Category Archives: Technology

Elon Musk says X will pull operations from Brazil after ‘censorship orders’

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Judge Alexandre de Moraes had ordered X to block certain accounts as he investigated fake news and hate messages

Elon Musk announced on Saturday that the social media platform X would close its operations in Brazil “effective immediately” due to what it called “censorship orders” from the Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes.

X claims Moraes secretly threatened one of its legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform. Brazil’s supreme court, where Moraes has a seat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Iranian group used ChatGPT to try to influence US election, OpenAI says

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AI company bans accounts and says operation did not appear to have meaningful audience engagement

OpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues.

The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said.

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Blow to ESPN and Fox as US judge halts sports streaming venture

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Fubo TV accuses Venu Sports – which also involves Hulu and Warner Bros Discovery – of anti-competitive practices

The launch of Venu Sports will be delayed after a federal judge granted FuboTV’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the planned sports streaming venture by ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery.

US district judge Margaret M Garnett in New York said in her 69-page ruling that Fubo was likely to be successful in proving during a trial that the joint venture would violate antitrust laws, and Fubo and consumers would “face irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction”.

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Meta struggles with moderation in Hebrew, according to ex-employee and internal documents

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Meta has system for evaluating the effectiveness of its own moderation for Arabic language content but not Hebrew

Meta is struggling with moderating content related to the Israel-Palestine war, particularly in Hebrew, despite recent changes to internal policies, new documents have revealed.

Internal policy guidelines shared with the Guardian by a former Meta employee who worked on content moderation outline a multilayered process for moderating content related to the conflict. But the documents indicate Meta, which owns the platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, does not have the same processes in place to gauge the accuracy of moderation of Hebrew content and Arabic content.

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Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand to US

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Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after FBI-ordered raid over filesharing site

Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling.

German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the country’s supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review.

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Wyoming reporter caught using AI to create fake quotes and stories

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Robotic, peculiar wording in recent issues of Cody Enterprise tipped a veteran reporter off

A quote from Wyoming’s governor and a local prosecutor were the first things that seemed slightly off to Powell Tribune reporter CJ Baker. Then, it was some of the phrases in the stories that struck him as nearly robotic.

The dead giveaway, though, that a reporter from a competing news outlet was using generative artificial intelligence to help write his stories came in a 26 June article about the comedian Larry the Cable Guy being chosen as the grand marshal of the Cody Stampede parade.

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Intel sued by fired Jewish employee over ex-supervisor’s alleged antisemitism

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Plaintiff in New York case says he lost job after complaining that his manager openly celebrated terrorism against Israel

A Jewish former employee of Intel sued the chipmaker on Tuesday, saying he was fired after complaining that the senior executive he reported to openly celebrated antisemitism, Hamas and terrorism against Israel.

The plaintiff, a former vice-president of engineering using the pseudonym John Doe, said Intel fired him on 2 April in a purported cost-cutting move barely two months after assigning him to report to Alaa Badr, vice-president of customer success.

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Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview

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After a 45-minute delay, the former president ran through his greatest hits – and biggest lies – to a fawning Elon Musk

Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that skyrocketed his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.

Here are key takeaways from the event.

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Trump rehashes vitriol and falsehoods in rambling talk with Musk – as it happened

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This blog is now closed. You can read our on that interview story here.

In addition to this live blogger, conservative commentator Glenn Beck is among those unable to listen to Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk:

The interview was supposed to start five minutes ago, but instead, all we are seeing is a gray box with the words “Details not available”.

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Trump revisits most divisive talking points in rambling interview with Musk

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Ex-president attacks migrants and denounces Kamala Harris in discussion delayed by technical glitch

Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.

The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.

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Elon Musk’s X suffers tech failures at start of Donald Trump interview

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Musk blames cyber-attack as conversation is delayed, resembling glitchy launch of Ron DeSantis’s campaign

As a high-profile conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was about to begin, users of X, formerly Twitter, were confronted with the message: “This Space is not available.”

Spaces, X’s livestreaming audio feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it wasn’t working. Clicking on the link to the broadcast, hosted by Trump’s dormant @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and rendered it unusable. Tweeters said they couldn’t dial in; some said their browsers had crashed.

