Unmasking Truths Unraveling Stories
Unmasking Truths Unraveling Stories
As Twitter, the social media company struggled to find its influencer niche. While YouTube had pranksters and beauty gurus, and Instagram had fashionistas and travel bloggers, Twitter had grouchy journalists, political flame wars, and niche humor. Before Mr. Musk took over, the company dabbled in different ways to attract creators. It provided funding for aspiring […]
With its streamlined curves and glow-in-the-dark sound system, the silver Lamborghini Huracán Performante was the stuff of teenage fantasy: $350,000 of aerodynamic metals and lightweight upholstery, packed into a taut and powerful body. Ben Armstrong loved it dearly. When he started shopping for a Lamborghini, Mr. Armstrong, a cryptocurrency evangelist with more than one million […]
Universal’s concerns are real, and reflect some of the most urgent challenges in the music business today: artists’ need to make a decent living, the parameters of modern licensing contracts, the role of artificial intelligence. And in recent years music companies have begun to adjust to the reality that music fans’ attention is not solely […]
“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered.” He said that his company was working so that no one else would have to do so, and did not address Meta’s role. The leaders of Meta and TikTok took most […]
Christopher A. Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned on Wednesday that China was ramping up an extensive hacking operation geared at taking down the United States’ power grid, oil pipelines and water systems in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. Mr. Wray, appearing before a House subcommittee on China, offered an […]
Law enforcement officials are bracing for an explosion of material generated by artificial intelligence that realistically depicts children being sexually exploited, deepening the challenge of identifying victims and combating such abuse. The concerns come as Meta, a primary resource for the authorities in flagging sexually explicit content, has made it tougher to track criminals by […]
The talent agency WME announced a partnership with the technology firm Vermillio on Tuesday that it hopes will protect its clients from having their likenesses misused through artificial intelligence technology. Vermillio has created a platform, Trace ID, that could insulate WME clients from thefts of their likeness and intellectual property by using A.I. technology to […]
For more than a decade, the pioneers of the cryptocurrency industry envisioned digital coins as an alternate branch of finance, a renegade sector that would operate outside the reach of big banks and government regulators. But as digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ether became more mainstream, the crypto industry collided with a 1946 Supreme Court […]
Amazon said on Monday that it was abandoning plans to buy iRobot, the maker of the self-driving Roomba vacuum, after regulators raised concerns the deal would hurt competition. The announcement is a rare admission of defeat by Amazon, which has in recent years acquired an eclectic mix of companies such as Whole Foods and MGM […]
casey newton This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions. You see WWE is coming to Netflix? kevin roose I did. casey newton Yeah. kevin roose Are […]
Ring, a home security camera company owned by Amazon, said that it would stop letting police departments request users’ footage in its app amid longstanding concerns from privacy advocates about the company’s relationship with law enforcement. Eric Kuhn, the general manager of subscriptions and software for the Ring app Neighbors, announced on Wednesday that the […]
David L. Mills, an internet pioneer who developed and, for decades, implemented the timekeeping protocol used by financial markets, power grids, satellites and billions of computers to make sure they run simultaneously, earning him a reputation as the internet’s “Father Time,” died on Jan. 17 at his home in Newark, Del. He was 85. His […]
For decades, the Copyright Office has been a small and sleepy office within the Library of Congress. Each year, the agency’s 450 employees register roughly half a million copyrights, the ownership rights for creative works, based on a two-centuries-old law. In recent months, however, the office has suddenly found itself in the spotlight. Lobbyists for […]
The genetic testing company 23andMe is being accused in a class-action lawsuit of failing to protect the privacy of customers whose personal information was exposed last year in a data breach that affected nearly seven million profiles. The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in federal court in San Francisco, also accused the company of […]
When Apple blocked the Beeper Mini app last month from giving Android users access to the tech giant’s messaging service, Beeper encouraged customers to use their Mac computers instead to connect and continue sending messages. But in recent days, dozens of Beeper customers have reported that they no longer have access to Apple’s messaging service […]
Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images. One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, […]
The Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry on Thursday into the multibillion-dollar investments by Microsoft, Amazon and Google in the artificial intelligence start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic, broadening the regulator’s efforts to corral the power the tech giants can have over A.I. These deals have allowed the big companies to form deep ties with their smaller […]
