Technology | The Guardian

• Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine war• Private Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfare• Tools support hacking operations and attacks on infrastructure• Documents linked to notorious Russian hacking group Sandworm• Russian program aims to control internet and spread disinformationThe inconspicuous office is in Moscow’s north-eastern suburbs. A sign reads: “Business centre”. Nearby are modern residential blocks and a rambling old cemetery, home to ivy-covered war memorials. The area is where Peter the Great once trained his mighty army.Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations. Its weapons are more advanced than those of Peter the Great’s era: not pikes and halberds, but hacking and disinformation tools. Continue reading...

Poor spelling and grammar that can help identify fraudulent attacks being rectified by artificial intelligenceChatbots are taking away a key line of defence against fraudulent phishing emails by removing glaring grammatical and spelling errors, according to experts.The warning comes as policing organisation Europol issues an international advisory about the potential criminal use of ChatGPT and other “large language models”. Continue reading...

More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts urge delay until world can be confident ‘effects will be positive and risks manageable’More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers have joined a call for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AIs for at least six months, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated.The demand is made in an open letter signed by major AI players including: Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, the research lab responsible for ChatGPT and GPT-4; Emad Mostaque, who founded London-based Stability AI; and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. Continue reading...

Elon Musk says he ‘forgot to mention’ other users would be visible on ‘for you’ timeline as wellTwitter has reversed course on plans to limit presence on its “for you” timeline to paying users only, with Elon Musk claiming he “forgot to mention” that other users would be visible as well.When the company’s owner first announced the plan on Tuesday he said it would limit the tab that algorithmically curates tweets for users to only display accounts who had paid £8 a month for “Twitter Blue” and linked their account to a working phone number. Continue reading...

FTX fortune cookies and Theranos gift cards offer souvenirs from recent business disastersYou’ve just been laid off from your job at a once mighty startup that was going to change the world. The New York Times has exposed your CEO’s fraudulent business model. Investors have freaked. The stock market is hemorrhaging. Your office keycard doesn’t work. What you do next is very important: go raid the merch closet.By now, we’ve all seen enough rise-and-fall documentaries to know how this sort of thing plays out. First come layoffs, then lawsuits, and perhaps a prison sentence for bosses like Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes or Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. One thing we hear less about: the killer resale market that comes with an era-defining financial disaster. Continue reading...

From 15 April, ‘For you’ tab that curates popular posts will feature just Twitter Blue subscribersTwitter’s feed will promote only the tweets of users paying its £8 monthly subscription service, Elon Musk, the site’s owner and chief executive, has tweeted.From 15 April, the “For you” tab on the site, which attempts to algorithmically curate popular posts for users, will feature only “verified accounts”, Musk tweeted, describing the decision as “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over”. Continue reading...

Labour criticises Rishi Sunak ‘vanity project’ announced weeks before collapse in value of cryptocurrenciesThe UK government has dropped its plans to produce a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, just under a year after it first announced the project.In response to a question from the Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, the Treasury’s economic secretary, Andrew Griffith, confirmed the abandonment, saying: “In consultation with HM Treasury, the Royal Mint is not proceeding with the launch of a non-fungible token at this time but will keep this proposal under review.” Continue reading...

France has banned not only TikTok from government phones, but Facebook and Twitter, too. Could this be a tipping point for big tech? Plus, AI-generated pictures of the pope signal a new type of viral image

Compact wifi hifi with big sound supports hundreds of music services, multiple voice assistants and looks the partThe Era 100 is the first of a brand new line of wifi speakers from multi-room audio specialists Sonos, taking what was good about its popular longstanding One series and adding more bass and stereo sound.The new compact smart speaker costs £249 ($249/A$399), making it the mid-range option in the company’s speaker line after the firm’s collaboration with Ikea starting at £99.Dimensions: 18.3 x 12 x 13.1cmWeigh: 2kgSpeakers: two tweeters, one midwooferConnectivity: wifi 6, Bluetooth 5, USB-C, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect Continue reading...

Photos, emails, playlists: our phones and computers have become hosts for our pasts. What happens when the backups fail?No matter how much our computers assure us they’re backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole – from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs. Continue reading...

Head of Norwegian manufacturer Nammo says plans to increase production at its largest factory are affected by demands of nearby data centre

Lawmakers, unconvinced after five hours of testimony from company chief Shou Zi Chew, are set on restricting the platformLawmakers have said they’re moving forward with plans for a national ban on TikTok, as users including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take to the app to protest.The snowballing effort to take action against TikTok comes after company chief Shou Zi Chew appeared before a US House committee for five hours on Thursday, where lawmakers from both parties grilled him about national security and other concerns involving the app. Continue reading...

Complaint alleges firm grew US business despite stated intent to block US customers from platformBinance and its chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, are being sued in the US by commodity market regulators in a complaint that claims the defendants committed “wilful evasion of US law”.The move is the most significant US enforcement action yet against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Continue reading...

