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  • Hogwarts Legacy breaks record before official release, despite controversy | CNN Business

    Hogwarts Legacy breaks record before official release, despite controversy | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The world of Harry Potter is getting new life.

    Hogwarts Legacy – the new open-world video game by Avalanche and Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, will be released Friday, to much anticipation.

    The single-player game has been five years in the making — experts put its budget at $150 million. The game already broke a record on Twitch for being the most-watched single-player game, played by streamers who got the game early. And it’s the No. 1 pre-sale this week on gaming platform Steam.

    “Open world style games are a really a big deal in the games industry,” said Joost van Dreunen, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who was formerly CEO of games market research firm Super Data Research. “The expectations are quite high not just from the consumers, but also from the game makers themselves.”

    Warner Bros. has had 20 years of experience putting out Harry Potter video games — but those were based on the movies. Not every game was a blockbuster hit, despite the fandom around the Harry Potter franchise.

    Hogwarts Legacy is based on Harry Potter but is set in the late 1800s, well before the action in the Harry Potter books take place, and opens the Harry Potter World beyond Hogwarts Castle. Players are witch or wizard avatars that complete missions to gain skills such as flying on a broom.

    “They definitely put out some big titles and worked with some big franchises, but their games have been hit and miss,” Dan Martin, general manager at videogamesnewyork says of the Warner Bros. games.

    The game’s release has been delayed twice — building excitement from Potter fans but then fizzling. Videogamesnewyork, a New York City store that sells modern and retro video games, is ordering just enough games to their store based on pre-orders.

    “We’re not over-ordering or under ordering. Only because we don’t know what to expect,” said Martin.

    Part of the game’s expectation is based on controversy surrounding Harry Potter’s creator — J.K. Rowling. The author has repeatedly made anti-trans comments, and some of the movies’ actors have spoken out against them. Some gamers also are boycotting Hogwarts Legacy over the controversy.

    “It’s not a commercial risk so much as is a cultural one,” van Dreunen said of the game’s release.

    The game features a trans character, a first for the franchise. Though the Hogwarts Legacy character Sirona Ryan does not explicitly say she is trans, dialogue in a scene suggests it: “[It] took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard,” the character said.

    Warner Bros. Discovery said creating diverse characters was a high priority in order to encompass all people who play the games including the LGBTQIA+ community.

    The company says J.K. Rowling is not involved in the Hogwarts Legacy game. But she does stand to make licensing royalties. Some fans have been turned off to the franchise because of Rowling’s comments, others say they won’t let that get in the way of experiencing a new world of Harry Potter.

    “There was a time when I thought it was going to impact my view on the whole Harry Potter world, but I am able to separate the situation with JK Rowling with the Harry Potter world,” said Camila Rodrigues, a Harry Potter fan who says she plans to buy the game.

    Despite the controversy, gaming experts anticipate a blockbuster release — easily selling 10 million copies, according to some estimates. In some ways, the game is a re-branding opportunity for the franchise.

    “It perhaps has room to develop something new, to iterate on the existing relationship with its fan base,” said van Dreunen. “Perhaps making it into this big production video game allows the franchise to kind of save itself a little bit from the drag it’s been experiencing culturally.”

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  • The week that tech became exciting again | CNN Business

    The week that tech became exciting again | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Let’s be honest: For much of the past decade, tech events have been pretty boring.

    Executives in business casual wear trot up on stage and pretend a few tweaks to the camera and processor make this year’s phone profoundly different than last year’s phone or adding a touchscreen onto yet another product is bleeding edge.

    But that changed radically this week. Some of the world’s biggest companies teased significant upgrades to their services, some of which are central to our everyday lives and how we experience the internet. In each case, the changes were powered by new AI technology that allows for more conversational and complex responses.

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a revamped Bing search engine using the capabilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries. And there are already rumors of another event next month for Microsoft to demo similar features in its Office products, including Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.

