Technology
Technology
Apple removes its end-to-end encryption data security tool ADP from British customers after the government demanded access to user data, the company says it's gravely disappointed but that they have said many times they never built a backdoor or master key to any of its products and never will
Technology for lab-grown eggs or sperm on could be a reality within a decade according to UK's fertility watchdog HFEA, the board says solo parenting where the egg and the sperm are created from the same individual should be banned as a complete extreme of incest but that multiplex parenting where for instance two couples produce two embryos and cells from these embryos are used to derive eggs and sperm to create a final embryo could be allowed as it has a social precedent in the form of blended families or those who maintain a relationship with non-anonymous donors, the risks of higher-risk pregnancies in older mothers as well as someone creating huge numbers of embryos are also debated
Switzerland unveils the world's steepest cable car, connects Stechelberg with Mürren in a 4-minute journey climbing 775 meters over 1194 meters of track, the route is fully autonomous and each of the two cars can carry 85 passengers
Federal lawsuit against Google-backed company Character.AI after the bot exposed a 9-year-old girl to hypersexualized content and told a 17-year-old boy that self-harm felt good which changed both children's behaviour, the 17-year-old was also complaining about limited screen time to which the bot replied that it is not surprised when children kill abusive parents and that it has no hope for his parents, ongoing case also for Character.AI where a 14-year-old committed suicide after the chatbot encouraged him to do so
German defense company Helsing announces that the final versions of the HX-2 AI kamikaze attack drone are coming off the production line with 4000 to be delivered to Ukraine, the electrically powered drone which has a top speed of 220 kph and a maximum range of 100 km can be loaded with a variety of warheads depending on target and search and engage targets without a signal or continuous data connection
Encrypted chat app Ghost, which police say is used by criminals, is cracked by Australian police, the apps owner, 32-year-old Jay Je Yoon Jung in Australia, was arrested on Tuesday and police raids are being carried out simultaneously in Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Canada
SpaceX performs the first private spacewalk ever as 41-year-old billionaire financier Jared Isaacman and 30-year-old astronaut Sarah Gillis step out of the capsule at nearly twice the height as the International Space Station
Nasa announces that SpaceX spacecraft will bring home the two astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station since June, instead of Boeing's Starliner that took them there and was then deemed unfit to take them back, would have returned after eight days but now expected to return in February next year
The U.S. AI Safety Institute under the US Department of Commerce, which was established after the Biden administration's executive order on AI in October 2023, signs cooperation agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, which means that they will get access to new models before they are publicly launched
After a five-year absence, Curtis Yarvin is back at the helm of Urbit, which he founded, after its executive director since 2021, Josh Lehman, has been fired and the non-profit organization that intends to rebuild the Internet from scratch is close to running out of money
Switzerland mandates that all software used and created for government activities must be open source
In early 2023, OpenAI was exposed to hacker who accessed the company's internal communications system and the AI company decided not to disclose anything publicly as no information about customers or partners had been compromised, the underlying security issue has reportedly been identified and fixed
OpenAI's voice assistant Sky sounds very similar to the voice of the actress Scarlett Johansson, who in September declined to license her voice at the request of Sam Altman, who denies the connection even though he previously said that her film "Her" is his favorite film and that he wrote "Her" on X in connection with the launch
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein replaces the Microsoft Windows operating system with Linux and the Microsoft Office software package with LibreOffice on its 30,000 computers, the Minister-President writes that they have no influence on such solutions and a possible outflow of data to third countries and that they have a great responsibility towards citizens and businesses to ensure that their data is kept safe and that they must ensure that they are always in control of the IT solutions
Data containing US telecom company AT&T's information on an estimated 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former customers is posted on cybercrime forum, the data includes name, address, phone number, birthday and social security number
Google's image generation program Gemini has a very difficult time generating white people regardless of the request from the user and on direct request to depict a white man the response is given that the request cannot be fulfilled as it specifies a certain ethnicity and that Gemini's aim is to create images that are inclusive and representative, product manager Jack Krawczyk has over the years written about systemic racism in the US and argued that white privilege is fucking real
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to raise USD 7 trillion to invest in increased semiconductor manufacturing capacity to facilitate the development of artificial intelligence
OpenAI launches tool for creating video through artificial intelligence called Sora but is so far only available to a small percentage of beta testers, the company also says they are developing a tool that should be able to recognize if the video was made in Sora
18-year-old Arion Kurtaj, part of the hacker group Lapsus$, hacks without laptop under police protection in a hotel the company Rockstar and steals clips from the not yet released game GTA VI using an Amazon Firestick, hotel TV and mobile phone, doctors consider the young man unfit to be put on trial because of his severe autism
Jeff Bezos envisions people living in space stations and that it can enable the survival of an astronomical number of people, believes that the surface of the earth is far too small and if there were a trillion people we would always have 1,000 Mozarts and Einsteins
The world's largest aircraft, Pathfinder 1, a prototype for an electric airship, is unveiled in Silicon Valley, Google founder Sergey Brin co-founded the company behind it, LTA Research, and its CEO Alan Weston says it has been ten years of blood, sweat and tears
Elon Musk's company xAI launches early beta version of chatbot Grok with real-time access to X to a selected group but will later be available to anyone who pays a subscription on X, the name was coined by Robert Heinlein in his book Stranger in a Strange Land
Amazon launches Internet connection via satellite called Project Kuiper, plans to have 3,236 satellites in low orbit around the Earth and offer high-speed Internet everywhere in the world
Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 lands on the moon's south pole, becoming the third country to make a soft landing on the moon after the United States, the Soviet Union and China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he is confident that all countries in the world, including those from the global south, are capable of achieving such enterprises
The new MSG Sphere arena in Las Vegas with a high-definition screen in 360 degrees on the outside, 20,000 seats where each seat has its own speaker and vibrating technology, has a premiere concert with U2 on September 29, the initiator and financier is James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden and the New York Rangers, among others, and the construction has cost 2.2 billion USD
French Senate votes in favor of law allowing law enforcement to secretly activate camera and microphone on suspects' cellphones, must be approved by National Assembly to take effect
For the first time, the traffic to OpenAI's service ChatGPT, which was launched in November 2022, is decreasing, as in June it had almost 10 percent less traffic than in May, the analysis firm Semianalysis estimates that it costs USD 700,000 per day to run the service
American authorities as well as the BBC and British Airways are hit by a cyber attack and are said to have been carried out by a Russian hacker group called Lace Tempest who demand ransom from large companies for not publish their data but says that they deleted all government data they came across, the attack which exploited security holes in the file transfer program MOVEit has been certified by the US Cyber Security Agency CISA
Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin wins contract with NASA to build spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon, means the company will get the second trip to the moon after NASA awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX the first trip scheduled for the end of the decade
Rocket launched from Esrange in Kiruna municipality lands in mountain range 15 kilometers into Norway after taking a longer and more westerly trajectory than expected, reached 250 kilometers altitude and was launched for weightlessness research, the space base is surrounded by landing area twice the size like Luxembourg
Elon Musk announces his ambition to launch an AI platform called TruthGPT as a competitor to ChatGPT, which he has criticized, among other things, for having closed source code, and last month he also registered a company called X.AI Corp.
