TULSA, Okla. (KTUL) — A man suspected of stealing catalytic converters for months was arrested this week after the owner says he caught him on camera.

If your catalytic converter is stolen, it’s going to cause a number of run-ability issues. Your car will be loud, you will see a bunch of lights on your dashboard, and your pockets will be lighter.

The Tulsa Police Department has been trying to catch a suspect for almost seven months who has been stealing catalytic converters from a specific shop. That shop is Paramount Capital Motors.

They have had several different incidents at the same shop from the same suspect. That suspect, Robby Harvey, was arrested on July 3rd with four different catalytic converters.

“Was able to make contact with the female inside who said she was driving the boyfriend who walked away from the vehicle towards that yard. Little further investigation they got into the yard there able to find a bunch of burglary tools that they were using to get catalytic converters, said Tulsa Police Officer Danny Bean.

"Some help came and we were able to find our suspect hiding under a car where they made the arrest. No incident. Kind of gave up. Made the arrest and find out that this is our suspect that we have been looking for in this particular area," said Bean.

This has become a huge problem worldwide. After TPD’s arrest in 2021, that turned into a major investigation that spanned multiple states. The total amount stolen in catalytic converters was over $500 million.

How can you stop catalytic converter thieves?

“Etch to protect and it was to help combat specifically catalytic converter thefts", said Bean.

The program engraves or etches your VIN number on the catalytic converter so that it becomes indestructible and nobody will take it from the thief with your car’s information it.

Jiffy Lube, who also partners with crime stoppers and TPD, has a free plan available all over town.

“We’re happy to say that this is no appointment necessary service. Free to come in. Service does not take us long. Matter of minutes, most vehicles five to ten minutes. It’s a free service. All 17 area locations are participating in this service. We call it our etch to protect. A gentleman is going to go underneath the vehicle where the catalytic converter is located. And he is going to inscribe that on the catalytic converter ang again with that high temp paint", Jiffy Lube Tulsa area supervisor, Allan Mason.

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Its acquirer (Bending Spoons) has taken over operations. They’ve also hiked subscriptions prices and told customers they intend to use new revenues to pay for new features. How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.

918 Coffee, 2446 E. 11th St., permanently closed June 30. In a Facebook post, owner Morad El-Raheb announced he was retiring and the coffeehouse he and his wife, Annie, opened in 2013 would be closing.

“Ten years ago, we set out to invest in an area that we had a personal connection with, and to provide jobs for our fellow Tulsans,” the post reads. “We are delighted to see the growth in the area. We’ve had a great run, but now it is time to retire and say goodbye to all the friends we have met on this journey. It’s been our pleasure to serve you.”

On Monday, Gizmodo spotted that Google updated its privacy policy to disclose that its various AI services, such as Bard and Cloud AI, may be trained on public data that the company has scraped from the web.

“Our privacy policy has long been transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate,” said Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon to The Verge. “This latest update simply clarifies that newer services like Bard are also included. We incorporate privacy principles and safeguards into the development of our AI technologies, in line with our AI Principles.”

Following the update on July 1st, 2023, Google’s privacy policy now says that “Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features, and technologies that benefit our users and the public” and that the company may “use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”

You can see from the policy’s revision history that the update provides some additional clarity as to the services that will be trained using the collected data. For example, the document now says that the information may be used for “AI Models” rather than “language models,” granting Google more freedom to train and build systems beside LLMs on your public data. And even that note is buried under an embedded link for “publically accessible sources” underneath the policy’s “Your Local Information” tab that you have to click to open the relevant section.

The updated policy specifies that “publicly available information” is used to train Google’s AI products but doesn’t say how (or if) the company will prevent copyrighted materials from being included in that data pool. Many publicly accessible websites have policies in place that ban data collection or web scraping for the purpose of training large language models and other AI toolsets. It’ll be interesting to see how this approach plays out with various global regulations like GDPR that protect people against their data being misused without their express permission, too.

A combination of these laws and increased market competition have made makers of popular generative AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4 extremely cagey about where they got the data used to train them and whether or not it includes social media posts or copyrighted works by human artists and authors.

The matter of whether or not the fair use doctrine extends to this kind of application currently sits in a legal gray area. The uncertainty has sparked various lawsuits and pushed lawmakers in some nations to introduce stricter laws that are better equipped to regulate how AI companies collect and use their training data. It also raises questions regarding how this data is being processed to ensure it doesn’t contribute to dangerous failures within AI systems, with the people tasked with sorting through these vast pools of training data often subjected to long hours and extreme working conditions.

Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, is suing Google and its parent company, Alphabet, claiming that advancements in AI technology have helped the search giant to hold a monopoly over the digital ad market. Products like Google’s AI search beta have also been dubbed “plagiarism engines” and criticized for starving websites of traffic.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Reddit — two social platforms that contain vast amounts of public information — have recently taken drastic measures to try and prevent other companies from freely harvesting their data. The API changes and limitations placed on the platforms have been met with backlash by their respective communities, as anti-scraping changes have negatively affected the core Twitter and Reddit user experiences.

Microsoft is getting ready to make its new Teams 2.0 client available for all users. As of today, the new app is available via a toggle in public preview, but the same toggle will become generally available for customers in September.

Microsoft launched the new Teams 2.0 client in public preview in March 2023. The app has been rebuilt from the ground up to make it two times faster and consume 50 percent less memory as compared to the classic Teams desktop app. Microsoft Teams 2.0 is no longer an Electron-based application, and it leverages Microsoft’s Webview2 technology instead.

At launch, the preview version of the new Teams 2.0 client lacked several features that are available in the classic Teams desktop app. Since then, Microsoft has been working to add support for third-party apps, line-of-business (LOB) applications, and advanced calling and meeting capabilities. These include 7×7 video, breakout rooms, call queues and voice-enabled channels, as well as survivable branch appliance (SBA).

Later this month, end users will be able to switch between the new Teams client and the classic app with a toggle button. This change will be applicable to tenants where the admin policy setting of “UseNewTeamsClient” is set to Microsoft default. Microsoft will let IT admins deploy new Teams directly to all devices in their organization in mid-July.

“We’re still working on this version, so some things aren’t available yet. It’s easy to toggle back and forth between using the classic and new Teams, so you can take advantage of the new Teams performance enhancements on some days and switch back to the classic Teams when you need to,” Microsoft explained.

Microsoft expects to make Teams 2.0 the default client for all customers in late September. The upcoming update will be available for both enterprise and business (Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, and Teams Essentials, etc) customers. Microsoft recommends IT admins to start preparing users for this upcoming change in Fall 2023.

Currently, Microsoft Teams 2.0 is only available in preview on Windows PCs. Microsoft has confirmed that the new Teams client will launch on macOS, VDI, and Web later this year. Let us know in the comments below if you have switched to the Microsoft Teams 2.0 preview app.

Google searched worked really well for reddit if trying to find an answer to a technical question or the like. How well will this translate for Lemmy? I assume it would be a lot more difficult as the post could reside on any number of smaller instances.