List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

GENEVA (Reuters) -A pro-Russian hacking group had intensified its cyberattacks against Switzerland, authorities said on Tuesday, with hackers claiming to

The US Federal Trade Commission has sued to stop Microsoft buying Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard. It is just the latest problem for the deal, which has already been blocked by UK regulators. If completed, it will become one of the largest takeovers ever – but has faced scrutiny from regulators around the world, who argue that it might cause problems for the gaming market. The FTC's Monday filing in a federal court in San Francisco seeks a restraining order and injunction to stop Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of the California gaming company behind hit franchises such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. Microsoft, maker of the Xbox game system, has been struggling to win worldwide approval for the deal with just over a month before the deadline to close it, according to the contract it signed with Activision. “We welcome the opportunity to present our case in federal court," said a statement Monday from Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice chair and president. "We believe accelerating the legal process in the U.S will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market.” The FTC already took Microsoft to court to block the merger, but that was before the U.S. agency's in-house judge in a trial set to start on Aug. 2. That administrative process doesn't preclude the parties from closing the deal. The contract between Microsoft and Activision required the deal to close by July 18, but the FTC's latest action seeks to stop that from happening. “Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have represented in the past that they cannot close their deal due to antitrust reviews of the transaction in other jurisdictions," the FTC said in a statement Monday. "But Microsoft and Activision have not provided assurances that they will maintain that position. In light of that, and public reporting that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are considering closing their deal imminently, we have filed a request for a temporary restraining order to prevent them from closing while review continues.” Microsoft's other main obstacle is in the United Kingdom, where antitrust regulators have also taken action to block the acquisition. The all-cash deal announced in January 2022 has been scrutinized by regulators around the world over fears that it would give Microsoft and its Xbox console control of Activision's hit franchises and give it an unfair boost in the emerging business of cloud-based game subscriptions. It could be the priciest tech industry merger in history. Fierce opposition has been driven by rival Sony, which makes the PlayStation gaming system. Microsoft sought to counter the resistance by striking a deal with Nintendo to license Activision titles like Call of Duty for 10 years and offering the same to Sony if the deal went ahead. European regulators representing the 27-nation bloc approved the deal last month on condition that Microsoft make some promises meant to boost competition in the cloud-based gaming market. A number of other countries, including China, Japan, Brazil and South Korea, have also approved it. But the blockbuster deal has remained in jeopardy because of the surprise April decision by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority and the ongoing case in the U.S. Microsoft in late May filed an appeal of the British regulator's decision and has also voiced strong public opposition directed at top government officials. U.S.-based consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, an opponent of the deal, welcomed the FTC's move Monday. “Although the agency has already used its authority to block the merger through administrative proceedings, Microsoft is pushing to culminate the purchase of Activision before the agency can finish its process," said a statement from Public Citizen's competition policy advocate Matt Kent. ""By filing in federal court to enjoin the transaction, the FTC is showing that it won’t back down in the face of Microsoft’s escalatory tactics.” Additional reporting by Associated Press

The current outrage at Reddit will “pass”, its chief executive has said, as the site continues to deal with one of its most significant protests ever. In recent days, many of the site’s largest forums have gone “dark”, as moderators set them to private, meaning they cannot be seen by the world. The changes also meant that Reddit became overwhelmed and stopped working for a brief period on Monday. That was a response to a move by Reddit to start charging for access to its data, which meant that third-party apps for viewing the forum became unsustainable. Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman said that the protest was a “challenge” and “we have our work cut out for us”. Staff have been working around the clock to deal with technical problems and engage with the moderators who run those forums, he said in a memo that was first reported by The Verge. He also said that the company has “not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor”. “There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen,” he wrote. “Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward.” He suggested that while two biggest third-party apps had announced they would be shutting down, along with some others. But he said that others were still in “conversations” with the company. Mr Huffman also advised staff that they should be “mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public”. “Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.” He also claimed that “starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private”. That is far below third-party estimates, which suggest that the vast majority of the thousands of the site’s forums have gone dark. Reddit’s chief executive has been at the heart of the fallout over the changes at the site. He conducted an ask me anything session on the site, intended on quelling protest – but which was met with widespread criticism from the site’s users and moderators. Unlike other social networks such as Facebook, Reddit relies on unpaid moderators to check the content and administer the posts on its forums. As such, those moderators are able to make changes to the forums as they wish.

Amazon is experimenting with using artificial intelligence to sum up customer feedback about products on the site, with the potential to cut down on the time shoppers spend sifting through reviews before making a purchase.

By Sarah Marsh, Supantha Mukherjee and Andreas Rinke BERLIN/STOCKHOLM The European Union is set to urge Germany to

Discord, the chat app, has stopped working properly. Users complained on Tuesday that messages were slow to send, if they could sign in at all.

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former Theranos CEO, has "limited financial means" and should not be forced to pay $250 a month to victims of her crimes after she is released from prison, her lawyers argued in a court filing on Monday.

