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The folk tale that inspired Dreams on a Pillow tells of a mother who rushes into her home to retrieve her baby before fleeing, only to realise that she has escaped with a pillow instead. In the game, she spends her days trying to make her way to Lebanon after the massacre at Tantura, and the nights dreaming of the Palestine she knew as a child. Putting the pillow down lets her move through the game’s scenarios more freely, but invites nightmares and hallucinations. Abueideh estimates that it will take two years to complete; heartbreakingly, the crowdfunding page contains an assurance that “a clear plan for the completion of the game has been put in place to ensure continuity in the case of Rasheed’s disappearance, injury or demise at the hand of the continuously expanding Israeli aggression in the West Bank”.
In the city of Nablus in the West Bank, Rasheed Abueideh owns a nut roastery, where he works to provide for his family. He is also an award-winning game developer. A decade ago, as the 2014 Gaza war raged, he created a harrowing video game called Lilya and the Shadows of War, about a man trying to find safety for his daughter and himself – but as missiles fall around them, it quickly becomes clear that there is no safety. When the game was released in 2016, it was initially rejected by Apple on the grounds of inappropriate content, a decision reversed after a week of outcry.
Despite the acclaim and attention that Lilya received, however, Abueideh has not been able to raise funding for his next game through conventional means. The game he envisions, Dreams on a Pillow, is about the 1948 Nakba, told through a folk tale about a mother in the Arab-Israeli war, in which more than half the Palestinian population was displaced. He tells me that his game has been rejected almost 300 times, by publishers and providers of cultural grants, for being too controversial, too much of a risk. “Talking about the Palestinian story was always forbidden,” he says.
“Crowdfunding was our only option, but even that would not work for me because all the major crowdfunding platforms do not recognise Palestine,” says Abueideh. The team turned to LaunchGood, a Muslim-focused platform, where it met its funding goal on 7 January.
The fake operation has a curious tendency to defend the Pakistan military
In October, a new foreign policy think tank calling itself the Beltway Grid Policy Centre quietly entered D.C.'s diplomatic fray. While there was no launch party and is no K Street office we could find, the think tank nevertheless began producing its intellectual product at a startling pace, issuing reports, press releases, and pitching journalists on news coverage—much of it focused on South Asia, and, in particular, the ongoing political crisis in Pakistan.
The unusual nature of Beltway Grid's staffing leaves open several possibilities. The organization may be so hard at work defending the policies of the Pakistan military and criticizing former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the team simply hasn't had time to lead previous lives or respond to requests for comment. They may be early alien settlers, dropped off by drones on the coast of New Jersey, who are fans of Jane Austen and have come to study "the modern dynamics of lobbying." Or, more likely, somebody with a small budget asked ChatGPT to set up a fake think tank. Using AI to make a think tank adds a deeper layer of irony, since AI proponents regularly admonish the public not to conflate the operations of an AI program with “thinking.”
Beltway Grid's work product has left a few other clues as the motivations of its creator. One recent report, "Democracy Under Siege: Economic Fallout and Diplomatic Implications of Protests in Pakistan," argues that the November 2024 protests, which lasted just a few days and were led by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party under former Prime Minister Imran Khan, resulted in higher inflation, a currency collapse, a loss of 0.8% of GDP, a cumulative cost of 3 trillion rupees. The numbers are eerily similar to a report distributed internally by the army and obtained by Drop Site News. Independent analysts have suggested the economic malaise may be more closely linked to the overall policies of the military government, but according to the author of the report Beltway Grid's "Chief Strategic Analyst, Political Influence," Alexandra Caldwell, the problems all belong at the foot of Khan. Caldwell could not be reached for further comment, but her report was convincing enough for Pakistani news to turn it into a broadcast. And its report on Imran Khan's bid for Oxford Chancellor—Beltway Grid took a dim view, believe it or not—can be found reported on PR wire services and even republished on Yahoo News.
Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Musk’s platform X.
The company said Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.
Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
SMBSync2. It looks sketchy as hell but has a pretty intuitive interface to copy files to a NAS.
First create a task saying which folder to copy to where. Then either activate it manually or put it on a schedule. It makes it possible to auto create new folders based on date whenever I do a copy which I love.
Disgraced crypto tycoon Do Kwon, a key figure related to the 2022 collapse of TerraUSD and Luna coins, has been extradited to the United States, where he will face federal fraud charges.
