Month: August 2022

Launched on Friday, the conversational AI fueled by material found online spews uncomfortable truths and blatant lies If you’re worried that artificial intelligence is getting too smart, talking to Meta’s AI chatbot might make you feel better. Launched on Friday, BlenderBot is a prototype of Meta’s conversational AI, which, according to Facebook’s parent company, can …

Meet BlenderBot, Meta’s AI chatbot, that loves slamming Facebook Read More »

The company has offered only a 35p rise, and hundreds of workers stopped work last week in protest The GMB union has submitted formal pay claims to Amazon seeking a minimum of £15 an hour for workers at its UK warehouses as unofficial protests continue to dog the online retailer. Hundreds of workers in warehouses …

GMB calls for £15 an hour minimum pay at Amazon warehouses in UK Read More »

Professional test driver using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode repeatedly hit a child-sized mannequin in its path A safe-technology advocacy group issued claims Tuesday that Tesla’s full self-driving software represents a potentially lethal threat to child pedestrians, the latest in a series of claims and investigations into the technology to hit the world’s leading electric carmaker. …

Tesla’s self-driving technology fails to detect children in the road, tests find Read More »

Cybersecurity expert Ron Diebert to testify to Canadian MPs about troubling spread of invasive surveillance tools The mercenary spyware industry represents “one of the greatest contemporary threats to civil society, human rights and democracy”, a leading cybersecurity expert warns, as countries grapple with the unregulated spread of powerful and invasive surveillance tools. Ron Diebert, a …

Spyware is huge threat to global human rights and democracy, expert warns Read More »

Disturbing global trend should be ‘entirely preventable’, says Internet Watch Foundation head Incidents of children aged between seven and 10 being manipulated into recording abuse of themselves have surged by two-thirds over the past six months, according to a global report. Almost 20,000 reports of self-generated child sexual abuse content were seen by the Internet …

Self-generated sexual abuse of children aged seven to 10 rises two-thirds Read More »

App spares users the embarrassment of a blanket notification as part of series of updates over coming month WhatsApp users will soon be able to avoid social awkwardness by gracefully – and silently – leaving annoying groups, the company has announced. Currently, if you leave a WhatsApp group, every member is notified, which can be …

WhatsApp opens the door to silent exits from annoying groups Read More »

Allow a budget of £4,000 to do-it-yourself, from the editing and design through to marketing “A top-of-her-game literary agent tells us she receives about 3,000 submissions a year,” says Joe Sedgwick, the head of writing services at The Literary Consultancy. “Of those, she requests to see the full manuscripts of about 70. Of those writers, …

How to get your own book published: a step by step guide Read More »

Users also reported problems with Gmail, Google maps and Google images Get our free news app, morning email briefing and daily news podcast Google experienced a major international internet outage on Tuesday, technology platforms reported. The realtime online platform Downdetector reported users had registered problems with Google explorer, the world’s dominant search engine from 2.12am …

Google hit by worldwide outage as users report search engine down Read More »

US treasury says popular cryptocurrency service reportedly laundered more than $7bn worth of virtual currency The United States on Monday imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash, a popular cryptocurrency service that allows users to mask their transactions, accusing it of helping hackers, including from North Korea, to launder proceeds from their cybercrimes. A senior treasury department …

US sanctions Tornado Cash over fears of aiding North Korean hackers Read More »

Could the universe be an elaborate game constructed by bored aliens? Elon Musk thinks you don’t exist. But it’s nothing personal: he thinks he doesn’t exist either. At least, not in the normal sense of existing. Instead we are just immaterial software constructs running on a gigantic alien computer simulation. Musk has stated that the …

The big idea: are we living in a simulation? Read More »