Stories We Can’t Stop Thinking About: Deepfakes, the Tesla Backlash, and All Things Chips
This week on “Uncanny Valley,” our hosts talk about three big stories from February.
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…
Less than 24 hours after going dark, TikTok says it has come back online after President-elect Donald Trump gave the company’s service providers—presumably Apple, Google, and Oracle—reassurance that his administration wouldn’t enforce a law banning the app in the first place. “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,”…
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…
Adhering to the new rules is also proving to be a major lift for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the US Postal Service. The latter briefly stopped accepting packages from China and Hong Kong altogether on Tuesday, as it scrambled to manage the deluge of packages from China that were suddenly subjected to…
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 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…