Tesla’s profit from sales of electric cars slumped in the last three months of last year because of price cuts intended to thwart increasingly intense competition, the company said on Wednesday as it warned of a tough year ahead. Profit in the fourth quarter nearly doubled to $7.9 billion, up from $3.7 billion a year […]
After years of anticipation, Apple’s first major new product in nearly a decade has arrived. The $3,500 Vision Pro, a face computer that resembles ski goggles, will be released next week. So, what can we expect? The device, which includes high-resolution displays and sensors that track eye movements and hand gestures, is one of Apple’s […]
For four years, the computer scientist Trieu Trinh has been consumed with something of a meta-math problem: how to build an A.I. model that solves geometry problems from the International Mathematical Olympiad, the annual competition for the world’s most mathematically attuned high-school students. Last week Dr. Trinh successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on this topic […]
Voters in New Hampshire received robocall messages over the weekend in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to impersonate President Biden’s, urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office. The fake recordings, which told listeners that “your vote makes a difference in November, not this […]
When Augustin Lignier, a professional photographer in Paris, was in graduate school, he began to ponder the point of picture-taking in the modern world: Why did so many of us feel compelled to photograph our lives and share those images online? It was not a novel question, but it led Mr. Lignier to a surprising […]
On the volcanic slopes of Hawaii’s Big Island, hundreds of farmers in the Kona region produce one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Those farmers recently won a series of settlements — totaling more than $41 million — after a nearly five-year legal battle with distributors and retailers that were accused of using […]
It is hard to believe that it has only been about a year since travelers started dabbling in ChatGPT-created itineraries. This year will bring even more experimentation and innovation. “A.I. is like a teenage intern,” said Chad Burt, co-owner of the travel adviser network Outside Agents, “better, smarter, faster than you, but you need to […]
Back in the 1980s, it seemed as if everyone with a spare quarter was playing the arcade game Donkey Kong, scooting up ramps and climbing ladders while avoiding barrels hurled by a giant ape. For most players, the video game provided a few minutes of excitement before inevitable defeat. But a handful of top players […]
As Teslas and other electric vehicles dazzled car buyers with futuristic technology and dreams of a gasoline-free future, hybrid cars began to seem like yesterday’s news. Sales of the Toyota Prius, the standard-bearer for hybrids, fell 85 percent over a decade. Now, a slowdown in the growth of electric car sales has led General Motors, […]
An elite hacking group sponsored by Russian intelligence gained access to the emails of some of Microsoft’s senior executives beginning in late November, the company disclosed in a blog post and regulatory filing on Friday. Microsoft said it had discovered the intrusion a week ago and was still investigating. The hackers appeared to focus on […]
When Apple released the Apple Watch in 2015, it was business as usual for a company whose iPhone updates had become cultural touchstones. Before the watch went on sale, Apple gave early versions of it to celebrities like Beyoncé, featured it in fashion publications like Vogue and streamed a splashy event on the internet trumpeting […]
A spacecraft that was headed to the surface of the moon has ended up back at Earth instead, burning up in the planet’s atmosphere on Thursday afternoon. Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh announced in a post on the social network X that it lost communication with its Peregrine moon lander at 3:50 p.m. Eastern time, which […]
A private astronaut mission is scheduled to launch on Thursday to the International Space Station. But unlike on earlier such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists paying their own way to orbit. Instead, three nations — Italy, Sweden and Turkey — are taking advantage of new commercial possibilities to send astronauts from […]
Apple said on Wednesday that it would begin selling its flagship smartwatches without the ability to detect people’s blood-oxygen levels. The tech giant will drop the feature starting Thursday after losing a patent case over its blood-oxygen measurement technology two months ago. The court ordered Apple to stop selling its Apple Watch Series 9 and […]
I’m not especially powerful; it doesn’t matter which in-jokes include me and which dinners I’m invited to. But it’s instructive to think of the digital rooms being constructed by those who are. We often get glimpses of such group chats in court filings, the familiar blue-and-white bubbles of iMessage screenshotted and laid out as evidence. […]
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, stunned investors by demanding that the company’s board give him shares worth more than $80 billion if it wants him to continue developing products based on artificial intelligence. In the latest demonstration of his disregard for conventional ways of communicating with investors, Mr. Musk said late Monday on […]
Synopsys, a key Silicon Valley supplier to the chip industry, said on Tuesday that it had agreed to pay $35 billion for Ansys, a Pennsylvania company that makes software used to simulate and analyze product designs for electronics manufacturers, car makers, defense contractors and others. The deal, which was struck for a combination of cash […]
