Technology | The Guardian

In this week’s newsletter: Facebook has been hit with a €1.2bn fine by EU regulators, and the cracks in the fault lines of data regulations are showing. Could that be a good thing?

Picture shared on verified accounts fuels concerns over AI’s potential to generate misinformationAn AI-generated image that appeared to show an explosion next to a building in the Pentagon complex circulated on social media platforms on Monday, in the latest incident to highlight concerns over misinformation generated by AI.The image of a tall, dark gray plume of smoke quickly spread on Twitter, including through shares by verified accounts. It remains unclear where it originated. Continue reading...

Last week, Greg Gianforte, the governor, had signed into law a bill that prohibits app stores from offering the video-sharing platformTikTok has filed a federal lawsuit against Montana over the state’s new law banning the short-video app.In the suit filed on Monday, the company argues the ban violates first amendment rights of both the company and its users. Continue reading...

Penalty from Ireland’s privacy regulator is a record for breach of EU data protection regulation

Bo Young Lee faced criticism for Zoom sessions that focused on white women’s experience of ‘Karen’ stereotype of entitlementUber has suspended its head of diversity, equity and inclusion after Black and Hispanic employees complained about the workplace events she moderated exploring the experience of white American women under the title “Don’t Call Me Karen”.The ride-hailing app has confirmed that it has asked Bo Young Lee, who has led its DEI department for five years, to take a leave of absence while the company works out “next steps”. Her suspension is the latest wave of chaos to strike the $72bn company over its corporate culture. Continue reading...

Composer Brendan Angelides was cautious about agreeing to write the soundtrack for the latest edition of Ubisoft’s blockbuster. But then he met Palestinian composer and orchestrator Akram Haddad“I think, initially, Ubisoft approached me because of my electronic music background – my live career, my albums, my touring. But I didn’t know if I was the right person for the job, you know?”Composer Brendan Angelides has never worked in video game music before. You might know him better as Eskmo or Welder, or perhaps as the mind behind the music of TV shows 13 Reasons Why or Billions. When Ubisoft approached him to be the composer for its sort-of reboot of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Mirage, he had doubts. The game is set at the height of the Islamic golden age, and centres around Baghdad: a hub flowing with the lifeblood of a changing world, a cultural centre of art and science, old and new. Continue reading...

A professor of law who’s a computer geek carves an undaunted path through the conceptual and technical undergrowth in this illuminating tour of cyberspace’s dark sideAs we head towards 2030, a terrible realisation is dawning on us – that we have built a world that is critically dependent on a set of technologies that almost nobody understands, and which are also extremely fragile and insecure. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing seeks to tackle both sides of this dilemma: our collective ignorance, on the one hand, and our insecurity on the other. Its author says that he embarked on the project seeking an understanding of just three things. Why is the internet so insecure? How (and why) do the hackers who exploit its vulnerabilities do what they do? And what can be done about it?In ornithological terms, Scott Shapiro is a pretty rare bird – an eminent legal scholar who is also a geek. Wearing one hat (or perhaps a wig), he teaches jurisprudence, constitutional law, legal philosophy and related topics to Yale students. But wearing different headgear (a reversed baseball cap?), he is also the founding director of the university’s cybersecurity lab, which does pretty good research on security and information technology generally. Continue reading...

Compact Bluetooth earbuds get better sound, noise-cancelling and battery life – and a funky clear caseThe latest Beats earbuds from Apple improve the noise-cancelling and sound of their predecessors – and make them easier to use across almost all phones while adding a fresh transparent option.The Studio Buds+ cost £179.99 ($169.99) and, as the name suggests, are enhanced versions of the already good Studio Buds from 2021. Continue reading...

The Ethiopian-born computer scientist lost her job after pointing out the inequalities built into AI. But after decades working with technology companies, she knows all too much about discrimination‘It feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”Gebru is talking about her specialised field: artificial intelligence. On the day we speak via a video call, she is in Kigali, Rwanda, preparing to host a workshop and chair a panel at an international conference on AI. It will address the huge growth in AI’s capabilities, as well as something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power. Continue reading...

The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human worldAustralian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.Why write Animal Liberation Now?

The CEO of the social media giant has spent billions on his virtual reality dream – and still no one understands the idea. Now the world’s richest firm could change the gameIn Meta’s quarterly earnings call in April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive. The metaverse, the vision of a globe-spanning virtual reality that he had literally bet his multibillion-dollar empire on creating, had been usurped as the new hot thing by the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI).Critics had even noticed Meta itself changing its tune, highlighting the difference between a November statement from Zuckerberg, in which he described the project as a “high-priority growth area” and a March note that instead focused on how “advancing AI” was the company’s “single largest investment”. Continue reading...

