List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

By Julie Zhu and Jane Xu HONG KONG Chinese authorities are likely to announce a fine of at

Meta has responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit threat against its new platform Threads saying that none of the staff working on the app are former Twitter employees. On Thursday, Twitter threatened Meta with legal action over its new social media app Threads, claiming it is a “copycat” platform it built by hiring former Twitter staff. Since its roll out, Meta’s text-based platform built in partnership with Instagram, has racked up tens of millions signups, seemingly becoming the most rapidly downloaded app ever and the most popular Twitter alternative yet. Just hours after its launch, however, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg arguing that his company was guilty of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”, according to Semafor. “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Mr Spiro said in the letter. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta,” the attorney added. Mr Spiro alleged that Meta hired dozens of former Twitter staff who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”. He said “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app” was built with the “specific intent” that they use “Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property “in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app”. The attorney argued that this was “in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter”. Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, responded to the claims on Friday saying that the Threads engineering team does not have any former Twitter employee. “To be clear: No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing,” Mr Stone wrote on Threads. Mr Musk reponded to Twitter threatening Meta with a lawsuit saying: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” Read More What is Threads? All your questions about Meta's new Twitter rival, answered. Threads is already more than three times bigger than every Twitter rival combined I tried Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival, Threads – I’m not impressed Mark Zuckerberg accused of hypocrisy for shielding children’s faces in Instagram post Kim Kardashian, Rylan Clark and Dalai Lama among those joining new app Threads Twitter threatens legal action against Meta over new ‘Threads’ app

Sales of Square Enix Holdings Co.’s new Final Fantasy game tumbled during the second week after its release,

Twitter is threatening Meta with a lawsuit after the blockbuster launch of Meta's new Twitter rival, Threads — in perhaps the clearest sign yet that Twitter views the app as a competitive threat.

Kim Kardashian and Rylan Clark are among some of the celebrities to have signed up for the new social media site Threads. The Meta app, from the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has a text-style format which encourages users to post updates and join public discourse. Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader Dalai Lama also signed up to the newly launched platform. Former Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two presenter Clark kept his first update short with a photo captioned: “Get ya threads out for the ladddsss.” Chef Gordon Ramsay, known for his Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares series, said in his post: “Is this where I find the lamb sauce?” Colombian pop singer Shakira already has one million followers on the app, whilst reality TV star and businesswoman Kardashian has one and a half million, despite a lack of posts on her profile. TV personality and model Khloe Kardashian, who is Kim’s sister, is also on the platform and posted a photo with the caption: “Oh hi my little threaders”. Other celebrities such as Paris Hilton, former One Direction members Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, The Last Of Us star Bella Ramsey, Dragons’ Den panellists Deborah Meaden and Steven Bartlett and former Big Brother presenter Davina McCall have also signed up. Also setting up account were American singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo, radio DJ Chris Moyles, Little Mix singer Leigh-Anne Pinnock, British singer Louise Redknapp, American rapper Jack Harlow and The Help actress Jessica Chastain. The site is connected to Instagram so usernames and verification checks can carry over so celebrities can make the move to Threads easily. Brands and companies including streaming platform Netflix, clothing retailer Pretty Little Thing and supermarket Aldi have also joined the app. Threads posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos of up to five minutes in length. On Meta’s website, the company says: “Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas.” Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, which is also text based and allows posts of up to 280 characters. The South African-born billionaire announced at the weekend that his social media platform would be temporarily limiting the number of tweets people can read in a day, as thousands of users reported problems accessing the site. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Mastercard helping banks predict scams before money leaves customers’ accounts Art historian helps build new Assassin’s Creed game after son’s suggestion Twitter to stop TweetDeck access for unverified users

Twitter has threatened Meta with legal action over its new social media platform “Threads,” claiming that they have created a “copycat” platform and hiring former Twitter staff to do so. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook led by Mark Zuckerberg, revealed Threads on Wednesday, a text-based app partnering with Instagram that is similar to Twitter and other apps. More follows...

