Great screen, flagship chips and good camera with a few corners cut for significantly cheaper price
With the Mi 11 Xiaomi, one of China’s largest electronics firms, is attempting to undercut Samsung with a premium, top-spec phone costing significantly less.
The £750 Mi 11 is the first of Xiaomi’s new top-spec phones for the year, replacing the Mi 10 series from 2020.
Continue reading...Brothers Patrick and John Collison’s online payments empire is now valued at $95bn
The latest fundraising round by the digital payments firm Stripe has boosted the net worth of its co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, to about $11.5bn (£8.3bn) each, catapulting them into the top bracket of the world’s millennial billionaires. Not bad for two brothers from the tiny Tipperary village of Dromineer, population: barely 100.
Related: Silicon Valley's Stripe valued at $95bn after fundraising
Continue reading...To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens
Humans might be tiring of video calls, Zoom birthdays and streamed performances, but the chimps at two Czech zoos are just starting to enjoy their new live online link-up.
To make up for the lack of interaction with visitors since the attractions closed in December under Covid-19 restrictions, the chimpanzees at Safari Park Dvur Kralove and the troop at a zoo 150km away in in Brno, can now watch one another’s daily lives on giant screens.
Continue reading...Washington Post reported on the study which confirmed what researchers have long argued about: the echo chamber effect
A small subset of Facebook users is reportedly responsible for the majority of content expressing or encouraging skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines, according to early results from an internal Facebook study.
The study, first reported by the Washington Post, confirms what researchers have long argued about how the echo chamber effect can amplify certain beliefs within social media communities. It also shows how speech that falls short of outright misinformation about vaccines, which is banned on Facebook, can still contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
Continue reading...Company’s financial chief has been rebranded ‘master of coin’ following £1bn bitcoin investment
Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla with a penchant for eccentric behaviour, has changed his job title to “technoking” of the electric car manufacturer.
In addition to Musk, who also retains his position as chief executive, the company’s financial chief, Zach Kirkhorn, has been rebranded as “master of coin”.
Continue reading...Holmes is on trial for allegedly defrauding investors, doctors and patients while at the helm of blood-testing startup
The alleged Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is pregnant, according to a new court filing, potentially delaying her trial by several weeks.
Continue reading...Streaming service tests feature that asks viewers if they share household with subscriber
Netflix has begun testing a feature that asks viewers whether they share a household with a subscriber, in a move that could lead to crackdown on the widespread practice of sharing passwords among friends and family.
Some Netflix users are reported to have received a message asking them to confirm they live with the account owner by entering a code included in a text message or email sent to the subscriber.
Continue reading...Researchers claim breakthrough in study of 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in sea
From the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.
The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.
Continue reading...Everything from online news to social media and streaming platforms are captured by the regulations, branded ‘palpably illegal’ by opponents
Not long before he was elected as India’s prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi spoke of his dreams of a “digital India”, where “access to information knows no barriers”.
But this week, unprecedented barriers on every form of digital content, from online news to social media and films and television on streaming platforms, came into force, making India’s digital realm one of the most heavily regulated of any major democracy.
Continue reading...Biak island residents say SpaceX launchpad would devastate island’s ecology and displace people from their homes
Papuans whose island has been offered up as a potential launch site for Elon Musk’s SpaceX project have told the billionaire Tesla chief his company is not welcome on their land, and its presence would devastate their island’s ecosystem and drive people from their homes.
Musk was offered use of part of the small island of Biak in Papua by Indonesian president Joko Widodo in December.
Continue reading...OpenAI’s Clip system fails to correctly decipher images when words are pasted on picture
As artificial intelligence systems go, it is pretty smart: show Clip a picture of an apple and it can recognise that it is looking at a fruit. It can even tell you which one, and sometimes go as far as differentiating between varieties.
But even cleverest AI can be fooled with the simplest of hacks. If you write out the word “iPod” on a sticky label and paste it over the apple, Clip does something odd: it decides, with near certainty, that it is looking at a mid-00s piece of consumer electronics. In another test, pasting dollar signs over a picture of a dog caused it to be recognised as a piggy bank.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Document produced by university cited agency as secret funder of research
For an agency devoted to secrecy and surveillance, it is an embarrassing slip-up. An inadvertent disclosure on a university document has revealed that MI5 is partly behind what was meant to be a covert bug and drone research project.
Ostensibly, Imperial College’s research was to create a quadcopter system for charging remote agricultural sensors – but MI5’s participation has emerged because somebody involved stated it was the secret second funder of the programme.
Continue reading...In this book extract, Steve Braunias describes a visit to the New Zealand home of the German internet entrepreneur who is fighting extradition to the US
This is the way the world ends: in a candy store. When I asked Kim Dotcom for his address in Queenstown so I could sit with him a while and interview him about his views on how to survive the coming apocalypse, he replied that he would send someone to collect me on a Thursday at 4pm at the Remarkables Sweet Shop on the main street in nearby Arrowtown. I got there early. It was a cold, fresh winter’s day, with black ice and low snow, and birds shivered in the trees above the pretty Arrow River. Tourists filled the candy store. I stood there lurking among the trays of Aniseed Twists and Cola Fizzballs. As soon as I stepped onto the pavement, a big black Mercedes pulled up. It was four o’clock on the dot.
