Technology

Four former Volkswagen managers have been convicted of fraud for their roles in the so-called Dieselgate scandal, which erupted when U.S. regulators discovered that the company had installed software to cheat emissions tests on millions of VW, Audi, and Porsche vehicles worldwide.

In late April 2025, the Meta Oversight Board (“Board”) published its first six decisions since Meta implemented sweeping changes to its content moderation policy. While these decisions prompted concern among many over ongoing inconsistencies in its approach to freedom of expression, some also welcomed the Board’s critical stance on certain recent changes (see here and here).

In this post, I argue that the Board appears to be shifting towards a more permissive stance on harmful or discriminatory expression. If this trend continues, it could significantly reshape the boundaries of acceptable speech on Meta’s platforms – with far-reaching implications for online public discourse. This also raises broader questions about the Board’s independence and legitimacy at a time when content governance is becoming increasingly politicised.

Yvette Blauvelt arrived at Seattle’s University Village with a “cone of shame.”

A Tesla owner since 2019, she felt as if she had to justify why she was at the protest against Tesla CEO Elon Musk held biweekly at the upscale mall. So she brought a pet recovery cone to wear around her neck, and a picture of a sad dog.

“I love my car. I don’t love what’s going on with Elon Musk,” Blauvelt said.

High schools and colleges are stuck in limbo: Use of generative AI to cut corners and cheat is rampant, but there’s no clear consensus on how to fight back.

This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2010-2013.

This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share os many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.

• Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
• Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
• Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.

Class action will target “Real-Time Bidding” (RTB) data breach in Microsoft’s advertising system, and is anticipated to affect Microsoft’s operations across the EU

The Syrian army’s failure to repel a modest opposition attack on Aleppo in December, which ultimately culminated in the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, defies explanation.

The opposition’s military strength and its use of drones were contributing factors, no doubt, but they were hardly enough. The Syrian army had previously reclaimed vast swaths of territory from rebel forces. By the summer of 2024, Assad’s government controlled two-thirds of the country. The sudden unraveling and the conventional explanations behind it belie what unfolded beneath the surface of the military event itself.

In a previous interview with New Lines, a high-ranking Syrian officer, who recounted the final days of the regime’s existence, disclosed a revealing detail that I decided to spend some time pursuing. A closer examination revealed it to be the key to understanding the regime’s collapse from a different angle, not merely as a logistical or battlefield failure, but as the result of a silent, invisible war.

The snippet of information was this: A mobile application, distributed quietly among Syrian officers via a Telegram channel, had spread rapidly in their ranks. In truth, the app was a carefully planted trap, the opening salvo of a hidden cyberwar — perhaps one of the first of its kind against a modern army. Militias had weaponized smartphones, turning them into lethal instruments against a regular military force.

Beyond revealing the contours of a cyberattack against the Syrian army, this investigation seeks to understand the application itself, its technology and reach, and to uncover the nature of the information it siphoned from within military ranks. This, in turn, leads directly to the potential impact on Syria’s military operations.

The larger question remains: Who orchestrated the cyberattack, and to what end?

The answers may point to players within the conflict itself — factions of the Syrian opposition, regional or international intelligence services, or other, still unseen hands. In any case, the attack must be understood within its full political and military context.

In short:

Donald Trump has revealed plans to end the United States's Digital Equity Act, which provides funding to programs that assist people to live in an increasingly online world.

The US president has branded the act — which was first intended to bring internet access to every home and business in the country — "racist and illegal".

What's next?

Whether Mr Trump has the legal authority to end the program remains unknown, but his government can now simply stop providing funding assistance covered by the act.

• Executive Summary.
• Interactive Summary

Dramatic advances in artificial intelligence over the past decade (for narrow-purpose AI) and the last several years (for general-purpose AI) have transformed AI from a niche academic field to the core business strategy of many of the world’s largest companies, with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual investment in the techniques and technologies for advancing AI’s capabilities.

We now come to a critical juncture. As the capabilities of new AI systems begin to match and exceed those of humans across many cognitive domains, humanity must decide: how far do we go, and in what direction?

