by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6M07M)
Repairable electronics pioneer shows noise-cancelling Bluetooth earbuds do not have to be disposableFairphone, the repairable and ethical electronics pioneer, is back with a pair of some of the first Bluetooth earbuds to make it so easy and cheap to replace their batteries that you can do it at home in minutes.Bluetooth earbuds have become a ubiquitous part of life, driven by the success of Apple's AirPods. Until now they have all compromised on sustainability by being very difficult to repair, in effect making them disposable. Continue reading...
AI to be used by researchers to scour documents for information on women omitted from chronicles written by men about menFour centuries ago Dublin had an official city scavenger" who was tasked with running sanitation teams to clear streets of human and animal waste. In return, the scavenger earned tolls from shopkeepers and traders.It could have worked well, except the contractor decided to cut costs and maximise profits by deploying just two carts rather than six. Dung piled up and the city stank. Continue reading...
Regulating new technology is never simple, but the status quo offers inadequate protectionThe principle that some products are available to adults and not children is uncontroversial. Access to weapons, alcohol and pornography is curtailed in this way because a level of maturity is the precondition for access (but not a guarantee of responsible use).Until recently, few people put smartphones in that category. The idea of an age restriction on sales would be dismissed as luddism or state-control freakery. But ministers are reported to be considering just such a ban for under-16s. Opinion polls suggest that it could be popular with parents. Government guidance already calls for a de facto ban on mobile phone use in schools in England and Wales. Many headteachers had already imposed rules to that effect. If there is not yet a consensus that young people's use of smartphones needs stricter regulation, that is the trajectory. Continue reading...
With its giant inflatable Pikachu, fairground games and friendly vibe, this just might be my favourite esports event around, and it's touching to see kids living out their trainer dreams Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI spent much of my weekend at the ExCeL convention centre in London, where about 10,000 people from across Europe were gathered for the European Pokemon championships. There were 4,500 competitors, playing the perennially popular trading card game, Pokemon Go, the arena battle game Pokemon Unite and, of course, the video games (currently Scarlet and Violet).The Pokemon championships aren't like many of the other esports events I've been to over the years. The prizes are only a few thousand dollars and a lot of the 340 Pokemon professors (who act as judges and facilitators) attended on their own dime. The crowd is also significantly younger, as you might expect. Among the competitors were plenty of kids and teenagers, and there were even more among the spectators. Continue reading...
Launches within 12 hours of one another, and more activity expected in industry over summerOpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of one another, as the industry prepares for a burst of activity over the summer.The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI's hit chatbot Chat-GPT. Continue reading...
Polls show significant support for curb to protect children but some Tories uneasy with idea of government microparenting'Ministers are considering banning the sale of smartphones to children under the age of 16 after a number of polls have shown significant public support for such a curb.The government issued guidance on the use of mobile phones in English schools two months ago, but other curbs are said to have been considered to better protect children after a number of campaigns. Continue reading...
Adam Schiff introduces bill amid growing legal battle over whether major AI companies have made illegal use of copyrighted worksA bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force artificial intelligence companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies. Continue reading...
Major elections around the world so far this year have not suffered from systematic malicious interference, says global affairs chiefGenerative AI is overblown as an election risk, according to Meta's Nick Clegg, who claims the technology is more useful for defending democracy than attacking it.Speaking at the Meta AI Day event in London on Tuesday, the social network's global affairs chief said that the evidence from major elections that have already been run this year around the world is that technology such as large language models, image and video generators, and speech synthesis tools aren't being used in practice to subvert democracy. Continue reading...
His claims come with a caveat that shortages of training chips and growing demand for power could limit plans in the near termSuperhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, Elon Musk has said, unless the sector's power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.The prediction is a sharp tightening of an earlier claim from the multibillionaire, that superintelligent AI would exist by 2029. Whereas superhuman" is generally defined as being smarter than any individual human at any specific task, superintelligent is often defined instead as being smarter than every human's combined ability at any task. Continue reading...
