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From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists

NYT Technology - Mon, 03/18/2024 - 21:00
As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online to discredit Ukraine’s leader and undercut aid. Some have a Hollywood-style plot twist.

Supreme Court Wary of Limiting Government Contact With Social Media Companies

NYT Technology - Mon, 03/18/2024 - 14:33
The justices tried to distinguish between persuading social media sites to take down posts, which is permitted, and coercing them, which violates the First Amendment.

Tesla’s Troubles Raise Questions About Its Invincibility

NYT Technology - Mon, 03/18/2024 - 13:49
As the share price plunges, investors wonder whether the company, led by Elon Musk, can withstand intensifying competition.

What Elon Musk Said in Testy Interview on Don Lemon’s New Show

NYT Technology - Mon, 03/18/2024 - 08:45
The former CNN frontman released a wide-ranging interview with the billionaire about business, politics, hate speech online and more.

Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time

NYT Technology - Mon, 03/18/2024 - 00:00
To decarbonize the electrical grid, companies are finding creative ways to store energy during periods of low demand.

What Meltdown? Crypto Comes Roaring Back in the Philippines.

NYT Technology - Sun, 03/17/2024 - 23:00
Two years after the cryptocurrency market crashed, internet cafes for playing crypto-earning video games are opening and farmers have started harvesting virtual crops from the games for income.

The Department of Homeland Security Is Embracing A.I.

NYT Technology - Sun, 03/17/2024 - 23:00
The agency will be the first in the federal government to roll out a comprehensive plan to integrate the technology into a variety of uses, from fighting crime to helping disaster survivors.

Walmart makes its AI-powered route optimization logistics tech available to businesses

Memphis Business Journal - Sun, 03/17/2024 - 20:42
Walmart's Commerce Technology arm is now offering Route Optimization as a software as a service (SaaS) to businesses.

Elon Musk to Open Source Grok Chatbot in Latest AI War Escalation

NYT Technology - Sun, 03/17/2024 - 17:07
Mr. Musk’s move to open up the code behind Grok is the latest volley in a war to win the A.I. battle, after a suit against OpenAI on the same topic.

Khanna Explains Opposition to TikTok Bill While Senators Signal Openness

NYT Technology - Sun, 03/17/2024 - 16:15
The California Democrat Ro Khanna pointed to the need for a federal data privacy law, and a Democrat and a Republican in the Senate suggested sympathy for the calls to ban the app.

TikTok Bill’s Progress Slows in the Senate

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 21:09
Legislation to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app or have it banned in the United States sailed through the House, but the Senate has no plans to move hastily.

Sam Bankman-Fried Should Get 40 to 50 Years in Prison, Prosecutors Say

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 15:53
Mr. Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, faces a maximum penalty of 110 years.

Tesla Settles Discrimination Suit With Former Factory Worker

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 15:38
The carmaker and energy company settled with a Black man who had worked at its California factory and had won a $3 million judgment against the company.

Uber and Lyft Threaten to Pull Out of Minneapolis After City Council Vote

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 14:21
Local lawmakers in the Minnesota city voted on Thursday to guarantee a minimum hourly wage to ride-hailing drivers.

What China Is Saying About the TikTok Ban Furor in Washington

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 13:07
A bill to force TikTok’s sale in the United States has been criticized by Beijing but has not triggered a high-alert public response or retaliation.

Supreme Court Sets Rules for Blocking Citizens From Officials’ Accounts

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 11:15
In two unanimous rulings, the justices tried to distinguish between private conduct, which is not subject to the First Amendment, and state action, which is.

New macOS Sonoma update is reportedly taking down printers as well as USB hubs

Techradar - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 09:23

Not content with playing havoc with USB hubs in some scenarios, it appears the latest update for macOS Sonoma is also a troublemaker for printers, too.

Indeed, according to various reports online as flagged up by Apple Insider, the macOS Sonoma 14.4 update is breaking printers in some cases. In other cases, there appears to be a more limited impact, in that the printer still works, but selecting page sizes doesn’t.

It seems Sonoma 14.4 is either stripping out, or messing up, printer drivers in Apple’s operating system, rendering the devices non-functional, at least for the time being in many of these reported cases.

There are users complaining about printer functionality going very wonky on Reddit and Apple’s support forums – however, there does appear to be a solution.

Namely, as stated in the above Apple post, you need to head to System Settings, and ‘Privacy & Security’ and then ‘Full Disk Access’ to grant full disk access to ‘com.microsoft.dlp’ – and that might sort the issue.

This isn’t guaranteed, mind, but there are a number of users giving the thumbs-up and saying this move did get their printer (or printers) working in macOS again.

Analysis: A cocktail of possible causes?

Seemingly the issue pertains to Microsoft Defender (which is what the above disk access change relates to), and/or JAMF mobile device management software, and possibly some other factors. It’s difficult to know exactly what, but the most prominent commonality seems to be Defender.

The good news is that this doesn’t seem to be affecting too many macOS Sonoma 14.4 users, as while there are a number of reports, they aren’t too widespread. And they appear to relate to particular configurations, too, mainly in office scenarios.