The government of Montenegro announced on Tuesday (local time) that the extradition procedure of Kwon to the U.S. FBI was completed at Podgorica International Airport.
This marks one year and nine months since the 33-year-old Korean national was arrested at the same airport on March 23, 2023.
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TikTok was already forced to host their data in the US because of “security concerns” but the level of censorship is not the same. The US wants to fully control what people are able to see to brainwash them.
American companies such as Twitter and Meta have IDF soldiers running their censorship division and systematically surpress Palestinian channels. This shadow censorship gives Americans the illusion they are experiencing free speech.
In a Tuesday episode of the This Past Weekend podcast, Von dismissed any national security concerns being floated about the China-owned TikTok platform, arguing the prevalence of content related to Israel’s bombing of Gaza — where thousands of civilians have been killed — is the real reason the government is uncomfortable.
“I believe that they don’t want people sharing the truth about the genocide in Palestine and that’s why they’re doing it. I believe that that’s what it is and TikTok is one of those places where people can still do that. And they want to own it. They want to own it, dude,” the podcaster and comedian said.
An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence after the high court in London ruled he was in contempt because he would not stop suing people.
Mr Justice Mellor had already found that Craig Wright, 54, repeatedly lied about his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or people who launched bitcoin – the cryptocurrency that was first mined in 2009 and recently soared in value to £79,000.
Wright had claimed intellectual property rights associated with bitcoin, but that was demolished when the high court found he lied about his role, deploying often clumsy forgeries “on a grand scale” and “technobabble”. The real Nakamoto is likely to be a billionaire because they are thought to own 1 million bitcoins.
Wright was then ordered to stop taking legal actions against bitcoin developers, but defied that court order in October when he brought suits against cryptocurrency developers amounting to more than £900bn in respect of his claimed intellectual property rights related to bitcoin.
More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.
The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.
The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.
The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.
NSO competitor Paragon, creator of Graphite spyware used by Israel and U.S., sold to American defense contractor, marking a shift in ties of cyber arms between Jerusalem and D.C.
Police and intelligence services in Serbia are using advanced mobile forensics products and previously unknown spyware to illegally surveil journalists, environmental campaigners and civil rights activists, according to a report.
The report shows how mobile forensic products from the Israeli firm Cellebrite are used to unlock and extract data from individuals’ mobile devices, which are being infected with a new Android spyware system, NoviSpy.
High speed rail can be cost effective. High speed planes however cannot.
The amount of air resistance at higher speeds is insane. Instead of relying on wing lift for efficiency the entire aircraft has to remove all wings and it literally becomes a missile.
Efficient planes have long wings to create lift and cruise at lower speeds. This is the opposite where all lift is generated from the fuel.
NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - U.S. TikTok users spent heavily to buy merchandise from a range of vendors on the e-commerce platform TikTok Shop so far this holiday shopping season, according to TikTok estimates and a Reuters analysis of spending patterns measured by data from Facteus.
When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy.
While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and an internal company email reviewed by The Intercept show the deal forged between Google and Israel doesn’t operate under the tech company’s general terms of service. Rather, Nimbus is subject to an “adjusted” policy drafted between Google and the Israeli government. It is unclear how this “Adjusted Terms of Service” policy differs from Google’s typical terms.
“The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract published to the Israeli government’s public contracting portal. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”
The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
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to"As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne’s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. “They’re no longer neo-Nazis,” Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position of the White House.
Shortly after the delisting, The Intercept reported that Meta rules had been quickly altered to “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Suddenly, billions of people were permitted to call the historically neo-Nazi Azov movement “real heroes,” according to policy language obtained by The Intercept at the time.
Byrne and other concerned colleagues were given an opportunity to dissent and muster evidence that Azov fighters had not in fact reformed. Byrne said that even after gathering photographic evidence to the contrary, Meta responded that while Azov may have harbored Nazi sympathies in recent years, posts violating the company’s rules had sufficiently tapered off.'"
Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.
She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.
Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.
A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.
Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.
She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.
Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible. "Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government...”
Dec 2 (Reuters) - Intel (INTC.O) Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger has stepped down less than four years after taking the helm of the company, handing control to two lieutenants as the faltering American chipmaking icon searches for a permanent replacement.