The rendezvous had come about because Dotcom got in touch after reading a story I wrote for The New Zealand Herald about preparing for Doomsday. “The end of the world as we know it is coming,” he emailed. “We are close, I think.” I thought so, too. I wrote a year-long series of stories about end days; the subject occupied my mind day and night, I was sleepless, worried, a wreck, but I fancied that I was also practical and methodical, and kept busy by laying down provisions and supplies to protect my family when the world spiralled towards Hell in a fiery and terrifying hat.
Continue reading...Decline wipes billions off Elon Musk’s fortune as investors fear firm is vastly overvalued
A sharp decline in Tesla’s share price has wiped more than $250bn (£193bn) off the value of the electric car company, and dragged down the value of an Edinburgh-based investment fund that is one of Tesla’s biggest backers.
The shares dropped by 7.5% in early trading in the US on Friday to $575 – setting them on course to close down 16% this week and 35% below their record peak of $883 on 26 January.
Continue reading...Visual effects artist Christopher Ume reveals he made TikTok fakes with help from Cruise impersonator
Joining TikTok has become something of a trend for Hollywood celebrities stuck at home like everyone else. So it wasn’t necessarily surprising to see Tom Cruise on the app, sharing videos of himself playing golf and pratfalling around the house.
But the strange thing is that Cruise never actually made the videos. And the account that posted them, DeepTomCruise, wore that on its sleeve: it was openly the work of a talented creator of “deepfakes”, AI-generated video clips that use a variety of techniques to create situations that have never happened in the real world.
Continue reading...When is a meme worth $600,000? When technology has created a ‘unique’ version that can’t be owned by anyone else
Pat, I keep hearing references to cryptoart which are all very … cryptic. What is this thing?
Hey Lucy! So you might have heard of it in context of the $US600,000 Nyan Cat gif or the more recent Kings of Leon NFT Album, both of which are examples of cryptoart. Cryptoart is a way of making digital art unique, and therefore – according to some people – valuable. Normally, digital art is very easy to replicate due to the very nature of digital information. So cryptoart is a way of making digital files one-of-a-kind.
Continue reading...Is smartphone tracking a less intrusive reward for good behaviour or just a way to enrich the incarceration industry?
In 2018, William Frederick Keck III pleaded guilty in a court in Manassas, Virginia, to possession with intent to distribute cannabis. He served three months in prison, then began a three-year probation. He was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor before his trial and then to report for random drug tests after his release. Eventually, the state reduced his level of monitoring to scheduled meetings with his parole officer. Finally, after continued good behaviour, Keck’s parole officer moved him to Virginia’s lowest level of monitoring: an app on his smartphone.
Once a month, Keck would open up the Shadowtrack app and speak his answers to a series of questions so that a voice-recognition algorithm could confirm it was really him. He would then type out answers to several more questions – such as whether he had taken drugs – and the app would send his responses and location to his parole officer. Unless there was a problem, Keck would not have to interact with a human and the process could be completed during a TV ad break.
Continue reading...Companies such as Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian environmental campaigners
The bank of cameras camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement and involvement in an international conspiracy whose elements include (but are not limited to): Indian farmers in revolt, the global pop star Rihanna, supposed plots against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism and Greta Thunberg.
If you think that sounds far-fetched, well, so did the judge who released Ravi after nine days in jail under police interrogation. Judge Dharmender Rana was supposed to rule on whether Ravi, one of the founders of the Indian chapter of Fridays for Future, the youth climate group started by Thunberg, should continue to be denied bail. He ruled that there was no reason for bail to be denied, which cleared the way for Ravi’s return to her home in Bengaluru that night.
Continue reading...Videos posted to Chinese-owned site show men in military gear threatening to kill protesters
TikTok has been urged to take action over a flood of videos shared in Myanmar that feature men in military uniform threatening to kill anti-coup protesters, at times while brandishing weapons.
Myanmar’s police and army have been widely condemned for using lethal force against peaceful protesters who have held mass rallies over recent weeks calling for the return of democracy. More than 20 people have been killed since the military seized power on 1 February.
Continue reading...Xi Jinping wants ‘positive energy’ but critics say the surveillance tools’ racial bias and monitoring for anger or sadness should be banned
“Ordinary people here in China aren’t happy about this technology but they have no choice. If the police say there have to be cameras in a community, people will just have to live with it. There’s always that demand and we’re here to fulfil it.”
So says Chen Wei at Taigusys, a company specialising in emotion recognition technology, the latest evolution in the broader world of surveillance systems that play a part in nearly every aspect of Chinese society.
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