Given that, hopefully your average user at home isn’t seeing this problem – or only in rare cases. In short, you’re probably pretty unlucky if you hit this snag outside of a business network setting – but it seems that there are isolated incidents of this occuring with individual Macs.

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Windows 11 speech recognition feature gets ditched in September 2024 – but only because there’s something better

Techradar - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 08:08

Windows 11’s voice functionality is being fully switched over to the new Voice Access feature later this year, and we now have a date for when the old system – Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) – will be officially ditched from the OS.

The date for the replacement of WSR by Voice Access has been announced as September 2024 in a Microsoft support document (as Windows Latest noticed). Note that the change will be ‘starting’ in that month, so will take further time to roll out to all Windows 11 PCs.

However, there’s a wrinkle here, in that this is the case for Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2 users, which means those still on Windows 11 21H2 – the original version of the OS – won’t have WSR removed from their system.

Windows 10 users will still have WSR, of course, as Voice Access is a Windows 11-only feature.

Analysis: WSR to go MIA, but it’s A-OK (for the most part)

This move is no surprise as Microsoft removed Windows Speech Recognition from Windows 11 preview builds back at the end of 2023. So, this change was always going to come through for release versions of Windows 11, it was just a question of when – and now we know.

Will the jettisoning of WSR mean this feature is missed by Windows 11 users? Well, no, not really, because its replacement, Voice Access, is so much better in pretty much every respect. It is leaps and bounds ahead of WSR, in fact, with useful new features being added all the time – such as the ability to concoct your own customized voice shortcuts (a real timesaver).

In that respect, there’s no real need to worry about the transition from WSR to Voice Access – the only potential thorny issue comes with language support. WSR offers a whole lot more in this respect, because it has been around a long time.

However, Voice Access is getting more languages added in the Moment 5 update. And in six months’ time, when WSR is officially canned (or that process begins), we’ll probably have Windows 11 24H2 rolling out, or it’ll be imminent, and we’d expect Voice Access to have its language roster even more filled out at the point.

Those on Windows 11 21H2 will be able to stick with WSR as observed, but then there’s only a very small niche of users left on that OS, as Microsoft has been rolling out an automatic forced upgrade for 21H2 for some time now. (Indeed, this is now happening for 22H2 as of a few weeks ago). Barely anyone should remain on 21H2 at this point, we’d imagine, and those who are might be stuck there due to a Windows update bug, or oversight during the automated rollout.

Windows 10 users will continue with WSR as it’s their only option, but as a deprecated feature, it won’t receive any further work or upgrades going forward. That’s another good reason why Windows 11 users should want to upgrade to Voice Access which is being actively developed at quite some pace.

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Here’s more proof Apple is going big with AI this year

Techradar - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 06:16

The fact that Apple is going to debut a new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool in iOS 18 this year is probably one of the worst-kept secrets in tech at the moment. Now, another morsel has leaked out surrounding Apple’s future AI plans, and it could shed light on what sort of AI features Apple fans might soon get to experience.

As first reported by Bloomberg, earlier this year Apple bought Canadian startup DarwinAI, with dozens of the company’s workers joining Apple once the deal was completed. It’s thought that Apple made this move in an attempt to bolster its AI capabilities in the last few months before iOS 18 will be revealed, which is expected to happen at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.

Bloomberg’s report says that DarwinAI “has developed AI technology for visually inspecting components during the manufacturing process.” One of its “core technologies,” however, is making AI faster and more efficient, and that could be the reason Apple chose to open its wallet. Apple intends its AI to run entirely on-device, presumably to protect your privacy by not sharing AI inputs with the cloud, and this would benefit from DarwinAI’s tech. After all, Apple won’t want its flagship AI features to result in sluggish iPhone performance.

Apple’s AI plans

Siri

(Image credit: Unsplash [Omid Armin])

This is apparently just the latest move Apple has made in the AI arena. Thanks to a series of leaks and statements from Apple CEO Tim Cook, the company is known to be making serious efforts to challenge AI market leaders like OpenAI and Microsoft.

For instance, it’s been widely reported that Apple will soon unveil its own generative AI tool, which has been dubbed Ajax and AppleGPT during its development process. This could give a major boost to Apple’s Siri assistant, which has long lagged behind competitors such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. As well as that, we could see generative AI tools debut in apps like Pages and Apple Music, rivaling products like Microsoft’s Copilot and Spotify’s AI DJ.

Tim Cook has dropped several hints regarding Apple’s plans, saying customers can expect to see a host of AI features “later this year.” The Apple chief has called AI a “huge opportunity” for his company and has said that Apple intends to “break new ground” in this area. When it comes to specifics, though, Cook has been far less forthcoming, presumably preferring to reveal all at WWDC.

It’s unknown whether Apple will have time to properly integrate DarwinAI’s tools into iOS 18 before it is announced to the world, but it seems certain it will make use of them over the coming months and years. It could be just one more piece of the AI puzzle that Apple is attempting to solve.

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A Looming TikTok Ban, a Royal Photoshop Mystery and Your Snitching Car

NYT Technology - Fri, 03/15/2024 - 04:04
Maybe go ahead and download your favorite TikToks.

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