Technology | The Guardian

In the top company in the world's most explosive industry, the boss was fired and rehired - and no one has said why OpenAI was working on model so powerful it alarmed staff'The OpenAI farce has moved at such speed in the past week that it is easy to forget that nobody has yet said in clear terms why Sam Altman - the returning chief executive and all-round genius, according to his vocal fanclub - was fired in the first place. Since we are constantly told, not least by Altman himself, that the worst outcome from the adoption of artificial general intelligence could be lights out for all of us", somebody needs to find a voice here.If the old board judged, for example, that Altman was unfit for the job because he was taking OpenAI down a reckless path, lights-wise, there would plainly be an obligation to speak up. Or, if the fear is unfounded, the architects of the failed boardroom coup could do everybody a favour and say so. Saying nothing useful, especially when your previous stance has been that transparency and safety go hand in hand, is indefensible. Continue reading...

The surprise sacking of the AI venture's CEO was followed by a near mutiny at the company and his reinstatementOpenAI's messy firing and rehiring of its powerful chief executive this week shocked the tech world. But the power struggle has implications beyond the company's boardroom, AI experts said. It throws into relief the greenness of the AI industry and the strong desire in Silicon Valley to be first, and raises urgent questions about the safety of the technology.The AI that we're looking at now is immature. There are no standards, no professional body, no certifications. Everybody figures out how to do it, figures out their own internal norms," said Rayid Ghani, a professor of machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. The AI that gets built relies on a handful of people who built it, and the impact of these handfuls of people is disproportionate." Continue reading...

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Weeks after the Bankman-Fried trial, the billionaire founder of the largest cryptocurrency exchange has been fined $50m and resigned Crypto giant Binance admits to money launderingChangpeng Zhao, founder of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, warned last year that it was difficult to prevent illegal activity in the industry that he dominated. [If] somebody wants to violate the law, the law is not going to prevent that. The law can help to reduce that," the company's then chief executive said.But the authorities can catch up with you, as the 46-year-old found out this week. Zhao quit as Binance's chief executive on Tuesday after pleading guilty to breaking US anti-money-laundering legislation. He will pay a $50m fine and faces a possible prison term, while Binance has agreed to pay a $4.3bn settlement. Continue reading...

Hidden Pikmin, secret Mario logos and mad merch ... the world of Mario has been brilliantly reconstructed in real life, letting me live out a fantasy decades in the making Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI've always written about the intersection of games and real life - that's where the interesting stories are often found - but rarely do I get the opportunity to do so quite so literally as I have this week. Yesterday I visited the Universal Studios theme park in Osaka, where the world of Mario has been reconstructed in the real world. You walk through a green warp pipe and, when you come out the other side, through Princess Peach's castle, you emerge into a primary-coloured, crowded Mario-scape, all green grass, yellow blocks and brown brick, with critters moving back and forth across banks of question-mark blocks and the yawning maw of Bowser's Castle across the way.My jaw dropped. I've been dying to see this Nintendo theme park since it opened, but I wasn't prepared for how impactful it would be to walk into a physical manifestation of my eight-year-old self's dreams. Super Mario World is constructed in such a way that you can't see the outside world when you're in there, helping you to disappear into the fantasy. Continue reading...

Ruling clears way for lawsuit brought against company over fatal crash in 2019 in which Stephen Banner was killed near MiamiA judge has found reasonable evidence" that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company's self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida.Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he had found evidence that Tesla engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous" and that Musk's public statements about the technology had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products". Continue reading...

TikTokers are sharing strangers' conversations, hoping to expose gossipers to the very people they're talking about. Is the humiliation worth it?Marissa Meizz was out to dinner with a friend when her phone started vibrating. It was an unusually frenzied buzz, unresponsive to the silence button - a flood of texts from friends, acquaintances and even an offline" aunt all linking to a TikTok video titled Send this to Marissa in NYC".She froze. Then she started watching. Continue reading...

