Users say harmful content from accounts they do not follow appears even after
requests to block it
Debbie was scrolling through X in April when some unwelcome posts appeared on
her feed. One showed a photo of someone who was visibly underweight asking
whether they were thin enough. In another, a user wanted to compare how few
calories they were eating each day.
Debbie, who did not want to give her last name, is 37 years old and was first
diagnosed with bulimia when she was 16. She did not follow either of the
accounts behind the posts, which belonged to a group with more than 150,000
members on the social media site.
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Tag - Technology
The detainment of the murky messaging service’s founder in France shows online
moguls can no longer act with impunity
On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget
airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial
police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for
interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged
complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug
trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”,
which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further
notice.
The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects
nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of
his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president,
Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing
daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports,
“he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice
bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for
meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found
time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a
free-speech extremist.
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Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot
replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft
redundant is not lost on them
For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of
dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several
other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we
are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be
read by anyone outside the company.
That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.
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Pavel Durov said the feature – which has had issues with bots and scammers –
would be replaced
The chief executive of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has announced the messaging app
will improve moderation on the platform and has removed some features that have
been used for illegal activity.
The app’s founder unveiled the changes on Friday hours after calling his arrest
by the French authorities last month “misguided”. Durov has since been charged
with allegedly allowing criminal activity on the app.
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CMA says tech company has ‘abused its dominant position’ to the detriment of
publishers and advertisers
* Business live – latest updates
The UK competition watchdog has accused Google of anti-competitive behaviour in
the market for buying and selling ads on websites, in a move that follows
similar investigations in the US and the EU.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had found that Google has
“abused its dominant position” in online advertising to the detriment of
thousands of UK publishers and advertisers.
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Experts are issuing stern warnings about business support for Trump – it could
backfire badly and endanger democracy
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, a growing number of billionaires, tech
titans and venture capitalists are backing Donald Trump’s campaign for
president, among them Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone, the world’s
largest private-equity fund, Steve Wynn, the casino tycoon, Bill Ackman, the
hedge fund manager, and Marc Andreessen, a leading venture capitalist.
But many business school professors and historians are issuing stern warnings
about this business support for Trump, saying that backing him could backfire
badly for business and endanger America’s democracy. These professors caution
that corporate America – along with everyone else – should be hugely concerned
about a candidate who has talked of being a dictator on day one, terminating the
constitution, and weaponizing the justice department to exact revenge against
his critics.
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Comprehensive sleep, recovery and health tracking without a smartwatch appeals,
but cost and fit won’t suit everyone
Smart rings are having a bit of a moment with the Oura seen adorning the fingers
of celebrities and elite sportspeople alike. It promises the health-tracking
features of a smartwatch squeezed into a much smaller, less techie device
focused on sleep, recovery and resilience. But can it deliver for regular
people, too?
Now several years into its third iteration, the Oura Gen 3 is the most popular
smart ring on the market, available in a range of attractive colours, metals and
sizes. It looks and feels like an attractive piece of jewellery, and is priced
accordingly, costing from £299 (€329/$299) and requiring a £6-a-month
subscription on top. Keeping up with celebrity crazes has never been cheap.
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Russian-born billionaire detained last month in France denies app is ‘anarchic
paradise’
The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in
France, has said that French authorities should have approached his company with
their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public
comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an
“anarchic paradise”.
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Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for
a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts
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In case you missed it, Serial’s Sarah Koenig was recently interviewed by Fiona
Sturges for the Guardian, on 10 years of Serial. It was an intriguing interview
about how web sleuths had changed Koenig’s own view of the Adnan Syed case that
made her podcast such a huge hit back in 2014. But one section struck me as
pretty surprising, if not totally shocking. Good friends and family, Koenig said
– “like, even my siblings” – had asked her whether its fourth series, on
Guantánamo Bay, had been released yet (it came out in March). “We can speculate
about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod]
universe is completely different,” she added. “There are so many choices. We are
in a sea of podcasts.”
Serial season four isn’t a whodunnit – Serial hasn’t really done that since its
inception, and that first series that hinged on whether Syed had killed his
high-school sweetheart Hae Min Lee. Successive outings have also leaned less on
the serialisation you might assume from the title, with the Guantánamo series
focusing instead on somewhat interlinked stories of life at the notorious US
prison camp, rather than one overarching, unfurling narrative. In many ways,
it’s kind of become a podcast Ship of Theseus, its elements slowly changing with
each season. Still, it’s slightly sad to think that some people may have
abandoned it just because it isn’t that same show it was at that very specific
moment in time, pre-true crime boom, rather than something that has changed and
evolved over a decade. Plus, the Guantánamo series is pretty solid (although,
beware – episode eight in particular comes with some deeply upsetting details of
sexual assault).
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Shoppers can use technology to advise them on outfit choices based on their body
shape and style preferences
Marks & Spencer is using artificial intelligence to advise shoppers on their
outfit choices based on their body shape and style preferences, as part of
efforts to increase online sales.
The 130-year-old retailer is using the technology to personalise consumers’
online experience, and suggest items to buy.
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