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Greens demand answers after Australians temporarily unable to post news links to Instagram and Threads

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Sarah Hanson-Young wrote to Meta demanding to know if social media giant was test-running a news ban

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young is demanding answers from Meta after Australian users were unable to post links to Australian news outlets on Threads and Instagram on Monday, sparking fears that news was being blocked on the social media sites. The company called it an error.

Publisher accounts were still able to post in some cases, but individual user accounts were unable to post links, including to the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC and Crikey, as well as some global sites such as the Guardian. International sites such as the New York Times appeared to be unaffected. The incident was first reported by Crikey.

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Donald Trump 2024 campaign says emails were hacked

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Spokesperson Steven Cheung accuses ‘foreign sources hostile to the United States’ of leaking internal documents

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said on Saturday it had been hacked.

Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung released a statement about the alleged hack, following reports from Politico that it had begun receiving emails from an anonymous account with internal documents from the campaign.

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Jess Phillips calls X a ‘place of misery’ as she vows to scale back use

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Labour minister says she removed social media platform’s app from her mobile phone when Elon Musk took over

A government minister said she has scaled back her use of social media platform X, arguing it had become “a bit despotic” and was “a place of misery now”.

Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said although she had previously been “massively addicted to Twitter”, referencing the former name of X, she had removed the app from her phone after Elon Musk took over the company in October 2022.

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Apple changes EU App Store rules after commission charges

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Change in policy means developers will be able to communicate with customers outside App Store

Apple on Thursday changed its policy in the European Union to allow developers to communicate with their customers outside its App Store after the commission charged the iPhone maker in June for breaching the bloc’s tech rules.

The commission had said that under most of the business terms, Apple allows steering only through “link-outs”, meaning that app developers can include a link in their app that redirects the customer to a web page where the customer can conclude a contract.

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Nicolás Maduro blocks X for 10 days in Venezuela amid spat with Elon Musk

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President accuses social network’s owner of using it to ‘incite hatred’ after country’s disputed election

President Nicolás Maduro said he had ordered a 10-day block on access to X in Venezuela, accusing the owner, Elon Musk, of using the social network to promote hatred after the country’s disputed presidential election.

Associated Press (AP) journalists in Caracas found that by Thursday night posts had stopped loading on X on two private telephone services and the state-owned Movilnet.

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Online Safety Act not fit for purpose after far-right riots, says Sadiq Khan

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Exclusive: London mayor warns law must be revisited ‘very, very quickly’ due to falsehoods that contributed to unrest

Laws designed to counter misinformation are “not fit for purpose” and must be revisited after the spread of online falsehoods contributed to this month’s far-right riots, the mayor of London has said.

Sadiq Khan, one of the UK’s most senior Muslim politicians, said ministers should act “very, very quickly” to review the Online Safety Act after the violent unrest in England and Belfast over the past week. There have been calls to hasten the act’s implementation.

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Labour needs X to get its message out however much it may wish it didn’t

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The Elon Musk-owned platform remains a vital tool for politicians despite misinformation about disorder in Britain

When Keir Starmer was running to be Labour leader in 2020, his aides seriously considered whether they should leave Twitter for good.

A number of those who remain close to Starmer as prime minister were then enthusiastic about moving off the platform. The party was still feeling wounded by the brutal election campaign and by the bitterness of the way it had been conducted on social media.

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UK police monitoring TikTok for evidence of criminality at far-right riots

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Footage of disorder can reach hundreds of thousands of viewers and often shows faces of those committing crimes

Police officers are watching TikTok in an attempt to catch far-right demonstrators livestreaming self-incriminating footage of their illegal behaviour.

TikTok’s Live function has become one of the defining outlets for coverage of this summer’s riots, with hundreds of thousands of viewers watching live streams of rioting over the last week in cities such as Stoke, Leeds, Hull and Nottingham.

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X to shut down flagship San Francisco office – report

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CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly said Bay Area employees would be relocated to Silicon Valley in an internal email

X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, will shut down its flagship San Francisco office “over the next few weeks”, the New York Times reported. The internal announcement comes after owner Elon Musk stated last month he would be moving the headquarters out of California.

In an email to employees obtained by the Times, chief executive Linda Yaccarino said Bay Area employees will be relocated to Silicon Valley, distributed between an existing office in San Jose and a new office to be built in Palo Alto.

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