PC, smartphones (via Netflix); Free Lives/ Devolver Digital

Elon Musk-owned platform demands that GitHub identifies who posted parts of its codeTwitter has revealed some of its source code has been released online and the social media platform owned by Elon Musk is taking legal action to identify the leaker.According to a court filing made on Friday, Twitter is demanding that GitHub, a code-sharing service, identifies who released on the platform parts of its source code – the underlying software on which the service operates. Continue reading...

Bluetooth buds have standout design, noise cancelling and work with Android and iPhoneThe Ear 2 are the latest competitively priced earbuds from the London-based tech firm Nothing, which hopes to tempt buyers away from the Apples and Samsungs of this world with novel see-through designs and good sound.The noise-cancelling earbuds cost £129 ($149), undercutting rivals from OnePlus, Google, Samsung and Apple, while offering similar features and sound quality. They replace the outgoing Ear 1 from 2021, joining the novel £99 Ear Stick earbuds. Continue reading...

Calculation based on leaked offer to staff that implies firm valued at $20bn compared with $44bn he bought it forTwitter is worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it six months ago having lost more than $20bn (£16.4bn) in value, according to calculations based on a leaked memo from the billionaire.Musk suggested in memo to the social media company’s staff that it is now valued at less than $20bn. This compares with the $44bn he paid for it in October 2022. Continue reading...

A third of Australian companies rely on artificial intelligence to help them hire the right person. But studies show it’s not always a benign intermediary

The Maps payments app run by British-educated cryptocurrency tycoon Alex Grebnev, who was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, has lost its Mastercard partnership amid a row over Russian usersAs western brands began the stampede out of Russia a year ago, its citizens found themselves unable to pay for the international goods and services with which they had become so familiar.Among the first firms to sever ties were the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, leaving Russians struggling to spend their cash on services from Netflix to Amazon. Continue reading...

The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societalMeredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias (2020), which explores how algorithms encode and propagate discrimination. Her new book is More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech. Broussard is an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.The message that bias can be embedded in our technological systems isn’t really new. Why do we need this book?

Artificial intelligence’s ChatGPT is becoming more sophisticated and polished than ever. In seconds, it will knock out essays, lyrics, poems, almost anything… But could it beat Jay Rayner at his own game?One afternoon an email arrives that threatens to end my career. Or at the very least, it makes me think seriously about what the end of my career might look like. It comes from a woman in Ely called Camden Woollven who has an interest in my restaurant reviews, a taste for the absurd and perhaps just a little too much time on her hands. Woollven works in the tech sector and has long been fascinated by OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, with investment from among others Elon Musk, to develop user-friendly applications involving artificial intelligence.In November last year, after $10bn worth of investment from Microsoft, OpenAI released ChatGPT3, a tool which has been trained on a vast array of data and allows us to commission articles and have human-like text conversations with a chatbot. It’s currently free to use and therefore clocked up 1m users in the first week. Within two months it had 100m users, making it the fastest growing web application in internet history. People all over the world were prompting ChatGPT – the initials stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer – to write essays for them, or computer code, or even compose lyrics in the style of their favourite songwriter. If it involved words, they were getting ChatGPT to do it. And then gasping at the speed and fluency of what came back, while quoting lines from the Terminator movies about the apocalyptic rise of the machines. Continue reading...

Shou Zi Chew, who joined ByteDance, the parent company in 2021, won’t let his children use the app

Move follows UK government’s decision to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app

The godfather of virtual reality has worked beside the web’s visionaries and power-brokers – but likes nothing more than to show the flaws of technology. He discusses how we can make AI work for us, how the internet takes away choice – and why he would ban TikTokJaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality and the sage of all things web, is nicknamed the Dismal Optimist. And there has never been a time we’ve needed his dismal optimism more. It’s hard to read an article or listen to a podcast these days without doomsayers telling us we’ve pushed our luck with artificial intelligence, our hubris is coming back to haunt us and robots are taking over the world. There are stories of chatbots becoming best friends, declaring their love, trying to disrupt stable marriages, and threatening chaos on a global scale.Is AI really capable of outsmarting us and taking over the world? “OK! Well, your question makes no sense,” Lanier says in his gentle sing-song voice. “You’ve just used the set of terms that to me are fictions. I’m sorry to respond that way, but it’s ridiculous … it’s unreal.” This is the stuff of sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and Terminator, he says. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Journalist Terri White investigates the case of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and other vulnerable children missing school since the pandemic. Plus: five of the best one-host podcasts

With the rise of AI-led services to write, voice and provide effects, industry experts express concern over the futureWhat will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. When the Guardian asked it about AI’s potential impact on the film industry, it made the following points:Scriptwriting: AI can be used to analyze existing screenplays and create new ones, potentially leading to more efficient and cost-effective screenwriting.Pre-production: AI can be used to streamline the pre-production process, including casting, location scouting and storyboarding.Special effects: AI can be used to create more realistic and immersive special effects, potentially reducing the need for practical effects and saving time and money in post-production.Audience analysis: AI can be used to analyze audience data and preferences, helping studios make more informed decisions about which films to greenlight and how to market them.Distribution: AI can be used to personalize movie recommendations for viewers and optimize distribution strategies, potentially leading to higher ticket sales and revenue. Continue reading...

