Category: Uncategorized

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Apple announces Assistive Access, a suite of features to improve cognitive, vision, and speech accessibility on iOS and iPadOS, rolling out later in 2023  —  Apple previewed a suite of new features today to improve cognitive, vision and speech accessibility.

James T. Areddy / Wall Street Journal: Futu and Tiger Brokers, two Nasdaq-listed online brokerages catering to clients in China, plan to remove apps from Chinese app stores and stop taking on users  —  The online brokerages earlier agreed to stop accepting new customers from mainland China  —  Two Nasdaq-listed online brokerages …

Financial Times: As the European Central Bank prepares to pilot a digital euro in October, consumers, financiers, and politicians are questioning the project’s aims and benefits  —  Europe’s central bank is pushing ahead with the development of electronic currency even as politicians question its purpose

We barbecued for weeks to find the right charcoal and propane grills for road trips—or just for smaller homes.

Algorithms can exacerbate employment discrimination. It’s time for the US Federal Trade Commission to regulate them.

The families of victims of a mass shooting in Buffalo are challenging the platforms they believe led the attacker to carry out a racist massacre.

Victor Dey / VentureBeat: Cloudflare debuts Cloudflare One for AI, a zero-trust security controls suite to help businesses use generative AI tools while protecting IP and customer data  —  Internet solutions firm Cloudflare today unveiled Cloudflare One for AI, its latest suite of zero-trust security controls.

Jay Peters / The Verge: WhatsApp introduces Chat Lock, which lets users put chats in a password- or biometrics-protected folder and hide chats’ contents and senders in notifications  —  WhatsApp is getting a new “Chat Lock” feature intended to make it easier to keep conversations more private.

The writers’ strike was initially about compensation in an era of streaming services. Now the role of AI has also become a major point of contention in negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and companies such as Disney and Netflix

Victor Dey / VentureBeat: Together, which aims to build open-source LLMs and was part of RedPajama, a project where six companies replicated Meta’s LLaMA dataset, raised a $20M seed  —  Together, an open-source AI startup, announced today that it has raised $20 million in seed funding to support its mission …

Stephen Marche worked with ChatGPT and other AI tools to craft this thriller. The prose is plodding and the final twist leans heavily on a Sherlock Holmes story – but this is an interesting experiment

Thirteen MIT undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni have been awarded Fulbright fellowships and will embark on projects overseas in the 2023-24 grant year. Four other MIT affiliates were offered awards but declined them to pursue other opportunities. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers American citizen students and recent […]

“The scale, complexity, the global nature of the problems we’re dealing with are so big that no single institution, industry, or country can deal with them alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in her first remarks to the Solve community. Over 300 social impact leaders from around the world convened on MIT’s campus for Solve […]

Since 2001, the MIT School of Science has awarded Infinite Mile Awards to staff members who go the extra mile to make the Institute a better place. Nominated by their colleagues, the winners receive a monetary award and are invited to attend a celebratory event with family, friends, nominators, and recipients of the Infinite Expansion […]

New research shows three ways these smaller companies can drive change rather than react to it.

Sponsor content from PLN.

Five ways remote workers, freelancers, and contractors can stay top of mind — even when out of sight.

A government effort to collect people’s internet records is moving beyond its test phase, but many details remain hidden from public view.

Sudowrite, a tool that uses OpenAI’s GPT-3, was found to have understood a sexual act known only to a specific online community of Omegaverse writers.

Chill materials to extreme temperatures, and their vibrations show properties that could one day be exploited to create memory in quantum computers.

Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg: A survey of 60 major crypto companies in Q1 on the state of governance and controls finds many operate outside the norm; around half engage an external auditor  —  Before it filed for bankruptcy last November, many of the entities in Sam Bankman-Fried’s colossal FTX empire had never held a board […]

Jared Newman / Fast Company: Pluto TV co-founder Ilya Pozin’s Telly opens a waitlist to give away 500,000 55-inch 4K HDR TVs in 2023 with a second screen that constantly shows ads  —  Would you take a free TV if it constantly ran banner ads beneath everything you watched?  —  That’s the proposition for Telly […]

TechCrunch: London-based Smart, which helps employers and employees manage their pensions, raised a $95M Series E led by Aquiline; reports said Smart sought to raise $123M  —  Smart, a London-based startup that helps employers and their employees manage and monitor their pensions, said that it has closed $95 million in Series E funding.

