A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago. Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which…
The Biden administration announced a bold and controversial new export control scheme today, designed to prevent the advanced chips and artificial intelligence models themselves from ending up in the hands of adversaries such as China. The administration’s new “AI Diffusion rule” divides the world into nations that are allowed relatively unfettered access to America’s most…
This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X’s Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation…
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new measure on Friday that could protect your Robux from scammers and hackers. The proposed rule would interpret terms in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, or EFTA, which has traditionally been used to protect consumers from unauthorized debit transactions, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and…
“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, notwithstanding that internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew LibGen was ‘a dataset we know to be pirated,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (Originally filed in late 2024, the…
“Meta has perennially been a home for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation,” claims Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, Meta apparently has decided to open the floodgates completely.” Again, fact-checking isn’t perfect; Croviz says that NewsGuard has tracked several “false narratives” on…
Using a series of prompts six days before he died by suicide outside the main entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, a highly decorated US Army Green Beret from Colorado, consulted with an artificial intelligence on the best ways to turn a rented Cybertruck into a four-ton vehicle-borne explosive. According…
Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including ending its fact-checking partnerships and “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV…
Nvidia announced today it’s releasing a family of foundational AI models called Cosmos that can be used to train humanoids, industrial robots, and self-driving cars. While language models learn how to generate text by training on copious amounts of books, articles, and social media posts, Cosmos is designed to generate images and 3D models of…
For all the goofiness, memecoin fever has been embraced by some corners of the crypto industry. In search of outsize returns, a small number of hedge funds have invested in memecoins this year. Other investment firms, like Pantera Capital, consider memecoins to be a “Trojan horse” likely to introduce new people to crypto. The idea,…