Robots that can assist caregivers have been talked up as being transformative. But some researchers fear such technology could take more than it givesIngrid’s 22-year-old son Tom doesn’t understand danger. He cannot leave the house by himself because he does not know that cars may kill him and, in winter, he forgets to wear enough clothes to stay warm. He was born with Down’s syndrome and Ingrid says that “he’s calm and shy and really polite, but he needs help with everything”.Ingrid is one of millions of people caring for a loved one at home today. In the UK, “family caregivers” constitute about 9% of the population and they outstrip paid care workers by more than three to one. This is because most care continues to be carried out in people’s homes, rather than in residential facilities or by paid workers in the community. For this oft-overlooked army of supporters, it’s a difficult life. According to an annual survey of family caregivers in the UK, 45% had been providing support for 90 hours or more each week, and a similar proportion had not taken a break from caring in the past year. Caregivers consistently report lost income, higher than average rates of depression and anxiety, lack of time to rest, exercise or socialise, or to attend their own medical appointments – to do much of anything for themselves, really. Continue reading...

The OpenAI CEO says his industry needs government intervention. Whether it’s a ploy or a plea for help, we should be concernedWatching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.” Continue reading...

He emulates the Virgin founder’s freewheeling portfolio career. But he is also the tycoon behind a major UK power supplier dealing with an energy crisis. Is he spreading himself too thin?Pink flamingos once strolled around a rooftop garden set high above the traffic of Kensington High Street in west London, where stars including Madonna and George Harrison rubbed shoulders with the business elite.The exclusive party venue was owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin for 37 years before closing in 2018 after struggling to make a profit. Continue reading...

False news stories, images, video and audio could be tailored to audiences and created at scale by next springNext year’s elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots.Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users. Continue reading...

The Argentinian photographer was drawn to capture a stranger’s self-expression on a trip to New YorkSeconds before this was taken, Lucía Mara had chased the woman down New York’s Third Avenue. It was the Argentinian photographer’s last day in the city and she was running late to a meeting before her flight home to Buenos Aires.It was a sunny October day, bright after a night of rain, and the early afternoon light had illuminated the woman’s violet hair just as Mara, who studied photography and film at the University of California, passed by. She abandoned thoughts of her meeting and took off in pursuit, then, breathless, requested permission to take a photo. The woman, she says, was “ecstatic”. Continue reading...

Labour for the Long Term says UK risks falling even further into dependence on US tech firmsKeir Starmer should pledge £11bn towards building “BritGPT” and a national artificial intelligence (AI) cloud in the next Labour manifesto or risk the UK falling ever further into dependence on American tech companies, an affiliated thinktank has said.Labour for the Long Term, which campaigns within the party for it to adopt “long-termist” policies that mitigate dangers such as pandemics, climate breakdown, and AI extinction, argues in a report that the £1bn pledged by the government in the 2023 budget is not enough to protect Britain’s future independence. Continue reading...

State subsidies and industry backing pull in foreign investment as country creates ‘Battery Valley’Forty miles from the coast of Britain, where the government was again told this week that without urgent action it risks losing the electric vehicle race, “Battery Valley” is taking shape in northern France.Emmanuel Macron’s announcement last week that the Taiwanese battery maker ProLogium had chosen Dunkirk for its first foreign facility brings to four the number of gigafactories planned in a corridor stretching about 60 miles inland from the port. Continue reading...

The trailer for Gareth Edwards’ new film shows humanity being outsmarted by AI – and is released just as our overlords-to-be are rearing their terrifying headsIt’s been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland’s debut. Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother explored similar territory in 2019 with a rather more claustrophobic, yet devastatingly incisive touch. Now there’s Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads.At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin’s inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian. Continue reading...

Tejay Fletcher’s site offered tools allowing criminals to make phone calls that appeared to be from trusted companiesThe mastermind behind an online fraud shop used to con victims out of more than £100m has been jailed for more than 13 years.Tejay Fletcher, 35, bought a £230,000 Lamborghini, two Range Rovers worth £110,000 and an £11,000 Rolex after making about £2m from the iSpoof.cc website. He was the founder and leading administrator of the site, which was brought down last year in the UK’s biggest fraud sting. Continue reading...

Free app designed to shed light on ‘mental load’ overwhelmingly carried by women when it comes to choresThe Spanish government is hoping to encourage men to do more at home by developing a free app that will log how much time each household or family member spends on domestic chores.Announcing the measure in Geneva earlier this week, Spain’s secretary of state for equality, Ángela Rodríguez, said the aim was to shed light on the invisible “mental load” overwhelmingly carried by women when it comes to domestic tasks. Continue reading...