(Reuters) -Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms over its new Threads platform, news website Semafor reported on Thursday, citing

Scientists have achieved a major breakthrough using a so-called ‘miracle material’ to boost the efficiency of solar panels. Two separate studies published on Thursday demonstrated how the material perovskite could push the power conversion efficiency rate of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells above 30 per cent – beyond the theoretical limit of 29 per cent for traditional silicon (PV) solar cells. “Overcoming this threshold provides confidence that high-performance, low-cost PVs can be brought to the market,” wrote material science researchers Stefaan de Wolf and Erkan Aydin, who were not involved in the research, in an article published in the journal Science. Perovskite has emerged in the past 15 years as a material capable of transforming an array of industries, from renewable energy, to ultra high-speed communications. Materials science professor Zeev Valy Vardeny from the University of Utah described perovskite in 2017 as “unbelievable, a miracle material”, after it was able to radically improve the sunlight-to-energy efficiency of solar cells. Perovskite’s properties allow it to harvest energy from a greater range of the light spectrum, however until recently it was too unstable to be used outside of laboratory conditions. By stacking a layer of perovskite on top of silicon into a tandem device, the researchers were able to significantly boost the efficiency of commercial PV technologies while retaining the industry standard configuration. “Tandem solar cells are the most straight-forward route toward decreasing the levelized cost of electricity, well beyond what is possible for single-junction solar cells,” wrote Professor de Wolf and Aydin. The teams from China and Japan who were behind the latest breakthrough claim the latest design will pave the way for the mass production of ultra-efficient solar panels. The current efficiency record for this next-generation solar cell is 33.7 per cent, achieved by engineers at the KAUST Solar Center in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, having risen from under 4 per cent efficiency in 2009. Last month, a startup in China announced that it planned to begin production of tandem solar cells, with the abundance of perovskite cutting costs to “just one 20th of traditional solar cells”, according to Professor Tan Hairen from Nanjing University. The scientists behind the latest research believe their approach could ultimately achieve an efficiency rate “well above 35 per cent”, though more work needs to be done on making the tandem cells more durable in real-world conditions, as well as scaling them up to the size of traditional solar panels. “Arguably, the most critical factor lies in the annual degradation rate under actual outdoor conditions, which for perovskite-silicon tandems remains largely unknown,” the Perspective noted. “To be commercially viable, this degradation should be on par with mainstream PV technologies, which is less than 1 per cent relative per year.” The research was detailed in two separate papers published in the journal Science. Read More Massive mineral deposit discovery could meet global battery and solar panel demand ‘for next 100 years’

Robots took part in a UN session examining how artificial intelligence can be beneficial for healthcare. At the "Robots that assist and care: developing socially intelligent robots for good" event as part of the 2023 AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, speakers explored and demonstrated how robotics can be used for socially assistive functions such as recovery and wellness. The panel also examined how robot dogs for comfort and support, robot medical assistants, expressive robots for human communication, and robot dogs that keep people safe in industrial settings and public safety operations can be used. Key issues of community acceptance, policy, and ethics were also covered. The speakers list included Ben Goertzel, CEO and Founder of SingularityNET, Maja Matarić, Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, Will Jackson, CEO and Founder at Engineered Arts, Brendan Schulman, Vice President of Policy & Government Relations for Boston Dynamics, and Cindy L Bethel, Professor and Director of the Social, Therapeutic & Robotic Systems Lab at Mississippi State University. Read More AI rise will be ‘most profound’ shift seen in our lifetimes, Google UK boss says ‘Miracle material’ smashes solar panel efficiency threshold Mark Zuckerberg trolls Elon Musk with Spider-Man meme after launching Twitter rival

By Daniel Wiessner Uber Technologies Inc, DoorDash Inc and other app-based food delivery companies filed lawsuits on Thursday

