WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 10, 2023--

Mark Zuckerberg is being criticised by some for perceived hypocrisy, after the Facebook co-founder posted a 4th of July photo of his family but obscured the faces of his daughters. To celebrate Independence Day, the tech billionaire posted on one of the tech platforms he oversees, Instagram, sharing a photo of himself, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their three daughters, Aurelia, Maxima, and August. “Happy July 4th!” the caption on the post reads. “Lots to be grateful for this year. As the big girls get older, I love talking to them about why America is so great. Looking forward to discussing with little Aurelia soon too.” The post was met with mixed reactions, with some arguing it was hypocritical for Zuckerberg to seek to protect the privacy of his children, when Facebook and Instagram have been accused of violating people’s privacy in the past. One of the top comments on the photo came from an Instagram user who argued, “Even Zuck doesn’t trust his platforms to put his kids faces up.” Many agreed. As Shanon Palus wrote in Slate, “I almost feel some schadenfreude imagining Zuckerberg also agonizing over being public or private on social media. After all, he got us into this mess!” “Fascinated by Zuck’s choice to not have his kids’ faces on his social media platform,” added Bloomberg reporter Reyhan Harmanci in a post on Twitter. Zuckerberg companies have faced multiple high-profile settlements surrounding privacy in recent months. In May, the Federal Trade Commission accused Facebook of violating a 2020 order and misleading parents about their ability to control whom their children communicated with on the Messenger Kids app, as well as misrepresenting what kind of access developers had to private user data. “Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told The Associated Press at the time. “The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.” Meta has said the FTC is incorrect and it will “vigorously fight” the allegations. That same month, the European Union fined Meta $1.3bn for transferring user data to the US, which the body said didn’t sufficiently protect users from US spy agencies. Meta has said it will appeal the fine. In 2022, the company paid $725m to settle a lawsuit alleging Facebook allowed millions of users’ personal data to be fed without consent to Cambridge Analytica, a firm which supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Prior to that, the FTC fined the company $5bn for privacy violations and mishandling user data. The Independent has contacted Meta for comment. Read More Twitter threatens legal action against Meta over new ‘Threads’ app Mark Zuckerberg trolls Elon Musk by posting Spider-Man meme on Twitter after launching rival Threads What is Threads? All your questions about Meta's new Twitter rival, answered. Twitter threatens legal action against Meta over new ‘Threads’ app What is Threads? All your questions about Meta's new Twitter rival, answered. Mark Zuckerberg trolls Elon Musk with Spider-Man meme after launching Twitter rival

Elon Musk disclosed on Twitter Saturday that, due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and a "heavy debt load," the platform still has a negative cash flow.

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SpaceX’s Starship blew itself up in the air, Elon Musk’s private space company has said. Starship underwent its second flight test over the weekend, when the company attempted to send the rocket almost into orbit and then have it land in the ocean. It completed the first part of that mission – but disappeared around eight minutes into its flight. Now the company has confirmed that it lost data from the flight at that moment, which came near the end of the burn of the second stage of the rocket. At that point, the spacecraft used a “safe command destruct” that meant that it caused itself to explode in the air, the company said. It did not say why that had been issued, but did indicate that it had been “appropriately triggered based on available vehicle performance data”. SpaceX noted that until that moment the flight appeared to have been going as planned. The Super Heavy Booster on the bottom of the spacecraft completed a full burn for the first time, for instance, and the two pieces of Starship separated successfully. The booster also managed to flip after it had separated from the upper part of the rocket, SpaceX said. It started another burn then but then “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly”, as SpaceX refers to explosions. That came three and a half minutes into the flight and happened around 90 kilometres above the Gulf of Mexico, SpaceX said. The company said that the explosions would prove useful in adjusting future builds of the Starship spacecraft. Before the flight it had explicitly said that the launch was intended as a test and could go wrong – and it reiterated that “while it didn’t happen in a lab or on a test stand, it was absolutely a test”. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” SpaceX said. “Data review is ongoing as we look for improvements to make for the next flight. The team at Starbase is already working final preparations on the vehicles slated for use in Starship’s third flight test, with Ship and Booster static fires coming up next.” Read More SpaceX launches “limitless” ‘zero fuel’ engine into space SpaceX hints next Starship launch attempt could be soon SpaceX launches world’s most powerful rocket – and then it disappears