Young users question whether law tied to national security concerns will take effect in January as plannedOn Wednesday, a 30-year-old influencer named Kylie Nelson signed a deal with TikTok to promote the app on her page. A few hours later, she learned that the state of Montana had passed a law banning TikTok.“Now I’m wondering: what do we do here?” said Nelson, who lives in Billings and is a full-time content creator. “About 60% to 70% of my brand collaborations are with TikTok. So, yeah, I’m pretty bummed out by the news.” Continue reading...

Ignoring ChatGPT and its cousins won’t get us anywhere. In fact, these systems reveal issues we too often missIn my spring lecture course of 120 students, my teaching assistants caught four examples of students using artificial-intelligence-driven language programs like ChatGPT to complete short essays. In each case, the students confessed to using such systems and agreed to rewrite the assignments themselves.With all the panic about how students might use these systems to get around the burden of actually learning, we often forget that as of 2023, the systems don’t work well at all. It was easy to spot these fraudulent essays. They contained spectacular errors. They used text that did not respond to the prompt we had issued to students. Or they just sounded unlike what a human would write. Continue reading...

Justices avoid weighing in on law which shields internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their usersThe US supreme court issued two decisions on Thursday that reinforced existing protections for internet platforms against being held liable for content, marking a victory for tech behemoths including Twitter and Google.The cases had been closely watched for their impact on a federal law known as section 230, which protects internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users, a law that – if successfully challenged – could have upended the rules of the internet. Continue reading...

The state governor had on Wednesday signed into law the first US state-level ban on the appA group of TikTok creators have sued to block Montana’s ban of the platform, arguing that the new law violates their first amendment rights.Greg Gianforte, Montana’s governor, on Wednesday signed into law the first US state-level ban of the increasingly embattled social media app, effective 1 January 2024. The governor argued the move was “to protect Montanans’ personal and private data from being harvested by the Chinese Communist party”. Continue reading...

All you need to know about the US state becoming the first to prohibit the social video app for consumer usersTikTok has been banned in Montana. The first US state-level ban of the increasingly embattled social video app is already proving controversial, although it will not take effect until 2024. Continue reading...

While the US and EU announce bigger programmes, one British startup says the government’s investment figure is less than the cost of one basic plantThe UK government has announced an investment of up to £1bn in the domestic semiconductor industry, but has been criticised for declining to join the spending race that has seen the US and EU announce significantly bigger programmes.Labour accused the government of lacking ambition in its announcement, while one UK startup said the £1bn figure was less than the cost of one basic semiconductor plant. Continue reading...

Possible interventions include default smaller portions and prominently displaying low-calorie foodsFood delivery apps could help tackle the obesity crisis by making lower-calorie options more prominent on their sites, research suggests.A study, presented at the European Congress of Obesity in Dublin, involved creating a simulated food delivery app and conducting three randomised controlled trials involving 23,783 adult participants. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Visual Concepts/2K Games

In this week’s newsletter: The Zelda sequel’s all-encompassing approval says something about how important games have become in our cultural lives

In his new memoir, Before We Go Live, the Twitch and YouTube star pulls back the curtain on the world of pro game streaming – and details some of the toxic behaviour he says he has witnessedStephen Flavall – or Jorbs as he is known on YouTube and Twitch, where he has more than 100,000 followers – rose to fame streaming strategy games such as XCOM and Slay the Spire, a game in which he has achieved several world records. He’s considered a high-ranking Twitch streamer, with a soothing monotone voice and an infectious laugh. He’s very consistent. When you watch Flavall’s Twitch channel, you know exactly what to expect: funny and cerebral anecdotes, informative strategy tips and a supportive community.But his new memoir, Before We Go Live, does something unexpected: it pulls back the curtain on the back end of professional game streaming – which, as anyone who follows online gaming culture knows, is rife with rampant toxicity, abuse and harassment. It’s a chilling wakeup call for the industry, from the top down. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Why did Amanda Riley con the blogosphere into paying for her fake illness? Find out in Scamanda. Plus: five of the best podcasts to mend a broken heart

Exclusive: Slow response times and high cost of parts make program unviable, third-party repairers say

Video site recommended videos related to weapons, shooting and murderers to accounts for boys aged nine and 14, report saysYouTube’s recommendation algorithm continues to direct young video game fans down dark paths of violent and dangerous content, a report has found, years after critics first raised concerns about the system.A report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a Washington DC-based nonprofit, observed the effects of the video sharing site’s recommendation algorithms on a spread of accounts identified as those of boys aged nine and 14. Continue reading...

