List of All Articles with Tag 't'

By Raphael Satter WASHINGTON In late June, one of cybersecurity expert Steven Adair's clients got an alert from

Getting locked out of your iPhone is frustrating. But it’s possible to solve the problem of a forgotten passcode without hiring a hypnotist.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked a federal court on Thursday for a stay that would prevent

Cryptocurrencies rallied as digital-asset advocates touted a ruling from a federal judge in the US Securities and Exchange

Your Chipotle guacamole may soon be prepared by a robot. Meet "Autocado," a Chipotle robot designed to perform the more tedious tasks of creating the chain's guacamole, including cutting, coring, and peeling avocados.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been left somewhat red-faced after a clip of her attempting to explain artificial intelligence was viewed more than 800,000 times. Ms Harris describing AI as a “fancy thing” during a roundtable with advocacy representatives has been roundly mocked, with many people comparing the answer to some of the gaffes that President Joe Biden has become known for. “I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing, first of all, it’s two letters, it means artificial intelligence but ultimately ... it’s about machine learning,” Ms Harris said. “And so the machine is taught and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine, and we can predict then if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced in terms of decisions and opinions that may be made through that process.” One Twitter user referred to Ms Harris’ description as being like “the introduction to a 6th-grade essay on AI”, while another suggested the vice president “always speaks as if she is talking to a room of 3rd graders”. “It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between Kamala Harris speaking about AI and Bart Simpson’s book report on Treasure Island,” another user added. Ms Harris has previously been mocked for past comments, in particular after she told Today in January 2022 on the topic of the coronavirus pandemic: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day. Every day, it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.” The vice president currently has an approval rating of 39.2 per cent, according to polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, while President Biden has a slightly higher approval rating of 40.6 per cent. Read More Vice President Kamala Harris makes history with tiebreaking votes in Senate Kamala Harris arrives in Ghana to ‘deepen ties’ with country amid competition from China Ron DeSantis rules out being Trump’s running mate: ‘I’m not a number two guy’

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is attempting to rally support for a bill that would reveal to Americans if their household devices are spying on them. Mr Cruz took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to rally support for the Informing Consumers about the Smart Devices Act — warning that as more and more Americans bring smart devices into their homes, the result could be a loss of privacy. “In Texas, we’ve become very aware of that cost,” Mr Cruz said. “The past few years, smart thermostats have allowed electric companies to control the temperature in your own home from afar in the name of conserving energy. Furthermore, a lot of Americans don’t realize or expect that the growing number of smart household devices and appliances, have cameras on them, and microphones that can surreptitiously record families and transmit data.” Mr Cruz says his bill would require technology manufacturers to clearly disclose whether their appliances have listening devices, cameras, or any other spying technologies. The bill would not apply to cell phones, laptops, or other devices “that a consumer would reasonably expect to include a camera or microphone.” Mr Cruz first introduced the proposal back in January with Sen Maria Cantwell of Washington, a Democrat. Sen Raphael Warnock of Georgia also joined the bill as a co-sponsor in late March, shortly after it was marked up by the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee. According to Mr Cruz’s testimony, the bill passed the Commerce Committee by a voice vote but has not yet been taken up by the full Senate. At its core, Mr Cruz said, the bill is designed as a consumer protection measure to let Americans know what they’re bringing into their home — a right that he feels takes precedent over concerns about government overreach. “Now, I’m sympathetic to the argument that there are too many mandates from government and that many of the mandates are unnecessary, burdensome, and costly,” Mr Cruz said. “But requiring a manufacturer to tell you if they’re spying on you does not fall into that category. And I have to say in assessing the minimal burden, the disclosure burden, against the harm, I fall down on the side of individual liberty. I fall down on the side of privacy.” Privacy is, in many ways, one of the defining issues of the internet age — particularly at a time when the buying and selling of people’s personal data is a multi-billion dollar industry that is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. “I don’t think the American people want their air fryer spying on them,” Mr Cruz said. “And at a minimum, they have a right to know if their air fryer is spying on them.” Read More Ted Cruz accuses new Barbie movie of ‘pushing Chinese propaganda’

Republicans are escalating their legal threats against Target, pressuring the company to remove merchandise for transgender customers and backtrack on its initiatives to hire minorities and diversify vendors.

The US Federal Trade Commission urged an appeals court to delay Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion takeover of Activision

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States will not pay reparations to developing countries hit by climate-fueled disasters, John Kerry, the U.S.

OpenAI has lost another board member with the departure of former Texas representative Will Hurd, who announced at

Google has been accused of “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet” in order to train its AI chatbot Bard. The class-action lawsuit filed in California alleges that Google and its AI division DeepMind used data from millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent to build its generative AI products. “Personal data of every kind, especially conversational data between humans, is critical to the AI training process,” the lawsuit notes. “This is how products like Bard develop human-like communication capabilities. Creative and expressive works are just as valuable because that is how AI products learn to ‘create’ art.” Google updated its online privacy policy earlier this month, stating that it can use publicly available data to train its artificial intelligence tools. According to the latest lawsuit, this change was designed to “double-down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use, including to build and enhance AI products like Bard”. Beyond freely available data, the lawsuit claims that Google illegally accessed “at least 200 million materials explicitly protected by copyright”, including the text from books and articles behind paywalls. Among those copyrighted materials is allegedly a book written by one of the plaintiffs named in the legal action. Many of the other plaintiffs named are listed solely as users of Google products like Search and Gmail, as well as other online platforms like TikTok. The lawsuit alleges that Google scraped “the entire internet to take anything it could, whether contributed on Google platforms or not, and without regard for the privacy, property, and consumer protection interests of hundreds of millions of Americans who shared their insights, talents, artwork, data, personally identifiable information, and more, for specific purposes, not one of which was to train large language models to profit Google while putting the world at peril with untested and volatile AI products”. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which features similar capabilities to Google’s Bard, also has a proposed class action lawsuit filed against it, which accuses the chatbot of drawing on “massive amounts of personal data from the internet”. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent, but a spokesperson told Reuters that the allegations were “baseless”. Read More Google’s AI chatbot Bard can now talk Elon Musk reveals plan to use AI to reveal mysteries of the universe