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Updated 2024-05-18 08:35
How China is using AI news anchors to deliver its propaganda
News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessibleThe news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan's outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.Water spinach looks at water spinach. Turns out that water spinach isn't just a name," says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsai being Hollow Tsai" - a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach. Continue reading...
Binance executive denied bail in Nigeria over money laundering charges
Tigran Gambaryan faces allegations of serious criminality' on behalf of world's largest cryptocurrency exchangeA Nigerian court has ruled that Tigran Gambaryan, the Binance executive detained on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, can face trial on behalf of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.In a judgment in Abuja on Friday - Gambaryan's 40th birthday - the presiding judge, Emeka Nwite, denied the American national bail, saying he was likely to abscond. Continue reading...
Think before you click – and three other ways to reduce your digital carbon footprint | Koren Helbig
The invisible downside to our online lives is the data stored at giant energy-guzzling datacentresIt's been called the largest coal-powered machine on Earth" - and most of us use it countless times a day.The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud. Continue reading...
‘I’m the new Oppenheimer!’: my soul-destroying day at Palantir’s first-ever AI warfare conference
America's military-industrial complex took center stage at AI Expo for National Competitiveness, where a fire-breathing panel set the toneOn 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it.It was the inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness", hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project - better known as the techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. Continue reading...
UK engineering firm Arup falls victim to £20m deepfake scam
Hong Kong employee was duped into sending cash to criminals by AI-generated video call
Protesters vow to keep up pressure on Tesla as it expands German gigafactory
Town of Grunheide approved the US automaker's plan on Thursday to double the capacity of the site, despite oppositionEnvironmental protesters vowed to keep up the pressure on Tesla after failing to stop plans by Elon Musk's company from expanding its sprawling electric vehicle plant outside Berlin.The town council of Grunheide, guarded by police and plain-clothed security guards, gave the green light on Thursday to the US automaker after a heated, nearly three-hour debate disrupted by heckling and booing from the audience of about 200 people. Continue reading...
The artist behind the short-lived portal linking New York and Dublin: ‘People got carried away’
Benediktas Gylys admits he was surprised by the rowdy behavior that came from the exhibit connecting people in the two citiesThe artist behind the controversial Portal" art exhibit that visually linked New York and Dublin in real time, but was then closed due to rowdy and extreme behavior by the public using it, has admitted he was surprised by the reaction.Benediktas Gylys also vowed to continue with his project, which has the aim of connecting people and communities all over the world and is hoped to reopen soon. Continue reading...
Meta revokes job offer to sextortion expert after he publicly criticizes Instagram
Exclusive: Paul Raffile held webinar where he said app failed to protect children, and his offer was rescinded hours laterMeta revoked a job offer to a prominent cyber-intelligence analyst immediately after he criticized Instagram for failing to protect children online.Paul Raffile had been offered a job as a human exploitation investigator focusing on issues such as sextortion and human trafficking. He had participated in a 24 April webinar on safeguarding against financial sextortion schemes, during which he criticized Instagram for allowing children to fall prey to scammers and offered possible solutions. Continue reading...
EU investigates Facebook owner Meta over child safety and mental health concerns
Company's social media platforms, which also include Instagram, may have addictive effects, says European Commission Business live - latest updatesThe European Commission has opened an investigation into the owner of Facebook and Instagram over concerns that the platforms are creating addictive behaviour among children and damaging mental health.The EU executive said Meta may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law passed by the bloc last summer that makes digital companies large and small liable for disinformation, shopping scams, child abuse and other online harms. Continue reading...
What’s up with ChatGPT’s new sexy persona? | Arwa Mahdawi
OpenAI's updated chatbot GPT-4o is weirdly flirtatious, coquettish and sounds like Scarlett Johansson in Her. Why?Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Arthur C Clarke famously said. And this could certainly be said of the impressive OpenAI update to ChatGPT, called GPT-4o, which was released on Monday. With the slight caveat that it felt a lot like the magician was a horny 12-year-old boy who had just watched the Spike Jonze movie Her.If you aren't up to speed on GPT-4o (the o stands for omni") it's basically an all-singing, all-dancing, all-seeing version of the original chatbot. You can now interact with it the same way you'd interact with a human, rather than via text-based questions. It can give you advice, it can rate your jokes, it can describe your surroundings, it can banter with you. It sounds human. It feels like AI from the movies," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Monday. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change." Continue reading...