    On Wednesday, Google held an event to detail how it plans to use similar AI technology to allow its search engine to offer more complex and conversational responses to queries. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu also said this week that they would be launching their own ChatGPT-style services. And other companies are sure to follow suit soon.

    After years of incremental updates to smartphones, the promise of 5G that still hasn’t taken off and social networks copycatting each others’ features until they all the look the same, the flurry of AI-related announcements this week feels like a breath of fresh air.

    Yes, there are very real concerns about the potential of this technology to spread biases and inaccurate information, as happened in a Google demo this week. And it’s certainly likely numerous companies will introduce AI chatbots that simply do not need one. But these features are fun, have the potential to give us back hours in the day and, perhaps most importantly, some are here right now to try out.

    Need to write a real estate listing or an annual review for an employee? Plug a few keywords into a ChatGPT query bar and your first draft is done in three seconds. Want to come up with a quick meal plan and grocery list based on your dietary sensitivities? Bing, apparently, has you covered.

    If the introduction of smartphones defined the 2000s, much of the 2010s in Silicon Valley was defined by the ambitious technologies that didn’t fully arrive: self-driving cars tested on roads but not quite ready for everyday use; virtual reality products that got better and cheaper but still didn’t find mass adoption; and the promise of 5G to power advanced experiences that didn’t quite come to pass, at least not yet.

    But technological change, like Ernest Hemingway’s idea of bankruptcy, has a way of coming gradually, then suddenly. The iPhone, for example, was in development for years before Steve Jobs wowed people on stage with it in 2007. Likewise, OpenAi, the company behind ChatGPT, was founded seven years ago and launched an earlier version of its AI system called GPT3 back in 2020.

    “ChatGPT exploded onto the market and people’s awareness,” said Bern Elliot, an analyst at Gartner, “but this has been a long time in the making.”

    More than that, artificial intelligence systems have for years underpinned many of the functions people may now take for granted, from content recommendations on social media platforms and auto-complete tools in e-mail to voice assistants and facial recognition tools. But when ChatGPT was released publicly in November, it put the power of AI systems on full display for millions in an entertaining and immediately graspable way. ChatGPT simultaneously made it much easier to see how far the technology has progressed in recent years and to imagine the vast potential for the impact it could have across industries.

    “When new generations of technologies come along, they’re often not particularly visible because they haven’t matured enough to the point where you can do something with them,” Elliott said. “When they are more mature, you start to see them over time — whether it’s in an industrial setting or behind the scenes — but when it’s directly accessible to people, like with ChatGPT, that’s when there is more public interest, fast.”

    Now that ChatGPT has gained traction and prompted larger companies to deploy similar features, there are concerns not just about its accuracy but its impact on real people.

    Some people worry it could disrupt industries, potentially putting artists, tutors, coders, writers and journalists out of work. Others are more optimistic, postulating it will allow employees to tackle to-do lists with greater efficiency or focus on higher-level tasks. Either way, it will likely force industries to evolve and change, but that’s not? necessarily a bad thing.

    “New technologies always come with new risks and we as a society will have to address them, such as implementing acceptable use policies and educating the general public about how to use them properly. Guidelines will be needed,” Elliott said.

    Many experts I’ve spoken with in the past few weeks have likened the AI shift to the early days of the calculator and how educators and scientists once feared how it could inhibit our basic knowledge of math. The same fear existed with spell check and grammar tools.

    While AI tools are still in their infancy, this week may represent the start of a new way of doing tasks, similar to how the iPhone changed computing and communication in June 2007. But this time, it could be in the form of a Bing browser.

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  • The way we search for information online is about to change | CNN Business

    The way we search for information online is about to change | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    An entire generation of internet users has approached search engines the same way for decades: enter a few words into a search box and wait for a page of relevant results to emerge. But that could change soon.

    This week, the companies behind the two biggest US search engines teased radical changes to the way their services operate, powered by new AI technology that allows for more conversational and complex responses. In the process, however, the companies may test both the accuracy of these tools and the willingness of everyday users to embrace and find utility in a very different search experience.

