Category Archives: Technology

Elon Musk broke law with threat to Tesla workers’ stock options, court rules

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Appeal judges uphold previous ruling, citing ‘implied threat’ in CEO’s tweet directed at Fremont employees who wanted to join union

A US appeals court has ruled that Elon Musk violated federal labour law by tweeting that employees of Tesla would lose stock options if they joined a union.

The New Orleans-based 5th US circuit court of appeals upheld a decision by the US National Labor Relations Board that said the 2018 tweet amounted to an unlawful threat that could discourage unionising and ordered Musk to delete it.

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Italy’s privacy watchdog bans ChatGPT over data breach concerns

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Measure is in place ‘until ChatGPT respects privacy’, says Italian Data Protection Authority

Italy’s privacy watchdog has banned ChatGPT, after raising concerns about a recent data breach and the legal basis for using personal data to train the popular chatbot.

The Italian Data Protection Authority described the move as atemporary measure “until ChatGPT respects privacy”. The watchdog said it was imposing an “immediate temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users’ data” by ChatGPT’s owner, the San Francisco-based OpenAI.

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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty to bribery charges

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Bankman-Fried, 31, has already pleaded not guilty to eight counts over collapse of cryptocurrency exchange last year

The FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty on Thursday to new US criminal charges, which include conspiring to violate campaign finance laws and bribe Chinese authorities.

Bankman-Fried, 31, had earlier pleaded not guilty to eight counts of fraud and conspiracy for allegedly stealing billions in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research.

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Panera to adopt palm-reading payment systems, sparking privacy fears

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Bakery is first restaurant chain to use Amazon One biometric technology, which faces scrutiny from lawmakers and activists

The US bakery and cafe chain Panera will soon allow customers to pay with the swipe of a palm, marking the first restaurant chain to implement the new technology and raising alarm among privacy advocates.

The company announced last week it would roll out biometric readers in coming months that will allow customers to access credit card and loyalty account information by scanning their palms. Called Amazon One, the system was developed by Amazon and is in use at some airports, stadiums and Whole Foods grocery stores.

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AI chatbots making it harder to spot phishing emails, say experts

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Poor spelling and grammar that can help identify fraudulent attacks being rectified by artificial intelligence

Chatbots are taking away a key line of defence against fraudulent phishing emails by removing glaring grammatical and spelling errors, according to experts.

Phishing emails are a well-known weapon of cybercriminals and fool recipients into clicking on a link that downloads malicious software or tricks them into handing over personal details such as passwords or pin numbers.

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UK government drops plans for NFT made by Royal Mint

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Labour criticises Rishi Sunak ‘vanity project’ announced weeks before collapse in value of cryptocurrencies

The UK government has dropped its plans to produce a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, just under a year after it first announced the project.

In response to a question from the Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, the Treasury’s economic secretary, Andrew Griffith, confirmed the abandonment, saying: “In consultation with HM Treasury, the Royal Mint is not proceeding with the launch of a non-fungible token at this time but will keep this proposal under review.”

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Latitude Financial faces possible class action after millions affected by data breach

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Cyber-attack in which information of 14 million customers has been exposed dubbed Australia’s largest to date

Latitude Financial Services could face a class action lawsuit from some of the 14 million customers who have had their personal information exposed in what has been dubbed Australia’s largest data breach.

Law firms Gordon Legal and Hayden Stephens and Associates announced on Tuesday they would investigate a potential legal action against Latitude over the breach.

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Australian TV networks criticise Meta over ‘inadequate’ response time to damaging scam ads

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Seven, Nine and Ten tell Senate inquiry that scam ads on Facebook featuring their stars or fake news stories are causing harm to consumers

Australia’s broadcast industry group has condemned Facebook’s parent company Meta over its handling of scam ads featuring TV stars including David Koch and Karl Stefanovic, saying the company’s response time is inadequate and damages broadcaster reputations.

Free TV Australia – which represents broadcasters including Seven, Nine and Ten – said in a submission published this month to a Senate inquiry into digital platforms that scam ads featuring their networks’ stars without the network or star’s knowledge or authorisation, and fake news stories had been causing harm to consumers over the past few years.

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White House ‘very in favor’ of bill thought to target TikTok

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Platform has drawn close congressional scrutiny because the data of users could be available to the government of China

One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the federal commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said that the Joe Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but he stopped short of saying whether the president’s administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok in particular.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the proposed legislation has also picked up support in his congressional chamber from 11 Democrats – of which he is one – as well as 11 Republicans.

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Elon Musk memo suggests Twitter worth less than half of what he paid for it

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Calculation based on leaked offer to staff that implies firm valued at $20bn compared with $44bn he bought it for

Twitter is worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it six months ago having lost more than $20bn (£16.4bn) in value, according to calculations based on a leaked memo from the billionaire.

Musk suggested in memo to the social media company’s staff that it is now valued at less than $20bn. This compares with the $44bn he paid for it in October 2022.

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Twitter loses bid to throw out complaint by Australian Muslim group over ‘hateful’ content

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Queensland Human Rights Commission disagrees with assertion complaint is ‘lacking in substance’ and refers matter to tribunal over jurisdiction

Twitter has lost a bid to have a complaint by an advocacy group for Australian Muslims thrown out after they accused the platform of failing to take action against accounts that incite hatred.

