Innholdsfortegnelse for #630 i Techlife News

While the scandals in the cryptocurrency industry seem to never end, Washington policymakers appear to have little interest in pushing through legislation to codify the structure of the industry. The latest shoe to drop is Binance’s multibillion dollar settlement with U.S. authorities and the resignation of its CEO this week. Before that came the conviction of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for stealing billions from customers and the implosion of smaller crypto companies that cost investors large sums of money. When cryptocurrencies collapsed and a number of companies failed last year, Congress considered multiple approaches for how to regulate the industry in the future. However, most of those efforts have gone nowhere, especially in this chaotic year that has been dominated by geopolitical tensions, inflation and the upcoming 2024 election. In…

It’s been quite a week for ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — and co-founder Sam Altman. Altman, who helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab back in 2015, was removed as CEO Friday in a sudden and mostly unexplained exit that stunned the industry. And while his chief executive title was swiftly reinstated just days later, a lot of questions are still up in the air. If you’re just catching up on the OpenAI saga and what’s at stake for the artificial intelligence space as a whole, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s a rundown of what you need to know. WHO IS SAM ALTMAN AND HOW DID HE RISE TO FAME? Altman is co-founder of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company behind ChatGPT (yes, the chatbot that’s seemingly everywhere today —…

COUNTERFEITS ON THE RISE For over 30 years, Apple has set a benchmark in design, concept, quality, and user experience. These attributes make Apple products highly desirable and a prime target for counterfeiters. The brand’s status symbol appeal further drives the demand for cheaper, fake versions, especially among low-income classes who aspire to own Apple products but cannot afford genuine articles. The range of fake Apple products is vast, including AirPods, chargers, cables, iPhones, Macs, and iPads. And they’re costing Apple money. In 2021 alone, fake AirPods and AirPods Pro products cost Apple an eye-watering $3.2 billion while schemes involving swapping counterfeit products for genuine alternatives has cost Apple millions more, too. These counterfeits often appear shockingly similar to the genuine products but come with considerable risks. Fake chargers and…

Elon Musk’s social media company X filed a lawsuit against liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America this week, saying it manufactured a report to show advertisers’ posts alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist posts in order to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.” Media Matters, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, called the lawsuit “frivolous.” Advertisers have been fleeing the site formerly known as Twitter over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content — and hate speech on the site in general — while billionaire owner Musk has inflamed tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast said last week that they stopped advertising on X after the Media Matters report said their ads were appearing alongside…

Last week, President Joe Biden and other global leaders have spent days melding minds with Silicon Valley titans in San Francisco, their discussions frequently focusing on artificial intelligence, a technology expected to reshape the world, for better or worse. For all the collective brainpower on hand for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, there were no concrete answers to a pivotal question: Will AI turn be the springboard that catapults humanity to new heights, or the dystopian nightmare that culminates in its demise? “The world is at an inflection point — this is not a hyperbole,” Biden said at a CEO summit held in conjunction with APEC. “The decisions we make today are going to shape the direction of the world for decades to come.” Not surprisingly, most of the technology…

For such a famed historical figure, Napoleon has made only fleeting appearances in movies since Abel Gance’s 1927 silent film. Stanley Kubrick had grand designs for a Napoleon epic that went unmade. (Steven Spielberg is attempting to revive those plans as a series ). Napoleon and his bicorne hat — more icon of history than a real character — mostly only pops up in time-traveling odysseys like “Time Bandits” or “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” The party, though, is finally on in Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” starring Joaquin Phoenix. Scott doesn’t do anything small, not even famously diminutive French emperors. And his two-hour-38-minute big-screen biopic serves up a heaping historical spectacle complete with bloody European battles and massive military maneuvers. But don’t mistake “Napoleon” for your average historical epic. Our first…

Electric vehicle sales are expected to hit a record 9% of all passenger vehicles in the U.S. this year, according to Atlas Public Policy. That will be up from 7.3% of new car sales in 2022. It will be the first time more than 1 million EVs are sold in the U.S. in one calendar year, probably reaching between 1.3 million and 1.4 million cars, the research firm predicts. Although the numbers show significant progress for electrification, the nation is lagging behind countries like China, Germany and Norway. EVs reached 33% of sales in China, 35% in Germany, and 90% in Norway for the first six months of 2023, according to a BloombergNEF EV outlook published in June. These figures include both battery electric vehicles and plugin hybrid EVs. In…

The ousted leader of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is returning to the company that fired him late last week, culminating a days-long power struggle that shocked the tech industry and brought attention to the conflicts around how to safely build artificial intelligence. San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday: “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.” The board, which replaces the one that fired Altman on Friday, will be led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who also chaired Twitter’s board before its takeover by Elon Musk last year. The other members will be former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. OpenAI’s previous board of directors, which included D’Angelo, had refused to…

Amazon is cutting hundreds of jobs in the unit that handles its popular voice assistant Alexa as it plows more resources into artificial intelligence. In a note to employees, Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, wrote that the company is eliminating certain roles because it is ditching some initiatives. “As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” Rausch wrote. He said “several hundred” positions would be cut but did not give a more precise figure. Seattle-based Amazon is in fierce competition with other tech companies rushing to capitalize on the generative AI craze. The company has…