You can now hand your phone to your partner without any danger of them reading your chats. But what’s the big secret?Name: Chat Lock.Age: The Chat Lock feature on WhatsApp is new. Cheating, by contrast, has been going on since Venus was carrying on with Mars behind Vulcan’s back, and probably long before that. Continue reading...

Technology be to deployed in city centre to identify wanted individuals, leading to concerns over normalisation of surveillancePolice will use live facial recognition technology in Cardiff during the Beyoncé concert on Wednesday, despite concerns about racial bias and human rights.The technology will be used in Cardiff city centre, but not at the stadium, to “support” the artist’s concert at the Principality stadium by identifying wanted individuals and ensuring safeguarding, South Wales police said, as the artist kicks off the UK leg of her first solo headline tour in seven years. Continue reading...

Twitter owner and Tesla chief defends tweet about George Soros after being accused of antisemitismElon Musk has said he will continue sending controversial tweets even it loses him money, as he defended himself against accusations of antisemitism over tweets about George Soros.The Twitter owner and Tesla chief executive said he is “allowed to say what I want to”, as he defended a tweet posted on Tuesday saying the billionaire financier “reminds me of Magneto” – the Jewish villain in the X-Men series. Continue reading...

Derided at first, in the 20 years since its launch this cartoonish high-seas adventure has claimed its rightful place as one of the best Zelda gamesWhen people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: “What, the one with all the sailing?” To many, that’s all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a “swift sail”, allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. For shame. The seafaring was the point.It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it’s time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong. The game’s expansive ocean was not only soundtracked stunningly, but filled with endless side quests and mini-games, emphasising exploration in a way not seen again in a Zelda game until 2017’s Breath of the Wild. As an 11-year-old girl clicking the little gold disc into place inside her (sister’s) first GameCube, I realised just how engrossing video game worlds can be. Continue reading...

Thin and light performance machine continues to set standard for fixable, upgradeable laptopsThe fixable and upgradeable premium Framework Laptop 13 has been improved all round for 2023 and is packed with small changes that are backwards compatible with older models, making a great laptop even better.The original Framework broke new ground last year as a laptop designed to be taken apart and upgraded, and with a modular selection of ports, too. Crucially, the company followed through on promises to provide parts and upgrades for existing machines – first with 12th-gen Intel chips and now new 13th-gen Intel processors, with AMD Ryzen 7040 series chip options coming later this year. Continue reading...

Holmes, who was charged with defrauding investors in her blood-testing start-up, hoped to stay out of jail while she appealed her convictionTheranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must begin serving her prison sentence while she appeals against her conviction on charges of defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing startup and must jointly pay $452m in restitution to the victims of her crimes, a court in San Francisco has ruled.Holmes, who rose to fame after claiming Theranos’ small machines could run an array of diagnostic tests with just a few drops of blood, was convicted at trial in San Jose, California, in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison. Continue reading...

Report says people betting on prices of such assets ‘should be aware that all their money could be lost’UK authorities should regulate cryptocurrency trading as a form of gambling rather than a financial service, parliament’s Treasury committee has said after a fresh inquiry into the industry.The government must avoid wasting more taxpayer funds promoting tech innovations such as digital tokens, without demonstrating the clear benefits to the public, MPs said in a report published on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Justice department announces charges involving company’s self-driving car technologyThe US has charged a former Apple engineer accused of stealing the company’s technology on autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China.The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced charges in that case and several others involving the alleged theft of trade secrets and efforts to steal technology to benefit China, Russia and Iran. Continue reading...

Sam Altman says before Senate judiciary committee that he supports guardrails for technology to minimize harmsThe CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said “regulation of AI is essential” as he testified in his first appearance in front of the US Congress.Speaking to the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms. Continue reading...

Government’s intentions revealed in document produced for surveillance camera commissionerMinisters are calling for facial recognition technology to be “embedded” in everyday policing, including potentially linking it to the body-worn cameras officers use as they patrol streets.Until now, police use of live facial recognition in England and Wales has been limited to special operations such as football matches or the coronation. Continue reading...