A female student bravely investigates who is behind deepfake images of her online in this compelling documentaryGermaine Greer famously said that women have no idea how much men hate them. Her maxim has a new relevance in the light of this terrifying (and enraging) documentary about the explosion of deepfake porn targeting women: famous women, of course, like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who dare to get above themselves, but also private women who are just trying to live their lives and have been hit with this revenge-hate tactic from fantasists, ex-boyfriends, would-be boyfriends, a range of misogynists and incels.Deepfake porn is booming and making serious money for the porn sites who refuse to take these images down and are under no legal compunction to do so. Last year, the YouTuber who goes by the name Gibi ASMR spoke publicly about experiencing a loathsome attack. Another Body's heroine is, however, someone else: a woman studying engineering who first alerted Gibi ASMR to her situation because it had also been done to her by the very same man, her face attached with startling realism to porn images, and using her actual name. She herself appears to have been told about it by a male friend, who presumably had to ride out his own embarrassment at thereby admitting to his porn use. To protect her privacy, Another Body gives this woman the pseudonym Taylor Klein" and actually uses a deepfake image of someone else's face in the interviews (I had assumed the film-makers would use an AI face, but an actual actor is credited). Continue reading...

Optimists and doomers' are fighting over the direction of AI research - and those who want speed may have won this roundIn November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a consumer-facing artificial intelligence tool that could hold a conversation with users, answer questions, and generate anything from poems to computer code to health advice. The initial technology was not perfect - it would sometimes hallucinate", producing convincing but inaccurate information - but its potential generated enormous attention.A year later, ChatGPT's popularity has continued, with 100 million people using it on a weekly basis, and over 92% of Fortune 500 companies and several competitor firms looking to cash in or improve on the technology. But that's not why ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI, was in the news this week. Instead, OpenAI was the center of a fierce philosophical debate about what it means to develop artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.Sarah Kreps is a professor of government at Cornell University and the director of the Tech Policy InstituteThis article was amended on 22 November 2023 to reflect changing developments Continue reading...

New board announces agreement in principle' for return of former CEO after campaign by staff and investorsSam Altman is to return as chief executive of OpenAI after the ChatGPT developer said it had reached an agreement in principle" for his reinstatement.The San Francisco-based company made the announcement after days of internal turmoil after Altman's surprise sacking on Friday. Nearly all of OpenAI's 750-strong workforce had threatened to resign unless the board overseeing the business brought him back and then quit immediately afterwards. Continue reading...

Satya Nadella reveals Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest investor, was not consulted about Sam Altman's dismissal as fallout continuesThe boss of Microsoft has said there is no OpenAI" without his company's involvement, as he revealed the American tech behemoth was not consulted about the sacking of Sam Altman.Satya Nadella said Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest investor, was not contacted by OpenAI board members before they sacked Altman as chief executive on Friday. Continue reading...

While the great and the good worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence, my friends are embracing it to pad out their emails and cut corners in the kitchenIt's been a drama-filled week for OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Its wunderkind CEO Sam Altman has been unceremoniously booted out by its board and more than 600 staff members are now threatening to quit unless he's allowed back in. (Don't be too sad for Altman - the 38-year-old has already been snapped up by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum.)As a writer, I am of course duty-bound to swear on my copy of McNae's Essential Law for Journalists that I did not use OpenAI's chatbot to write this column - or did I? Even if I did, why would I fess up to it? Thanks to disastrously unpopular attempts by the likes of BuzzFeed to create AI-assisted content, its name is mud in the media industry. Saying you use ChatGPT is like admitting you thought the T-1000 was just misunderstood or that Skynet had a point. Continue reading...

Online electrical goods seller still able to report pre-tax profits of 13m in the half year as cost-cutting measures bear fruitAO World has said consumers are holding off on updating their mobile phones amid the cost of living crisis, a lack of technological innovation and the higher cost of network contracts.UK consumers bought 13% fewer handsets with contracts in the last six months, forcing AO's mobile phone business into a loss. Analysts at stockbroker Jefferies said they estimated that the worse than expected mobile phone sales would hit the online electrical goods sellers' annual profits by about 4m. Continue reading...

Experts say figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson bringing great replacement' theory mainstream signals growing extremismThe racist and antisemitic great replacement" theory is encroaching out of the far right and more visibly into mainstream US politics in the wake of its platforming by major figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, in a move experts believe shows the growing extremeness of rightwing politics in the US.High-profile users of Twitter/X including rightwing personality Carlson and the platform's proprietor Musk, are helping to mainstream extremist narratives that are increasingly prevalent on the site, experts and advocates say. Continue reading...

