TrishBytes

The R&D teams of BBC, NYT have begun testing authentication tools outside of official C2PA mechanisms. Aside from the news mentioned by @ctsats and @mbransfield about BBC Verify, "Building off their previous work in the News Provenance Project, the New York Times R&D team has partnered with the CAI on a prototype exploring tools to give readers transparency into the source and veracity of news visuals."

Not sure there's enough time to move from proof of concept to a formal policy.

Writing this from Bangkok.

Carnegie's tracker lists three major protests since the pandemic.

1. Move Forward protests, July 2023

Trigger: Thailand’s parliament voted to prevent Pita Limjaroenrat of the opposition Move Forward Party from standing for election for the premiership for a second time.

2. Term limit protests, August 2022

Trigger: Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha refused to step down upon the date which activists considered to be his term limit.

3. Antigovernment protests, July 2020

Trigger: Government failure to boost the economy during the pandemic, kidnapping of a leading political activist, and protesters’ desire to repeal Thailand’s strict royal defamation law.

I've also found one smaller protest:

February 12, 2024: A small group of protesters gathered outside the Justice Ministry on Monday opposing the expected release of Thaksin Shinawatra from prison without having spent a day behind bars.

The article doesn't mention how many gathered.

And scattered incidents such as this instance of two activists arrested for attempting to interrupt a royal motorcade. Both activists have started a hunger strike.

Will the timeframe of this question closing out soon, keeping the probability at zero, but this could change in the coming year.

Raising to slightly better than even odds based on media reports of an "extraordinarily generous" ceasefire deal offered by Israel.

Israel's proposal includes a 40 day truce "in return for the release of hostages and the prospect of displaced families being allowed back to northern Gaza. It reportedly also involves new wording on restoring calm meant to satisfy Hamas's demand for a permanent ceasefire."

Mediators from US, Egypt and Qatar have been working for weeks to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have bombed the Jabalia refugee camp. And in Rafah, an Al Jazeera journalist reports (April 30):

"Despite the ongoing talks and progress made in Cairo for a potential ceasefire, people are still very cautious because they still have to deal with this intense bombing campaign that has been going on for the past 24 hours."

Maintaining a low likelihood of direct Iran aggression against US forces.

The US is acting as a moderating force, as escalating tensions in the Middle East are against Washington's foreign policy interests, especially in an election year.

The Israeli missile strike on Iran was a close call:

"Video shared with BBC Persian shows orange flashes in the sky over the city, showing what appears to be bursts of anti-aircraft fire

Israel has not officially commented on the attack, while Iran downplayed the reports

Iranian media quoted the country's foreign minister as saying no one was injured and no damage was caused

Israel was reportedly targeting an air defence radar system near Isfahan, which protects the Natanz nuclear facility, said ABC News citing a senior US official"

From one AP article: 

"Iran’s public response to the Israeli strikes Friday also was muted, raising hopes that Israel-Iran tensions — long carried out in the shadows with cyberattacks, assassinations and sabotage — will stay at a simmer."

Lowering with passage of time. No news since the flurry of articles in January indicating that "Microsoft has no plans to close down its AI lab in China".

Also, Microsoft's Beijing office, which is where the research lab is housed, is actively hiring:

https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/locations/beijing.html

Confirming previous forecast. No new information to indicate otherwise.

Lowering due to passage of time. No buzz indicating any progress on technical feasibility of labelling AI-generated text, and with the question deadline looming large, lowering by several percentage point to reflect that reality.

FYI, interesting read:

 Drawing from information theory, we argue that as machine-generated text approximates human-like quality, the sample size needed for detection increases. We establish precise sample complexity bounds for detecting AI-generated text, laying groundwork for future research aimed at developing advanced, multi-sample detectors. Our empirical evaluations across multiple datasets (Xsum, Squad, IMDb, and Kaggle FakeNews) confirm the viability of enhanced detection methods. We test various state-of-the-art text generators, including GPT-2, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Llama, Llama-2-13B-Chat-HF, and Llama-2-70B-Chat-HF, against detectors, including oBERTa-Large/Base-Detector, GPTZero. Our findings align with OpenAI's empirical data related to sequence length, marking the first theoretical substantiation for these observations.

Updating with some new movement after the 7.4 magnitude earthquake.

UK, Canada and Australia made note of the earthquake but did not issue a Level 3 above or equivalent advisory.

Australia:

Updated:04 April 2024

Latest update :A 7.4 magnitude earthquake occurred off the coast of Taiwan on 3 April. There's damage to buildings and infrastructure, with disruptions to local transport. Avoid affected areas and follow the advice of local authorities. (See 'Safety').

We advise: Exercise normal safety precautions in Taiwan.

See also:

Canada: https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/taiwan

UK: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/taiwan