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a revamped Bing search engine using the abilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries.

    The next day, Google, the dominant player in the market, held an event to detail how it plans to use similar AI technology to allow its search engine to offer more complex and conversational responses to queries, including providing bullet points ticking off the best times of year to see various constellations and also offering pros and cons for buying an electric vehicle. (Chinese tech giant Baidu also said this week that it would be launching its own ChatGPT-style service, though it did not provide details on whether it will appear as a feature in its search engine.)

    The updates come as the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can generate shockingly convincing essays and responses to user prompts, has sparked a wave of interest in AI chatbot tools. Multiple tech giants are now racing to deploy similar tools that could transform the way we draft e-mails, write essays and handle other tasks. But the most immediate impact may be on a foundational element of our internet experience: search.

    “Although we are 25 years into search, I dare say that our story has just begun,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, an SVP at Google, at the event Wednesday teasing the new AI features. “We have even more exciting, AI-enabled innovations in the works that will change the way people search, work and play. We’re reinventing what it means to search and the best is yet to come.”

    For those who may not be sure what exactly to do with the new tools, the companies offered some examples, ranging from writing a rhyming poem to helping plan an itinerary for a trip.

    Lian Jye Su, a research director at tech intelligence firm ABI Research, believes consumers and businesses would be happy to embrace a new way to search as long as “it is intuitive, removes more friction, and offers the path of least resistance — akin to the success of smart home voice assistants, like Alexa and Google Assistant.”

    But there is at least one wild card: how much users will be able to trust the AI-powered results.

    According to Google, Bard can be used to plan a friend’s baby shower, compare two Oscar-nominated movies or get lunch ideas based on what’s in your fridge. But the tool, which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for a factual error it made during a Google demo: it incorrectly stated that the James Webb Telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside of our solar system. A Google spokesperson said the error “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process.”

    Bard and ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November OpenAI, are built on large language models. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts warn these tools can be unreliable — spreading misinformation, making up responses and giving different answers to the same questions, or presenting sexist and racist biases.

    There is clearly strong interest in this type of AI. The public version of ChatGPT attracted a million users in its first five days last fall and is estimated to have hit 100 million users since. But the trust factor may decide whether that interest will stay, according to Jason Wong, an analyst at market research firm Gartner.

    “Consumers, and even business users, may have fun exploring the new Bing and Bard interfaces for a while, but as the novelty wears off and similar tools appear, then it really comes down to ease of access and accuracy and trust in the responses that will win out,” he said.

    Generative AI systems, which are algorithms that can create new content, are notoriously unreliable. Laura Edelson, a computer scientist and misinformation researcher at New York University, said, “there’s a big difference between an AI sounding authoritative and it actually producing accurate results.”

    While general search optimizes for relevance, according to Edelson, large language models try to achieve a particular style in their response without regard to factual accuracy. “One of those styles is, ‘I am a trustworthy, authoritative source,’” she said.

    On a very basic level, she said, AI systems analyze which words are next to each other, determine how they get associated and identify the patterns that lead them to appear together. But much of the onus remains on the user to fact check the answers, a process that could prove just as time consuming for people as the current model of scrolling through links on a page — if not more so.

    Microsoft and Google executives have acknowledged some of the potential issues with the new AI tools.

    “We know we wont be able to answer every question every single time,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer. “We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn.”

    Raghavan, at Google, also emphasized the importance of feedback from internal and external testing to make sure the tool “meets the high bar, our high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness, before we launch more broadly.”

    But even with the concerns, the companies are betting that these tools offer the answer to the future of search.

    – CNN’s Clare Duffy, Catherine Thorbecke and Brian Fung contributed to this story.

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  • Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has gone on the attack over Social Security and Medicare.

    In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White House have singled out particular Republican senators – notably including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from those senators that could affect the retirement and health care programs.