From hyperrealistic deepfakes to videos that not only hijack our attention but also our emotions, tech seems increasingly full of cognitohazards' Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereLet's talk about sci-fi.Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term metaverse", and was one of Mark Zuckerberg's pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson's fictional world in reality.Seeing a watermark doesn't necessarily have the effect one would want, says Henry Parker, head of government affairs at factchecking group Logically. The company uses both manual and automatic methods to vet content, Parker says, but labelling can only go so far. If you tell somebody they're looking at a deepfake before they even watch it, the social psychology of watching that video is so powerful that they will still reference it as if it was fact. So the only thing you can do is ask how can we reduce the amount of time this content is in circulation?" Continue reading...
Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people's slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots - even where strong regional English dialects existThere's a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media following and showcasing their patch of land to the world. 950 [pounds] for that, you know my ting," a teenage white boy says about his Canada Goose jacket in a video recorded in Bury St Edmunds. We're checking his drip, ya dun know, you heard my man," someone says in another video.Both the hosts and many of the interviewees speak with this distinct drawl - Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect born in London's African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. (Some, like researcher Ife Thompson, argue that Black British English" is a more fitting term.) It's rooted in Jamaican patois with influences from cockney, and more recently Arabic, the US and West African Pidgin English. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6KYC7)
Quality earbuds with improved Bluetooth, great battery life, good controls and future-proofed techSennheiser's latest high-end earbuds aim to retake the crown as the best-sounding noise-cancelling earbuds you can buy, with cutting-edge chips, tricks and future-proofed tech.The Momentum True Wireless 4 earbuds cost 259.90 (299.90/$299.95), pitting them directly against the best from Bose and Sony.Water resistance: IP54 (splash)Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4, SBC, AAC, aptX adaptive, LC3Battery life: Seven hours; up to 28 hours with caseEarbud weight: 6.2g eachDriver size: 7mmCharging case weight: 66.4gCase charging: USB-C, Qi wireless charging Continue reading...
Walter Huang was killed when his car steered in to a highway barrier and Tesla will avoid questions into its technology in a trialTesla has settled a lawsuit over a car crash which killed an Apple engineer in 2018 after his car veered off a highway near San Francisco, court documents showed on Monday.The settlement was made as the trial was about to start over the high-profile accident involving Tesla's driver assistant technology, ending a five-year legal battle over the case. Continue reading...
This week, Somerset House houses a selection of avant garde games on the theme of liminalityFor a week or so every year, Somerset House in London becomes home to a mini-festival of experimental video games: last year's were all on the theme of love. Now Play This has been running for 10 years, and this year's theme - liminality - is especially well-suited to the medium. Video games are in-between spaces: they are fictional worlds in which real-world relationships are made; they are an art form that exists across and between technology and culture. You could make a case for the inclusion of plenty of games in this selection, and the ones that are here explore the theme from some unexpected angles. There are games here about transition, expansion, life and death, borders, and skateboarding through cyberspace.The variety of interactive experiences here is, as ever, huge, showing the full range of what games and digital art can be. There are relatively conventional pieces of interactive entertainment here - such as Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus, in which you walk through a procedurally generated dreamscape - and Sad Owl Studios's Viewfinder, a superb game about perception and photography. And then there's Labyrinth, a lattice of interconnected ropes that light up bright LED cubes when they touch, and a playable suitcase (Pamela Cuadros's Moving Memories). In one room a film about journeying to the broken, glitchy edgelands of the game Cyberpunk 2077 plays opposite a game (Crashboard) where you wear 3D glasses, stand on a skateboard and tilt your way through an obstacle course of pixellated imagery from the early days of the internet. Continue reading...
Trend seeks to dispel myths of a perfect life with experts saying it can help users feel less alone in difficult momentsWhether it's a recipe for last night's dinner, pictures of a recent trip to a gallery or a track-by-track review of Beyonce's new album, the routine of chronicling our daily lives and thoughts on social media is now so commonplace that it's no longer clear what actually counts as oversharing.But an emerging trend in which users are encouraged to post their most soul baring, often uncomfortable truths is taking online candour to a whole new level.In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org. Continue reading...
Multibillionaire called for resignation of judge who ordered platform to block far-right usersElon Musk faces a legal investigation in Brazil after becoming embroiled in a public row with a supreme court judge over an order requiring the social network X to take down some far-right accounts.Justice Alexandre de Moraes had issued a court order forcing the site formerly known as Twitter to block several users as part of his investigation into the former president Jair Bolsonaro's attempts to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat. Continue reading...
