Category Archives: Technology

MPs and peers ask information commissioner to investigate TikTok

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Letter argues that Chinese-owned video-sharing app could be in breach of UK law

A cross-party group of MPs and peers have asked the information commissioner to investigate whether the Chinese-owned TikTok’s handling of personal information is in breach of UK law.

The letter from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) argues that TikTok cannot be compliant with data protection rules – and comes just hours after the UK announced a ban on the popular video-sharing app appearing on ministers’ and officials’ government-owned phones.

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Will UK follow US in demanding TikTok be sold by its Chinese owner?

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TikTok will be concerned Rishi Sunak will match each upward ratchet in pressure from his allies

When asked this week whether the UK would ban TikTok on government phones, Rishi Sunak’s response signalled a change in stance: “We look at what our allies are doing.”

Previously ministers had seemed sanguine, even saying that whether or not the app stayed on someone’s phone should be a matter of “personal choice”.

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UK bans TikTok from government mobile phones

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Move brings Britain in line with US and Europe and reflects worsening relations with China

Britain is to ban the Chinese owned video-sharing app TikTok from ministers’ and civil servants’ mobile phones, bringing the UK in line with the US and the European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing.

The decision marks a sharp U-turn from the UK’s previous position and comes a few hours after TikTok said its owners, ByteDance, had been told by Washington to sell the app or face a possible ban in the country.

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Chinese ChatGPT rival from search engine firm Baidu fails to impress

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Shares plummet after Ernie Bot AI chatbot software falls short of expectations at unveiling in Beijing

The Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after it presented its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.

The AI-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, prompting widespread fears over cheating or of professions becoming obsolete.

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Contest launched to decipher Herculaneum scrolls using 3D X-ray software

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Global research teams who can improve AI and accelerate decoding could win $250,000 in prizes

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa.

Now, researchers are launching a global contest to read the charred papyri after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence programme can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the fragile, unrolled documents.

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OpenAI says new model GPT-4 is more creative and less likely to invent facts

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Latest version can take images as inputs and improves upon many of the criticisms users had, but will still ‘hallucinate’ facts

The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of the groundbreaking AI system that powers ChatGPT, which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor.

Calling it “our most capable and aligned model yet”, OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said the new system is a “multimodal” model, which means it can accept images as well as text as inputs, allowing users to ask questions about pictures. The new version can handle massive text inputs and can remember and act on more than 20,000 words at once, letting it take an entire novella as a prompt.

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Zuckerberg’s Meta to lay off another 10,000 employees

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Restructuring, as part of the company’s ‘Year of Efficiency’, also sees 5,000 unfulfilled job adverts closed without hiring

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is laying off another 10,000 people and instituting a further hiring freeze as part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency”, the chief executive announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

The restructuring, which also sees a further 5,000 unfilled job adverts closed without hiring, comes less than six months after the company announced another wave of 11,000 redundancies. At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees globally, with a substantial portion of that hiring occurring in the middle of the Covid pandemic.

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TechScape: How Silicon Valley Bank UK was saved

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In this week’s newsletter: While its quick slip into financial hardship has left American bankers reeling, its UK division is surprisingly fine. But the tech sector isn’t out of trouble yet

Last week, if you had heard of Silicon Valley Bank UK, you probably worked in tech. The bank had only been spun out in to a separate entity last summer, after its few thousand corporate customers pushed it over a regulatory threshold, and while SVB had grown to almost hold £10bn of deposits, with £5.5bn of outstanding loans, it was very much a specialist player.

The bank’s selling point was that it understood the needs of the “innovation economy”, something that high street banks frequently failed to acknowledge. A startup might have zero revenue, yet hold £5m in the bank and have 10 employees, a profile fundamentally different from a typical small business. As a result, trying to get something as simple as a corporate credit card could be a surprising hassle, and when SVB arrived on the UK scene, it was enthusiastically adopted by founders and venture capitalists alike.

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Why Silicon Valley Bank was so important to UK tech sector

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SVB specialised in high-growth startups, solving problems other lenders would not touch

Silicon Valley Bank’s name isn’t just hollow branding. Founded in Santa Clara in the 1980s, in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech cluster, it was a regional bank that served the local economy.

As that local economy became the engine of American growth, SVB – which collapsed on Friday – grew alongside it. It remained a tech specialist, a limitation that allowed it to continue to be regulated as a regional bank and so avoid the stricter requirements piled on larger competitors, but otherwise spread across the US and the world.

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USD Coin value falls after revealing $3.3bn held at Silicon Valley Bank

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The stablecoin fell as low as $0.87 as Circle broke the news that its reserves were at the collapsed lender

The value of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC), slumped to an all-time low on Saturday after Circle, the US firm behind the coin, revealed that $3.3bn of the reserves backing it were held at Silicon Valley Bank.