The headquarters of Twitter was left with a sign saying “ER” after San Francisco Police interrupted the physical rebrand of the social media platform’s offices. The new name, “X”, was later projected onto the building as night fell. The operation to take down the old sign was put on hold on Monday afternoon after Mr Musk didn’t obtain the correct permits for the crane that had been placed on the street, blocking traffic, according to a witness. “Welp, @twitter name so coming off the building right now but @elonmusk didn’t get permit for the equipment on the street so @SFPD is shutting it down,” Wayne Sutton tweeted from the scene. A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson told The Daily Beast that they had responded to “a report of a possible unpermitted street closure. Through their investigation officers were able to determine that no crime was committed, and this incident was not a police matter”. The name change has led to the social media platform dropping in value by between $4bn and $20bn, according to Bloomberg. The move has also been mocked as uninspired. “The old Twitter logo was open, accessible, instantly recognisable around the world. This new one looks like the logo of a seedy suburban strip club. Devoid of colour, bland, generic... BORING! This is branding suicide!” CM Kosemen wrote. “Taking one of the most recognizable brand names in the world and changing it to X is unfathomably dumb. Sounds like a porn site and the logo looks like the emblem to a bad Call of Duty gamebattles team from 2008,” YouTuber Charlie White wrote. “Gonna be honest this new widget design looks like an app for a membership-only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest,” one user said. “Musk doesn’t have the money or the staff to meaningfully update or even fix Twitter, so he’s making the cheapest, smallest tweak he can – literally swapping out a GIF file - that grabs the biggest headlines. It’s nothing but a cheap, meaningless play to get his name in the press,” comedian Adam Conover added. Mr Musk wrote on Sunday about wanting “a good enough X logo,” prompting his supporters to offer their suggestions. Sawyer Merritt posted several, with Mr Musk choosing one of them, saying: “Going with minimalist art deco on the upper right. Probably changes later, certainly will be refined.” The new logo is very similar to a generic Unicode character, which is an international symbol that would be impossible to trademark, the founder of Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, noted. Meta, the operator of X competitor Threads, and Microsoft both own versions of the X symbol, which could possibly lead to legal disputes. “Twitter Japan apparently legally cannot change their rebranding to ‘X Japan’ because the Jrock band X JAPAN owns the rights to the name. How funny would it be if Yoshiki is the one who saves us all from this awful rebranding move? LOL,” one user noted. “I’m not a [copyright] lawyer but I think he should have figured out if he owned the name before changing it,” Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast wrote. “Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app,” Mr Musk wrote on Monday. “This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.” Mr Musk claimed that users would soon have the “ability to conduct your entire financial world” on the app. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” he said. Mr Musk has reportedly been fond of the letter X for decades, co-founding an online bank called x.com in 1999, which later merged and grew into what is now PayPal. Read More Elon Musk’s ‘X’ already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for ‘social networking services’ TikTok launches text-only posts as social media innovation race heats up Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Twitter rebrands to X as Elon Musk loses iconic bird logo

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at a faster pace than laws can be drafted in response, an academic has warned. Although the technology has been around in some form for some time, the rate at which it is changing and improving is the new, key challenge, senators and TDs were told. The Oireachtas Enterprise Committee heard that AI can offer “profound opportunities” to help people, but can also be used to reduce white-collar employees’ salaries and even prompt diplomatic incidents. Professor of AI at Trinity College Dublin Gregory O’Hare cited cases including technology beating a world chess champion in 1997, as well as fake AI-generated images of Donald Trump being arrested and the Pope wearing a designer puffer jacket, as he outlined landmark moments in the development of the “disruptive technology”. He said there have been many previous “false dawns and unrealised promises” about the technology’s potential, and that ChatGPT has gathered 100 million users in two months and is the fastest-growing technology in history. He said white-collar professions like the law, academia, marketing, architecture, engineering, journalism and the creative industries will all be “profoundly affected”, and cited a recent study which estimated that two-thirds of all US occupations will be affected by AI. “In terms of the point around wages, I think there is certainly an opportunity for employers to reduce salaries,” he said. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) argued that unions should be involved at an early stage in any initiatives looking to address concerns around AI. Dr Laura Bambrick, of the ICTU, said the EU AI Act is not suitable to regulate AI and is “more than disappointing” from workers’ point of view, stating that the amendments tabled offer some comfort but “don’t go far enough”. “It only requires software providers to self-assess their own technology between low- and high-risk before putting it on the market, and did not include any rules on the use of AI in the workplace,” she said. The velocity of AI technology is, alas, fast exceeding the rate at which the law around AI can be framed Professor Gregory O'Hare, Trinity College Dubin Prof O’Hare said he believes the current legislative framework proposed to regulate AI is not “in a position to be able to respond with the speed that we need”. He added: “The velocity of AI technology is, alas, fast exceeding the rate at which the law around AI can be framed.” Cork East TD David Stanton said that statement is “quite scary”, and “science fiction is actually becoming science fact”. He suggested the topic is so serious and developing at such a pace that it could warrant setting up a dedicated Oireachtas committee to discuss it. During the session, committee chairman Maurice Quinlivan said he used ChatGPT to double-check that the three guests had not used ChatGPT to write their opening statements, with one TD remarking he was “using AI to check for AI”. Prof O’Hare said it is difficult to assess how AI comes to a particular conclusion, even for experts. “Not only is there typically not a set of algorithmic steps that one, even with a trained eye, could scrutinise, AI, and in particular deep AI, does not have an algorithmic basis. “So, even were it to be the case that someone like myself, a professor of artificial intelligence, were I to look at a particular AI application that was using deep learning, I would have great difficulty in being able to establish, on the surface, how it actually arrived at its deduction and its recommendation or conclusion.” It knows no political boundaries, it knows no geographic boundaries, no socio-economic boundaries. This is something that demands potentially a global position Professor Gregory O'Hare, Trinity College Dublin He added that, while it is crucial to engage with all stakeholders involved, it will take “some considerable time”, and the rate at which AI is developing “does not afford us that level of time”. Responding to the suggestion that the use of AI should be slowed down or halted to allow for consultation, he said: “We’re talking about something that knows no boundaries.” “It knows no political boundaries, it knows no geographic boundaries, no socio-economic boundaries. This is something that demands potentially a global position. So Ireland needs to find a way and a voice into that global discussion.” Ronan Lupton SC, of the Bar Council of Ireland, said that although AI has been around for some time, “where we’re moving to now, at the moment, is a sphere in an environment of extreme pace”, which is the “key challenge”. He said AI could help people with speech disabilities to communicate, but also warned of the dangers of misinformation. He said that newsrooms, instead of sending a draft article to a solicitor to check for defamation or other legal issues, are now using artificial intelligence technologies instead, which he said is “an interesting development”. Prof O’Hare agreed with the potential of AI to help people with disabilities and said it is “very important that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater”. “This technology has profound opportunities, absolutely profound opportunities.” But he suggested that, because the technology has been put out “into the wild”, it could be used for “sinister” means which could have financial or political implications, such as boundary incursions – and even wars. “The question is will it always be used for good purpose, or is there a significant chance that it will be used for Machiavellian purposes?” he said. 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