Category Archives: Technology

Biden talks up electric vehicle revolution – but is America ready to give up gas?

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President appears at Detroit auto show, where EVs are this year’s stars – but the road to electrification promises to be a bumpy one

Fresh off signing legislation aimed at propelling the nation’s electric vehicle (EV) transition, Joe Biden was in Detroit last week to reaffirm his support for electrification ahead of the opening of the US’s largest annual car show.

“The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified, whether you’re driving along the coast, or on I-75 here in Michigan,” he declared as the first North American International Auto Show since 2019 prepared to open its doors.

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Dutch town takes Twitter to court over unfounded satanic paedophile claims

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Bodegraven-Reeuwijk has been plagued by a conspiracy theory and wants tweets spreading it removed

A small Dutch town took Twitter to court on Friday to demand the social media company take down all messages relating to a supposed ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles alleged to have been active in the town in the 1980s.

Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, a town of about 35,000 inhabitants in the middle of the Netherlands, has been the focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, when three men started spreading unfounded stories about the abuse and murder of children they said took place in the town in the 1980s.

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Uber responding to ‘cybersecurity incident’ after hack

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Ride-hailing company confirms attack after hacker compromises Slack app and messages employees

Uber has been hacked in an attack that appears to have breached the ride-hailing company’s internal systems.

The California-based company confirmed it was responding to a “cybersecurity incident”, after the New York Times reported that a hack had accessed the company’s network and forced it to take several internal communications and engineering systems offline. The hacker claimed to be 18 years old, according to the report.

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Twitter whistleblower tells Senate of ‘egregious’ security failings by company

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Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, former head of security, says ‘any employee could take over the accounts of any senator in this room’

A Twitter whistleblower who accused the company of “egregious” security deficiencies testified in front of Congress on Tuesday, expanding on accusations of corporate failings he filed to federal agencies in August.

Former hacker Peiter “Mudge” Zatko worked as head of security at Twitter from 2020 until he was fired in 2022, and says in that time he witnessed “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate”.

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Coinbase employee mired in first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency

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Rohan Wahi, the brother of a former product manager at the company, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy charges

The brother of a former Coinbase Global Inc product manager pleaded guilty on Monday to a wire fraud conspiracy charge, in what US prosecutors have called the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency.

Nikhil Wahi, 26, admitted during a virtual court hearing before US district judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan that he made trades based on confidential Coinbase information.

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‘We’ve experienced an anomaly’: Bezos’s latest Blue Origin launch fails

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New Shepard rocket fails shortly after launch, but uncrewed capsule jettisons successfully

An uncrewed rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, failed shortly after launch in Texas on Monday morning, a potential setback for the Amazon founder’s wider ambitions of sending humans into orbit.

The malfunction of the New Shepard booster, a type of rocket that is similar to the one Blue Origin has used this year to send three crews of up to six people on suborbital flights, came 1min 4sec after launch and just as the vehicle was reaching its maximum dynamic pressure, known as “max q”.

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Insider cyber threats pose ‘significant’ risk to Australia’s defence force, brief warns

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Incoming brief to Albanese government cites risk of malicious employees accessing and inappropriately using systems

Defence is at “significant risk” from cyber insider threats, the department’s incoming brief to the Albanese government says.

That could include malicious, disgruntled or merely duped employees accessing Defence’s systems and threatening their security.

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US bans ‘advanced tech’ firms from building facilities in China for a decade

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Move comes as Biden administration outlines plans to boost domestic production of semiconductors

US technology firms that receive government funding will be banned from building “advanced technology facilities” in China for a decade, the Biden administration has announced, as it outlined plans to increase domestic production of semiconductors.

The requirements come under the US government’s near-$53bn (£46bn) plan to scale up manufacturing of semiconductor chips – the “brain” in every electronic device from cars to household appliances – which are predominantly produced in Asia.

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Uber’s ex-security chief faces landmark trial over data breach that hit 57m users

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Joe Sullivan’s trial is believed to be the first case of an executive facing criminal charges over such a breach

Uber’s former security officer, Joe Sullivan, is standing trial this week in what is believed to be the first case of an executive facing criminal charges in relation to a data breach.

The US district court in San Francisco will start hearing arguments on whether Sullivan, the former head of security at the ride share giant, failed to properly disclose a 2016 data breach affecting 57 million Uber riders and drivers around the world.

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Elon Musk demands Twitter trial delay over whistleblower concerns

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Twitter counters that Musk is using new claims to cover up buyer’s remorse as trial over broken deal set to begin next month

A trial over Elon Musk’s bid to end his $44bn deal for Twitter should be delayed by several weeks to allow him to investigate a whistleblower’s claims about security on the social media platform, Musk’s lawyer told a judge on Tuesday.