USDC is a stablecoin – cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value – USDC’s value is supposed to mimic the dollar. But the coin broke its 1:1 dollar peg and fell as low as $0.87 on Saturday morning.

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TikTok unveils European data security plan amid calls for US ban

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Move comes as White House backs bill that could give it power to ban Chinese-owned app nationwide

TikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app.

The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company.

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Models and robots share the runway at Coperni fashion show

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Boston Dynamics’ canine automatons steal show in Paris as maison stages modern fable, designers say

Welcome to the age of the super-robot.

With their impossible proportions, thousand-yard stares and supernatural ability to walk in 5in heels, catwalk models often appear a different species to regular humans.

But it was the models, including Kate Moss’s daughter Lila, who played the role of vulnerable, flesh and blood creatures at the Coperni fashion show in Paris, where they shared the stage with five robots.

Coperni partnered with Boston Dynamics for the first fashion show in which robots, rather than models, were the star turn.

As the lights went down, four pairs of green eyes began to flash in the darkness. When the “Spots” – Boston Dynamic’s robot canines, in tarantula stripes of yellow and black – stalked into the room, there was an audible collective intake of breath as each creature seemed to lock eyes with, and approach, an audience member.

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UK chip designer Arm chooses US-only listing in blow to Rishi Sunak

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PM had held talks with firm’s owner SoftBank in effort to make London first choice for tech flotations

The Cambridge-based chip designer Arm is to pursue a US-only listing this year, dealing a major blow to Rishi Sunak’s ambitions to make London the first choice for tech company flotations.

The company, which is owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, confirmed its preferred plan of seeking a US-only main listing later this year, spurning the UK despite heavy lobbying by successive prime ministers.

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China leading US in technology race in all but a few fields, thinktank finds

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Year-long study finds China leads in 37 of 44 areas it tracked, with potential for a monopoly in areas such as nanoscale materials and synthetic biology

The United States and other western countries are losing the race with China to develop advanced technologies and retain talent, with Beijing potentially establishing a monopoly in some areas, a new report has said.

China leads in 37 of 44 technologies tracked in a year-long project by thinktank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The fields include electric batteries, hypersonics and advanced radio-frequency communications such as 5G and 6G.

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Romania PM unveils AI ‘adviser’ to tell him what people think in real time

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Nicolae Ciuca says bot named Ion is a world first and that using artificial intelligence is ‘an obligation’ to make better decisions

Romania’s prime minister has presented his “new honorary adviser” – an artificial intelligence assistant named “Ion” that Nicolae Ciuca hailed as the first of its type.

Developed by Romanian researchers, Ion’s main task will be to scan social networks to inform the government “in real time of Romanians’ proposals and wishes”, Ciuca said on Wednesday.

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House committee advances legislation to ban TikTok over security concerns

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Republican committee chair describes Chinese-owned social app as a ‘spy balloon in your phone’

A powerful US House committee has applied further pressure to TikTok by backing legislation that could give Joe Biden the power to ban the social video app.

The House foreign affairs committee voted on Wednesday along party lines to grant the administration new powers to ban the Chinese-owned app as well as other apps believed to pose security risks. The fate of the measure is still uncertain and it would need to be passed by the full House and Senate before it can go to Biden.

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Canada bans TikTok on government devices over security risks

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EU and parts of US already block access to Chinese-owned app amid concerns over data privacy and security

Canada has joined the US and EU in enacting a sweeping ban preventing TikTok from being installed on all government-issued mobile devices, as western officials take action over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, did not rule out further action. “I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones, many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” he said.

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Meta-funded online tool lets people remove their explicit images from the internet

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Take It Down allows anyone to anonymously generate a digital fingerprint of the image they want deleted, without uploading it

“Once you send that photo, you can’t take it back,” goes the warning to teenagers, often ignoring the reality that many teens send explicit images of themselves under duress, or without understanding the consequences.

A new online tool aims to give some control back to teens, or people who were once teens, and take down explicit images and videos of themselves from the internet.

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German minister warns of ‘massive’ danger from Russian hackers

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Nancy Faeser says Ukraine war has exacerbated German cybersecurity concerns

Germany’s interior minister has warned of a “massive danger” facing Germany from Russian sabotage, disinformation and spying attacks.

Nancy Faeser said Vladimir Putin was putting huge resources into cyber-attacks as a key part of his war of aggression. “The cybersecurity concerns have been exacerbated by the war. The attacks of pro-Russia hackers have increased,” she said in an interview with the news network Funke Mediengruppe published on Sunday.

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Rishi Sunak faces calls to ban TikTok use by government officials

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PM under pressure to follow EU and US in taking step over fears Chinese-owned app poses cybersecurity risk

Rishi Sunak has been urged to ban government officials from using TikTok in line with moves by the EU and US, amid growing cybersecurity fears over China.

Officials in Europe and the US have been told to limit the use of the Chinese-owned social video app over concerns that data can be accessed by Beijing.

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