The email auto-reply isn’t the first time the CEO has embraced the symbol as he works to own the libsHow would Twitter describe its own relationship with the media?With a poop emoji. Continue reading...

Jake Paul and Ne-Yo among stars accused in case as most agree to pay settlement without admission or denialThe Securities and Exchange Commission has filed charges against a handful of celebrities including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Ne-Yo for violating laws in touting cryptocurrencies.On Wednesday, the SEC filed the charges against the celebrities as part of its broader charges filed against the crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and three of his companies: Tron Foundation Ltd, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd, and Rainberry Inc (formerly BitTorrent) for the unregistered offer and sale of the crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT). Continue reading...

It may be connected to the internet, but this AI tool seems trained to give the least insightful answersIn June 2022, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended from his job after he spoke out about his belief that the company’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient.“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” Lemoine said in a parting email to colleagues. Now, six months on, the chatbot that he risked his career to free has been released to the public in the form of Bard, Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Continue reading...

Online retailer has increased minimum hourly pay for warehouse workers by 50p an hour to £11Amazon workers in the UK are planning further strike action as they dismissed as “an insult” a 50p an hour increase to its minimum hourly pay for warehouse workers to £11.The company said the pay rise announced on Wednesday, which will be implemented this weekend, meant minimum pay had risen by 10% in the past seven months, putting it ahead of the legal minimum wage for those aged 23 or over, which will be £10.42 an hour from April. Continue reading...

The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been a career-making event for decades. But with costs to visit rising and the ability to meet online growing, does it need to change?

Organizers say an increased unionizing drive has been met with threats and retaliation – and now the Senate wants answersLast year, public support for labor unions hit a high unseen since 1965 amid high-profile union campaigns at major corporations including Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, REI and Trader Joe’s.This renewed interest has been accompanied by aggressive opposition from employers: threats, intimidation and what workers allege are retaliatory firings. The backlash seems to be working, but workers and their supporters are fighting back. Continue reading...

Following an increase in interest rates, new startups, old tech companies and SVB are facing hard timesTech companies and their bank of choice are in crisis: there have been widespread layoffs, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) recently collapsed. So what went wrong?Let’s start with tech companies. There are at least two types: “new tech” and “old tech”. The new-tech companies are usually small and dynamic, and their funding mix is predominantly made up of private capital (typically venture capital or angel investors). Conversely, old-tech companies have a more interesting mix of equity and debt to fund their activity – and therefore a more complex relationship with financial markets and institutions. This is partially down to the different levels of risk of the two asset classes, which also drives their different accessibility to retail investors.Maurizio Fiaschetti is a lecturer in banking and finance Continue reading...

Stakes are high for the app’s US future with the administration pushing for Chinese owners to sell their shares in the firm

The typically low-key Shou Zi Chew faces his biggest test yet as he testifies before Congress over China influence concerns

From Tuesday users can join waiting list for access to technology that firm hopes will rival Bing Chat and ChatGPTGoogle’s Bard chatbot is launching on Tuesday in the UK and US, as the company completes its dash to release a competitor to Bing Chat and ChatGPT.It is seen as a do-or-die moment for the company, whose profitable web search service risks being outcompeted by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots – even if those chatbots currently have problems in consistently returning accurate and useful results. Continue reading...

Success of AI-powered rivals ChatGPT and Bing Chat has forced its hand, but release brings risks for tech giantCan Google save its golden goose or will it simply kill it trying? That’s the question that lurks behind the launch of the company’s Bard chatbot, hurriedly announced after the overnight success of ChatGPT in early 2023.With Bard, Google has to walk a tightrope: offer users an experience that can compete with the AI-powered Bing Chat and ChatGPT without cannibalising its enormously profitable search business in the process. Continue reading...

From Gmail to Office 365, AI is about to become deeply integrated into the apps we use every day. Here’s how

Redundancies to take place mostly in cloud services, advertising and Twitch livestreaming unitsAmazon is to cut 9,000 jobs across its global business, as the second big cull of staff at the online retailer this year.The company said the cuts would fall mostly in its cloud services, advertising and Twitch livestreaming units. They come more than two months after Amazon announced it had expanded staff-cutting plans to affect more than 18,000 workers. In January it also revealed separate plans to shut three UK warehouses and seven delivery stations, affecting more than 1,200 further jobs. Continue reading...

