India temporarily blocking Telegram to prevent exam fraud, Google Earth's flight simulator is now available, and millions of songs were used for AI music training

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India will temporarily block Telegram to prevent exam fraud.
An investigation by The Atlantic revealed many millions of songs were used for AI music training.
And Google Earth's Flight Simulator Mode is now available in your browser. It's Tuesday, June 16th, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in and around tech this morning, from Engadget.
India has temporarily blocked Telegram for a strange justification, test cheating. The government recently annulled the results of a key medical school entrance test because it said that the answers were leaked ahead of time on Telegram. That's according to a report by the Financial Times. To preserve the integrity of the retest slated for June 21st, the government is completely blocking the messaging app until exams finish on June 22nd. Now, that may sound like a weird reason to block Telegram and its largest market, estimated to be around 84 million people, but there's a little bit more to the story. Apart from the leak, the exam system has been called broken and corrupt by India's primary opposition leader. That issue is what initially led to student outrage and protests against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There's a pretty good explanation for the scandal at Al Jazeera, but a summary would be some two and a quarter million students, many of whom studied for years, took the neat medical school entrance exam on May 3rd. And this year, the CBSC introduced an on-screen marking system to better grade the millions of answer sheets. The contract for that system went to a controversial firm, and after the initial test, students found troubling discrepancies in their results. One student who obtained a scan of his answer sheet discovered that it wasn't even his. Other complaints followed. Then another student exposed security vulnerabilities in the test marking portal and claimed he was able to enter the system and edit his marks. On May 12th, the government's national testing agency annulled the results, saying investigators found evidence that large sections of the paper may have been leaked and circulated on Telegram prior to the test. The NTA said that Telegram channels were offering exam paper access in exchange for money. But the Internet Freedom Foundation called the ban a band-aid solution and a disproportionate response to exam fraud, adding that the block of Telegram is reactive and ineffective, and it will punish ordinary users instead of addressing the systemic source of exam leaks.
The publication The Atlantic has published four searchable databases of music that has been used to train AI models. Now, the scope is pretty staggering, with 12 million tracks in one database, nine million in another, and the two final ones each containing about 100,000 songs. The article by Alex Reisner gave further context to just how much copyrighted music was used for AI training, including hit tracks from Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny. He points to some of the legal cases already underway against generative AI music platforms such as Suno and Udio, which have often made claims of fair use as a defense for wholesale scraping of copyright protected content to power their platforms. A similar case in book publishing did not make the headway with the judge on claims of copyright infringement, but piracy allegations have proved to be a more compelling argument. The full results and payout from that suit are still pending, though the initial settlement was for one and a half billion dollars. Having sources such as these databases from the Atlantic could help parties in the music industry try for similar lawsuits in the future. Many music streaming services have taken steps to prevent, identify, or label generative AI creations, but those efforts have seen varying degrees of success. They also have not stopped scammers from creating imitations of existing bands and trying to benefit off their work with AI copycats.