TikTok has filed a lawsuit challenging Montana’s recently announced ban of the video sharing app. The social media firm argued that the new law, which is set to come into effect on 1 January next year, is an unconstitutional violation of free speech. The company, which is owned by China-based ByteDance, said the attempt to block users from accessing TikTok is based on “unfounded speculation” that the Chinese government could access their data. The lawsuit by TikTok itself follows one filed last week by five content creators who made the same arguments, including that the state of Montana has no authority to take action on matters of national security. Both lawsuits were filed in federal court in Missoula. Republican Govenor Greg Gianforte signed the bill last Wednesday and the content creators’ lawsuit was filed hours later. TikTok has not shared and would not share US user data with the Chinese government and has taken measures to protect the privacy and security of its users, including storing all US user data in the United States, the company stated in its complaint. Some lawmakers, the FBI and officials at other agencies are concerned that the video-sharing app could be used to allow the Chinese government to access information on US citizens or push pro-Beijing misinformation that could influence the public. Chinese law compels Chinese companies to share data with the government for whatever purposes it deems to involve national security. TikTok says this has never happened. “TikTok is spying on Americans. Period,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, whose office drafted the bill, told a legislative committee in March. Knudsen’s office has said they expected lawsuits and were prepared to defend the new law. The federal government and about half the US states, including Montana, have banned TikTok from government-owned devices. Montana’s new law prohibits downloads of TikTok in the state. It would fine any “entity” – an app store or TikTok – $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access the social media platform or download the app. The penalties would not apply to users. Even if the law comes into force in 2024, security experts have warned that it would be nearly impossible to prevent TikTok users from accessing the app. Oded Vanunu, head of products vulnerability research at the cyber security firm Check Point, said last week that it would be difficult for any single state to ban the app, as easily available technologies like virtual private networks (VPNs) would allow users to bypass any geolocation blocks. Additional reporting from agencies Read More TikTok ban in numbers: Charting the controversial rise of the world’s most popular app Schoolboy almost dies from swallowing magnets for TikTok challenge Woman shares honest review of New York City apartment TikTok mom slammed after making 5-year-old son run in 104 degree heat

DURHAM, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 18, 2023--

As insurers start to pull out from markets battered by the fallout of climate change, governments are increasingly

At least two brands have said they will suspend advertising on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, after their ads and those of other companies were run on an account promoting fascism. The issue came less than a week after X CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly affirmed the company's commitment to brand safety for advertisers.