“Doesn’t justice demand a few weeks to look into this?” said Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, at a hearing in Wilmington, Delaware.

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Trouble for Trump’s Truth Social as investors back away from cash boost

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Injection of $1.3bn for former president’s media company looks set to be derailed because of lackluster investor support

Donald Trump’s beleaguered social media company is facing further financial turmoil after a long-awaited $1.3bn cash injection looks set to be derailed due to lackluster investor backing.

Shareholders of the special purpose acquisitions firm, which last year brokered a deal to take the Trump Media and Technology Group public, have not backed a one-year extension to complete the transaction, which threatens to spoil the merger.

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Instagram owner Meta fined €405m over handling of teens’ data

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Penalty follows investigation into Instagram setting that allowed teenagers to set up accounts that displayed contact details

Instagram owner Meta has been fined €405m (£349m) by the Irish data watchdog for letting teenagers set up accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses.

The Data Protection Commission confirmed the penalty after a two-year investigation into potential breaches of the European Union’s general data protection regulation (GDPR).

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Starbucks and Amazon accused of dragging their feet on union contracts

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After successful unionization drives, experts say companies will ‘fight to the end’ to prevent the next step

Over the past year, workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Apple have all achieved historic, hard-won union victories, but now many of these newly unionized workers fear they might face an even bigger challenge: negotiating a first union contract.

Exhibit A for that challenge is the slow pace of progress at Starbucks. Unions have won elections at more than 220 stores. Many baristas are upset that Starbucks has begun negotiations with workers at only three of them.

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US blocks sales of some AI chips to China as tech crackdown intensifies

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Ban on Nvidia and AMD sales marks a major escalation of US efforts to restrict China’s military technology capabilities as tensions bubble over Taiwan

Chip designer Nvidia said that US officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms’ ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition.

The company on Wednesday said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year.

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First-of-its-kind legislation will keep California’s children safer while online

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Bill approved Monday will require companies to install guardrails for those under age 18 and use higher privacy settings

California lawmakers passed first-of-its-kind legislation on Monday designed to improve the online safety and privacy protections for children.

The bill, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, will require firms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to install guardrails for users under the age of 18, including defaulting to higher privacy settings for minors and refraining from collecting location data for those users.

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FTC sues company for selling data that could be used to track consumers

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The lawsuit against data broker Kochava seeks to halt the sale of sensitive geolocation data and delete what was collected

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday sued Idaho-based data broker Kochava for selling geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices that could be used to track consumers.

The FTC said consumer data could be used to trace people’s movements to and from sensitive locations including “reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters, and addiction recovery facilities”.

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French tax officials use AI to spot 20,000 undeclared pools

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Scheme to be extended across the country after trial in nine departments led to extra €10m in tax receipts

French tax authorities using AI software have found thousands of undeclared private swimming pools, landing the owners with bills totalling about €10m.

The system, developed by Google and Capgemini, can identify pools on aerial images and cross-checks them with land registry databases. Launched as an experiment a year ago in nine French departments, it has uncovered 20,356 pools, the tax office said on Monday, and will be extended across the country.

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Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach lawsuit ends in 11th hour settlement

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Dramatic move shows Mark Zuckerberg ‘desperate to avoid being questioned over cover-up’, says Observer journalist who exposed scandal

Facebook has dramatically agreed to settle a lawsuit seeking damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica access to the private data of tens of millions of users, four years after the Observer exposed the scandal that mired the tech giant in repeated controversy.

A court filing reveals that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has in principle settled for an undisclosed sum a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the UK analysis firm.

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Facebook agrees to settle Cambridge Analytica data privacy lawsuit

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The four-year-old case alleged that the company had violated consumer privacy laws by sharing users’ personal data with third parties

Meta’s Facebook has in-principle agreed to settle a lawsuit in the San Francisco federal court seeking damages for letting third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, access the private data of users, a court filing showed.

The financial terms were not disclosed in the filing on Friday that asked the judge to put the class action suit on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalize a written settlement.

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Judge orders Twitter to turn over to Elon Musk data from 2021 users audit

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The company had said the information did not exist, but it sampled 9,000 users in order to estimate the number of spam accounts

Elon Musk may get access to Twitter data used in a 2021 audit of active users but other information the billionaire seeks in a bid to end his $44bn deal to buy the company were rejected as “absurdly broad”, a judge said on Thursday.

Twitter must turn over data from the 9,000 accounts sampled in the fourth quarter as part of its process to estimate the number of spam accounts.

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