Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand to US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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US chip factory workers say it’s a ‘struggle to survive’ on their wages as industry booms

Companies stand to gain billions in federal funds and tax breaks as employees suffer in poor working conditions

As chip manufacturers grapple for billions of dollars in federal funds and tax breaks designed to boost the US semiconductor industry, they face growing calls from inside their factories to improve working conditions and pay.

Workers and labour unions are urging key companies in the sector to “do the right thing” and prioritize the wellbeing of employees over the wealth of their shareholders.

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Neuralink has implanted second trial patient with brain chip, Elon Musk says

Founder says procedure, aimed at helping paralyzed people use digital devices by thinking alone, went ‘extremely well’

Neuralink has successfully implanted in a second patient its device designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone, according to the startup’s owner Elon Musk.

Neuralink is in the process of testing its device, which is intended to help people with spinal cord injuries. The device has allowed the first patient to play video games, browse the internet, post on social media and move a cursor on his laptop.

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The far right has moved online, where its voice is more dangerous than ever

Social media such as X are fuelling the growth of extremism by allowing its figureheads a platform to direct violence

The resurgence of far-right violence in the UK is in part due to Elon Musk’s decision to allow figures such as Tommy Robinson back on to the social media platform X, researchers say.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and those of his ilk are not leaders in the traditional sense and the far right has no central organisation capable of directing the disorder and violence that has been seen, experts say.

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‘We have to adapt or die’: Daniel Bedingfield says AI is music’s future

Exclusive: Gotta Get Thru This singer argues that ‘neo-luddites’ risk being left behind as technology develops

The growing use of artificial intelligence in the creative industries has been described as an existential threat to jobs and artistic integrity. Earlier this year artists including Billie Eilish and Katy Perry signed an open letter urging tech companies not to “sabotage creativity”, while Nick Cave has called lyrics written by ChatGPT “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”. But according to the musician Daniel Bedingfield, AI is music’s future, and anyone who fights against it faces being left behind.

“AI is now here for ever,” he told the Guardian. “And so I think that there will be two paths: there’ll be the neo-luddite path, and then there’ll be everyone else, most of the planet, who thinks the music’s really good and enjoys it.”

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