What began as a primitive tool has spawned hyperrealistic fakes with the potential to disrupt elections around the worldConcern about doctored or manipulative media is always high around election cycles, but 2024 will be different for two reasons: deepfakes made by artificial intelligence (AI) and the sheer number of polls.The term deepfake refers to a hoax that uses AI to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people, with the effect often compounded by a voice component. Combined with the fact that around half the world's population is holding important elections this year - including India, the US, the EU and, most probably, the UK - and there is potential for the technology to be highly disruptive. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6KXG1)
Faster chip, tremendous battery life, premium touch points and a price cut make the best even betterApple's latest MacBook Air adds more power to an already potent package while maintaining its very long battery life and coming at a lower price than its predecessor.The 2024 model ships with Apple's latest M3 chip, first seen in the MacBook Pro, giving the company's thinnest and lightest machine a boost in performance. On the outside the laptop is identical to the 2022 model. Continue reading...
Tell-tale signs of generative AI images are disappearing as the technology improves, and experts are scrambling for new methods to counter disinformationWith more than 4,000 shares, 20,000 comments, and 100,000 reactions on Facebook, the photo of the elderly woman, sitting behind her homemade 122nd birthday cake, has unquestionably gone viral. I started decorating cakes from five years old," the caption reads, and I can't wait to grow my baking journey."The picture is also unquestionably fake. If the curious candles - one seems to float in the air, attached to nothing - or the weird amorphous blobs on the cake in the foreground didn't give it away, then the fact the celebrant would be the oldest person in the world by almost five years should. Continue reading...
Pierre Huyghe's uncanny machine-human hybrids in Venice are the latest attempt to find deeper meaning in a technology that leaves many creatives playing catch-upTwo people dressed in black are kneeling on the floor, so still that they must surely be in pain. If they are grimacing, there would be no way to know - their features are obscured by oversized, smooth gold masks, as though they have buried their faces in half an Easter egg.Their stillness makes them seem like sculptures, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm they are indeed human. Which is fitting, really - because they aren't actually human, at least not totally. They're human-machine hybrids, Idioms", created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his largest ever exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. Continue reading...
by Blake Montgomery and Nick Robins-Early and agencie on (#6KWE0)
A jury found that Do Kwon and Terraform Labs misled investors before the collapse of the company's namesake cryptocurrencyA jury in Manhattan found a Singapore-based former crypto CEO liable on civil fraud charges on Friday, agreeing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that both he and his firm misled investors before the 2022 collapse of the company's namesake cryptocurrency wrecked cryptocurrency markets.The jury delivered the verdict in federal court after a two-week trial after hearing closing arguments earlier in the day. The Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon did not attend the trial, as he has been detained in Montenegro since March 2023. He was intercepted while on his way to Dubai on the lam from authorities in multiple countries, traveling using forged Costa Rican travel documents. Continue reading...
In discovering malicious code that endangered global networks in open-source software, Andres Freund exposed our reliance on insecure, volunteer-maintained techOn Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.Freund's digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a supply-chain attack" (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020) - where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it. Continue reading...
A massive cliff and a fearless friend helped the photographer capture an unforgettable imageEskil is a tough guy," Atle Ronningen says of the friend he was hiking Pulpit Rock with. It's a massive cliff over 600 metres high, in Preikestolen, Norway. It's so popular and busy in the summer months, so we went in the spring as soon as the snow had gone. It was still icy in some places, and the weather changed abruptly all day," he says.It was fortunate Eskil had no fear of heights, Ronningen adds, because as he approached the ledge, the rain had turned to snow and the wind had picked up. Even so, the guys kept their goal in mind. We wanted to show how capable mobile phone photography is," Ronningen explains. This was 2014, so Instagram was very new and few people knew how to take good pictures using their phone. We wanted to show what could be done." Continue reading...
Parent company Meta also to add high-risk' label to Al-altered content that deceives the public on a matter of importance'Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced major changes to its policies on digitally created and altered media on Friday, before elections poised to test its ability to police deceptive content generated by artificial intelligence technologies.The social media giant will start applying Made with AI" labels in May to AI-generated videos, images and audio posted on Facebook and Instagram, expanding a policy that previously addressed only a narrow slice of doctored videos, the vice-president of content policy, Monika Bickert, said in a blogpost. Continue reading...