Gelsinger, who resigned on Dec. 1, left the company before the completion of an ambitious and costly four-year plan to restore the company's lead in making the fastest and smallest computer chips, a crown it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) which makes chips for Intel rivals such as Nvidia (NVDA.O)
While Gelsinger has assured both investors and U.S. officials, who are subsidizing Intel's turnaround, that his manufacturing plans remain on track, the full results will not be known until next year, when the company aims to bring a flagship laptop chip back into its own factories.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired after over four decades at the company and stepped down from the board of directors effective December 1st, 2024. Gelsinger rejoined Intel as CEO in February 2021, taking over from Bob Swan to turn around the already struggling chipmaker — an effort that hasn’t gone as planned. It’s largely missed out on the AI chip boom that fueled Nvidia’s rise, failed to launch new technology on schedule, and struggled with recent CPU instability issues.
While recent rumors had suggested that Qualcomm was considering an acquisition of Intel, that prospect appears to have cooled. When asked about the potential deal on November 20th, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the company has “not identified any large acquisition that is necessary.”
Ahead of the launch of Intel’s new Arc GPUs this week, the company’s Core Ultra 9 200S-series processors were met with a lukewarm reception, as Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and GM of AI and technical marketing admitted that the launch “didn’t go as planned.”
Meta is actively helping self-harm content to flourish on Instagram by failing to remove explicit images and encouraging those engaging with such content to befriend one another, according to a damning new study that found its moderation “extremely inadequate”.
Danish researchers created a private self-harm network on the social media platform, including fake profiles of people as young as 13 years old, in which they shared 85 pieces of self-harm-related content gradually increasing in severity, including blood, razor blades and encouragement of self-harm.
The aim of the study was to test Meta’s claim that it had significantly improved its processes for removing harmful content, which it says now uses artificial intelligence (AI). The tech company claims to remove about 99% of harmful content before it is reported.
But Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), an organisation that promotes responsible digital development, found that in the month-long experiment not a single image was removed.
When it created its own simple AI tool to analyse the content, it was able to automatically identify 38% of the self-harm images and 88% of the most severe. This, the company said, showed that Instagram had access to technology able to address the issue but “has chosen not to implement it effectively”.
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to“This only hurts your cause” - person who doesn’t care about cause.
For more info https://mastodon.cloud/@[email protected]/113559307152573904
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toYes stating you like visiting an Apartheid state while it is in the middle of a genocide is the same as saying ‘kill all the Palestinians’
How else would you interpret someone saying “good to be back in Nazi Germany” at the height of the Holocaust.
You are not expected to participate in every boycott. If you cannot avoid using something you can keep using it. But if you do not care much about a certain brand and it is on the boycott list, consider using alternatives
Over the past few years, the UEFI threat landscape, particularly that of UEFI bootkits, has evolved significantly. It all started with the first UEFI bootkit proof of concept (PoC) described by Andrea Allievi in 2012, which served as a demonstration of deploying bootkits on modern UEFI-based Windows systems, and was followed with many other PoCs (EfiGuard, Boot Backdoor, UEFI-bootkit). It took several years until the first two real UEFI bootkits were discovered in the wild (ESPecter, 2021 ESET; FinSpy bootkit, 2021 Kaspersky), and it took two more years until the infamous BlackLotus – the first UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing UEFI Secure Boot on up-to-date systems – appeared (2023, ESET).
A common thread among these publicly known bootkits was their exclusive targeting of Windows systems. Today, we unveil our latest discovery: the first UEFI bootkit designed for Linux systems, named Bootkitty by its creators. We believe this bootkit is merely an initial proof of concept, and based on our telemetry, it has not been deployed in the wild. That said, its existence underscores an important message: UEFI bootkits are no longer confined to Windows systems alone.
The bootkit’s main goal is to disable the kernel’s signature verification feature and to preload two as yet unknown ELF binaries via the Linux init process (which is the first process executed by the Linux kernel during system startup). During our analysis, we discovered a possibly related unsigned kernel module – with signs suggesting that it could have been developed by the same author(s) as the bootkit – that deploys an ELF binary responsible for loading yet another kernel module unknown during our analysis.
Supporters of Palestine have called to boycott the payment platform Stripe after its CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison - an Irish-American billionaire who has advocated for Palestinians in the past - posted on social media on Wednesday about his run on the beach in Tel Aviv and how it was "great" to be back.
Many responded to his post on X by pointing out that he was only thirty minutes away from the Gaza Strip. Conservative estimates say nearly 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's war on Gaza and two million have been under constant Israeli aggression as they fight what UN experts have called "'deliberate starvation".
