Nintendo is developing a film based on its hugely popular "The Legend of Zelda" franchise, the Japanese gaming giant announced, as it bids to capitalize on the blockbuster...

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HBCU college football classics have become a staple in the Black community

Tesla has a flair for launches that only tech companies once wielded. If the Cybertruck starts at under $50,000 it will be cheaper than a base-model Ford F-150 Lightning.

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Millions of Reddit fans will find themselves locked out of their favorite pages in the coming days, as

Scientists have got to the bottom of a 5-year mystery after finally identifying a tiny sea creature captured on camera in 2018. It is the latest in a series of oceanic discoveries and experts recently observed “zombie worms” devour an alligator in an incredible experiment. For the tiny creature, the baffling question of its identity took a team of zoologists and parasitic worm specialists to solve after the small creature was pictured by an underwater photographer in 2018 off the coast of Okinawa in Japan. After photographer Ryo Minemizu captured the image, he shared it on social media asking the hive mind if they knew what the creature was, but everyone was left stumped. Minemizu was determined not to give up and instead went back to the area and was able to capture another ladybird-sized creature that was the same, or very similar, to the original one he had come across. The research team that was interested in identifying the sea creature approached him and Minemizu sent them the sample to research. Your browser does not support the video tag. Current Biology (2023) The team’s results were published in the Current Biology journal putting an end to the 5-year long mystery baffling experts. In a fascinating twist, the team found that the sample was not one, but two creatures that were clinging tightly to one another. Both were identified as types of cercariae parasitic larvae worms, with experts dubbing one as the “sailor” and the other as a “passenger” thanks to how they behave when they are connected. Passengers were much smaller than the sailors and when they were bonded together, they formed a flat-topped hemisphere shape. They squeeze their bodies together with heads facing the inside of the sphere, meanwhile, their tails latch onto one another. Experts believe the two individual creatures have created a colonial organism that suits both of their needs and according to the study's authors, “represents the first case of labor division in digenean larvae”. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman has labelled bitcoin the “super logical” next step for technological progress, just months after launching his own cryptocurrency. Mr Altman, whose company launched the viral AI assistant ChatGPT last year, made the comments on a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, during which he also lamented the role of government regulation in the crypto space. “The war on crypto... that makes me quite sad about the country,” Mr Altman said. “I think this idea that we have this global currency that is outside of the control of any government is a super logical and important step on the tech tree.” The price of bitcoin fell sharply in 2021 and 2022, largely driven by the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has since filed lawsuits against other exchanges like Binance and Coinbase as part of a crackdown against the industry. A crypto bill has also been introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren in an attempt to address “crypto’s use in money laundering, drug trafficking, and financing of terrorism and rogue nations”. The OpenAI boss spoke briefly about his own cryptocurrency project, called Worldcoin, which has faced several controversies since officially launching in July. The project involves collecting people’s biometric data through an iris-scanning orb in exchange for a share of the crypto token WLD. The idea is to use the data to verify each individual’s “unique personhood” in order to ensure that no one is able to claim more than their allotted share of the cryptocurrency. The unique approach has been branded both “outlandish” and “revolutionary” by crypto commentators, with some warning that the sensitive nature of the data means it could be exploited by nefarious actors. Regulators in several countries, including France and Germany, are investigating Worldcoin’s operations to see if it is in violation of data security practices. Worldcoin has acknowledged the privacy concerns, noting in a blog post in August that “everything is optional” and that no personal information needs to be tied to the iris scan. “[The Orb] validates a person’s humanness locally on the device, without needing to send, upload or save images,” the post stated. “By default, the Orb promptly deletes iris images after the creation of the iris code.” Read More Sam Bankman-Fried trial: Billion dollar crypto fortune was ‘built on lies’, prosecutors say How bad is bitcoin for the environment really? Crypto experts discuss bitcoin price predictions What is Solana? The crypto rising 200-times faster than bitcoin

LE BOURGET, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 19, 2023--

Do social media echo chambers deepen political polarization, or simply reflect...

Bots are better and significantly faster than humans at cracking Captcha tests, according to a comprehensive new study that inspected the security system deployed in over 100 popular websites. Automated bots pose a significant threat to the internet because they can masquerade as legitimate human users and perform harmful operations like scraping content, creating accounts and posting fake comments or reviews, as well as consuming scarce resources. “If left unchecked, bots can perform these nefarious actions at scale,” warned scientists, including those from the University of California, Irvine. For over two decades, Captchas have been deployed as security checks by websites to block potentially harmful bots by presenting puzzles that are supposed to be straightforward for people to solve – but very difficult for computers. Earlier forms of Captcha, for instance, asked users to transcribe distorted text from an image, but with advances in computer vision and machine learning, bots soon caught up to recognise the text with near perfect accuracy. Engaged in an arms race with bots, Captchas have since evolved into an annoying presence on the internet, becoming increasingly more and more difficult to solve for both bots and humans. However, the new yet-to-be peer-reviewed research, posted in arXiv, finds bots are able to quickly crack Captcha tests with ease, suggesting global effort users put into cracking these puzzles every day may be more trouble than its worth. In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds – varying in location, age, sex and educational level – to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy. Some captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. “The bots’ accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent),” scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots’ solving times are “significantly lower” or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases. Since current Captchas do not meet the required security goal of keeping bots away, researchers have called for better and more dynamic approaches to protect websites. Read More Shock for millions of voters as details exposed in hack – which went undetected for a year AI-driven cyberattack can now steal your passwords with near 100 per cent accuracy, study warns More than a million NHS patients’ details compromised after cyberattack Many adults would struggle to understand video-sharing platforms’ rules – Ofcom Now even Zoom tells staff: ‘Come back to the office’ Ozzy Osbourne PlayStation tweet which failed to reveal link to Sony banned

By Elvira Pollina and Supantha Mukherjee MILAN/STOCKHOLM Italy's data protection authority Garante plans to review other artificial intelligence