    The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the public about where they stand. Here is a fact-check of the exchanges.

    Biden and his White House targeted Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m here right now to tell you one thing that you probably have never heard from a politician. It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip features Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up.”

    The videos are authentic, though Biden didn’t tell his Wednesday speech audience in Wisconsin they are from more than 12 years ago – an event in 2010, when Lee was running for the Senate but before he was first elected. And as Lee noted in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t mention that Lee added at the same 2010 event that current Medicare beneficiaries should have their benefits “left untouched” and that “the next layer beneath them, those who will retire in the next few years, also probably have to be held harmless.”

    Still, while Biden could have included more context, he was accurate in saying Lee had called for Social Security to be phased out.

    And while Lee said in a tweeted statement on Wednesday that, during his 12 years as a senator, he has not called for “abolishing” Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, only for “solutions to improve those programs and move them toward solvency,” he has supported benefit cuts. For example, he has endorsed various proposals over the years to raise the Social Security retirement age.

    Since last year, Biden has criticized Scott over particular components of what Scott calls his “12 Point Plan to Rescue America.”

    In the State of the Union address on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to a part of Scott’s plan that says, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Biden correctly asserted that “all federal legislation” would include Social Security and Medicare, which do not currently require congressional re-approval.

    Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that while his plan does say that “all” federal legislation should sunset in five years and become subject to a new vote by Congress, “This is clearly & obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late.”

    But the plan itself doesn’t say that.

    The plan’s official text, which remains online on a dedicated website, says “all federal legislation,” period, should be sunset in five years – not all recent legislation, all crazy legislation or all legislation except for the laws that created Social Security and Medicare. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan last year, McConnell too said that the plan “sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

    Last year, Biden sometimes overstated the support for Scott’s sunset proposal among congressional Republicans, which appears very limited. Biden has been more precise in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or accurately saying in the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – support it.

    Biden may have created an inaccurate impression, however, by mentioning the sunset proposal during the section of the State of the Union in which he discussed the battle over the debt ceiling. There is no indication that House Republicans are pushing this proposal as part of the current debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, more generally, said cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in these negotiations.

    Scott, in turn, has tossed a false claim into the debate with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of having cut billions from Medicare in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act did not cut Medicare benefits; rather, it allowed the government and seniors to spend less money to buy prescription drugs – and, in fact, simultaneously made Medicare benefits more generous to seniors. The claim of a Medicare cut was repeatedly debunked last year, when Scott and a Republican campaign organization he chaired used it during the midterm elections.

    On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell told a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will be a “challenge” for Scott’s own 2024 re-election campaign in a state with a large population of seniors, Scott announced he is introducing a new bill that would make it more difficult for Congress to make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that would send the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding to Social Security and Medicare instead.

    This week and in numerous previous speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying last year that Medicare and Social Security should be treated as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve every year, rather than as permanent entitlements.

    Biden has accurately cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Here’s what Johnson told a Green Bay radio show in August: “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt. Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.” When Johnson faced criticism for those remarks at the time, he stood by them and said that was his consistent longtime position.

    Johnson, however, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “lying” when the president discussed Johnson’s comments shortly after saying that some Republicans want to “cut” Social Security. Johnson has repeatedly said that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Security spending, and to “fix” and “save” Social Security in light of its poor fiscal shape at present, does not mean that he wants to put the programs on the “chopping block” or even to “cut” it.

    “The Democrats have been accusing me, since the first time I ran for office, of wanting to end Social Security, wanting to cut it, wanting to gut it, wanting to – I’ve never said that. I’ve always been consistent: I want to save it,” he said in a radio interview this week.

    It’s impossible to definitively fact-check this particular dispute without Johnson specifying how he wants to “fix” and “save” the program. His office did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

    White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted in an email to reporters on Thursday that, though Johnson accused Biden this week of lying about his stance on Social Security, Johnson also said in interviews this week that Social Security is a “legal Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Security might be in a more stable position for younger workers” if the government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and eventually abandoned proposal in the mid-2000s to allow workers born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts in which they could buy into the stock market and make other investments.