Best podcasts of the week: The stone cold truth about the scandal that rocked curling
How can one broom tear apart a Canadian curling community? John Cullen investigates in Broomgate. Plus: five of the best post-apocalyptic podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereBroomgate
YouTube blocks videos set to Hong Kong protest anthem
Court order compels Google subsidiary to block local access to 32 videos of Glory to Hong Kong, judged to be prohibited contentAlphabet's YouTube on Tuesday said it would comply with a court decision and block access inside Hong Kong to 32 video links deemed prohibited content, in what critics say is a blow to freedoms in the financial hub amid a security clampdown.The action follows a government application granted by Hong Kong's court of appeal requesting the ban of a protest anthem called Glory to Hong Kong. The judges warned that dissidents seeking to incite secession could weaponize the song for use against the state. Continue reading...
Wild Diamond review – French social-realist drama fuelled by TikTok energy
Cannes film festival
OpenAI co-founder who had key role in attempted firing of Sam Altman departs
Ilya Sutskever helped orchestrate dramatic firing and rehiring of ChatGPT maker's CEO last yearOpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the startup at the center of today's artificial intelligence boom.After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI," Sutskever said in a post on X. Continue reading...
Put it down! Should children be allowed smartphones? - podcast
Almost all children have them by the time they are 11 years old - and some get them at four. But are they ruining childhoods? Blake Montgomery reportsThis episode was first played on our global news podcast, Today in Focus.Conversations around if and when children should be given mobile phones have being going on for years. But recently the question has been catapulted to the forefront of national debate. Continue reading...
Apple store workers vote to authorize first strike over bargaining delays
Maryland employees at first US Apple store to unionize take historic step as progress for a first contract has stagnatedWorkers at the first Apple store in the US to have unionized, in Towson, Maryland, have voted to authorize a strike as progress in bargaining for a first contract has stagnated.They could be the first Apple retail store workers to ever go on strike. Continue reading...
Tech firm Raspberry Pi readies for London stock market float
Cambridge-based business could be valued at up to 500m and is boost for UK after some companies switched listings
iPad Pro M4 review: ludicrously good hardware that’s total overkill for most
Apple sets new standard in screen and power but Pro model verges away from consumer tablet needsApple's latest iPad Pro is thinner and lighter, and has a stupendous new OLED screen, plus oodles of power to do practically anything. But it is no longer just the super-premium iPad - it is also aiming to be an impressive tool for the creative industry.It still looks and acts like an iPad, ready to do regular iPad things such as browse the web, watch TV or chat to your family on the other side of the country. But to do only that with a machine this advanced is total overkill - Apple has many other iPad models suited to that sort of thing. Continue reading...
The China-linked EV battery mega factory dividing a US township
Michigan factory making battery components for electric cars may offer an economic lifeline, but for some residents there's a problem: the parent company is in ChinaSet among green rolling hills and tall pines, Lori Brock's storybook farm encapsulates northern Michigan. A five-day-old mare bucks around a pen, while small black pigs roam through a barn and donkeys graze in fields bordered by white fences.It is a bucolic way of life in Green Township, but one that Brock and many of her neighbours believe could be threatened by an unlikely adversary - China's Communist party. Continue reading...
Google rolls out AI-generated, summarized search results in US
Tech giant also reveals AI assistant in progress, currently called Project Astra, and AI video generator Veo at annual I/O conferenceGoogle will use artificial intelligence to return summarized responses to search engine queries from US users as it continues to infuse generative AI into its most widely used products.The company has been testing AI overviews" that appear at the tops of search results, summaries created by its Gemini AI model that appear alongside the traditional link-based search results. Continue reading...
OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model offers promise of improved smartphone assistants
System can operate directly in speech, speeding up responses and noticing voice quirks, but it still needs the power of SiriIn the year and a half since the launch of ChatGPT, one nagging question has only got more pressing: if AI can do this, why is my phone's assistant still so bad?On Monday, the gulf grew larger still, as OpenAI announced a new model called GPT-4o - the o' stands for Omni - which gives the chatbot new abilities to understand and create audio, video, and still images. Continue reading...
Law professor says Tesla threatened to fire law firm over Musk’s huge payout
Charles Elson accused EV company of strong-arming law firm where he consulted over his legal brief opposing Musk's payA leading professor of corporate governance has accused Tesla of threatening to fire one of its law firms over his objections to Elon Musk's claim to a massive $56bn compensation package.Retired professor Charles Elson of the University of Delaware alleged in a legal filing on Monday that Holland & Knight, a law firm that he has worked for over close to three decades, told him that Tesla threatened to end its relationship with the firm unless he dropped plans to submit a legal brief to a shareholder lawsuit opposing the controversial payout, the largest in US history. Continue reading...