Many modern cars are internet-connected and have apps that allow an owner to see a car’s location, turn it on remotely, honk its horn and even adjust the temperature. These apps for car control and tracking are designed for convenience, but a New York Times article last month detailed how they have been weaponized in […]
Breana Newton, a legal coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts regularly about books on TikTok, was one of the people who responded to Ms. Blalock’s video. “I am going to show you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her own. “Ready?” She then gives viewers a brief tour of her home, […]
Discord, the social chat and messaging start-up beloved by gamers, told employees on Thursday that it would cut 17 percent of its staff, adding to the string of recent jobs reductions by tech firms. Roughly 170 jobs will be affected by the layoffs, according to an internal memo sent by Jason Citron, Discord’s founder and […]
California has long championed renewable energy, but a change in the state’s policies last year has led to a sharp decline in the installation of residential rooftop solar in the state. Thousands of companies — including installers, manufacturers and distributors — are reeling from the new policy, which took effect in April and greatly reduced […]
More than $4 billion of a newly approved investment product tied to Bitcoin changed hands in the first day of trading on Thursday, as cryptocurrency enthusiasts celebrated a watershed moment for the industry. Eleven of the products, known as exchange-traded funds, or E.T.F.s, started trading on popular platforms such as the Nasdaq a day after […]
The rental car company Hertz will be selling about one-third of the electric vehicles in its fleet after they lost value more quickly than expected, the company said on Thursday. The drop in value is a blow to the company’s efforts to replace gasoline vehicles with cars that do not produce tailpipe emissions. The electric […]
For more than a decade, Apple was the stock market’s undisputed king. It first overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable public company in 2011 and held the title almost without interruption. But a transfer of power has begun. On Friday, Microsoft surpassed Apple, claiming the crown after its market value surged by more […]
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube Casey is taking his newsletter Platformer off Substack, as criticism over the company’s handling of pro-Nazi content grows. Then, The Wall Street Journal spoke with witnesses who said that Elon Musk had used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, worrying some directors and board […]
The Justice Department charged eBay on Thursday with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in a rare criminal case against a well-known Silicon Valley company. The charges, which will be dropped under a deferred prosecution agreement if eBay maintains a good record for the next three years, stem from actions taken by the company […]
When experts in artificial intelligence recently showed a gathering of state legislators a deepfake image that had been generated by A.I. in early 2022, depicting former presidents Donald J. Trump and Barack Obama playing one-on-one basketball, the crowd chuckled at how rudimentary it was. Then the panel brought out a fake video that was made […]
Google laid off hundreds of workers in several divisions Wednesday night, seeking to lower expenses as it focuses on artificial intelligence and joining a wave of other companies cutting tech jobs this year. The Silicon Valley company laid off employees in its core engineering division, as well as those working on the Google Assistant, a […]
When Microsoft opened an advanced research lab in Beijing in 1998, it was a time of optimism about technology and China. The company hired hundreds of researchers for the lab, which pioneered Microsoft’s work in speech, image and facial recognition and the kind of artificial intelligence that later gave rise to online chatbots like ChatGPT. […]
For 15 minutes, the cryptocurrency industry was euphoric. At 4:11 p.m. on Tuesday, the official X account of the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that regulators had approved a new investment product tracking the price of Bitcoin, an apparent victory for the embattled crypto industry. Coinbase, a giant crypto exchange, posted a celebratory banner. Crypto […]
This time of year, everyone asks what you like least about your life, but they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?” My biggest regret of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone settings. My Apple Screen Time reports regularly clocked in at […]
The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter. The agency is focused on […]
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube The New York Times sued OpenAI last week for copyright infringement. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton walk through the lawsuit and discuss the stakes for news publishers. Then, they talk about Apple’s “walled garden,” which is facing threats from both regulators and 16-year-olds. Finally, […]
Several prominent museums have been unable to display their collections online since a cyberattack hit a prominent technological service provider that helps hundreds of cultural organizations show their works digitally and manage internal documents. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American […]
Ms. Cox bought her son a version of a Nintendo console called a RetroN, which used the same hardware as the original Nintendo console, from a pawnshop, as well as an old cathode-ray tube television to help him get started. In a given week, Willis said, he plays about 20 hours of Tetris. “I’m actually […]
