

OpenAI says learnings from these early measures, if successful at all (and that's a very big "if"), will help it roll out similar strategies across the globe. The firm will have more related announcements in the coming months.

The post OpenAI lays out its misinformation strategy ahead of 2024 elections appeared first on Best News.

Fulton County made headlines in August as the place where prosecutors chose to bring election interference charges against former president Donald Trump. But don't worry, officials assured the public that the case had not been impacted by the attack. “All material related to the election case is kept in a separate, highly secure system that was not hacked and is designed to make any unauthorized access extremely difficult if not impossible,” said Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Despite this, Fulton County election systems did not appear to be the target of the attack. While Fulton County's Department of Registration and Elections went down, “there is no indication that this event is related to the election process,” Fulton County said in a statement. “In an abundance of caution, Fulton County and the (Georgia) Secretary of State’s respective technology systems were isolated from one another as part of the response efforts.”

So far, the impact of the attack ranges widely from delays getting marriage certificates to disrupted court hearings. On Wednesday, a miscommunication during the outage even let a murder suspect out of custody. A manhunt continues after officials mistakenly released the suspect while being transferred between Clayton County and Fulton County for a hearing.

The county has not released information on when it expects systems to be fully restored, but it is working with law enforcement on recovery efforts. In the meantime, while constituents have trouble reaching certain government services, Fulton County put out a list of contact information for impacted departments. Fulton County also released a full list of impacted systems.

While the government IT outages occurred, a local student also hacked into Fulton County Schools systems, according to StateScoop on Friday. The school system is still determining if any personal information may have been breached, but most services came back online by Monday.

The post Fallout from the Fulton County cyberattack continues, key systems still down appeared first on Best News.

Formella says an investigation has linked the source of the robocalls to Texan companies Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. No charges have yet been filed against either company or Life Corporation's owner, a person named Walter Monk. The probe is ongoing and other entities are believed to be involved. Federal law enforcement officials are said to be looking into the case too.

“We have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws," Formella said at a press conference, according to CNN. "We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we are taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom and any other individual or entity."

The Federal Communications Commission also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Lingo Telecom. The agency said (PDF) it has warned both companies about robocalls in the past.

The deepfake was created using tools from AI voice cloning company ElevenLabs, which banned the user responsible. The company says it is "dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools and [that it takes] any incidents of misuse extremely seriously."

Meanwhile, the FCC is seeking to ban robocalls that use AI-generated voices. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the agency is responsible for making rules regarding robocalls. Commissioners are to vote on the issue in the coming weeks.

The post Phony AI Biden robocalls reached up to 25,000 voters, says New Hampshire AG appeared first on Best News.