Amazon Web Services chief to step down, veteran named successor
The head of Amazon's most profitable and fastest-growing division will leave the company on 3 June after three yearsThe chief of the wildly profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit will step down next month after a three-year term.Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of Amazon's team advising CEO , will leave the company on 3 June, according to an Amazon statement on Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, a senior vice-president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS. Continue reading...
‘I don’t see the point of me without the politics’: video game writer Meghna Jayanth on the benefits of staying indie
After a less happy time attached to triple-A games, Jayanth has settled on smaller, freer developers - and is using that freedom to speak up for causes bigger companies would rather ignoreCan a video game writer do her best work at the industry's biggest scale? Well: Meghna Jayanth is fine where she is. Last year, with Outerloop Games, she released Thirsty Suitors, a fluorescent fusion of messy flirting and sick skating; coming up next is All Rise, a climate action courtroom drama. These are indie games - Thirsty Suitors' hero is a queer Desi skater and the villain is her feelings; of course it is an indie game - and Jayanth, one of the star video game writers of her generation, is perfectly at home here, where a modest budget is the trade-off for making joyful games about colonialism, identity and sexuality, with people whose values align with hers.The money is smaller, and that hurts getting the work noticed. It was tough to come out when we did," Jayanth says of Thirsty Suitors. People were still playing Baldur's Gate III, because it's huge. The average gamer on Steam plays four games a year. That's the real problem for most indie studios: how do you reach people without millions and a marketing budget?" Continue reading...
TechScape: The new law that could protect UK children online – as long as it works
Thanks to a new act that could reshape the internet, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms will need to tame' harmful content and algorithms Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThe Online Safety Act in the UK is, quietly, one of the most important pieces of legislation to have come out of this government. Admittedly, the competition is slim. But as time goes by, and more and more of the act begins to take effect, we're starting to see how it will reshape the internet.From our story last week:Social media firms have been told to tame aggressive algorithms" that recommend harmful content to children, as part of Ofcom's new safety codes of practice.The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience.The Goldilocks theory of policy is simple enough. If Mummy Bear says your latest government bill is too hot, and Daddy Bear says your latest government bill is too cold, then you can tuck in knowing that the actual temperature is just right.Unfortunately, the Goldilocks theory sometimes fails. You learn that what you actually have in front of you is less a perfectly heated bowl of porridge and more a roast chicken you popped in the oven still frozen: frosty on the inside, burnt on the outside, and harmful to your health if you try to eat it.The code is weak on design features, however. While the research shows livestreaming and direct messaging are high risk, there are few mandatory mitigations included to tackle them. Similarly, the requirement for measures to have an existing evidence base fails to incentivise new approaches to safety ... How can you provide evidence that something does not work if you don't try it?As we celebrate the arrival of the draft code, we should already be demanding that the holes in it are fixed, the exceptions readdressed, the lobbyists contained.Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater computation that additional tokens allow. We show that transformers can use meaningless filler tokens (eg, ......') in place of a chain of thought to solve two hard algorithmic tasks they could not solve when responding without intermediate tokens. Continue reading...
Inside the rise and fall of Ashley Madison: ‘People literally lost their lives’
A new Netflix docuseries explores how the site that enabled married people to have affairs devolved into chaos back in 2015In theory, the internet promised, among other things, a solution to the age-old conundrum of finding a date. If you wanted romantic partnership, maybe you'd check out eHarmony. For fun and flings, try Tinder. If you wanted to narrow down the potential pool, there were Farmers Only and Christian Mingle, among other demographic-specific sites. And if you were married and wanted to have a clandestine affair, you could make an account on Ashley Madison.At least, that was the pitch. From its founding in 2002 until the summer of 2015, Ashley Madison, so-called for the two most popular girls names, billed itself as the premier destination for adulterers - no judgment, no risks, no strings attached other than the payments required to secure enough credits" to talk to other users. The Toronto-based company, founded by Darren Morgenstern based on a statistic that 30% of people on existing dating sites were already married, promised a certain fantasy, particularly aimed at men: a list of women ready and willing to have an affair; a secret good time outside the bounds of one's partnership; self-proclaimed extensive security measures to prevent torpedoing one's domestic life. The company's CEO, a Canadian businessman named Noel Biderman, appeared on news programs and daytime talkshows with his wife, touting the site as a way to resuscitate partnerships by covertly meeting one's extramarital needs while boasting of his own monogamous marriage. The site's tagline was simple and cheeky: Life is short. Have an affair." And it was popular - by 2015, the company had launched in 40 countries and claimed more than 37 million users. Continue reading...
New GPT-4o AI model is faster and free for all users, OpenAI announces
Tech company reveals new flagship model that is the future of interaction between ourselves and the machines'OpenAI announced on Monday that it was launching its new flagship artificial intelligence model, called GPT-4o, as well as updates that included a new desktop service and advances in its voice assistant capabilities.Chief technology officer, Mira Murati, appeared on stage to a cheering crowd in the OpenAI offices, touting the new model as a step forward in AI. The new model will bring the faster, more accurate GPT-4 AI model to free users, where it was previously reserved for paid customers. Continue reading...
‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services
Ownership rights are buried in the fine print and downloading or buying physical copies may be the only ways to keep your favourites
Spice up your spreadsheets! Should you run your relationship like a business?
Could office management software such as Slack and Notion optimise your relationship? A surprising number of people are trying it outName: Office romance.Age: Recently upgraded. Continue reading...
Hades II’s audacious, invigorating spin on Greek myth makes it worth playing right now
Developer Supergiant Games has released its hotly anticipated sequel to 2020's Hades in an early-access, unfinished state - but its powers are already godlikeTime comes for us all, and in Hades II, even the gods are not spared its wrath. This epic Greek-mythology-themed action game is the first sequel by arthouse studio Supergiant Games, meaning it has the tough task of surpassing a progenitor that won countless awards and widespread critical acclaim. Fortunately, time is on the side of the developers: while you can buy Hades II right now, it's under the guise of early access", meaning that there's still some placeholder content in here. Its creators are amassing feedback from players in the hope of eventually releasing a finished game that lives up to the impossible hype.Perhaps the closest parallel to what Hades represents within the world of video games is Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad, which came on the heels of her highly regarded interpretation of The Odyssey. Where Wilson's work helps recontextualise Greek myth for modern audiences, the Hades series has the audacious aim of expanding those myths. The first game starred Zagreus, son of Hades, a rarely cited figure from the pantheon who sought to escape the grasp of the underworld. Hades II takes a similar route, placing players in the shoes of Melinoe, a character so obscure that scholars muse that she may be a syncretisation of Persephone. Esoteric figures like these are fertile ground for Supergiant Games, which has set up a familial drama that's only possible when it involves a cadre of bickering gods. Continue reading...
Court ends injunction on X over videos of Sydney church stabbing
Federal court refuses to extend ban on 65 posts on Elon Musk's platform showing last months's attack on bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel
BT ramps up AI use to counter hacking threats to business customers
Firm has data from when criminals try to attack' and its Eagle-i technology suggests what action is neededBT has said it is increasingly using artificial intelligence to help it detect and neutralise threats from hackers targeting business customers amid repeated attacks on companies.The 10.5bn group is aiming to build up its business protecting customers from online criminals and has patented technology that uses AI to analyse attack data to allow companies to protect their tech infrastructure. Continue reading...
Put it down! Should children be allowed smartphones? - podcast
Almost all children have them by the time they are 11 years old - and some get them at four. But are they ruining childhoods? Blake Montgomery reportsConversations around if and when children should be given mobile phones have being going on for years. But recently the question has been catapulted to the forefront of national debate.From campaigning parents to bestselling books, a movement has emerged that believes smartphones are ruining childhoods and that young people should be banned from having them. It's not hard to come up with reasons why: they are addictive, keep children glued to screens instead of playing, can be used for online bullying and are one reason why so many children have seen pornography. Continue reading...
Internet use is associated with greater wellbeing, global study finds
Researcher cautions against one-size-fits-all solutions' amid growing debate over impact, particularly on young peopleSpending time online is often portrayed as something to avoid, but research suggests internet use is associated with greater wellbeing in people around the world.The potential impact on wellbeing of the internet, and social media in particular, has become a matter of intense debate. Our analysis is the first to test whether or not internet access, mobile internet access and regular use of the internet relates to wellbeing on a global level," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, who co-authored the work. Continue reading...
The rage epidemic: is our modern world fuelling aggression?
After the video of Peter Abbott screaming road-rage abuse through a car window went viral, we ask what's behind the fury so many feel - and expressLast week a video showing 60-year-old Peter Abbott screaming abuse at TV producer Samantha Isaacs gained a viral audience, after Abbott was found guilty at Poole magistrates court of using threatening words or behaviour to cause alarm, distress or fear of violence".In the phone-filmed video, Abbott is seen snarling and shouting as he presses his face up against Isaacs' car window. He looks as if he's channelling the Harry Enfield character Angry Frank, so cartoonishly aggressive are his contorted facial expressions and confrontational behaviour. Not only did he hammer on Isaacs' car but he also called her a slag" and a whore". Continue reading...
With its new iPad Pro ad, Apple is offering us the thin end of the wedge | Alex Clark
Maybe it's my age, but the company's brash new vision of digital minimalism looks like a portal to a sad and lonely worldIt was my birthday last week, and being these days a quiet rural dweller with a sweet pea obsession rather than the inner-city Dorothy Parker wannabe of yesteryear, I welcomed my appropriately gentle gifts: flowers, plants, an original exhibition catalogue from decades ago, some scent promising to recreate beach walks. I counted among my blessings a recent eye test that showed no further deterioration, an unbroken Duolingo streak (Irish), a roof repair that seems to be holding - what we might call the joy of things not getting worse, small triumphs that often feel disproportionately large and lucky.On the same day, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared to suggest that I have little need for all the funny little old-world analogue stuff that I hold dear. In an advertisement for the new iPad Pro - the chief attribute of which, according to same, is that it is extremely thin, indeed the thinnest it has ever been - viewers were treated to a hellish sight: a platform crammed with musical instruments, cameras, games, paints, a record player, an artist's mannikin, all reduced to splinters and dust beneath a giant industrial crusher. Get rid of all that crap, it seemed to say, for here is a gadget that renders the whole lot obsolete. Continue reading...
Making deepfake images is increasingly easy – controlling their use is proving all but impossible
New Australian laws will make it a crime to distribute non-consensual deepfake pornography - but there are deeper issues at play, experts sayVery creepy," was April's first thought when she saw her face on a generative AI website.April is one half of the Maddison twins. She and her sister Amelia make content for OnlyFans, Instagram and other platforms, but they also existed as a custom generative AI model - made without their consent. Continue reading...
ChatGPT and the like will co-pilot coders to new heights of creativity | John Naughton
Far from making programmers an endangered species, AI will release them from the grunt work that stifles innovationWhen digital computers were invented, the first task was to instruct them to do what we wanted. The problem was that the machines didn't understand English - they only knew ones and zeros. You could program them with long sequences of these two digits and if you got the sequence right then the machines would do what you wanted. But life's too short for composing infinite strings of ones and zeros, so we began designing programming languages that allowed us to express our wishes in a human-readable form that could then be translated (by a piece of software called a compiler") into terms that machines could understand and obey.Over the next 60 years or so, these programming languages - with names such as Fortran, Basic, Algol, COBOL, PL/1, LISP, C, C++, Python - proliferated like rabbits, so that there are now many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. At any rate, it takes quite a while to scroll down to the end of the Wikipedia page that lists them. Some are very specialised, others more general, and over the years programmers created libraries of snippets of code (called subroutines) for common tasks - searching and sorting, for example - that you could incorporate when writing a particular program. Continue reading...
‘A world first’: project recycles polyester into yarn for new clothes
A venture that uses methods applied to plastic bottles for old textiles aims to tackle the UK's mountain of unwanted garmentsFootball shirts, sports event banners and uniforms are piled up ready to be pumped into a machine which melts them down for recycling ready to be made into new clothes.In a world first in Kettering, Northamptonshire, Project Re:claim is taking technology used for recycling plastic bottles and adapting it to reprocess polyester textiles into granules that can be turned back into yarn for new clothes. Continue reading...
‘Rio is beautiful, democratic and welcoming. It has this spell’: Adriano Brodbeck’s best phone picture
The Sao Paulo-based photographer captures the end of a hot day on the beachAdriano Brodbeck describes his image asthe perfect portrait of Rio". The Sao Paulo-based photographer was on a trip with friends, and they had headed toIpanema beach.The neighbourhood was made famous by the Brazilian bossa nova song Garota de Ipanema, or The Girl from Ipanema. Despite the district being expensive and elitist, the beach is frequented by people of all classes from around the world: tourists and locals; rich people and humble people," Brodbeck says. It makes for acrowded beach, as can be seen in the picture." Continue reading...