After enjoying a strong rebound in sales in 2023, the auto industry appears headed for slower growth this year as consumers struggle with elevated interest rates and high prices for new cars and light trucks. Edmunds, a market researcher, expects the industry to sell 15.7 million vehicles this year. That would amount to a modest […]
The boom in artificial intelligence tools that draw on troves of content from across the internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law. Authors and a leading photo agency have brought suit over the past year, contending that their intellectual property was illegally used to train A.I. systems, which can produce humanlike prose […]
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. devoted his annual year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary, issued on Sunday, to the positive role that artificial intelligence can play in the legal system — and the threats it poses. His report did not address the Supreme Court’s rocky year, including its adoption of an […]
Crucial Events on the Path Back to the Moon NASA wants to put American astronauts on the moon’s surface in the years ahead with the Artemis III mission. Before that can happen, though, many things have to go right, and two of the most important are scheduled for 2024. The first is the Artemis II […]
Jerry Yu reúne las características de lo que los chinos llaman un rico de segunda generación. Estudió en una escuela preparatoria de Connecticut. Vive en un condominio de Manhattan que le vendió Jeffrey R. Immelt, exdirector ejecutivo de General Electric, en 8 millones de dólares. Y es el dueño mayoritario de una mina de bitcóin […]
When Thomas Wong set foot in the United States Embassy in Beijing this summer for a new diplomatic posting, it was vindication after years of battling the State Department over a perceived intelligence threat — himself. Diplomatic Security officers had informed him when he joined the foreign service more than a decade ago that they […]
In the last few months, Beth Fletcher, a 39-year-old photographer in Derbyshire, England, built a small following on TikTok by recapping and analyzing the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” When the latest season ended in early December, Ms. Fletcher was at a loss for content because, she said, […]
After almost 10 years of marriage, Christine Dowdall wanted out. Her husband was no longer the charming man she had fallen in love with. He had become narcissistic, abusive and unfaithful, she said. After one of their fights turned violent in September 2022, Ms. Dowdall, a real estate agent, fled their home in Covington, La., […]
Meet the Millers, George and Roxanne, proprietors of the world’s largest collection of mechanical puzzles: physical objects that a puzzler holds and manipulates while seeking a solution. In total, the Miller collection — an accumulation of collections, and collections of collections — amounts to more than 80,000 puzzles. It comprises some five thousand Rubik’s Cubes, […]
For months, some of the biggest players in the U.S. media industry have been in confidential talks with OpenAI on a tricky issue: the price and terms of licensing their content to the artificial intelligence company. The curtain on those negotiations was pulled back this week when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft […]
For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime […]
Neri Diaz thought he was ready for a crucial juncture in California’s ambitious plans, closely watched in other states and around the world, to phase out diesel-powered trucks. His company, Harbor Pride Logistics, acquired 14 electric trucks this year to work alongside 32 diesel vehicles, in anticipation of a rule that says that after Monday, […]
The Chinese spies wanted more. In meetings during the pandemic with Chinese technology contractors, they complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officers and intelligence operatives in Beijing’s embassy district fell short of their needs. The spies asked for an artificial intelligence program that would create instant dossiers on every person of interest in […]
After the FTX cryptocurrency exchange filed for bankruptcy last year, Thomas Braziel, an investor who specializes in collapsed businesses, started brokering an unusual kind of transaction: a market to profit from FTX’s downfall. Mr. Braziel put one of his clients in touch with a large financial firm that had lost nearly $100 million when FTX […]
In the tech industry, 2023 was a year of transformation. Spurred by the success of last year’s breakout tech star, ChatGPT, Silicon Valley’s giants rushed to turn themselves into artificial intelligence companies, jamming generative A.I. features into their products and racing to build their own, more powerful A.I. models. They did so while navigating an […]
Jerry Yu has the trappings of what the Chinese call second-generation rich. He boasts a Connecticut prep-school education. He lives in a Manhattan condominium bought for $8 million from Jeffrey R. Immelt, the former General Electric chief executive. And he is the majority owner of a Bitcoin mine in Texas, acquired last year for more […]
A federal judge on Friday gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit against the social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, in which workers claim that the company promised but never paid millions of dollars in bonuses. In June, Mark Schobinger, a former senior director of compensation for Twitter who lives in Texas, sued the […]
