Apple has criticised powers in the UK’s Online Safety Bill that could be used to force encrypted messaging tools like iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal to scan messages for child abuse material. Its intervention comes as 80 organisations and tech experts have written to Technology Minister Chloe Smith urging a rethink Read more…
In 2016, an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo from Google’s DeepMind AI lab made history by defeating a champion player of the board game Go. Now Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s cofounder and CEO, says his engineers are using techniques from AlphaGo to make an AI system dubbed Gemini that will be Read more…
96,000 American students took this year’s [Java-based] AP Computer Science A test. And more than a third — a full 34% — missed question #4. It asks test-takers to write two methods for the class BoxOfCandy — one that moves a Candy object to the first row (of a column), Read more…
The Paris Air Show, where developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (or eVTOLs) demonstrated their surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft. And in one year the Paris region “is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Read more…
Researchers at Oxford and elsewhere developed a method that figures out the most likely number and size of dimension in which to format a string of bits, with applications to interpreting messages from extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), if we were to receive them. The new method “looks at every possible combination Read more…
Yevgeny V. Prigozhin heads the Russia-backed paramilitary Wagner Group — and was also “a close confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin until he launched an alleged coup,” according to Wikipedia. The New York Times notes Prigozhin’s remarkable ability to bypass government censorship: Despite years of creeping Kremlin control over the Read more…
A US judge has fined two lawyers and a law firm $5,000 after fake citations generated by ChatGPT were submitted in a court filing. A district judge in Manhattan ordered Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay the fine after fictitious legal research Read more…