Tech company cuts employees from eight offices in Santa Clara in its first big wave of post-pandemic job cutsApple is laying off more than 600 workers in California, marking the company's first big wave of post-pandemic job cuts amid a broader wave of tech industry consolidation.The iPhone maker notified 614 workers in multiple offices on 28 March that they were losing their jobs, with the layoffs becoming effective on 27 May, according to reports to regional authorities. Continue reading...
Beijing did a test run in Taiwan using AI-generated content to influence voters away from a pro-sovereignty candidateChina will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned.The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company's threat intelligence team published on Friday. Continue reading...
The surveillance specialist was invited to dine with the home secretary after the company he ran gave the party thousandsRevealed: Tories planned to make millions from members' data with True Blue' appChristen Ager-Hanssen was in Mallorca conducting an espionage operation when the email from Conservative party headquarters arrived.Thank you for indicating you would like to attend our private dinner with Suella Braverman," a party official wrote to the Norwegian businessman last September. It promises to be a great evening." Continue reading...
Researchers have created fibre-based electronics that use the human body to power T-shirts that display changing messagesWhether it is a T-shirt that can display changing messages or a carpet that can sense where you are standing, the future of smart textiles has often seemed rooted in science fiction.Now researchers say they have created smart fibres that can do exactly those things - and they do not even require a battery pack. Continue reading...
Elon Musk's firm reverses policy of insisting on payment for verified status' - embarrassing some beneficiariesElon Musk has reversed one of his most notorious decisions since taking over X, the social network better known as Twitter, and started bestowing blue ticks on the site's most-followed users - whether they want them or not.The entrepreneur and one-time Chief Twit" had tweeted last week that the service would grant free premium" status to any user with more than 2,500 verified subscriber follows" and accounts with more than 5,000 would get premium+". That policy is now being enacted. Continue reading...
Cost of artificial intelligence service could mean leaders in sector turning to subscription modelsGoogle is reportedly drawing up plans to charge for AI-enhanced search features, in what would be the biggest shake-up to the company's revenue model in its history.The radical shift is a natural consequence of the vast expense required to provide the service, experts say, and would leave every leading player in the sector offering some variety of subscription model to cover its costs. Continue reading...
by Hollie Richardson, Alexi Duggins and Hannah Verdie on (#6KTZT)
The Welsh singer and actor explores family, love and working-class life through her Cardiff upbringing. Plus: five of the most controversial podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereKicking Back With the Cardiffians
The same year, 2022, company replaced plastic sleeves in EU with paper and cardboard, and cut plastic packaging globally by 11.6%The amount of plastic packaging waste created by Amazon has increased in the US even as the online retail giant sought to phase out plastics elsewhere in the world, a report claims, amid growing pressure for a global treaty to end plastic pollution.Amazon created 208m pounds (94m kg) of plastic packaging in the US in 2022, equal to the weight of nearly 14,000 large African elephants, which is a 9.8% increase in the amount of packaging it produced in 2021, according to Oceana, a US marine conservation group that used industry data and Amazon's market announcements to form its analysis. Continue reading...
by Amy Hawkins Senior China correspondent on (#6KTTG)
Growing interest in services that create digital clones of the dead as millions visit graves this week for tomb-sweeping festivalAs millions of people across China travel to the graves of their ancestors to pay their respects for the annual tomb-sweeping festival - a traditional day to honour and maintain the graves of the dead - a new way of remembering, and reviving, their beloved relatives is being born.For as little as 20 yuan (2.20), Chinese netizens can create a moving digital avatar of their loved one, according to some services advertised online. So this year, to mark tomb-sweeping festival on Thursday, innovative mourners are turning to artificial intelligence to commune with the departed. Continue reading...
Federal report says cascade of errors' by tech giant let Chinese operators break into senior government officials' email accountsIn a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency, a Biden administration-appointed review board issued a report on Tuesday saying a cascade of errors" by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior US officials including the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo.The Cyber Safety Review Board, created in 2021 by executive order, describes shoddy cybersecurity practices, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company's knowledge of the targeted breach, which affected multiple US agencies that deal with China. Continue reading...