As violence on the ground continues, emotions on social media are higher than ever - with critics asking if platforms need more transparency around their algorithms Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereAs the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas and its devastating effects play out in real time on social media, users are continuing to criticise tech firms for what they say is unfair content censorship - pulling into sharp focus longstanding concerns about the opaque algorithms that shape our online worlds.From the early days of the conflict, social media users have expressed outrage at allegedly uneven censorship of pro-Palestinian content on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Meta has denied intentionally suppressing the content, saying that with more posts going up about the conflict, content that doesn't violate our policies may be removed in error". Continue reading...

How the Streets of Rage and Etrian Odyssey composer was inspired by disco, city pop, and slyly recording music from arcade cabinetsFrom the urban warzones of Shinobi and Streets of Rage to the high fantasy realms of Ys and Etrian Odyssey, Japanese composer Yuzo Koshiro has seen (and heard) it all. His engineering wizardry helped establish video game music as a force to be reckoned with, alongside its cinematic and televisual siblings. His foresight allowed him to retain the rights to his own music, in an industry that's often keen on prising the art from the artist. In so many ways, and across so many disciplines, Koshiro has always been ahead of his time.And it all began with him secretly recording the music from his favourite games in arcades. When I was a teenager, spending time at amusement arcades, game developers would only release a few video game titles in a year," he explains. However, each game had its own distinct electronic sound that set them apart, creating an immersive atmosphere in the arcade halls." Koshiro - and many other Japanese game music enthusiasts of the era, he says - would go to a game centre with a tape recorder in hand, so he could thumb the cassette into a player at home and listen to the music whenever he wanted. Continue reading...

Companies such as IBM and Comcast pulled ads from the firm after the non-profits's report said ads appeared next to harmful contentThe social media platform X on Monday sued the media watchdog group Media Matters, alleging the organization defamed the platform after it published a report that said ads for major brands had appeared next to posts touting Nazism.X, formerly Twitter, has faced growing outrage since Media Matters published the report on Thursday, which led IBM, Comcast and several other advertisers to pull ads from the platform in response. Continue reading...

More than 600 employees demand resignation of board after shock firing of chief executive

OpenAI has been at the centre of a Silicon Valley corporate drama since the recent sacking of CEO Sam Altman

Thinktank study highlights productivity gains, as well as improvement in work-life balance for 28% of the workforce in Britain and the US, as a result of implementing artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence could enable millions of workers to move to a four-day week by 2033, according to a new study focusing on British and American workforces.The report from the thinktank Autonomy found that projected productivity gains from the introduction of AI could reduce the working week from 40 to 32 hours for 28% of the workforce - 8.8 million people in Britain and 35 million in the US - while maintaining pay and performance. Continue reading...

From Gen Z to boomers, each generation engages in some truly reprehensible smartphone behaviour. Don't get me started on voice notes...When Debrett's issued their ten commandments of mobile etiquette, the most surprising thing was that the first six were all a variation on don't just call someone, send a text first". So, in no particular order of importance because they are all the same; don't call without texting; don't call loads of times; don't be surprised if no one answers when you call, which you shouldn't have done; if you did all these bad things and no one picked up, send a text afterwards to explain why you are stupid; if someone does pick up, don't be surprised if they freak the hell out, because you shouldn't have called; make sure your opening gambit is nothing bad has happened".It reads like padding, which is weird, because there are at least a thousand other principles of mobile phone manners they could have mentioned. Please, gen X, stop leaving voice notes; it doesn't make you seem modern, it comes off as if some infirmity has prevented your texting, probably arthritic thumbs. Young people: Watch how I can text a perfectly accurate message without once looking at the screen" is not the spectator sport you think it is. Boomers: if you are in the middle of a conversation about something quite profound, such as the choreography of your low-carbon funeral, and whether a mariachi band would strike a discordant note against your wicker coffin, and the guy from the delicatessen calls, probably to tell you that he has made mini-lasagnes, you don't necessarily have to beg silence from the room and answer the phone. Continue reading...

Readers find themes that align with their values as they seek to grow empathy' for a religion long vilified in the westMegan B Rice loves reading. She started a romance novel club on the instant messaging platform Discord and posts book reviews on TikTok. Last month Rice, who is 34 and lives in Chicago, used her social media accounts to speak out about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.I wanted to talk about the faith of Palestinian people, how it's so strong, and they still find room to make it a priority to thank God, even when they have everything taken away from them," she said in an interview. Continue reading...

Not content with a billion fans, The Pokemon Company's COO Takato Utsunomiya talks about his plan to catch the rest of humanity - and for the far-reaching franchise to outlive us allWhen Satoshi Tajiri was a child, he developed a fascination with insects. Growing up in the greater Tokyo suburb of Machida, he'd spend summer days peeling back plants and scouring the undergrowth for creepy crawlies, carefully adding each new insect to his collection. This eyebrow-raising hobby earned him the playground nickname Mr Bug" from his teasing classmates, but Tajiri had the last laugh. After all, it was this formative obsession that inspired his crowning achievement - Pokemon.Thirty-three years later, that first duo of ambitious Game Boy games has blossomed into the world's highest-grossing media franchise, beating behemoths such as Star Wars and Marvel. Tajiri took a step back from his cutesy creation in 2012, and his developer Game Freak is now part of a larger Pokemon Company - whose COO, Takato Utsunomiya, now sits in front of me in Yokohama. Continue reading...

Full-size portable speaker gets stereo and bass upgrade, plus better wifi, Bluetooth and touch controlsSonos's top-class battery-powered wifi and Bluetooth speaker has been given an all-round upgrade with double the battery life, impressive stereo sound and new touch controls.The Move 2 is certainly not your average portable speaker. It costs 449 (499/$449/A$799) and aims to be the only sound system you need for indoor and outdoor use, weighing 3kg and sized about the same as a traditional bookshelf speaker.Dimensions: 241 x 160 x 127mmWeigh: 3kgConnectivity: wifi 6, Bluetooth 5, USB-C, AirPlay 2, Spotify ConnectBattery: 44Wh (24 hours playback), 120 hours standby, three hours to chargeCharging: Included dock or USB-C 45WWater resistance: IP56 (dust and high-pressure water jets) Continue reading...

The first in a series exploring the myths and realities surrounding EVsWhen a fire ripped through a car park at Luton airport last month it set off a round of speculation that an electric vehicle was to blame. The theory was quickly doused by the Bedfordshire fire service, which said the blaze appeared to have started in a diesel car.Yet the rumour refused to be quelled, spreading on social media like, well, wildfire. Even when these stories are patiently debunked, they come back as zombie myths that refuse to die. Continue reading...

Boss was sacked by ChatGPT developer over failure to be candid in his communications'

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers' questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsFor which tasks is artificial intelligence least well suited? Neil Hislop, ReadingPost your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday. Continue reading...

Braille is nearly two centuries old, but, rather than being supplanted by new technology, advocates say the script is having a new lease on life

Rising GMB membership, cross-border action and a probable new government point to better times for thousands of workersTen months after their first historic walkout, GMB members at Amazon's huge Coventry warehouse are staging a 28th day of strike action this week, to coincide with Black Friday.The seeds of the dispute were sown in summer 2022, when some staff reacted furiously to being told their pay would rise by 50p an hour, taking the basic rate to 10.50. Continue reading...

It can retouch, replace and remodel all it wants - I much prefer the fun and mess of unvarnished childhood snapsI love taking photos of my children. Not because I'm obsessed with sharing them on social media or anything like that (equally, I'm not one of those parents who considers doing this some sort of dreadful ethical violation). These are images to be scrolled through with their mother after we've spent another too-long day wearily struggling to look after them; to be shared, every now and again, on WhatsApp groups of family or friends.This has especially been the case since last year, when I, normally a committed luddite, finally got a smartphone with a camera good enough to take something other than murky, pixelated blurs. Now I long to do justice to the look of wild triumph on my son's face as he poses with the lollipop he has won for being the last reception kid standing at musical chairs; to catch my toddler daughter having inadvertently struck a pose straight out of a Mini Boden catalogue. I grab my phone, find the right angle, get a few shots - all before she spots me taking pictures and inevitably staggers over, gurning cheeeeeessse". Continue reading...

The conflicts of interest built into OpenAI's corporate structure may be a bigger story than the loss of its leaderThe news on Friday that Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, had been abruptly sacked by the company's board came as a shock to the tech industry.Mr Altman's departure," said the ponderous announcement, follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." Continue reading...

When four gay men with an average age of 74 started appearing on TikTok, they became an instant hit. They talk about how, as their audience has grown, their outfits have shrunkNo written description quite captures the joy-inducing positivity of their online videos: bopping along to Taylor Swift in slinky striped swimwear; countless dance trends and TikTok challenges, completed in various seductive states of undress. Twirling and whirling in only feather boas and Speedos to Kylie. Clips neatly edited to cut from outfit to outfit, often climaxing in the skimpiest of one-piece swimwear. Over the last six years, the foursome have become certified social media superstars, but not like any other. We're The Old Gays," they say, collectively, a TikTok sensation with 11 million followers and counting. And if you're not on TikTok, honey, you're living in the past."Today, the four are sitting squarely together in front of a laptop camera: two on low chairs upfront, the others perched on stools right behind. We're here to discuss their new book: The Old Gays Guide to the Good Life. As always on occasions like this, they've coalesced at 80-year-old Robert's place: a house in Cathedral City, deep in the California desert. He's sitting back right, behind Mick, 67, a committed bodybuilder, and Robert's housemate for the past 10 years. Then there's Jessay, 70, whose home is directly across the street. He's a professional singer; the only Black member of the group. And I'm Bill, 79," comes the final introduction. I live a couple of miles down the road. Before the Old Gays, we'd all get together and have dinner parties, get stoned, celebrate the holidays. Now we see so much of each other at work we stay away in our spare time." He winks. More colleagues than friends." Continue reading...

Company behind Chat GPT said to be in turmoil as top staff join exodusSam Altman, the recently sacked boss of OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, was telling investors he planned to launch a new company before his shock departure, it was claimed.The former OpenAI president, Greg Brockman, is also expected to join Altman after he quit the artificial intelligence firm along with other key senior executives following Altman's abrupt departure. Continue reading...

The rise of intrusive software that lets employers monitor workers' every move is part of ruthless corporate mindset, but its origins go back to 1900s scientific management theoriesThere are," F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, no second acts in American lives." Except when there are. Exhibit A in this connection is Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), the founder of a religion originally called scientific management" and now colloquially known as Taylorism. Its founder believed that there was no such thing as skilled work, only work", and that all work could be analysed the same way. His idea, set out in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), was that every worker should be trained into new working habits until he continually and habitually works in accordance with scientific laws, which have been developed by some one else", such as managers or time-and-motion experts.The formula could be boiled down to this: stopwatch plus coercion minus trade unions, and in an age of mass production, it created the world memorably satirised by Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. The management guru Peter Drucker once wrote that Taylor should be ranked with Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as one of the makers of the modern world". Continue reading...

Six Group, which operates the Swiss and Spanish bourses, is a target for cyberwarfare and must be on guard, its boss saysSix Group counts its profit in millions, but the financial pipework it controls moves billions. Its operations, which include the Spanish and Swiss stock exchanges, count as critical national infrastructure and this gives it a close relationship with governments and regulators in Madrid and Zurich.Those relationships are critical in an age where digital warfare makes financial infrastructure a prime target for hackers linked to hostile states. Jos Dijsselhof, the Dutch chief executive of the Swiss-based stock exchange group, is open about the scale of the challenge. I employ a lot of hackers," he says, tapping the table sharply. Sometimes it takes one to know one." Continue reading...

Social media firm boss says he will sue media watchdog that said ads were being placed alongside antisemitic contentElon Musk has said he will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters and others, after major US companies paused their adverts on his social media site over concerns about antisemitism.The media watchdog Media Matters said earlier this week that it found corporate advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast's Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content, including that praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Continue reading...

The Japanese photographer finds beauty in an Osaka traffic jamOne evening after finishing work, I looked out of my hotel room window and saw a long traffic jam on the expressway below," says Koichi Miyase, a Japanese freelance photographer. I was struck by how the cars' lights flowed like a river through the city's buildings."Miyase often uses his smartphone to capture casual" scenes. I'm attracted to them because you can edit photos and post them all in one place on social media." Continue reading...

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, attempted to do damage control as Paramount and Warner Bros among others also pulled adsApple will pause all its advertising on X, formerly Twitter, two days after owner Elon Musk tweeted his enthusiastic agreement with an antisemitic post.A cascade of other major technology and media companies, from IBM to Disney, made similar announcements on Friday. Continue reading...

