News and discussions about technology

For most games, a license is either free or the cost of a medium-nice dinner.

Artificial intelligence employed by the Pentagon has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones, helped Ukraine fight Russia, predicts when Air Force jets need maintenance and tracks rivals’ satellites in space.

A soft robot replica solves a mystery about the evolution of movement.

Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly, moving us closer to fully private internet searches.

Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases

Forced to use real names on platforms like Weibo, Chinese influencers quit social media instead.

The Telescope Array in Utah's West Desert picked up a rare particle with 244 EeV energy.

I hope Windows 12 brings back point releases.

Three computer scientists have disproved a long-standing conjecture about a fundamental problem involving imperfect information.

Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Appin was a leading Indian cyberespionage firm that few people even knew existed. A Reuters investigation found that the company grew from an educational startup to a hack-for-hire powerhouse that stole secrets from business titans, politicians, military officials and wealthy elites around the globe. Appin alumni went on to form other firms that are still active today.

Sam Altman confronted a member over a research paper that discussed the company, while directors disagreed for months about who should fill board vacancies.

Archive link: https://archive.is/zCWIv

The Orion capsule's heat shield suffered some unexpected damage at the conclusion of the Artemis 1 mission.

Uno reverse.

The charge was similar to practices uncovered after the collapse of the second largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, last year.

There’s still so much we don’t know about social media’s impact. But Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg tells MIT Technology Review that he hopes new tools the company just released will start to change that.

X's complaint alleged that Media Matters "manipulated" the platform's algorithm to generate inorganic ad placements to form a "blatant smear campaign," but the complaint seemingly admitted that no statements that Media Matters published were false. Media Matters will likely argue that advertisers could interpret its reporting however they felt would be best for their business.

X Corp. is hoping to convince the court that Media Matters intended to portray rare occurrences of ads being placed next to antisemitic content as a problem occurring frequently, but Media Matters' report does not make such a claim. Instead, Media Matters' report only noted that X "has been placing ads for major brands" next to "content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party." The report called out X CEO Linda Yaccarino for claiming that “brands are now ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ potentially toxic content" and simply said "that certainly isn’t the case for at least five major brands."

Business arrangements and opaque contracts have broken the pitch of the smart home. Better regulation can fix this problem.

Seriously, avoid Nothing Chats and check your Apple ID.

Google has officially announced plans to gradually eliminate third-party cookies, a key aspect of its Privacy Sandbox initiative.

For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug.

Sam Altman, the now former CEO of OpenAI, has departed his role and is leaving its board, according to a company post on Friday. But questions about his role at other entities like Worldcoin, the crypto project he co-founded, remain up in the air as its token falls on the news.

Seven months after a first attempt ended in a spectacular explosion, SpaceX's Starship spacecraft blasted off for a second test flight. The launch was presumed to have failed shortly after the ship reached space.

Social Links, a surveillance company that had thousands of accounts banned for mass-scraping Facebook and Instagram, is now using ChatGPT to make sense of data it grabs from social media.

Archive link without paywall: https://archive.is/vXSyR

US firms, including Apple and Disney, are reportedly suspending ads on the Elon Musk-owned site.