Feeling stuck on a problem that seems unsolvable? You may come up with a creative solution after a short nap — very short, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers. During the phase when you’re drifting between sleep and waking, a state known as sleep onset, the creative mind is […]

Businesses are increasingly feeling hard done by when it comes to artificial intelligence exploiting their data. It is time we figured out who is going to foot the bill

Five subtle acts of inclusion leaders can start practicing right now.

Bloomberg: Swedish cybersecurity company Truesec and experts: Russia-linked “Anonymous Sudan” is one of the most prolific hacktivist groups targeting Swedish organizations  —  Since February, a mysterious hacker group calling itself Anonymous Sudan has targeted dozens of Swedish airports …

Whether you’re skiing in the backcountry or trampolining in the backyard, we have an activity tracker for you.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Developer logs: Apple tests an M3 with 12 CPU cores, 18 GPU cores, and 36GB of RAM; Meta pulls Messenger from Apple Watch and launches WhatsApp on WearOS  —  As Apple prepares to launch its next M2 Macs, the company is already ramping up testing of M3 chips.

Fortesa Latifi / Washington Post: A look at TikTok’s #medicalmoms, where mothers of disabled and chronically ill kids share parenthood journeys, raising privacy, consent, and autonomy concerns  —  When Bella was born in 2013, she didn’t leave the hospital for the first two years of her life because of a combination of a rare form […]

The two-factor authentication tool got some serious upgrades that can help you bolster security for your online accounts.

This new Motorola Android phone is absolutely the right direction for the company, even if it’s eclipsed by its peers.

It’s easier to use your gaming console than you might think.

Prachi Patel / IEEE Spectrum: US universities are revamping their semiconductor curricula and striking industry deals to train staff as the CHIPS Act aims to kick start chip making in the US  —  The CHIPS Act could require 50,000 new engineers  —  The CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at kick-starting chip manufacturing …

Nikkei Asia: Sensor Tower: 156 of the 475 top five apps in 95 countries and regions for Q1 were Chinese, up 8% from 2020; Chinese apps took the top three spots in the US  —  Security concerns and lack of market access drives crackdowns around the world  —  Chinese apps such as TikTok and Shein […]

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: Research finds AI assistants may be able to influence users without them being aware, akin to humans swaying each other through collaboration and social norms  —  AI assistants may be able to change our views without our realizing it.  Says one expert: ‘What’s interesting here is the subtlety.’

Plus: Final Cut and Logic Pro land on the iPad, even Amazon is copying TikTok, and Google’s AI plans come to the fore at I/O.

There’s little reason to pay top dollar for a smartphone. These iPhones and Android devices—ranging from $150 to $500—stood up to WIRED’s testing.

Lend depth and drama to your gameplay, no matter what device you have.

Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post: A look at Forever Voices, which launched GPT-4-powered chatbot CarynAI, letting the fans of influencer Caryn Marjorie chat with her replica for $1 per minute  —  CarynAI is the first AI companion product from a new startup called Forever Voices, allowing users to chat with a digital version of the […]

Allison Johnson / The Verge: Google barely mentioned the next Android version, Android 14, during the 2023 I/O keynote, as the company prioritizes continuous updates over annual OS upgrades  —  There was a chilly marine layer hanging in the air above the Shoreline Amphitheater, but the danceable beats thumped on in spite of it.

Sebastian Herrera / Wall Street Journal: How an overhaul of Amazon’s US logistics network in recent months cut delivery times, changed inventory management, and altered search results on its website  —  Company seeks to trim package travel time, though some sellers still cite delays  —  Amazon.com has upended its vast logistics network …

Stimulating nerves on the back of your hand makes it feel like you are grasping things in VR without needing to have your palms covered in material

Researchers in Kotzebue, Alaska, are investigating why their town is increasingly playing host to harmful cyanobacteria.

From Hyrule to Hallownest, these are our absolute favorite escapes for the best portable console.

Guy Chazan / Financial Times: Germany plans to spend billions to subsidize its chip industry and secure the “oil of the 21st century”, as some believe the move does not make economic sense  —  The Scholz government is spending billions subsidising the country’s semiconductor industry.  Some believe it does not make economic sense

Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab: Google Search changes could significantly decrease publishers’ traffic and affiliate revenue, but the Perspectives section may highlight individual journalists  —  A shift to AI-generated search results will decrease the traffic that Google sends to publishers’ sites, as more people …

Yes, you can send texts in blue bubbles—and knock your friends with iPhones off their high horses.

Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review: The open-source AI boom is precarious because it is built on top of giant models like LLaMA and GPT-3, and could collapse if Meta and OpenAI decide to shut shop  —  Greater access to the code behind generative models is fueling innovation.  But if top companies get spooked, […]

From The Two Popes to Zombieland, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.