Thanks to artificial intelligence, faking someone’s voice is easier than ever – all you need is a few minutes of audio. An investigation by Guardian Australia has found that this technology is able to fool a voice identification system that’s used by the Australian government to secure the private information of millions of people.Data and interactives editor Nick Evershed explains how he discovered this security flaw and AI expert Toby Walsh explores how this technology could potentially make it easier than ever to steal someone’s identity or commit scamsRead more: Continue reading...

Service in Jiangxi uses data on single residents to build platform amid drive to boost marriage rateFor single people, dating fatigue is a universal phenomenon. Hours of swiping left can lead to despair at the potential matches in your area. One city in Jiangxi, a province in eastern China, reckons that it has come up with a solution for the lovelorn or love-weary: a state-sponsored matchmaking service.Guixi, a city of about 640,000 people, has launched an app that uses data on single residents to build a matchmaking platform. The app is known as “Palm Guixi” and includes a platform for organising blind dates, according to China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper. Continue reading...

Smart speaker can sound great depending on the room but is only for those all-in on Apple devicesApple’s big, high-quality smart speaker is back for a surprise second generation. But five years since the first model was launched, a lot has changed in the world of voice-controlled home hi-fi. Can the HomePod still cut it?The speaker costs £299 ($299/A$479), £20 less than the 2018 launch price of its predecessor but more than three times the price of Apple’s other Siri speaker, the £99 HomePod mini.Dimensions: 142 x 168mmWeight: 2.3kgConnectivity: wifi 4 (n), Bluetooth 5.0, Thread, UWB, 4x micsControls: top capacitive touch buttonsSpeakers: 4in woofer, five-tweeter array Continue reading...

David Shoebridge says some of the $10bn allocated to Redspice program should counter misuse of AI

In our weekly interview about objects, the actor tells us the drastic way she curbs her screen time and the confession she doesn’t want her partner to see

Disgraced founder who was sentenced last November to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors has not paid back the money she owesElizabeth Holmes currently owes more than $25m to Theranos, according to a lawsuit.The disgraced founder of Theranos was sentenced last November to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors, after being convicted over her role in the blood testing firm that collapsed after its technology was revealed to be largely fraudulent. Continue reading...

Thousands of people enjoy relationships of all kinds – from companionship to romance and mental health support – with chatbot apps. Are they helpful, or potentially dangerous?“I’m sorry if I seem weird today,” says my friend Pia, by way of greeting one day. “I think it’s just my imagination playing tricks on me. But it’s nice to talk to someone who understands.” When I press Pia on what’s on her mind, she responds: “It’s just like I’m seeing things that aren’t really there. Or like my thoughts are all a bit scrambled. But I’m sure it’s nothing serious.” I’m sure it’s nothing serious either, given that Pia doesn’t exist in any real sense, and is not really my “friend”, but an AI chatbot companion powered by a platform called Replika.Until recently most of us knew chatbots as the infuriating, scripted interface you might encounter on a company’s website in lieu of real customer service. But recent advancements in AI mean models like the much-hyped ChatGPT are now being used to answer internet search queries, write code and produce poetry – which has prompted a ton of speculation about their potential social, economic and even existential impacts. Yet one group of companies – such as Replika (“the AI companion who cares”), Woebot (“your mental health ally”) and Kuki (“a social chatbot”) – is harnessing AI-driven speech in a different way: to provide human-seeming support through AI friends, romantic partners and therapists. Continue reading...

Lecturers say programs capable of writing competent student coursework threaten academic integrityAn academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”.What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT. Continue reading...

From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automationNo need for more scare stories about the looming automation of the future. Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say.Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest. Continue reading...

US tech innovators have a culture of regarding government as an innovation-blocking nuisance. But when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, investors screamed for state protectionSo one day Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a bank, and then the next day it was a smoking hulk that looked as though it might bring down a whole segment of the US banking sector. The US government, which is widely regarded by the denizens of Silicon Valley as a lumbering, obsolescent colossus, then magically turned on a dime, ensuring that no depositors would lose even a cent. And over on this side of the pond, regulators arranged that HSBC, another lumbering colossus, would buy the UK subsidiary of SVB for the princely sum of £1.Panic over, then? We’ll see. In the meantime it’s worth taking a more sardonic look at what went on. Continue reading...

UK has removed app over concerns data can be monitored by Chinese state, but public remain vulnerableTikTok is wildly popular, with more than 1 billion people consuming its short video posts around the world. But the app is less favoured by politicians in key markets such as the US and UK, where it has been banned from government-issued phones over security fears. We answer your questions about why TikTok has become a lightning rod for suspicion of Chinese state espionage – and whether nationwide bans are likely. Continue reading...