Category Archives: Technology

Turn your phone off every night for five minutes, Australian PM tells residents

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Experts back Anthony Albanese’s cybersecurity advice, saying forcibly closing apps could stop criminals from monitoring users or collecting data

Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has told residents they should turn their smartphones off and on again once a day as a cybersecurity measure – and tech experts agree.

Albanese said the country needed to be proactive to thwart cyber risks, as he announced the appointment of Australia’s inaugural national cybersecurity coordinator.

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Marvel faces backlash over AI-generated opening credits

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Social media users condemned use of AI -generated opening credits for Secret Invasion premiering this week on Disney+

Marvel’s Secret Invasion, a new television series which launched on Disney+ this week, has received backlash online after it was revealed that its opening credits were generated by artificial intelligence.

In an interview with Polygon on Wednesday, director Ali Selim confirmed that AI operated by a company called Method Studios produced the opening sequence to the new series, which stars Samuel L Jackson as Marvel fixture Nick Fury.

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Online safety bill: changes urged to allow access to social media data

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Campaigners say bill in ‘serious peril’ of passing without powers to make platforms more transparent

Online safety experts will struggle to sound the alarm about harmful content if landmark legislation does not allow independent researchers to access data from social media platforms, campaigners have warned.

The government is being urged to adopt amendments to the online safety bill enabling researchers to access platform data in order to monitor harmful material. Access would be overseen by Ofcom, the communications watchdog, and would protect user privacy.

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EU countries accuse TfL debt collectors of breaching data protection laws over London penalty fines

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Belgium and Dutch vehicle licensing agency say citizens’ details obtained unlawfully to issue driving fines

Two EU countries have accused Transport for London’s debt collection agency of breaching data protection laws to obtain the names and addresses of citizens in order to issue fines for driving in the capital.

Motorists from across Europe have been hit with penalties, some totalling thousands of pounds, for driving in London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez). Penalty notices are being sent to foreign motorists who enter the capital without pre-registering their vehicle, and the Guardian has revealed hundreds of drivers have been fined despite driving emissions-compliant cars.

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Tory peer faces questions over links to cryptocurrency lobbying firm

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Exclusive: James Wharton is helping to forge Westminster connections for the cryptocurrency sector

A former campaign manager to Boris Johnson who was appointed to lead an education quango is facing fresh questions over his role in a cryptocurrency lobbying firm.

James Wharton, a peer and former MP who chairs the Office for Students (OfS), has launched a new public affairs company that pledges to “help clients navigate the complexities of Whitehall and Westminster” and specialises in “disruptive” highly regulated sectors.

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Hollywood producer and chewing gum heir explore takeover of notorious spyware firm assets

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Robert Simonds and William ‘Beau’ Wrigley consider acquiring assets of NSO, blacklisted Israeli company behind Pegasus spyware

An unlikely cast of characters including a Hollywood producer and the heir to the Wrigley chewing gum fortune are exploring a possible bid to take control of assets owned by NSO Group, the Israeli company behind one of the world’s most sophisticated cyber-weapons.

Robert Simonds, a US financier whose credits include producing several Adam Sandler films, has been engaged in talks to acquire the blacklisted spyware company’s assets, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

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EU regulator orders Google to sell part of ad-tech business

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Competition commission accuses firm of favouring its own services to detriment of rivals

The EU has ordered Google to sell part of its advertising business, as the bloc’s competition regulator steps up its enforcement of big tech’s monopolies.

The competition commission said it had taken issue “with Google favouring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers”.

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Discrimination is a bigger AI risk than human extinction – EU commissioner

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Commissioner says existential threat unlikely, but ‘guardrails’ needed for decisions affecting livelihoods

Discrimination is a bigger threat posed by artificial intelligence than possible extinction of the human race, according to the EU’s competition commissioner.

Margrethe Vestager said although the existential risk from advances in AI may be a concern, it was unlikely, whereas discrimination from the technology was a real problem.

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UK government to invest in film and TV AI special-effects research

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Almost £150m to be spent on research labs to help future-proof industry and lift creative economy

Ministers are seeking to future-proof the UK’s multibillion-pound film and TV production industry by investing almost £150m in a network of research labs across the country tasked with developing the next generation of special effects using tech such as artificial intelligence.

The scheme aims to build on Britain’s reputation for producing hi-tech hits from Star Wars to Harry Potter, and is part of wide-ranging plans to drive the UK creative economy. The government has earmarked millions to support grassroots music venues hammered by the Covid pandemic, and is tripling a fund designed to find and support the next generation of homegrown superstars like Adele and Ed Sheeran.

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Cruise robotaxi appears to hinder emergency crews after mass shooting

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Company said vehicle never obstructed access to scene in San Francisco even as police in video say it blocked first responders

A Cruise self-driving car appeared to hinder first responders as they tried to access the scene of a mass shooting in San Francisco’s Mission District on Friday night, raising concerns about robotaxis’ ability to safely offer rides throughout the city.