Artificial intelligence has been used to generate images showing some of the most controversial world leaders as babies and the results are strangely sweet. In recent years, AI has come to the fore as one of the most powerful and perhaps terrifying new types of technology we have ever seen. It has the ability to learn via data and produce results based on the information it is fed. One person has now used the technology to produce images of different world leaders as babies. On Instagram, a user named Planet AI explained they asked “AI to Draw World Leaders as Babies” and the results were pretty surprising. Included in the images were Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, the UK’s former PM Boris Johnson and the former US president Donald Trump. Remarkably, the AI-generated image managed to make the war-mongering Russian leader Vladimir Putin appear relatively sweet and innocent. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter In the comments, people certainly had some thoughts about the images AI had come up with. Someone commented: “Kim Jong Un did not change.” Another said: “I'm finding it really funny that Pope Francis is still in his pope clothes. Makes me think of a baby running the Catholic church.” “Putin is so sweet and Obama also,” another argued. On Twitter, another person wrote: “Joe Biden looks so old that even his baby version looks about 60 years old!” While AI technology can be used for relatively harmless entertainment purposes, one woman discovered how powerful it can be after claiming she “lost her job to AI” and had to apply for the job to train it. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

When Tim Cook took over as Apple CEO from Steve Jobs nearly 12 years ago, some thought the company was already at its peak.

A white dwarf star is undergoing the process of turning into a “cosmic diamond” as it begins to crystalise. The lullaby “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” talks about stars in the sky looking like diamonds, but for one specific type of star, that observation is truer than for others. Astronomers have observed that when a specific type of dead star starts to cool, it begins to crystalise and harden. An international team of astronomers, led by Alexander Venner of the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, have explained in a new paper Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society how a white dwarf star around 104 light-years away is doing just that. They noticed that the star, composed primarily of carbon and metallic oxygen, has a temperature-mass profile that suggests its centre is hardening into a dense “cosmic diamond” made of crystallised carbon and oxygen. The study explained: "In this work we present the discovery of a new Sirius-like quadruple system at 32 parsecs distance, composed of a crystallizing white dwarf companion to the previously known triple HD 190412.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It continued: “By virtue of its association with these main sequence companions, this is the first crystallizing white dwarf whose total age can be externally constrained, a fact that we make use of by attempting to empirically measure a cooling delay caused by core crystallization in the white dwarf.” All stars eventually die out when they run out of energy. Of those that have a mass of less than around eight times that of the Sun, the vast majority will form a white dwarf star. The matter of a white dwarf star is highly compressed and as they gradually cool, they evolve into a black dwarf star when they lose heat and crystalise. Scientists’ calculations estimate the process takes around a quadrillion years (one million billion years) to complete, though the signs that the process is occurring can be identified by experts. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Hundreds of people have attended an AI-generated church service in Germany, involving virtual avatars delivering sermons written by ChatGPT. The 40-minute service at Saint Paul’s church in Fürth received mixed reactions from the Protestant congregation, the Associated Press reported, with the avatars occasionally causing unintentional laughter. Some church members even refused to speak along when the digital avatar read out the Lord’s Prayer. “There was no heart and no soul,” said Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old IT worker who attended the service. “The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said. But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this.” Lutheran pastor Marc Jansen was more impressed by the artificial intelligence, saying he had “imagined it to be worse” than it was. “I was positively surprised how well it worked,” he said. “Also, the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times.” The AI began the service by stating: “Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany.” It went on to talk about leaving the past behind and never losing trust in Jesus, while also urging the congregation to overcome their fear of death. More than 300 people attended the service, which was organised by 29-year-old theologian Jonas Simmerlein from the University of Vienna. Mr Simmerlein instructed ChatGPT to include psalms, prayers and a blessing, saying the experiment was designed to show how religious leaders could use AI to help them with their work. “Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives, in all its facets. And that’s why it’s useful to learn to deal with it,” he said, adding that AI will not be able to replace the role pastors serve in interacting with the local community. “The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning. Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation.” Read More What is superintelligence? How AI could wipe out humanity – and why the boss of ChatGPT is doomsday prepping 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity Major Google Bard update allows it to not just write code, but execute it Instagram is working on an AI chatbot with multiple personalities The glaring omission from Apple’s AR headset launch

A whistleblower who claims that the US government has been operating UFO retrieval research in secret has reportedly said that UFOs have been responsible for the deaths of humans. David Grusch worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and was involved with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. He claimed that some of the “non-human intelligences” discovered have malevolent intentions and have killed people. Speaking to NewsNation [via the Daily Mail], he also reportedly claimed that the US is in a race with Russia and China to study extraterrestrial life. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “I think the logical fallacy there is because they’re advanced, they’re kind. We’ll never really understand their full intent and that’s because we’re not them. But I think what appears to be malevolent activity has happened.” He added: “That’s based on nuclear site probing activities and witness testimony. Grusch was then asked if UFOs had ever killed humans and he replied: “While I can’t get into the specifics because that would reveal certain US classified operations, I was briefed by a few individuals on the program that there were malevolent events like that.” The 36-year-old also suggested that the US government would go to extreme lengths to keep secrets covered up, saying: “At the very least, I saw substantive evidence that white-collar crime was committed… unfortunately. “I’ve heard some really un-American things I don’t want to repeat right now.” Grusch previously claimed that the US government has a "non-human origin" in-tact craft that they're keeping from the public. Speaking to NewsNation, Grusch said: "These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it a spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.