Category: Tech

WASHINGTON – Federal regulators have reached a deal that allows them to proceed with antitrust investigations into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia play in the artificial intelligence industry, in the strongest sign of how regulatory scrutiny into the powerful technology has escalated. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission struck the deal over the past week, and it is expected to be completed in the coming days, according to two people with knowledge of the matter,…

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon said Wednesday it is pouring an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the artificial intelligence startup to $4 billion. Amazon will maintain a minority stake in San Francisco-based Anthropic, a rival of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Swami Sivasubramanian,…

  NEW YORK – Wall Street stocks retreated March 25 as a market rally showed signs of fatigue and tech heavyweights faced stepped-up regulatory scrutiny in Europe. Maris Ogg of Fiduciary Trust said the reticent start was unsurprising given the relatively light schedule this week as far as economic news. “It certainly wouldn’t be unusual” to have some kind of consolidation after last week’s highs,” Ogg said. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.4 per cent to 39,313.64. The broad-based…

SINGAPORE – Digital content production house Vividthree Holdings in an announcement on March 24 noted the arrest of its board chairman and independent director Ho Choon Hou by the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) in relation to alleged breaches-of-disclosure obligations by private cord blood bank Cordlife Group. Dr Ho was arrested by the CAD in relation to an offence under the Securities and Futures Act. He has been released on bail and has surrendered his passport. The board of Catalist-listed Vividthree…

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) has announced that a “cyber incident” forced it to take its corporate systems offline as a precaution. FINTRAC is a government agency in Canada that operates as the country’s financial intelligence unit. It is engaged in money laundering investigations, tracking millions of suspicious transactions annually and making thousands of disclosures about illegal money flows to the police. The agency has published a short press statement on its website stating that…

  Thermal battery maker Antora Energy on Feb 22 said it has raised US$150 million (S$201.5 million) in a funding round led by a tie-up between the world’s biggest asset manager BlackRock and Singapore state investment firm Temasek. The BlackRock-Temasek partnership, called, Decarbonization Partners, led an investor group including Emerson Collective, GS Futures, The Nature Conservancy, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and top global miner BHP’s venture capital unit. The fresh financing for the start-up will underpin an increase in…

A former CIA software engineer was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday after his convictions for what the government described as the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history and for possession of child sexual abuse images and videos. The bulk of the sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017. He has been jailed since 2018. “We will…

Blackbaud has settled with the Federal Trade Commission after being charged with poor security and reckless data retention practices, leading to a May 2020 ransomware attack and a data breach affecting millions of people. Blackbaud is a U.S.-based company listed on NASDAQ with operations in multiple countries and a provider of cloud-based donor data management software catering to nonprofit organizations, like charities, education organizations, and healthcare agencies. The FTC’s complaint alleges that the company “failed to monitor attempts by hackers…

At the height of the online file-sharing boom, the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ was a reminder that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems lived or died on the availability of upload bandwidth. Its presentation allowed it to be about much more than that. The ‘give to get’ philosophy forms part of the BitTorrent protocol even today, but Sharing is Caring was a phrase that could influence human behavior, to the benefit of the wider file-sharing movement, with no suggestion of pressure. Sharing is…

SEATTLE – When Microsoft opened an advanced research lab in Beijing in 1998, it was a time of optimism about technology and China. The company hired hundreds of researchers for the lab, which pioneered Microsoft’s work in speech, image and facial recognition and the kind of artificial intelligence that later gave rise to online chatbots such as ChatGPT. The Beijing operation eventually became one of the most important AI labs in the world. Mr Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, called it…

A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining. By using the computing resources of others’ servers to mine cryptocurrency, the cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded…

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manipulating science to favor specific commercial interests. Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact. The Unmaking of Science The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette…

ALBANY – Alphabet’s Google violated US labour law by refusing to bargain with a union representing contract workers for YouTube Music, a federal agency has ruled. The National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) in a decision on Jan 3 rejected claims by Google, which owns YouTube, that it should not be considered the employer of workers provided by staffing firm Cognizant Technology Solutions. The group of YouTube Music content operation workers voted 41-0 in April 2023 to join the Alphabet Workers…

Adult media giant Aylo has blocked access to many of its websites, including PornHub, to visitors from Montana and North Caroline as new age verifications laws go into effect. This move also impacts other adult sites owned by the company, including Tube8, RedTube, and Brazzers. As of January 1st, new age verification laws went into effect in Montana and North Carolina that require adult websites to verify the age of visitors from those states.  Under these new laws, failure to…

Apple has said it would suffer “irreparable harm” after the White House allowed a ban on imports on some of its watches following a dispute over the devices’ blood oxygen technology. The tech giant is filing an emergency motion asking a court to allow it to sell two of its most popular watches – the Series 9 and Ultra 2 models – until the patent dispute against medical monitoring technology company, Masimo, is resolved. It requested to pause the ban…

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that attackers stole the personal information of more than 45,000 individuals after breaching its cloud-based Oracle HCM HR management platform last month. INL is one of 17 U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories, and it employs 6,100 researchers and support staff involved in national security and nuclear research. On November 20, it confirmed a “cybersecurity data breach” that impacted its off-site Oracle HCM system one day before. CISA and FBI are looking into…