Suit claimed Dudesy podcast violated Carlin's copyright, calling it a casual theft of a great American artist's work'The estate of comedian George Carlin settled a lawsuit on Tuesday against the owners of a comedy podcast who claimed they used artificial intelligence to mimic the deceased stand-up's voice. The lawsuit was one of the first in the US to focus on the legality of deepfakes imitating a celebrity's likeness.The Dudesy podcast and its creators - the former Mad TV comedian Will Sasso and the writer Chad Kultgen - agreed to remove all versions of the podcast from the internet and permanently refrain from using Carlin's voice, likeness or image in any content. Danielle Del, a spokesperson for Sasso, declined to comment. Continue reading...
by Eleni Courea Political correspondent on (#6KTFA)
A minister, political advisers and journalists were among those who received potentially compromising messages over six-month periodMore than a dozen politicians, advisers and journalists have been targeted in a phishing attack, in what cybersecurity experts believe is an attempt to compromise them.Twelve men working in Westminster, including a serving government minister, told Politico they had received unsolicited WhatsApp messages from two suspicious mobile numbers in the past six months. Continue reading...
Investor points finger at CEO's antics on X, but analysts say train wreck' quarter more down to problems in China and with EV demandFor one Tesla investor, the cause of Tuesday's underwhelming sales figures was clear: the chief executive.Basically, Tesla can't sell its cars due to Elon's behaviour," wrote Ross Gerber, the chief executive of the investment management firm Gerber Kawasaki. Let's stop blaming the Houthi rebels or German environmental terrorists. Or a recession that never came. Or interest rates. Only one person responsible for this." Continue reading...
In this week's newsletter: Fastest-selling, highest gross revenue ... the biggest gaming companies have long employed untrustworthy metrics to hype up their products, and it's the consumer who always suffers Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThe outgoing boss of Sony's games division, Jim Ryan, who joined the company a few months before the launch of the original PlayStation, was interviewed by the official PlayStation podcast last week to mark his retirement. He talked up the PlayStation 5 as potentially Sony's most successful ever console across multiple vectors" - interestingly, he did not specify what those vectors actually were. Time spent playing? Individual player spend? Sales? It would have to go some to beat the PlayStation 2's total of 160m - so far it's sold about 55m.As for that PlayStation 2 total: that's actually the first time we've heard it, in this podcast, in 2024, despite the fact that the PS2 was discontinued in 2013. The last official number we had for the PS2 was more than 155m" as of March 2012, a number that's still quoted on Sony's own website. Ryan claims that 160m was celebrated as an internal sales milestone, but Sony never actually announced it. Industry analyst Daniel Ahmad did some back-of-an-envelope maths that substantiates the total, but it begs the question: why did Sony never actually tell anyone how many PS2s it sold? Continue reading...
Paper by Anthropic outlines how LLMs can be forced to generate responses to potentially harmful requestsThe safety features on some of the most powerful AI tools that stop them being used for cybercrime or terrorism can be bypassed simply by flooding them with examples of wrongdoing, research has shown.In a paper from the AI lab Anthropic, which produces the large language model (LLM) behind the ChatGPT rival Claude, researchers described an attack they called many-shot jailbreaking". The attack was as simple as it was effective. Continue reading...
Letter signed by more than 200 artists makes broad ask that tech firms pledge to not develop AI tools to replace human creativesA group of more than 200 high-profile musicians have signed an open letter calling for protections against the predatory use of artificial intelligence that mimics human artists' likenesses, voices and sound. The signatories span musical genres and eras, ranging from A-list stars such as Billie Eilish, J Balvin and Nicki Minaj to Rock and Roll Hall of Famers like Stevie Wonder and REM. The estates of Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley are also signatories.The letter, which was issued by the Artist Rights Alliance advocacy group, makes the broad demand that technology companies pledge not to develop AI tools that undermine or replace human songwriters and artists. Continue reading...
Drop is sign that effects of its price cuts are waning while electric automaker's shares have fallen nearly 30% so far this yearTesla posted a fall in deliveries for the first time in nearly four years and missed Wall Street estimates, a sign that the effects of its price cuts are waning as the automaker battles rising competition and softer demand.Tesla's shares have fallen nearly 30% in value so far this year, sliding 5.7% in early trading on Tuesday. Continue reading...
Countries sign memorandum to develop advanced AI model testing amid growing safety concernsThe United States and Britain on Monday announced a new partnership on the science of artificial intelligence safety, amid growing concerns about upcoming next-generation versions.The US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, and British technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, signed a memorandum of understanding in Washington DC to work jointly to develop advanced AI model testing, following commitments announced at an AI safety summit in Bletchley Park in November. Continue reading...