AI firm's board said Altman was not consistently candid in his communications with the board' and had lost its confidence

The X owner tweeted that a post about Jewish people hating white people was the actual truth', prompting backlashJoe Biden has excoriated Elon Musk's abhorrent" tweets two days after the X owner posted his full-throated agreement with an antisemitic post.A statement from the White House issued on Friday said: We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans." Continue reading...

In response to criticism that Azure AI Speech was simply a deepfakes creator', Microsoft said it had implemented safeguardsMicrosoft announced its latest contribution to the artificial intelligence race at its developer conference this week: software that can generate new avatars and voices or replicate the existing appearance and speech of a user - raising concerns that it could supercharge the creation of deepfakes, AI-made videos of events that didn't happen.Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023, Azure AI Speech is trained with human images and allows users to input a script that can then be read" aloud by a photorealistic avatar created with artificial intelligence. Users can either choose a preloaded Microsoft avatar or upload footage of a person whose voice and likeness they want to replicate. Microsoft said in a blog post published on Wednesday that the tool could be used to build conversational agents, virtual assistants, chatbots and more". Continue reading...

Center for Countering Digital Hate files motion to dismiss claim by X, formerly TwitterThe anti-hate speech group being sued by Elon Musk's X has accused the company of lodging a claim riddled with legal deficiencies" and trying to intimidate and censor it, amid growing pressure over the platform's pro-Nazi content and its owner's support for an antisemitic post.The Center for Countering Digital Hate has filed a motion to dismiss a civil lawsuit brought by X, formerly Twitter, which accused the non-profit organisation of a number of legal breaches. Continue reading...

My creation was well received - the BBC described it as netlicks'During the pandemic, Tokyo's bustling Meiji University campus stood still. My students were confined to their homes, appearing only as small figures on my screen during Zoom lectures on human-computer interaction. I spent the days in my lab, looking for ways to pass the time.On a particularly bland day in 2020, I was reminiscing about how, before the pandemic, Tokyo used to be packed with people who had flown across the world to enjoy the exciting food scene. But now restaurants were empty and people longed for foods they once relished. I missed drinking wine in a bar, watching others enjoying their evenings. I wondered how I could contribute during these trying times. That's when inspiration struck: why not create a device to bring the flavours of the world into people's homes? Continue reading...

The Bluey TV show has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon, not least because of its frank, empathic take on parenting. But how to replicate that in a children's video game?Following Peppa Pig's capable reign as the most bearable option for overwhelmed parents looking for respite from the gaudy assault that is preschooler TV, a family of Australian dogs has set a new standard for what kids' shows can offer grownups. That family are the Heelers, stars of the tremendously popular children's animated sitcom Bluey - at one point Australia's most watched television programme, and more popular than Succession in the US.

Owner of X responds to antisemitic tweet calling it the actual truth' and criticizes Anti-Defamation LeagueElon Musk tweeted his fervent agreement with an antisemitic statement on Wednesday night.A tweet posted by @breakingbaht on Wednesday night read: Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them." Continue reading...

After years of reluctance, company announces iPhones will support RCS messaging standardApple plans to adopt a messaging standard that will allow for a smoother texting experience between iPhones and Android devices, long a point of contention with rival Google.For years, Apple has refused to make its products play nice with devices not designed under its roof, a dynamic exemplified in the green background that is the hallmark of iPhone-to-Android chats. Continue reading...

Platform says content promoting letter - published on the Guardian's website two decades ago - clearly violates our rules'TikTok is proactively and aggressively" taking down videos boosting a letter written by Osama bin Laden laying out his justification for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the company said in a statement on Thursday.Videos referencing the 2002 letter, which was published on the Guardian's website two decades ago, had spread across multiple social networks earlier in the week, though how widely was unclear. Continue reading...

As US Senate began looking at the firm's failures to shield children, it called for laws requiring parental approval of app downloadsMeta called on US lawmakers on Wednesday to regulate Google and Apple's app stores to better protect children, the same day that the Senate began investigating Meta's failures to shield children using its platforms.In a blogpost titled Parenting in a Digital World Is Hard. Congress Can Make It Easier, Antigone Davis, Meta's global head of safety, called for federal legislation that would mandate app stores to notify parents whenever a child between the age of 13 and 16 downloads an app, and would solicit the parents' approval. Children under 13 are already prohibited from creating accounts and downloading apps without a parent's go-ahead. Continue reading...