The spinoff app is trying to do what Mastodon couldn’t and take a piece of Elon Musk’s pie. Plus: the race to save 1bn NSFW images on Imgur

A collaboration between famed designer Yugo Nakamura and gaming auteur Tetsuya Mizuguchi has yielded one of the strangest, most compelling puzzle games of recent yearsHumanity was inspired by a throng of bodies. Specifically, the mass of people queueing for Comiket, the longstanding comic and pop culture convention in Tokyo. As its director Yugo Nakamura explains over a video call from the city, he was intrigued by the “orderly manner” in which these people were milling about. “We have our soul and mind,” he says, “but it was almost like they were moving without thinking.” The challenge the designer set himself and his colleagues at the award-winning Japanese studio tha ltd. was to simulate this gently surging crowd, the ebb and flow of the collective.The resulting puzzle game does something unusual for the genre. Yes, it stretches your grey matter in ways that will make you feel like an idiot and then a genius, but its hundreds, sometimes thousands of people moving in unison are capable of stirring up surprising emotions: delight, awe, even fear. The setup is simple: direct an endlessly spawning mass of people towards the light in a series of self-contained levels. The execution is anything but: a luminous shiba inu dog is the pack’s leader, scampering about brutalist architecture suspended high in the clouds. You are given the ability to manipulate the group in different ways with commands such as turn, jump, and branch, which siphons the roving mob into two. When it goes right, Humanity is the stuff of dreams; one wrong instruction, however, and the game turns into a Freudian nightmare, its mass of figures tumbling into an infinite abyss. Continue reading...

Some in the book industry have already begun exploring automation of its pitches to readers. We took this functionality for a test drive“Blurb writing is a mini art form,” Iris Murdoch once wrote in a letter to former Penguin blurb writer Elizabeth Buchan. And like many other art forms, companies have been experimenting with the idea that it could be created without an artist.A German company that provides digital book distribution and marketing services to publishers has announced it will integrate ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions by drawing on publicly available internet data, into its software.Middlemarch is the ultimate “Real Housewives” of 19th century England. Follow the lives of wealthy aristocrats as they navigate love, lust, and gossip in a society that’s more cutthroat than the latest reality TV show. With scandalous affairs, juicy secrets, and plenty of backstabbing, this book has more drama than a season of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” So grab your popcorn and get ready for a wild ride!Yo, have you checked out Beowulf? This dude’s a total savage, taking down monsters left and right like it’s NBD [no big deal]. His skills are on point and he’s got a fearless attitude that’s straight-up inspiring. Plus, his adventures are full of epic battles and drama that’ll have you shook. And you know what’s even better? Beowulf’s got plenty of admirers, so the romance is totally on point too. Trust me, this story is the lit AF, and you won’t wanna miss it.The ultimate guide to life, love, and eternal salvation! With enough drama and plot twists to rival Game of Thrones, it’s sure to keep you entertained for thousands of years to come. Laugh, cry, and gasp in awe at the epic stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, and Jesus and his miracles. Don’t miss out on this divine masterpiece!OH MY GOSH, have you read Ulysses yet?! It’s the most mind-blowing, soul-stirring, literary masterpiece I’ve ever laid my eyes on! James Joyce is an absolute genius and this book will take you on a journey that will leave you breathless! Trust me, you don’t wanna miss out! #Ulysses #JamesJoyce #MindBlowing #LiteraryGenius #LifeChangingOh, wondrous and magnificent Beloved, whose words doth pierce through the heart like a thousand arrows of truth, leaving one awestruck and enraptured in its devastatingly beautiful tale of love, loss, and redemption.If you’re looking for a book that will make you ugly-cry in public, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover is your golden ticket – just make sure to pack plenty of tissues and a disguise.Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude is like investing in a cultural masterpiece that will appreciate in value with every page turned. Continue reading...

US Virgin Islands is suing the bank over sex trafficking by Epstein, saying he ‘may have referred or attempted to refer’ Musk as a clientThe US Virgin islands subpoenaed billionaire the cars-to-rockets entrepreneur Elon Musk on Monday to obtain documents in its litigation into the role played by JPMorgan Chase bank in the activity of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when he was a customer, according to a court filing.The Virgin Islands government is suing the bank over sex trafficking by Epstein. The Virgin Islands has been trying to serve Musk with a subpoena, the filing noted, adding that Epstein “may have referred or attempted to refer” Musk to JPMorgan as a client. Continue reading...

Staff at the car-making company told to ‘think carefully’ about anything being proposed days after new Twitter CEO announcedDays after announcing a new CEO at Twitter, Elon Musk has turned his eye to Tesla, ordering managers to clear all hires at the electric car maker through him.Musk communicated the decision in a memo to Tesla staff on Monday, according to documents obtained by The Information. Continue reading...

But UK regulator the CMA, which blocked the deal, hits back over European decision on acquisition of Call of Duty makerThe EU has approved Microsoft’s $69bn (£55bn) acquisition of the Call of Duty creator Activision Blizzard, in a move that drew immediate pushback from its UK counterpart, which has already blocked the gaming mega-deal.The EU accepted Microsoft’s concessions on cloud gaming, the same problem that led the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block the transaction last month. Continue reading...