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  • A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

    A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.

    Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”

    “The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?

    “That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.

    A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.

    Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

    In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.

    That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.

    Guy Oseary and Madonna at a 2016 Billboard Women In Music event. Oseary said both bought NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

    The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.

    When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”

    A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.

    The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”

    Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.

    Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.

    Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”

    The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.

    The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.

    CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.

    The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.

    One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.

    Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.

    Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”

    “The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”

    Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.

    Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”

    Mad Dog Jones' SHIFT// goes on view as part of 'Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale' at Sotheby's in June 2021. NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art.

    The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”

    But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.

    Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.

    In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)

    Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.

    Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

    To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”

    Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”

    This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.

    “I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.

    So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.

    “Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”

    Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.

    This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.

    Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”

    In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.

    The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”

    “It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.

    Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.

    In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”

    “I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”

    – CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.

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  • Opinion: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it | CNN

    Opinion: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Rosanna Smart is an economist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-leader of its Gun Policy in America initiative to understand the effects of gun policies. Andrew R. Morral is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND; co-leader of the initiative; and director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, a private philanthropy that funds gun violence prevention research. The views expressed in this piece are their own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Barely through January, America has this year already experienced 63 incidents with four or more people shot and more than 4,200 firearm deaths.

    These statistics do not come from official governmental sources, but are rather the result of information compiled and disseminated publicly by a small non-profit organization, the Gun Violence Archive, funded primarily by a single private donor. Our government collects no official data on mass shootings – and has no comprehensive data collection system tracking nonfatal firearm injuries – despite intense public concern about these events and the direction they may be trending.

    The federal government does collect data on firearm deaths, although complete nationwide data that link whether individual deaths occurred in the same incident is not yet available. And finalized data is always a year or so delayed. By comparison, federal data on poultry slaughter across the country lags by only a couple of weeks.

    What’s more, federal data collection on other aspects of gun crime and violence is abysmal.

    This seems like a pretty fundamental statistic we should know, or at least have some decent estimate of. Measuring only firearm deaths and not all injuries may underestimate the prevalence of firearm violence by a factor of two to three, showing only a skewed subset of firearm violence. Because firearm assaults and police shootings often result in nonfatal injuries, federal data systems track only a portion of these incidents that disproportionately affect Black Americans.

    Building a surveillance system for nonfatal firearm injuries would be difficult and expensive. In 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded efforts to support such a system in seven states, but the project ended after just three years when Congress cut the CDC’s budget in response to its firearm violence research. It took more than two decades for Congress to approve federal funding to research gun violence.

    Now, a previously unreliable nonfatal firearm injury surveillance system is being redesigned with the goal of producing moderately precise national estimates of firearms injury hospitalizations by 2024. That’s a start, but what really may be needed is reliable state-level estimates to understand how laws and other prevention efforts affect firearm violence.

    The Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms (FASTER) program, a 10-state pilot project launched by the CDC in September 2020, will test whether the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, which helps track urgent crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and opioid overdoses, can be used to monitor firearm injuries.

    The federal government could make important contributions to firearm injury prevention efforts by ensuring that funding for data collection and maintenance through FASTER or another system is sustained moving forward and creating straightforward mechanisms for researchers to access deidentified individual-level data with geographic indicators.

    Unfortunately, data quality on other aspects of gun violence is deteriorating. For decades, the FBI has compiled and disseminated information from local law enforcement agencies on aggravated assaults and robberies involving firearms. This system was retired in 2021. As a result, the federal government has been unable to provide comprehensive state or national estimates on important crime trends for the past two years.

    While a more detailed (and theoretically improved) system replaced the prior one, the rollout of this FBI System has not gone smoothly. In 2021, the FBI’s new data system collected crime information from just over 60% of law enforcement agencies nationwide, resulting in uncertainty about whether murder in 2021 was up 17% or down 7% from the year before.