She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all
The moral panic following Raffaella Spone's deepfake' video spread around the world. She talks for the first time about being the centre of a story in which nothing was as it seemed ...Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky - as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi's face - but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive all-star" squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi's coaches.Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes," district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader's reputation. Continue reading...
Germany: police clash with hundreds of climate protesters trying to storm Tesla plant – video
Protesters opposed to expansion of the US electric vehicle maker Tesla's plant in Grunheide near Berlin clashed with police as some of them attempted to storm the facility. More than 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organising group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment. Footage shows people wearing blue caps and masks coming from a nearby wooded area and attempting to storm the company's premises with police officers trying to prevent them
Eight hundred protesters attempt to storm German Tesla factory
Demonstrators opposed to expansion of factory near Berlin claim it would damage environmentHundreds of protesters opposed to the expansion of a Tesla plant in Grunheide, near Berlin, clashed with police on Friday as some of them attempted to storm the electric vehicle manufacturing facility.About 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organizing group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment. Tesla has attracted intense backlash since the company opened the factory in March 2022, and later announced plans to expand into a nearby forest to increase its production capability. Continue reading...
MoD contractor hacked by China failed to report breach for months
Exclusive: Defence ministry was told in recent days that staff details accessed but sources say SSCL knew in FebruaryThe IT company targeted in a Chinese hack that accessed the data of hundreds of thousands of Ministry of Defence staff failed to report the breach for months, the Guardian can reveal.The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, told MPs on Tuesday that Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL) had been breached by a malign actor and state involvement" could not be ruled out. Continue reading...
Is AI lying to me? Scientists warn of growing capacity for deception
Researchers find instances of systems double-crossing opponents, bluffing, pretending to be human and modifying behaviour in testsThey can outwit humans at board games, decode the structure of proteins and hold a passable conversation, but as AI systems have grown in sophistication so has their capacity for deception, scientists warn.The analysis, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, identifies wide-ranging instances of AI systems double-crossing opponents, bluffing and pretending to be human. One system even altered its behaviour during mock safety tests, raising the prospect of auditors being lured into a false sense of security. Continue reading...
UK public warned after huge rise in fires caused by binned batteries
Fire chief says incorrect disposal of devices powered by lithium-ion batteries are disaster waiting to happen'Fires caused by batteries in waste have gone up by 71% in the UK since 2022, as the rise of disposable vapes and other portable battery-powered devices leads to more lithium-ion batteries ending up in the bin.An increase in the number of these devices being thrown in household rubbish bins has led to more than 1,200 fires in the waste system in the past 12 months, compared with 700 in 2022, according to research conducted by the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) and the campaign group Recycle Your Electricals. Continue reading...
The 15 (ish) greatest UK video game magazines of all time
Part newspapers, part fanzines, these titles were a lifeline to information-starved gamers and generated a sense of community to rival any YouTube streamerIn the 21st century, video game news is available in endless streams, 24 hours a day. But if you grew up in the 1980s and 90s, you went to magazines for your gaming news, reviews and gossip. For 30 years, the UK games mag industry was a thriving sector, providing players, not only with information about games on every format, but also a sense of community. They were part newspapers, part fanzines and their writers were the YouTube streamers of their day.I've been lucky enough to write for dozens of them, but before that I was an avid reader, spending all my money on these glossy celebrations of game culture. Here are, arguably, the 15 (ish) best ... Continue reading...
CEO of world’s biggest ad firm targeted by deepfake scam
Exclusive: fraudsters impersonated WPP's CEO using a fake WhatsApp account, a voice clone and YouTube footage used in a virtual meetThe head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an artificial intelligence voice clone. The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives.Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian. During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an agency leader", asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. Continue reading...
Apple apologises for iPad ad criticised as ‘destruction of the human experience’
Advert featuring huge hydraulic press crushing cultural objects struck wrong note with manyApple has apologised after an online backlash to an advert for its new iPad that features an industrial-sized hydraulic press crushing a collection of creative objects including musical instruments and books.The ad, launched by Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, on Tuesday, shows the machine squashing various items - ranging from a piano and a metronome to tins of paint and an arcade game - before a single iPad Pro then appears in their place. A voiceover then states: The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest." Continue reading...
OpenAI considers allowing users to create AI-generated pornography
Critics say ChatGPT creator's proposal to allow erotica, slurs and other adult content undermines its mission statementOpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create artificial intelligence-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products.While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce safe and beneficial" AI. Continue reading...
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