After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software start-up HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company’s revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin’s cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created […]
Apple has opened negotiations in recent weeks with major news and publishing organizations, seeking permission to use their material in the company’s development of generative artificial intelligence systems, according to four people familiar with the discussions. The technology giant has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles, […]
Under pressure from critics who say Substack is profiting from newsletters that promote hate speech and racism, the company’s founders said Thursday that they would not ban Nazi symbols and extremist rhetoric from the platform. “I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either — we wish no one held those […]
For years, Ben Black’s phone annoyed his family. It was the only Android device in a family message group with eight iPhones. Because of him, videos and photos would arrive in low resolution and there would be green bubbles of text amid bubbles of blue. But a new app called Beeper Mini gave him the […]
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed sweeping changes to bolster the key federal rule that has protected children’s privacy online, in one of the most significant attempts by the U.S. government to strengthen consumer privacy in more than a decade. The changes are intended to fortify the rules underlying the Children’s Online Privacy Protection […]
“Buy now, pay later” loans are helping to fuel a record-setting holiday shopping season. Economists worry they could also be masking and exacerbating cracks in Americans’ financial well-being. The loans, which allow consumers to pay for purchases in installments, often interest-free, have soared in popularity because of high prices and interest rates. Retailers have used […]
A man involved in a brazen plot to manipulate the stock price of a New Jersey deli’s parent company pleaded guilty to securities fraud on Wednesday. James T. Patten, 64, of North Carolina, admitted to orchestrating a series of misleading trades in an apparent bid to enrich himself and two co-defendants in U.S. District Court […]
On Dec. 11, NASA engineers anxiously gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to view a cat video, wondering if it would be in the pristine high definition for which they had hoped. To their relief, it was. For the first time, high-definition video — this one of a lab employee’s cat named […]
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, engineers at Convex, a Russian telecommunications company, needed to find American equipment to transmit data to the country’s feared intelligence service. But no gear was flowing in after Western nations imposed sweeping new trade limits on Russia. Convex’s employees soon found a solution. While Cisco, a U.S. tech […]
The founder of the electric truck company Nikola was sentenced to four years in prison on Monday in a fraud case that highlights the financial carnage left behind by a crop of electric vehicle start-ups and their promoters. A federal judge in Manhattan, Edgardo Ramos, sentenced Trevor Milton, Nikola’s founder and former chief executive, after […]
The European Union on Monday announced a formal investigation into X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, for failure to counter illicit content and disinformation, a lack of transparency about advertising and “deceptive” design practices. The inquiry is perhaps the most substantial regulatory move to date against X since it scaled back its […]
Parents, schools and even attorneys general have increasingly been raising concerns about how TikTok may be hooking children to the app and serving them inappropriate content. But some lawyers say bringing legal action against the company could be more difficult after TikTok quietly changed its U.S. terms of service this summer. In July, TikTok removed […]
For years, entertainment company executives happily licensed classic movies and television shows to Netflix. Both sides enjoyed the spoils: Netflix received popular content like “Friends” and Disney’s “Moana,” which satisfied its ever-growing subscriber base, and it sent bags of cash back to the companies. But around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear […]
Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99. Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou […]
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube A jury decided the Google Play store unfairly stifles competition and maintains a monopoly. Kevin and Casey discuss how the ruling could reshape the digital economy. Then, a growing movement of developers and enthusiasts of artificial intelligence want the technology developed as quickly as […]
In addition to Shopify, chatbots have come out over the past 12 months from Instacart, the delivery company; Mercari, a resale platform; Carrefour, a retailer; and Kering, which owns Gucci and Balenciaga. Walmart, Mastercard and Signet Jewelers are also testing chatbots, which may become publicly available as soon as next year. “In a way, it’s […]
A Republican-led campaign against researchers who study disinformation online has zeroed in on the most prominent American government agency dedicated to countering propaganda and other information operations from terrorists and hostile nations. The agency, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped […]
Last December, as high school and college students began trying out a new A.I. chatbot called ChatGPT to manufacture writing assignments, fears of mass cheating spread across the United States. To hinder bot-enabled plagiarism, some large public schools districts — including those in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York City — quickly blocked ChatGPT on […]