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on Monday portrayed Google as a ruthless bully that resorts to shady tactics to protect a predatory payment system. His portrayal came in testimony in an antitrust trial focused on Epic Games’ attempt to upend Google’s store for Android phone apps. Sweeney’s more than two-hour stint on the witness stand in San Francisco came less than a week after Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended before the 10-member jury the way his company runs its Play Store for Android apps. It’s one of two antitrust cases against Google, whose tech empire valued at $1.7 trillion is being threatened by legal attacks seeking to break it up. Testimony in the Android phone app case is scheduled to finish before Christmas. The other case, focused on Google’s dominant…

Users of Venmo, Cash App and other payment apps will get a tax reprieve this year. The IRS announced Tuesday it will delay implementing new reporting requirements that were to take effect for the coming tax filing season. Originally, app users who made $600 or more selling goods and services would have been required to report those transactions to the IRS, a new threshold required by the American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021. Instead, payment apps and online marketplaces will send out separate tax forms — called 1099-K documents — for taxpayers who receive over $20,000 and make over 200 transactions selling goods or services. For 2024, the basic reporting threshold will be increased from $600 to $5,000, the IRS said. IRS officials say one reason for the delay…

New Jersey will prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 as part of an effort to improve air quality and reduce planet-warming pollutants, officials announced this week. A rule that will take effect Jan. 1 commits the state to an eventual move toward zero-emission vehicles, the state Department of Environmental Protection said in a news release. It is one of a growing number of states to do so, including California, Vermont, New York, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland and Connecticut, according to Coltura, a Seattle-based nonprofit advocating for an end to gasoline vehicle use. New Jersey will start limiting the amount of new gasoline-powered cars that can be sold in the state starting in 2027, eventually reaching zero in 2035. The move does not prohibit ownership…

Consumers are expected to use “buy now, pay later” payment plans heavily this holiday season, a forecast that bodes well for retailers but that has credit experts again sounding alarm bells. The short-term loans often come with consumer-friendly interest rates and allow shoppers to make an initial payment at checkout, then pay the rest in installments, typically over a few weeks, even months. That can be appealing to a shopper buying multiple gifts for family and friends during the holidays, particularly if they’re balancing other debt such as student loans or credit cards. Data shows younger consumers and those with difficulty accessing credit use the loans most frequently. Used responsibly, the installment plans increase financial inclusion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But the Fed and some…

Computer chip and software maker Broadcom has announced it has cleared all regulatory hurdles and plans to complete its $69 billion acquisition of cloud technology company VMware on Wednesday. The company, based in San Jose, California, announced it planned to move ahead with the deal after China joined the list of countries that had given a go-ahead for the acquisition. Broadcom is paying $61 billion in cash and stock for VMware and taking on $8 billion of its debt, making this one of the biggest technology deals ever. The announcement came soon after Microsoft acquired video game-maker Activision Blizzard for $69 billion, also one of the most expensive tech acquisitions in history. It took 18 months for Broadcom to get all the regulatory approvals, just days before the merger agreement…

Toymakers are tweaking original classic games or coming out with new ones that embrace an audience that’s been around for a while: people over 65 years old. The products are being marketed as a way for older folks to sharpen their brain skills as well as allay loneliness by helping them connect with other family members and friends, although some experts have raised doubts about toymakers’ claims. Toymaker Hasbro penned a licensing deal with Ageless Innovation — which designs toys with older people in mind — to come out with new versions of Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit and Life with a tagline “Generations” that offer bigger fonts on tiles and bigger game pieces. The new “Generations” versions of Life and Trivial Pursuit also have expanded their content to cater to younger…

The U.S. government dealt a massive blow to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which agreed to pay a roughly $4 billion settlement Tuesday as its founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a felony related to his failure to prevent money laundering on the platform. Zhao stepped down as the company’s chief executive and Binance admitted in the settlement to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and apparent violations of sanctions programs, including failure to put into place suspicious transaction reporting programs. “Using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who called the settlement one of the largest corporate penalties in the nation’s history. As part of the settlement agreement, Binance will…

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said this week that the U.K. is setting up a new science initiative to help develop flood-tolerant rice, disease-resistant wheat and other crops that are more resilient to climate change. Sunak was joined by ministers, diplomats and philanthropists from about 20 countries at a one-day Global Food Security Summit in London, where he urged world leaders to harness artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technology to end malnutrition around the globe. Sunak told delegates that a “fundamental shift” is needed to confront a food-security crisis that is being worsened by climate change. He focused on the role of science and said the U.K. would set up a “virtual science hub” linking international researchers working on more resilient crops. The U.K. hub will be part of a…

Hong Kong Disneyland opened its first Frozenthemed attraction this week, with thousands of eager visitors turning up to experience the new rides, some lining up for hours to get an early start. Based on Disney’s wildly popular Frozen animation film, the new section of the park features landscapes and characters from the movie and two new rides, a roller coaster and a boat ride that takes visitors through different scenes featured in the film. “Over the past decade, the film has grown into one of the most successful franchises in Disney history,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences. “World of Frozen represents Hong Kong Disneyland’s largest and boldest expansion since the park opened in 2005.” The opening comes after Disney announced in September a $60 billion expansion of its…