Some drew comparisons to the Academy Award-winning film, Zone of Interest, which depicts the everyday lives of Germans who lived next to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War Two.
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It did, the updated version had a mission called Al Aqsa flood
An updated version of the game called Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the name Hamas uses for its October 7, 2023 attack, was released on Steam earlier this month.
It is similar to American military games in the middle east. Except instead of stealing oil you defend your homeland.
Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, released in 2022, lets gamers play as the fictional character “Ahmad al-Falastini,” a young Palestinian student, as he takes revenge on Israeli soldiers who tortured him and killed his family. An updated version of the game called Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the name Hamas uses for its October 7, 2023 attack, was released on Steam earlier this month.
Nijm, who identifies as a Muslim Brazilian, said that his game was intended to be a political protest and was not affiliated with any specific Palestinian group.
“I tried to show that we Palestinians have rights to resist against Israeli occupation and the genocide we clearly see [on] a daily basis on the news. But I also like to always stay ‘under the thin red line’ between freedom of speech and ‘terrorist propaganda,’” Nijm told Al Jazeera.
Operation al-Aqsa Flood’s cut scene was intended to be provocative and “to ‘trigger’ Zionists”, Nim said, but the gameplay itself is more toned down, with players immediately failing if they shoot unarmed civilians.
“I do not blame Valve nor Steam; the blame is on the UK government and authorities that are pissed off by a video game. On their flawed logic, the most recent Call of Duty Black Ops 6 should be banned, as well,” he said.
“As you play as an American soldier and go to Iraq to kill Iraqi people. What I can say is that we see clearly the double standards.”
OnlyFans gives women the chance to earn money by making porn. Sex traffickers also use the platform to abuse and exploit them, say police and prosecutors. The accused range from social media influencers to cash-hungry boyfriends. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed,” said one victim.
On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car. Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.
The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.
The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a judge to force Alphabet's Google GOOGL.O to sell off its Chrome internet browser, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the plans.
The DOJ will also ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, the report said.
The DOJ declined to comment. Google, in a statement from Lee-Anne Mulholland, Vice President, Google Regulatory Affairs, said the DOJ is pushing a "radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case," and would harm consumers.
Legal documents from the ongoing lawsuit between Israeli NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons firm, rather than its government clients, is responsible for "installing and extracting" data from mobile phones targeted by its hacking software, The Guardian wrote.
These revelations emerged from sworn depositions of NSO Group employees, portions of which were made public on Thursday. The lawsuit, filed by WhatsApp in 2019, followed the messaging app’s discovery that 1,400 of its users, including journalists and human rights activists, had been targeted by NSO's spyware over a two-week period.
WhatsApp's case centers on allegations that the Israeli firm, not its international government clients, operates the spyware. NSO has consistently claimed that its technology is designed to combat serious crimes and terrorism, with clients bound by agreements to avoid misuse of the software. The company has also alleged it has no knowledge of who its clients target.
Nov 14 (Reuters) - As Tesla’s electric-vehicle sales have flattened this year, CEO Elon Musk has increasingly staked the company’s future on his vision for self-driving robotaxis, despite the massive technological and regulatory obstacles in delivering them.
Now Musk - as one of President-elect Donald Trump's biggest backers - may have the influence to help break through those regulatory roadblocks.
“If there’s a department of government efficiency,” Musk said, “I’ll try to help make that happen.”
On Tuesday, Trump tapped Musk and another ally to lead such an entity, which is not a government agency. It remains unclear how the organization will function.
Musk's sway is likely to extend beyond efficiency. The billionaire, who gave at least $119 million to a pro-Trump group during the campaign, is expected to influence the president-elect’s pick for the next Transportation Department secretary, according to a person close to Musk and Trump’s transition planning. That department, which includes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), regulates automakers and could push through significant changes to the self-driving rules at a national level.
Nov 5 (Reuters) - When Reuters reported in April that Tesla had scrapped plans for a long-promised, next-generation $25,000 electric vehicle, the automaker’s stock plunged. Chief Executive Elon Musk rushed to respond on X, his social-media network.
“Reuters is lying,” he posted without elaborating. Tesla’s stock recovered some of its losses.
Six months later, Musk appears to have backed into an admission that Tesla dropped its plans for a human-driven $25,000 car. He said in an Oct. 23 earnings call that building the affordable EV would be "pointless” unless the car was fully autonomous.
His latest remarks came in response to an investor asking: “When can we expect Tesla to give us the $25,000 non-robotaxi regular car model?”