Emergency crews were responding to a shooting on 24th Street shortly after 9pm in which nine people were injured. In a video posted to Twitter, a Cruise self-driving car is seen in the road as an officer approaches it and says it’s “blocking emergency medical and fire. I’ve got to get it out of here now.” In a statement, Cruise maintained that the car did not block emergency access to the scene “at any point”.

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Mercedes-Benz beats Tesla for approval of automated driving tech in California

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German carmaker becomes first to gain permit for offering self-driving cars in California, but with strict conditions

The California department of motor vehicles has approved Mercedes-Benz’s automated driving system on designated highways under certain conditions without the active control of a driver.

California is one of Tesla’s largest markets, accounting for 16% of the carmaker’s global deliveries last year, according to Reuters calculations.

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China plans new rules to regulate file sharing services like Airdrop and Bluetooth

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Under the proposal, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save records and report their discoveries

China is planning to restrict and scrutinise the use of wireless filesharing services between mobile devices, such as airdrop and Bluetooth, after they were used by protesters to evade censorship and spread protest messages.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, has released draft regulations on “close-range mesh network services” and launched a month-long public consultation on Tuesday.

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Struggling Meta showcases new AI tools at company meeting

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Employees get preview of chatbots similar to ChatGPT for Messenger and WhatsApp

Facebook’s owner, Meta, announced new artificial intelligence-focused tools in an internal company meeting on Thursday and outlined its plan after months of financial struggle.

The company confirmed a New York Times report that employees were given a sneak peek of new products it has been building, including ChatGPT-like chatbots planned for Messenger and WhatsApp that could converse using different personas.

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Communist party accessed TikTok data of Hong Kong protesters, former executive alleges

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Ruling party accessed user data including Sim card ID and IP addresses, former executive alleges in legal filing

A former executive at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has alleged that the Chinese Communist party accessed user data from the social video app belonging to Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists.

Yintao Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance’s US operation, claimed in a legal filing that a committee of Communist party members accessed TikTok data that included the users’ network information, Sim card identifications and IP addresses in a bid to identify the individuals and their locations.

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AI should be licensed like medicines or nuclear power, Labour suggests

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Exclusive: party calls for developers without a licence to be barred from working on advanced AI tools

The UK should bar technology developers from working on advanced artificial intelligence tools unless they have a licence to do so, Labour has said.

Ministers should introduce much stricter rules around companies training their AI products on vast datasets of the kind used by OpenAI to build ChatGPT, Lucy Powell, Labour’s digital spokesperson, told the Guardian.

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BA, Boots and BBC staff details targeted in Russia-linked cyber-attack

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Hack attributed to criminal gang hit MOVEit software used by third-party payroll provider Zellis

British Airways, Boots and the BBC are investigating the potential theft of personal details of staff after the companies were hit by a cyber-attack attributed to a Russia-linked criminal gang.

BA confirmed it was one of the companies affected by the hack, which targeted software called MOVEit used by Zellis, a payroll provider.

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‘Much easier to say no’: Irish town unites in smartphone ban for young children

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Parents and schools across Greystones adopt voluntary ‘no-smartphone code’ in bid to curb peer pressure

On the principle of strength in numbers, parents in the Irish town of Greystones have banded together to collectively tell their children they cannot have a smartphone until secondary school.

Parents’ associations across the district’s eight primary schools have adopted a no-smartphone code to present a united front against children’s lobbying.

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US colonel retracts comments on simulated drone attack ‘thought experiment’

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Colonel clarifies comments about ‘rogue AI drone’ that supposedly killed its operator

A US air force colonel “misspoke” when he said at a Royal Aeronautical Society conference last month that a drone killed its operator in a simulated test because the pilot was attempting to override its mission, according to the society.

The confusion had started with the circulation of a blogpost from the society, in which it described a presentation by Col Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force and an experimental fighter test pilot, at the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May.

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Chinese censors remove protest site Sitong Bridge from online maps

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Amid usual scrubbing for Tiananmen Square anniversary, searches for bridge where protest was held in 2022 return no results

Chinese censors scrubbing the internet of any words or symbols that could be used to reference the Tiananmen Square massacre in the run-up to Sunday’s anniversary have a new target in their sights: a bridge in Beijing where a rare protest was staged last year.

As the 34th anniversary of the 1989 massacre approaches, anyone searching in Chinese for Sitong Bridge on Baidu maps will draw a blank.

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Twitter and Tesla’s interests at odds in Elon Musk’s quiet China visit

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The world’s richest person lapsed into an unusual silence on social media during his trip to the electric carmaker’s second largest market

Followers of Elon Musk didn’t know what to expect from his trip to China. Would he speak about Tesla, a company with a large market and manufacturing footprint there? Or SpaceX, with its symbiotic relationship with the American state? Or even Twitter, the social network he bought because “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”?

The one thing no one expected: silence.

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