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. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

Platform will ensure algorithms do not keep pushing similar content to young viewers, even though it does not breach guidelines YouTube is to stop recommending videos to teenagers that idealise specific fitness levels, body weights or physical features, after experts warned such content could be harmful if viewed repeatedly. The platform will still allow 13- to 17-year-olds to view the videos, but its algorithms will not push young users down related content “rabbit holes” afterwards. Continue reading...

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Guidelines also stipulate teenagers should have no more than three hours of screen time a day Children under the age of two should not be exposed to any screens whatsoever and teenagers should have no more than three hours of screen time a day, according to guidelines announced by health authorities in Sweden. Parents and guardians should think about how they use screens with their children and tell them what they are doing on their phones when they use them in their presence, the advice says. Continue reading...

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Rob Minnick uses the platform to detail the dangers of gambling in an effort to tackle content that normalizes it Rob Minnick was in a bathroom in Paris when it dawned on him that he might need some help. Having flown 3,700 miles to explore the French capital, he kept disappearing for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. “People must have thought I had the worst stomach problems in the world,” he said of his trip, in February 2022. While his stomach was fine, he was not. Minnick had developed an addiction to gambling. Continue reading...

Gig economy workers for Deliveroo and Uber Eats in the city are living in appalling conditions, while putting in long hours, earning low pay and facing mental health problems Two lines of dirt-encrusted, ramshackle caravans stretch along both sides of a road close to the motorway that winds its way into the heart of Bristol. Rats dart between water-filled concrete sluices to rubbish-flecked mounds of vegetation. Drug users stumble out of the nearby underpass while lorries thunder overhead. This is the grim encampment where about 30 Brazilian delivery riders working for large companies such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats are forced to live to make ends meet. Continue reading...