AI, like every technology, started with the goal of improving things for its creator. But our current trajectory, and implicit choice, is an unchecked race toward ever-more powerful systems, driven by economic incentives of a few huge technology companies seeking to automate large swathes of current economic activity and human labor. If this race continues much longer, there is an inevitable winner: AI itself – a faster, smarter, cheaper alternative to people in our economy, our thinking, our decisions, and eventually in control of our civilization.

But we can make another choice: via our governments, we can take control of the AI development process to impose clear limits, lines we won’t cross, and things we simply won’t do – as we have for nuclear technologies, weapons of mass destruction, space weapons, environmentally destructive processes, the bioengineering of humans, and eugenics. Most importantly, we can ensure that AI remains a tool to empower humans, rather than a new species that replaces and eventually supplants us.

This essay argues that we should keep the future human by closing the “gates” to smarter-than-human, autonomous, general-purpose AI – sometimes called “AGI” – and especially to the highly-superhuman version sometimes called “superintelligence.” Instead, we should focus on powerful, trustworthy AI tools that can empower individuals and transformatively improve human societies’ abilities to do what they do best. The structure of this argument follows in brief.

Imagine you are planning the funeral music for a loved one who has died. You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity.

We tend to think about inheritance in physical terms: money, property, personal belongings. But the vast volume of digital stuff we accumulate in life and leave behind in death is now just as important – and this “digital legacy” is probably more meaningful.

Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving. They include now-familiar items such as social media and banking accounts, along with our stored photos, videos and messages. But they also encompass virtual currencies, behavioural tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.

This digital data is not only fundamental to our online identities in life, but to our inheritance in death. So how can we properly plan for what happens to it?

Project

A wave of newly homebound people got the itch to knit during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in response, scores of knitters recorded how-to videos and posted them on YouTube.

"But videos don't give you feedback," said Dina El-Zanfaly, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design. She and Kris Kitani, associate research professor in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute, think artificial intelligence offers a better way.

Months after Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, a landlord in Boulder, Colorado, said the social media company stopped paying rent in a 64,557-square-foot building custom-designed to house the tech tenant for a decade.

"The NYT portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography shortly after receiving access," the plaintiffs say.

The world's first combat tournament featuring full-sized humanoid robots is to be held in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province in December, according to organizers on Friday.

The EngineAI Robot Free Combat Tournament: "Mecha King" marks a significant milestone in the robotics industry. It aims to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology, driving industrial upgrades and large-scale applications, industry insiders noted.

According to the organizers, the event is designed to test robots' physical limits and intelligence levels through highly competitive and visually engaging combat scenarios. The competition will also introduce pioneering rules for humanoid robot combat, requiring robots to simulate human movement patterns and make real-time intelligent decisions in complex environments.

EngineAI, a robotics company based in Shenzhen, will supply several models of humanoid robots for the competition. The company plans to open-source the robot codes, allowing participating teams to customize and train the machines.

Downdetector is currently reporting that user reports indicate problems at X/Twitter

X/Twitter developer platform site’s incident history log.

Source.

Vietnam’s government has instructed telecommunications companies to block the Telegram messaging app after the Ministry of Public Security concluded it was being used to disseminate “anti-state” contents, state media reported Friday.

Learn more about Pocket shutdown.

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Self-Host Alternatives:

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Business Insider wants more of its employees to use ChatGPT, and to use it more often in their everyday work. That was the message from an all-hands meeting at the end of April, during which several employees presented on how they have folded ChatGPT into their workflow, and leadership encouraged experimentation among holdouts on staff.

Robert Kevin Rose (born 1977) is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's The Screen Savers. From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at GV.

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• Over 90 000 employees have been laid off from the global technology industry in 2025 so far.
• Over 73 percent of all layoffs are taking place in American companies as they embrace AI-powered efficiency.
• Intel will likely be the biggest firer this year, with an expected over 40 000 positions being cut by the end of the year.

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