Month: August 2024

Brazil’s top court is expected to block access to X in the country of more than 200 million people as a prominent judge locks horns with site owner Elon Musk. Musk has been engaged in a months-long feud with Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes over X’s moderation policies. Earlier this year, Moraes opened an

This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee

In a separate analysis conducted this week, data journalist Ben Welsh found that just over a quarter of the news websites he surveyed (294 of 1,167 primarily English-language, US-based publications) are blocking Applebot-Extended. In comparison, Welsh found that 53 percent of the news websites in his sample block OpenAI’s bot. Google introduced its own AI-specific

“[Elon] Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability,” said Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter, who worked at the company’s British office, days after British protesters tried to set fire to a hotel for asylum seekers. But Telegram has provoked politicians more than any other platform. What could be called

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is forbidden from leaving French territory after being charged for complicity in running an online platform that allegedly enabled the spread of sexual images of children, creating an uncertain future for the messaging app that has become one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. Durov was arrested on Saturday at

ChatGPT has already wreaked havoc on classrooms and changed how teachers approach writing homework, since OpenAI publicly launched the generative AI chatbot in late 2022. School administrators rushed to try to detect AI-generated essays, and in turn, students scrambled to find out how to cloak their synthetic compositions. But by focusing on writing assignments, educators

Six months before the opening ceremony, Dirk Hoke, CEO of Volocopter, was still hopeful. “[We’re] making people aware that this is not science fiction,” he told WIRED in February, touting the flying taxi as a sustainable, safe, and quiet mode of transport that would become normal in just a few years. “It works and it

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. This is the most important moment in the life of an airliner: when the new owner signs for it and picks it up, much like a driver picking up a new car from a dealer. The aircraft in question is an Airbus

French prosecutors gave preliminary information in a press release on Monday about the investigation into Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was arrested suddenly on Saturday at Paris’ Le Bourget airport. Durov has not yet been charged with any crime, but officials said that he is being held as part of an investigation “against person unnamed”

Kronenfeld says the impact of Israel’s campaign is difficult to measure. Her nonprofit has spent tens of thousands of dollars, in addition to staff time, attempting to outbid Israel for the Google search ad slots. However, UNRWA USA raised as much money in the first half of this year as it did in all of

The essence of the case, Frye adds, is about NFT art writ large and “using NFTs the way most people are—to sell them.” The point is to get SEC regulators to have a “long, hard think” about what’s in their purview, he says. Security vs. Art In 1946, a US Supreme Court ruling about the

What’s undisputed is that, starting in the mid-1940s, powerful social forces transformed Los Angeles so that commuters had only two choices: drive or take a public bus. As a result, LA became so choked with traffic that it often took hours to cross the city. In 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported that people were

If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the last several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice today alleges that

Amongst the sea of American flags and ubiquitous blue signs at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week prowled Jonathan Padilla, the “crypto guy.” Wearing a baseball cap and conspicuous pineapple-print shirt, Padilla tramped the halls of the convention, talking crypto policy with anyone who would listen. In a selfie posted on Facebook, he

The backlash against image and video synthesis is not solely focused on creative app developers. Hardware manufacturer Wacom and game publisher Wizards of the Coast have faced criticism and issued apologies after using AI-generated content in their marketing materials. Toys “R” Us also faced a negative reaction after debuting an AI-generated commercial. Companies are still

Another weird feature of electricity pricing are demand charges. These are fees that EV charging site hosts pay, and are based on their highest usage, in 15-minute to one-hour intervals, during a pay period. These demand charges help utilities deal with the various costs of building and maintaining an electric grid. But they’re frustrating in

I confess to Hutchinson that if I were a politician, I would be scared to use BattlegroundAI. Generative AI tools are known to “hallucinate,” a polite way of saying that they sometimes make things up out of whole cloth. (They bullshit, to use academic parlance.) I ask how she’s ensuring that the political content BattlegroundAI

US prosecutors alleged that Lynch had embarked on an elaborate, multiyear scheme in which he backdated and fabricated sales and lied about the condition of Autonomy’s finances in public filings. The effect, they claimed, was to deceive HP into purchasing Autonomy for a puffed-up price. Prosecutors argued that Lynch himself walked away from the deal

At first glance, a recent batch of research papers produced by a prominent artificial intelligence lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver might not seem that notable. Featuring incremental improvements on existing algorithms and ideas, they read like the contents of a middling AI conference or journal. But the research is, in fact,

Even early adopters and those seeking to reduce their CO2 emissions wilt at some EVs’ first-year depreciation of 50 percent. Automakers, too, are feeling the heat. In a press release Ford said it was to broaden choices for customers as it “adjusts its rollout of pure electric vehicles to deliver a capital-efficient, profitable electric vehicle

WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X earlier this week, may just

Epic Games today officially launched a rival app store for iOS in the European Union, marking the first time Apple’s own App Store has had to face a serious rival. The Epic Games Store will initially offer Epic’s games, including Fortnite, for users to download onto their iPhones, with plans to start onboarding third-party developers’

Electric vehicle depreciation is something of a hot topic right now, and for good reason. On one hand, there are some fantastic deals to be had on the secondhand market, but on the other of course, there’s the thorny issue of some EVs losing half of their value in a single year. Cars losing you

“Ensuring that a stablecoin retains its peg even under stressed market conditions is a solvable problem,” Catalini says. In an optimal scenario, he says, reserves would be made up of exclusively “high-quality, liquid assets,” like short-term US government bonds, and providers would maintain an “adequate capital buffer.” In the two years since Celsius filed for

Bo Li, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in stress testing and provoking AI models to uncover misbehavior, has become a go-to source for some consulting firms. These consultancies are often now less concerned with how smart AI models are than with how problematic—legally, ethically, and in terms of regulatory compliance—they

Following an ordeal over whether the defendants could obtain Russian passports, sit for depositions in Europe, and turn over work files, Google’s attorneys and Litvak traded accusations of lying. In 2022, US district judge Denise Cote sided with Google. She found in a 48-page ruling that the defendants “intentionally withheld information” and “misrepresented their willingness

Roeland Decorte grew up in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the subtle early signs of mental decline in small changes to how residents walked or talked. When Decorte was 11, his father, who owned and managed the care home, started waking up in the middle of the night with chest

Ford created a surprise smash hit when it introduced the Maverick in 2021. This compact pickup, built on architecture shared with the Escape and Bronco Sport crossover SUVs, offered truck capability in a fuel-efficient, sensibly sized package. Now, Ford has introduced updates for the 2025 model year that make the Maverick even more appealing. First