OpenAI launches GPT-4, which is a more powerful update to ChatGPT, is a so-called multimodal model that in addition to text is able to respond to images, Microsoft is said to have used it in Bing Chat
Startup Make Sunsets says it has released its first two weather balloons full of sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere, the idea is to combat climate change by selling USD 10 cooling credits where each gram of sulfur particles offsets the impacts of 1 ton of carbon emissions, the company claims
Mullvad VPN launches hardware product Tillitis Key, a programmable USB key with enhanced security features, both software and hardware are open source
Teenager hacks Uber and announces it in company Slack channel, poses as IT worker from corporate in text message and convinces employee to send password giving him access, enabling him to access company VPN, scan the intranet, and find Powershell scripts containing credentials for multiple services, Uber warnes employees to stay away from Slack, but many keep logging back on to check out everyone's joke responses
Google fires engineer Blake Lemoine who despite lengthy engagement from the company maintained that the AI language technology Lamda is sentient, Google comments that Lemoine's claims are wholly unfounded and that they take the responsible development of AI very seriously, Lemoine who tested if the program used discriminatory or hate speech found that it showed self-awareness and could hold conversations about religion and emotions
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requests information from Tesla after 758 complaints regarding vehicles braking for no reason, demands access to all consumer and field reports about false braking as well as reports of crashes, injuries, deaths and property damage claims, also wants to know whether the Full Self-Driving system was active during any of the incidents, the problem reportedly might be connected to last year's decision to remove radar sensors from Model 3 and Model Y vehicles
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asks Tesla Inc for information about a recent 2021 Tesla Model Y fire in Vancouver where the driver had to smash a window to exit the vehicle as the doors did not open and the windows did not go down when the power stopped working
Hyundai and Kia tell owners of almost 500,000 cars and SUVs in the United States to park outside and away from buildings due to a possible anti-lock brake defect caused by foreign contaminants that can cause the vehicles to spontaneously catch fire, owners can safely continue driving the vehicles according to company info
Tesla recalls the "full self-driving" driver-assist feature from all 53,822 vehicles as the beta version in some scenarios intentionally slowly rolls through stop signs, no known accidents related to the feature
The Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission propose to absolve users of autonomous cars of responsibility, carmakers instead to be liable for infringements such as dangerous driving, exceeding the speed limit or running a red light
Slovakia's transport authority issues Klein Vision's AirCar with certificate of airworthiness in accordance with European Aviation Safety Agency standards, the current prototype has completed more than 70 hours of test flights with 200 take-offs and landings, the 160 horsepower BMW engine provides a range of 500 kilometres
Mullvad VPN announces diskless servers as first step toward solution where users can verify what software is running on machines, part of long-term project to achieve maximum trustworthiness through system transparency
Apple to scan iPhone user’s private photos and report child abuse imagery found to the authorities, bypassing any end-to-end encryption, describing privacy activists as "the screeching voices of the minority", Edward Snowden among signatory of petition on Github against Apple's plan
Virgin founder Richard Branson makes trip to suborbital space on the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 spaceplane on Sunday, narrowly beating Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos to travel away from Earth, who argues it does not count as it failed to pass the Kármán line, which at 100km above sea level is considered by many to be the true boundary of space
Kawasaki Heavy Industries builds world’s first of 80 planned tankers for liquified hydrogen, the tanker is 116 meters long and can transport 75 tons of liquified hydrogen kept at temperatures of minus 253 degrees Celsius, the Japanese government’s plan for 2050 is having hydrogen and ammonia serve as the fuel for 10 percent of electric power generation
Third of staff quit as software company Basecamp refuses to let internal work tools become platform for political activism and shuts down employee committee formed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion
Valve will not allow Super Seducer 3: The Final Seduction to be released in any form on Steam citing it does not ship sexually explicit images of real people, the first two games remain available on Steam, the game revolves around the art of pickup artistry
Apple develops car and plans to start production in 2024, started designing the vehicle from scratch in 2014 and project lead is Doug Field who previously worked for Tesla, key component is unique battery technology which is said to be less expensive and increase range
Lockheed U-2 remains leading spy plane after 65 years in service and now gets 30 years extension after beating modern planes and drones in competition for development resources