Musk responded: “We’re not making a non-robo…,” before he was interrupted by another Tesla executive. Musk later added: “Basically, I think having a regular $25K model is pointless. It would be silly.”
Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas. Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government.
But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need. Mohamed, who is from Egypt, said he now needs a new job in the next two months to transfer a work visa and avoid deportation.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”
In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.
In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”
The production company behind “Blade Runner 2049” filed a lawsuit Monday against Elon Musk and Tesla, accusing them of copyright infringement while promoting a new self-driving car.
In its lawsuit, Alcon Entertainment says Musk used AI-generated imagery mirroring scenes from its 2017 sci-fi film while presenting Tesla’s new autonomous Robotaxi at a marketing event earlier this month. Producers had denied his request to do so.
“He did it anyway,” the suit alleges, adding that the company denied Musk’s request due to the tech mogul’s “extreme political and social views” that occasionally veer into “hate speech.” Musk enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump for president, appearing alongside him at a rally earlier this month, and has espoused transphobic views.
Oct 18 (Reuters) - A federal judge in California has granted Google's request to temporarily pause his order directing the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit to overhaul its Android app store Play by Nov. 1 to give consumers more choice over how they download software.
San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge James Donato made the decision on Friday as part of an antitrust lawsuit against Google by "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Google argued that Donato's Oct. 7 injunction would harm the company and introduce "serious safety, security and privacy risks into the Android ecosystem."
Donato delayed the injunction to allow the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to consider Google's separate request to pause the judge's order. Donato denied Google's separate request to pause the order for the duration of its broader appeal in the case.
One of Amazon's (AMZN.O) top executives defended the new, controversial 5-day-per-week in-office policy on Thursday, saying those who do not support it can leave for another company.
Speaking at an all-hands meeting for AWS, unit CEO Matt Garman said nine out of 10 workers he has spoken with support the new policy, which takes effect in January, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.
Those who do not wish to work for Amazon in-office five days per week can quit, he suggested.
The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.
The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”
In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has announced a forecast-busting quarterly profit amid surging demand for chips used to power artificial intelligence.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, reported a net profit of 352.3 billion Taiwanese dollars ($10.1bn) for the third quarter, up 54.2 percent from the same period last year.
The figure marked the firm’s best-ever quarterly performance and was comfortably ahead of market estimates.
TAIPEI, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) the main producer of advanced chips used in artificial intelligence applications, is expected to report a 40% leap in third-quarter profit on Thursday thanks to soaring demand.
The world's largest contract chipmaker, whose customers include Apple (AAPL.O) and Nvidia (NVDA.O)
has benefited from the surge towards AI.
TSMC is set to report a net profit of T$298.2 billion ($9.27 billion) for the quarter ended Sept. 30, according to a LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 22 analysts. SmartEstimates give greater weighting to forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.
BRUSSELS, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's X will not be designated as a gatekeeper under landmark EU tech rules known as the Digital Markets Act which would have subjected it to an onerous list of obligations, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.
The European Commission, which opened an investigation into online social media platform X in May, will announce its decision next week, the people said.
The EU competition enforcer declined to comment.
X, formerly known as Twitter, had previously told the Commission that even though it met the criterion regarding the number of users to be classified as a gatekeeper, it does not qualify for the other criterion as an important gateway between businesses and consumers.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok owner ByteDance and Booking.com, have been designated as gatekeepers, among others.
ISTANBUL, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Turkey has blocked access to instant messaging platform Discord in line with a court decision after the platform refused to share information demanded by Ankara, Turkish authorities said on Wednesday.
The San Francisco-based company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Turkey's Information Technologies and Communication Authority published the access ban decision on its website.
Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity" had been committed by some using the platform.
BYD has informed the Chinese regulator it is recalling nearly 97,000 electric vehicles (EVs) for a manufacturing fault involving a steering control unit that could lead to fire risks, the market regulator said on Sunday.
The Chinese automaker is recalling Dolphin and Yuan Plus EVs manufactured in China between November 2022 and December 2023, according to a statement from the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).
BYD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company would ask its dealers to install a physical fix in the recalled cars, the SAMR statement added.
The recall is a rare one by BYD of its pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars as the Chinese company grew rapidly to become the world's biggest seller of such vehicles.
It recalled a small batch of Tang plug-in hybrids in 2022 due to a defect in the battery pack that could cause fires.
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