Undoing a repost on TikTok is just as effortless as the initial act of reposting

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room." So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”. Now, just as Neo discovered that the "life" he'd been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves. In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory known as the simulation hypothesis. This, in a nutshell, posits that the entire universe and our objective reality are just super-advanced virtual reality illusions. Elon Musk is among the well-known fans of the theory, which – as Dr Vopson notes in his paper – has been “gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry”. The university lecturer also pointed out that recent developments in a branch of science known as information physics “appear to support this possibility”. Information physics suggests that physical reality is made up of bits of information. However, Dr Vopson has gone further and is working to prove that information has a physical mass and is a fundamental building block of the universe. He even claims that information could be the mysterious dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe. In previous research, the physicist proposed that all elementary particles (the smallest known building blocks in the universe), store information about themselves, much like DNA in humans. Then, in 2022, he discovered a new law of physics, christened the second law of infodynamics, which states that entropy – the degree of randomness or disorder – within an isolated information system either remains constant or decreases over time. In other words, the system becomes less and less chaotic, implying that there is some kind of mechanism governing it rather than random chance. “I knew then that this revelation had far-reaching implications across various scientific disciplines,” Dr Vopson said in a statement released by the University of Portsmouth. “What I wanted to do next is put the law to the test and see if it could further support the simulation hypothesis by moving it on from the philosophical realm to mainstream science.” Is the Universe a Simulation? | Melvin Vopson www.youtube.com Dr Vopson employed the law in a range of different fields, including genetics, cosmology and even symmetry. Here, he found that the abundance of symmetry in the Universe (think snowflakes and facial structures) could be explained by the second law of infodynamics. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be,” he said. “My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it." Again, put simply, nature prefers things to be as well-ordered as possible. He continued: “This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimise power consumption.” As a result, this “supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.” Dr Vopson is serious about this idea and, last year, even launched a crowdfunding campaign to test it. At the time, he announced that he had designed an experiment to determine whether we are all just characters in an advanced virtual world. “There is a growing community out there looking seriously at the possibility that information is more fundamental to everything than we think,” he said in a statement released back in December. “If information is a key component of everything in the universe, it would make sense that a vast computer somewhere is in control. “Assuming the universe is indeed a simulation, then it must contain a lot of information bits hidden everywhere around us. I’ve devised an experiment that proposes a way of extracting this information to prove it’s there.” His proposed experiment is based on his conclusion that information is physical and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves. He posited that the information in an elementary particle could be detected and measured by using particle-antiparticle collision. “We can measure the information content of a particle by erasing it. If we delete the information from the particles, we can then look at what’s left,” he said in the December statement. “This experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and I’m hoping the crowdfunding site will help us achieve it.” And whilst the crowdfunder closed well before reaching its proposed £185,000 target, Dr Vopson still hopes to carry out the ambitious test. Following his most recent paper, he suggested the experiment had the power to confirm the “fifth state of matter in the universe” and “change physics as we know it.” Sign up for 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.

BlackRock Inc. is trying its hand at potentially getting the first spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded fund launched in the US.

Alphabet-owned Google is planning to make its suite of artificial intelligence-powered tools available to corporate Gmail accounts at

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said Ripple Labs Inc’s institutional sales of its XRP digital token violated federal

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 26, 2023--

China is proposing new measures to curb the amount of time that kids and teens can spend on their phones, as the country takes aim at internet addiction and tries to cultivate "good morality" and "socialist values" among minors.

Software company Adobe unveiled a new futuristic “digital dress” that lets wearers change patterns on its surface on the fly with the click of a button. The dress, created under Adobe’s “Project Primrose”, is made of sequins which are “reflective light-diffuser modules” built using liquid crystals such as those in smart lighting. Researchers say the sequins are basically tiny screens built using smart materials. The dress was unveiled for the first time for the audience at Adobe’s MAX conference last week with the software company describing it as bringing “fabric to life”. Video from the conference showed Adobe researcher Christine Dierk wearing the strapless outfit, which appeared like an average cocktail dress on first impression, but the patterns on it begin to shift immediately with the touch of a remote button. “Unlike traditional clothing, which is static, Primrose allows me to refresh my look in a moment,” the Adobe scientist said while demonstrating that its colors can go from light to dark in a moment. The researcher-turned-model also showed that the dress not only had static changes, but also animated designs with patterns fading in and out. Ms Dierk, who not only designed the dress but also stitched it herself, demonstrated that the outfit will even respond to movement. Researchers say the dress is built using “reflective-backed polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC)” a material commonly used in smart windows. “This low-power non-emissive material can be cut to any shape, and dynamically diffuses light,” scientists wrote in a study presented at a tech conference last year, but it remains unclear how heavy the dress can actually get. “Designers can layer this technology into clothing, furniture, and other surfaces to unlock infinite style possibilities – such as the ability to download and wear the latest design from a favorite designer,” Adobe noted. They said the high-tech sequins are also used for smaller products part of Project Primrose including a handbag and a canvas. “We hope this work inspires future designers of flexible displays,” scientists said. Read More Photo giant Getty took a leading AI image-maker to court. Now it's also embracing the technology John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, dies at age 82 In closed forum, tech titans to give senators advice on artificial intelligence Tell us if you think price is the biggest problem with electric cars Sadiq Khan, Met Commissioner to ask phone companies to ‘design out’ theft TikTok details plans for Israel-Hamas war posts