Every year, Michelle Miller-McNair asks her three children to make lists of what they want for Christmas. “They usually write it down on a piece of paper or send me a link to a website,” she said. But this holiday season, Ms. Miller-McNair, a comedian in Mooresville, N.C., received something else: An 18-slide PowerPoint presentation […]
Crisis as Opportunity In Amsterdam, Mr. Brown described Praxis as his response to being trapped inside his apartment during Covid, mixed with his longstanding interest in colonial America. “Ready to join America in 1776?” reads a company pitch deck. In 2022, Mr. Brown had been more specific about his motivation to build a city from […]
Vincent van Gogh has been surprisingly busy for a dead man. His paintings have featured in major museum exhibitions this year. Immersive theaters in cities like Miami and Milan bloom with projections of his swirling landscapes. His designs now appear on everything from sneakers to doormats, and a recent collaboration with the Pokémon gaming franchise […]
The Biden administration announced on Monday that BAE Systems, a defense contractor, will receive the first federal grant from a new program aimed at shoring up American manufacturing of critical semiconductors. The company is expected to receive a $35 million grant to quadruple its domestic production of a type of chip used in F-15 and […]
The price of Bitcoin is surging again. Major financial firms are showing renewed interest in digital currencies. And crypto fanatics are celebrating the end of a long period of depressed prices and business collapses. But the sudden explosion of optimism has come at a turbulent moment for the cryptocurrency industry. The last time crypto prices […]
QR codes, the square bar codes that can be scanned and read by smartphones, are seemingly used everywhere: to board flights, enter concerts and look at restaurant menus. But scammers trying to steal personal information have also been using QR codes to direct people to harmful websites that can harvest their data, wrote Alvaro Puig, […]
Elon Musk said on Saturday that he would consider allowing the right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to return to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Jones was banned from Twitter in 2018 after posting harassing messages, a month after other tech companies like Facebook and YouTube also suspended his […]
The Kremlin has unleashed a new weapon in its information war with the West: the fake celebrity cameo. “Hi, Vladimir, Elijah here,” the actor Elijah Wood said in a video packaged to seem as if Mr. Wood were addressing Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The actor, best known for playing Frodo Baggins in “Lord of the […]
Republican lawmakers are faulting the Biden administration’s enforcement of restrictions on China’s access to American technology, saying that the administration is still allowing semiconductors and other American innovation to flow to Beijing that could ultimately aid China in a military conflict. In a report released on Thursday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee said the administration […]
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube Google’s new artificial intelligence model, Gemini, is out. It’s advertised as America’s next top A.I. model. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton ask, Is it really better than OpenAI’s GPT-4? Also, by some estimates, millions of people have preordered Tesla’s Cybertruck, but has Elon Musk’s […]
“The U.S. will have to cede leadership in certain areas in particle physics,” said Karsten Heeger, a physicist at Yale University who is the P5 deputy chair. “That would be an impact that would be felt in the field, and beyond.” Failing all of that, the draft report urges the federal government to stay the […]
Though their attempts to keep up with developments in artificial intelligence have mostly fallen short, regulators around the world are taking vastly different approaches to policing the technology. The result is a highly fragmented and confusing global regulatory landscape for a borderless technology that promises to transform job markets, contribute to the spread of disinformation […]
For more than a year, Google has raced to build technology that could match ChatGPT, the eye-opening chatbot offered by the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI. On Wednesday, the tech giant took another step in the ongoing race, releasing a new version of its own chatbot, Google Bard. Available to English speakers in more […]
When European Union leaders introduced a 125-page draft law to regulate artificial intelligence in April 2021, they hailed it as a global model for handling the technology. E.U. lawmakers had gotten input from thousands of experts for three years about A.I., when the topic was not even on the table in other countries. The result […]
You can’t get to sleep. You’re tossing and turning. You want someone to read you a nice, wholesome bedtime story. And you want that someone to be the actor Jimmy Stewart. The sleep and meditation app Calm on Tuesday released a new story for premium users told by Mr. Stewart, the beloved actor who starred […]
Traumatic brain injuries have left more than five million Americans permanently disabled. They have trouble focusing on even simple tasks and often have to quit jobs or drop out of school. A study published on Monday has offered them a glimpse of hope. Five people with moderate to severe brain injuries had electrodes implanted in […]