Retro video games and aesthetics are having a moment, but it's not just gen X and older millennials reliving their heyday: younger millennials and gen Z are getting in on the nostalgia tooThe bouncy, midi melody of Nintendo's Wii theme descends into a drill beat. A Game Boy Colour opens up into a lip gloss case. A$AP Rocky goes full Minecraft" in a pixelated hoodie, and a panting man bobs up and down with his arm stuck in a bush. This is not a glitch. Both online and IRL, pop culture is embracing the sounds, visuals and experience of retro gaming.On TikTok, #retrogaming videos have amassed over 6bn views. On YouTube, uploads have increased 1,000-fold. Spotify users are creating 50% more retro-gaming-themed playlists than they were at this time last year, and live streamers are cashing in on the repetitive catchphrases and mechanical movements of NPCs (non-player characters). So why, in this age of hyperrealistic graphics and ever-expanding technological possibility, are younger generations captivated by an era of technological limitation? Continue reading...
Tech firms can do more, but it's the government's job to ensure children have safe places to play - and it's not doing itThree-quarters of children want to spend more time in nature. Having spent the Easter weekend trying to force four resistant teenagers off their phones and out for a nice walk over the Yorkshire Dales, admittedly I'll have to take the National Trust's word for this. But that's what its survey of children aged between seven and 14 finds, anyway.Kids don't necessarily want to spend every waking minute hunched over a screen, however strongly they give that impression; even though retreating online satisfies the developmentally important desire to escape their annoying parents, even teenagers still want to run wild in the real world occasionally. Their relationship with phones is complex and maddening, but not a million miles off adults' own love-hate relationship with social media; a greasy sugar-rush we crave but rarely feel better for indulging. Yet lately, longstanding parental unease over children's screen habits has been hardening into something more like revolt.Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
Suit claimed tech giant tracked activity of people who thought they were privately using its Chrome browser's incognito modeGoogle agreed to destroy billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately in its Chrome browser's incognito mode.Users alleged that Google's analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google's Chrome browser to incognito" mode and other browsers to private" browsing mode. Continue reading...
App-based cognitive tests found to be proficient at detecting frontotemporal dementia in those most at riskA smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics. Continue reading...
The royals are perennial clickbait, but the wild online bunkum over the Princess of Wales reveals new and darker forcesOn TikTok, there is a short clip of what an AI voiceover claims is a supposed ring glitch" in the video in which Princess of Wales reveals her cancer diagnosis. It has 1.3 million views. Others, in which users break down" aspects of the video and analyse the saga with spurious evidence, also rack up millions of views and shares. I have then seen them surface on X, formerly known as Twitter, and even shared on WhatsApp by friends and family, who see in these videos, presented as factual and delivered in reporter-style, nothing that indicates that this is wild internet bunkum.Something has changed about the way social media content is presented to us. It is both a huge and subtle shift. Until recently, types of content were segregated by platform. Instagram was for pictures and short reels, TikTok for longer videos, X for short written posts. Now Instagram reels post TikTok videos, which post Instagram reels, and all are posted on X. Often it feels like a closed loop, with the algorithm taking you further and further away from discretion and choice in who you follow. All social media apps now have the equivalent of a For you" page, a feed of content from people you don't follow, and which, if you don't consciously adjust your settings, the homepage defaults to. The result is that increasingly, you have less control over what you see. Continue reading...
Lena Forsen picture used as reference photo since 1970s now breaches code of ethics, professional association saysCropped from the shoulders up, the Playboy centrefold of Swedish model Lena Forsen looking back at the photographer is an unlikely candidate for one of the most reproduced images ever.Shortly after it was printed in the November 1972 issue of the magazine, the photograph was digitised by Alexander Sawchuk, an assistant professor at the University of California, using a scanner designed for press agencies. Sawchuk and his engineering colleagues needed new images to test their processing algorithms. Bored with TV test images, they turned to the centrefold, defending its choice by noting that it featured a face and a mixture of light and dark colours. Fortunately, the limits of the scanner meant that only the top five inches were scanned, with just Forsen's bare shoulder hinting at the nature of the original picture. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian