Great Tech, Inc.™

Technology | The Guardian
Chinese AI chip firms blacklisted over weapons concerns gained access to UK technology

Imagination Technologies had licences with two Chinese firms – but said it had not ‘implemented transactions’ that would enable the use of technology for military purposes

Chinese engineers developing chips for artificial intelligence that can be used in “advanced weapons systems” have gained access to cutting-edge UK technology, the Guardian can reveal.

Described by analysts as “China’s premier AI chip designers”, Moore Threads and Biren Technology are subject to US export restrictions over their development of chips that “can be used to provide artificial intelligence capabilities to further development of weapons of mass destruction, advanced weapons systems and hi-tech surveillance applications that create national security concerns”.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
Amazon workers across US gear up to strike this week

Move comes after company fails to meet deadline to begin contract talks with workers in Staten Island, New York

Thousands of Amazon workers are gearing up to strike from Thursday, days before Christmas, over the tech giant’s refusal to begin negotiations over a contract.

Union locals are preparing members for pickets and actions outside Amazon facilities around the US.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
Mouthwashing review – 2024’s most difficult game, but not in the way you might expect

PC; Creative Reflex/Wrong Organ
The word ‘challenge’ has an accepted meaning in the world of video games, but in this engrossing sci-fi horror it’s the subject matter that’s confronting

It is perhaps poetic that throughout this year, the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation, developers have found such a rich vein of horror in early 3D visuals. Crow Country, Fear the Spotlight and now Mouthwashing all make terrifying use of low-poly characters, smeared textures and muted colour palettes to generate dread and abjection – and in this sci-fi odyssey from Wrong Organ they’re also brilliantly utilised to symbolise complete psychological breakdown.

The setup to Mouthwashing is simple and familiar: when a hulking spacecraft crashes in a remote part of the galaxy, the small crew slowly goes insane waiting for a rescue that is never going to come. Not helping matters is their cargo: millions of gallons of high-alcohol mouthwash – which very quickly gets abused by the desperate and deeply flawed castaways.
Continue reading...
➖ Sent by @TheFeedReaderBot ➖

Technology | The Guardian
UK proposes letting tech firms use copyrighted work to train AI

Consultation suggests opt-out scheme for creatives who don’t want their work used by Google, OpenAI and others

Campaigners for the protection of the rights of creatives have criticised a UK government proposal to let artificial intelligence companies train their algorithms on their works under a new copyright exemption.

Book publishers said the proposal put out for consultation on Tuesday was “entirely untested and unevidenced” while Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer campaigning to protect artists’ and creatives’ rights, said she was “very disappointed”.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
Will the future of transportation be robotaxis – or your own self-driving car?

GM is shutting down its robotaxi business, Tesla is creating one of its own – what does the future hold for self-driving?

* Want TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Welcome back. This week in tech: General Motors says goodbye to robotaxis but not self-driving cars; one woman’s fight to keep AI out of applications for housing; Salt Typhoon; and tech’s donations to Donald Trump. Thank you for joining me.

Tenant-screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to ‘avoid engaging’ directly with the applicants and pass the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing Louis and the class of plaintiffs who sued the company.

The property management company told Louis the software alone decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated it was the management company that set the threshold for how high someone needed to score to have their application accepted.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
Amazon-hosted AI tool for UK military recruitment ‘carries risk of data breach’

Ministry of Defence says risk is low and ‘robust safeguards’ have been put in place by suppliers

An artificial intelligence tool hosted by Amazon and designed to boost UK Ministry of Defence recruitment puts defence personnel at risk of being identified publicly, according to a government assessment.

Data used in the automated system to improve the drafting of defence job adverts and attract more diverse candidates by improving the inclusiveness language, includes names, roles and emails of military personnel and is stored by Amazon in the US. This means “a data breach may have concerning consequences, ie identification of defence personnel”, according to documents detailing government AI systems published for the first time today.

The possibility of inappropriate lesson material being generated by a AI-powered lesson-planning tool used by teachers based on Open AI’s powerful large language model, GPT-4o. The AI saves teachers time and can personalise lesson plans rapidly in a way that may otherwise not be possible.

“Hallucinations” by a chatbot deployed to answer queries about the welfare of children in the family courts. However, it also offers round the clock information and reduces queue times for people who need to speak to a human agent.

“Erroneous operation of the code” and “incorrect input data” in HM Treasury’s new PolicyEngine that uses machine learning to model tax and benefit changes “with greater accuracy than existing approaches”.

“A degradation of human reasoning” if users of an AI to prioritise food hygiene inspection risks become over-reliant on the system. It may also result in “consistently scoring establishments of a certain type much lower”, but it should also mean faster inspections of places that are more likely to break hygiene rules.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
Potential payouts for up to 300,000 Australian Facebook users in Cambridge Analytica settlement

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner announces deal with Meta over scandal that may have affected 300,000 users

* Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
* Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Potentially hundreds of thousands of people who had their Facebook data harvested as part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal could be compensated, after Meta agreed to an A$50m settlement with Australia’s privacy regulator.

The settlement, announced by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) on Tuesday, follows a four-year legal battle against Meta over the scandal, and two years since a US$725m legal settlement was reached in the United States.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
Social media platforms have work to do to comply with Online Safety Act, says Ofcom

Regulator publishes codes of practice and warns that largest sites are not following many of its measures

Social media platforms have a “job of work” to do in order to comply with the UK’s Online Safety Act and have yet to introduce all the measures needed to protect children and adults from harmful content, the communications regulator has said.

Ofcom on Monday published codes of practice and guidance that tech companies should follow to comply with the act, which carries the threat of significant fines and closure of sites if companies breach it.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
TikTok turns to US supreme court in last-ditch bid to avert divest-or-ban law

Firm and parent company ByteDance file request for injunction to halt ban of app used by 170 million Americans

TikTok made a last-ditch effort on Monday to continue operating in the United States, asking the US supreme court to temporarily block a law intended to force ByteDance, its China-based parent company, to divest the short-video app by 19 January or face a ban.

TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency request to the justices for an injunction to halt the looming ban on the social media app used by about 170 million Americans while they appeal a lower court’s ruling that upheld the law. A group of US users of the app filed a similar request on Monday as well.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
A volcanic explosion every 15 minutes: how Australia’s museums are turning to tech to lure us in

Museums are using VR and immersive experiences to boost attendances – and, while it can provide an amazing spectacle, critics say it can be an expensive distraction

It starts with a low rumble, then an explosion and a deafening roar. A pyroclastic flow bursts from the volcano and hurtles towards us at a frightening speed. Showers of ash appear to pummel the space around us – well technically, it’s a pumice lapilli unique to Mount Vesuvius – and, for a few minutes, visitors to the National Museum of Australia are in Pompeii 1,946 years ago.

Immersive experiences, including increasingly sophisticated virtual reality technology, have gone from gimmick to essential component of blockbuster museum exhibitions, despite criticism from scholarly quarters that whiz-bang special effects can distract viewers from the actual artefacts and exhibits, and are training a future generation to assume entertainment is the primary function of museums.

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
From UFOs to drones, the US fascination with – and fear of – ‘anomalous detections’

A first-of-its-kind public archive of UFO records opens in New Mexico as New Jersey is gripped by drone panic

A widespread panic about drones or other unknown low-flying objects has gripped New Jersey in recent days, but many other parts of the US remain cheerfully gripped by another very American mystery in the skies that has had a modern resurgence of interest: UFOs.

At the newly opened National UFO Historical Records Center – an array of beige buildings on the grounds of the Martin Luther King Jr elementary school in Rio Rancho, New Mexico – records detailing unexplained aerial objects and public fears around them fill literally dozens of filing cabinets.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
‘People should feel there’s more than doom and gloom’: Monument Valley 3’s environmentalist hope-punk

How the pandemic and climate migration have influenced this third outing of a formerly sterile architectural puzzle game

Architectural surrealism is Monument Valley’s signature. Austere, beautiful structures transform and rotate at the player’s touch, creating new paths and staircases for its minimalist characters to traverse. Doorways can lead anywhere. Switches cause columns to rise out of the ground, a perspective shift can reveal a cache of hidden pathways. Since 2014 these games have been smartphone must-plays, one of the best and most elegant examples of satisfying touch-screen puzzlers. But the third in the series, released last week, is a little different.

The Moroccan-inspired architecture that made the game famous is still present, but this time your geometric character Noor walks alongside blooming flowers and twisting vines, too. She sails a small boat. She gets lost in fields of bright yellow wheat. And there are many more people around her: she is a lighthouse-keeper’s apprentice, charged with the welfare of her community – which, a few scenes into the game, is ravaged by a flood. In some scenes she is accompanied by someone else, or there is someone there to rescue. It is a game about buildings still, but also a game about rebuilding, together.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
‘Trump has been explicit about revenge’: Asif Kapadia on his new film about the threat to democracy

The man behind Amy and Senna has turned his attention to ‘techno-authoritarianism’ in the genre-defying 2073. He talks to our journalist – one of the movie’s unlikely stars – about the events that fed his dystopian vision

It was some time in the early 2000s and Asif Kapadia, already a successful film director, a wunderkind whose first feature in 2001, The Warrior, won the Bafta for outstanding British film, was travelling back from New York.

“There’s a beautiful, gorgeous sunset over Manhattan. I’m in a limo being taken to the airport. And I was taking photos of Manhattan because I was driving over Brooklyn Bridge and it’s just all so cinematic and I became subconsciously aware of the driver watching me in the rear view mirror.
Continue reading...

Technology | The Guardian
‘It’s game over for facts’: how vibes came to rule everything from pop to politics

From voters picking up ‘bad vibes’ to the Brat girl summer, vague instincts now make the world go round. Does this represent a crisis of seriousness or has it always been feelings that make us human?

Facts were cool for about 250 years. From the Enlightenment until this century, facts were where it was at. They had a good innings. But it is game over for facts, the end of the line for statistics. These days, what counts is what you feel. In other words, it’s all about the vibe.

Vibes are everywhere. Disillusioned Labour voters are “picking up bad vibes”, reports this paper. The Bank of England gets “wrong-footed by a vibe shift in the economy”. In the US, a “vibe-cession” – a downturn in economic confidence at an impressionistic level – was a key electoral issue. Google Maps will not only give you directions, but “vibe check” a neighbourhood for you. Of all this year’s hit albums, the one that had a vibe named after it – Brat – won the culture, catapulting Charli XCX to seven Grammy nominations. When a new production of Romeo & Juliet opened on Broadway recently, a US newspaper wrote that “the vibe is very ‘teens hanging out in the Target parking lot’, only with a lot more sonnets and glitter” – because even William Shakespeare is no one without a vibe these days.
Continue reading...