The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (Aman) lodged a complaint to the Queensland Human Rights Commission (QHRC) last June. They argued that, as a publisher, Twitter Australia and Twitter Inc are responsible for content posted by a far-right account that has been referred to in the manifesto of a white supremacist and mass murderer.

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Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder who predicted rise of the PC, dies at 94

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Engineer, whose microchip forecast became known as ‘Moore’s Law’, foresaw mobile phones and home computers decades before they existed

Intel Corp co-founder Gordon Moore, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” predicted a steady rise in computing power for decades, has died at the age of 94, the company announced.

Intel and Moore’s family philanthropic foundation said he died on Friday surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii.

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TikTok hearing: CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before US Congress amid looming ban – as it happened

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App’s future in doubt as Biden administration threatens to ban it entirely in the country

Representative Diana DeGette is bringing up the WSJ report again and asking Chew for comment. He said that he’d have to get back to them because whether ByteDance would be forced to sell TikTok is still developing so he doesn’t have specifics but that Project Texas would protect US users no matter what.

“Does TikTok share user information … overseas?” Degette asked. Chew said in the past, yes but with Project Texas that would no longer be the case. He reiterated that the efforts to protect user data through Project Texas is more than any other company has done.

Representative Richard Hudson asked Chew about the reports that ByteDance employees have accessed user data of US journalists in order to investigate an internal leak of information. Chew says TikTok condemns this behavior.

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TikTok CEO grilled for over five hours on China, drugs and teen mental health

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Shou Zi Chew attempts to play down concerns over data and privacy as lawmakers call for ban on Chinese-owned app

The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users, at a testy congressional hearing on Thursday that came amid a bipartisan push to ban the app entirely in the US over national security concerns.

The hearing marked the first ever appearance before US lawmakers by a TikTok chief executive, and a rare public outing for the 4o-year-old Chew, who has remained largely out of the limelight as the social network’s popularity soars. TikTok now boasts tens of millions of US users, but lawmakers have long held concerns over China’s control over the app, which Chew repeatedly tried to assuage throughout the hearing. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said in Thursday’s testimony.

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Amazon UK staff plan more strikes as they reject pay rise as an ‘insult’

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Online retailer has increased minimum hourly pay for warehouse workers by 50p an hour to £11

Amazon workers in the UK are planning further strike action as they dismissed as “an insult” a 50p an hour increase to its minimum hourly pay for warehouse workers to £11.

The company said the pay rise announced on Wednesday, which will be implemented this weekend, meant minimum pay had risen by 10% in the past seven months, putting it ahead of the legal minimum wage for those aged 23 or over, which will be £10.42 an hour from April.

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Fertility apps collect unnecessary personal data and could sell it to third parties – study

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Apps in Australia gathered information about finances and housing which could be sold to advertisers, research by UNSW and Choice found

Four of Australia’s top 12 fertility apps are unnecessarily collecting highly sensitive information and have left the door open to selling the data to other companies, a study has found.

The study, conducted jointly by University of New South Wales law researcher Dr Katharine Kemp and consumer group Choice assessed the privacy policies of the 12 most popular fertility apps in Australia, which help people track menstrual cycles, ovulation, potential fertile windows, and stages of pregnancy.

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State-sponsored matchmaking app launched in China

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Service in Jiangxi uses data on single residents to build platform amid drive to boost marriage rate

For single people, dating fatigue is a universal phenomenon. Hours of swiping left can lead to despair at the potential matches in your area. One city in Jiangxi, a province in eastern China, reckons that it has come up with a solution for the lovelorn or love-weary: a state-sponsored matchmaking service.

Guixi, a city of about 640,000 people, has launched an app that uses data on single residents to build a matchmaking platform. The app is known as “Palm Guixi” and includes a platform for organising blind dates, according to China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper.

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‘We are a little bit scared’: OpenAI CEO warns of risks of artificial intelligence

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Sam Altman stresses need to guard against negative consequences of technology, as company releases new version GPT-4

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that developed the controversial consumer-facing artificial intelligence application ChatGPT, has warned that the technology comes with real dangers as it reshapes society.

Altman, 37, stressed that regulators and society need to be involved with the technology to guard against potentially negative consequences for humanity. “We’ve got to be careful here,” Altman told ABC News on Thursday, adding: “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.

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New Zealand to ban TikTok from government devices

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MPs were informed of the decision, which comes after similar moves by western allies, by parliamentary service on Friday

New Zealand’s parliament will ban TikTok from all parliamentary devices, amid mounting international security concerns surrounding the app.

The country’s MPs were informed by parliamentary service on Friday that the Chinese-owned video-sharing app would be blocked from all parliamentary devices at the end of the month, and were told via email that “the Service has determined that the risks are not acceptable in the current New Zealand parliament environment”.

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Billionaire Peter Thiel claims he has $50m of his own money stuck in SVB fall

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In the wake of the bank’s crisis, venture capitalists have been trading accusations over who is responsible for the collapse

Facing heat for his investment fund’s role in triggering the run on the Silicon Valley Bank last week, billionaire Peter Thiel told the Financial Times that he had $50m of his own money “stuck” in the bank when it collapsed.

Even as Thiel’s Founders Fund was advising companies to move their money from the bank, a decision that has been widely blamed for precipitating its failure, Thiel said that he kept a portion of his own $4bn personal fortune in the bank.

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