The setbacks just keep coming for Twitter owner Elon Musk. After outages and daily view limits prompted users to flock to other platforms, and Mark Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in 11 years to savagely roast him, the individual behind the ‘Elon Jet’ account has set up a profile on rival app Threads. The text-based social network, run by Instagram, looks to build “an open, civil place for people to have conversations” and was released to the public on Thursday. As is to be expected, Musk isn’t exactly keen on Threads coming along and scooping up disgruntled Twitter users and has already criticised the app over the type of data it may collect from users. But if Zuckerberg isn’t enough of a headache for the businessman (the Tesla founder has challenged the Meta CEO to a cage fight), then a man who set up a Twitter account to track Musk’s private jet - in real-time, using publicly available data – setting up shop on Meta-managed Threads could well be. Jack Sweeney, who managed the account while studying at the University of Central Florida, soon angered Musk over the initiative, as he claimed the tweeting of public information was “becoming a security issue”. Unable to resist a dig at Musk on Threads, Sweeney created a Threads account on Thursday, with his second post (after the initial announcement) reading: “@Zuck will I be allowed to stay?” At the time of writing, @ElonMuskJet has more than 8,300 followers, and Zuckerberg is yet to comment. In January last year, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to take down the account, and when the then teenager got back to him asking for $50,000, the free speech “absolutist” went on to block him on Twitter. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Then, as talk continued to build of the tech mogul finally taking over the social media network, Sweeney tweeted in April that the move “doesn’t mean the end of ElonJet”, sharing links to the bot on other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Telegram. After buying Twitter in October – to the tune of $44bn – Musk took just two months to suspend the ‘ElonJet’ Twitter account, changing the platform’s rules to prohibit real-time location sharing. In a move which also saw several journalists temporarily banned, Musk tweeted in December: “Any account doxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.” Sweeney’s account was reinstated on the same day it was banned, with Musk making clear that sharing locations “on a slightly delayed basis” is OK as it “isn’t a safety problem”. It was relaunched as ‘ElonJet but Delayed’, with a 24-hour delay affecting tweets, and remains active on the platform to this day. 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.

Meta’s new Threads app will not let people leave without deleting their whole Instagram account, its rules warn. The app launched just hours ago and appears to have already received tens of millions of signups. It came at a particularly difficult time for Twitter – which has been limiting how many posts people can see – and has tight integration with Instagram, which makes it easy to sign up. However, people are not able to reverse that signup process once it has happened, users have found. If someone starts using Threads, and then wants to leave again, they will be forced to delete their entire Instagram account. Threads users can “deactivate” their profile, which will stop posts and interactions with other people’s posts from being shown. But that data will continue to live on parent company Meta’s servers, and will remain connected to the Instagram account it came from. Users can also delete all of their individual posts on Threads. As on most social networks, that has to be done one-by-one, with a user scrolling through their own account and deleting each post individually. But it is not possible to fully delete it without getting rid of all Instagram data. “Your Threads profile is part of your Instagram account, and may be deleted at any time by deleting your Instagram account,” a supplemental privacy policy published for Threads warns. Meta has said that it is working on the problem, presumably with a view to allowing people to get rid of their Threads account without deleting all of their data. The issue is just one of a range of problems that users have identified on the first day with Instagram’s Threads app. Many other users have complained, for instance, that there is no way to see only posts from accounts that they have actually followed. Instagram has built Threads to recommend posts from other accounts it thinks users are interested in, too – presumably in an attempt to ensure that the news feed is full up even when users start using the app. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has also confirmed on Threads that the company is working on that feature too. Mr Mosseri faced sharp criticism in recent months over the increasing amount of algorithmically chosen content being pushed into users feeds on the normal version of Instagram. Read More Threads: What it’s like to use Instagram’s new Twitter rival How to get and use ‘Threads’, the biggest new social app Mark Zuckerberg launches his ‘Twitter killer’ app called Threads