    This crumbling of the nation’s crime data infrastructure, even if temporary, could be an urgent problem for any effort to proactively intervene to respond to emerging crime trends.

    Although the Federal government uses large-scale surveys of Americans to understand trends in health and risk behaviors – such as consumption of drugs and alcohol, use of seatbelts, exercise habits, and even sexual practices – questions about ownership, storage, and use of firearms have been notably absent from national versions of these surveys for almost two decades.

    Indeed, one of the CDC’s flagship health behavior surveys included questions on gun ownership, but removed that question from the core module after 2004. As a result, many studies of the effects of gun violence prevention that need information on state firearm ownership rates must use data that are almost 20 years old.

    Similarly, although the government’s 50-state National Survey on Drug Use and Health asks respondents aged 12 to 17 about handgun carrying behavior, no such questions are asked of adults, despite evidence linking gun carriage policies with firearm violence.

    Other important questions also are omitted from these surveys, such as defensive gun use, firearm storage practices, safe handling practices and training and safety perceptions.

    The lowest hanging fruit to improve our data collection could be to remove statutory barriers that prevent researchers from using important data that the federal government is already collecting, such as information on guns used in crimes. Since 2003, the Tiahrt Amendments have prohibited the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from sharing disaggregated crime gun trace data with researchers.

    Removing these blanket restrictions, or even providing more detailed aggregate statistics on crime gun possessors, sources and prior transactions, could help provide better understanding of diversion of firearms from legal to illegal markets, risk factors related to “straw-purchasing” (buying a gun for somebody legally prohibited from possessing it), and the flow of firearms between states with different gun law regimes.

    Other missing data from federal collection efforts include reliable information on police shootings, mass shootings, legal defensive firearm homicides, firearm sales and many other such data.

    Although everyone wants to see reductions in firearm violence in this country, specific proposals are often controversial, sometimes because there are no data demonstrating their effectiveness. If those data were collected, this would no longer be an excuse. Better evidence on the effectiveness of different policy or community interventions may rely on access to data that is not being collected now.

    The federal government has many of the requisite tools in place to do this, and it does it well on a wide range of other problems. Shying away from measuring this problem may also make it more difficult to fix it.

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  • More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show | CNN Business

    More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics, in a striking sign of how far reaching the advertiser exodus has been following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.

    Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.

    Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data.

    The data demonstrate the sharp decline of what was once a $4.5 billion advertising business for Twitter. After Musk completed his takeover of the company in late October, advertisers began to worry about the safety and stability of the platform given his plans to cut staff and relax content moderation policies. In early November, Musk said Twitter had seen a “massive revenue drop.”

    Although Twitter’s ad business was always much smaller than that of competitors Facebook and Google, it was still responsible for the vast majority of the company’s revenue. Musk must now fill in that gap as he stares down interest payments for the debt he took on to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

    Twitter, which eliminated much of its media relations team during last year’s layoffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    After initially clashing with advertisers, Musk now appears to be trying to woo them back to the platform. The company reportedly offered a Super Bowl “fire sale” deal for advertisers in an attempt to win them back for one of Twitter’s biggest audience days of the year. Twitter has also partnered with a third-party “brand safety” firm that says it can show advertisers if their ads appear alongside inappropriate or unsafe content on Twitter.

    But the pushback continues. A coalition of civil society and civil rights groups renewed calls on Thursday for companies to join what they say is more than 500 advertisers who have stopped advertising on Twitter. The latest effort came after a research report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the coalition, raised concerns about ads “appearing next to toxic content” from previously banned accounts.

    In his first months in charge, Musk rolled back bans on users who had previously violated Twitter’s rules, including former President Donald Trump. He also dissolved a third-party content oversight group and halted enforcement of its Covid-19 misinformation policy.

    Some advertisers also complained that the Twitter employees they previously worked with had been terminated by Musk, causing confusion. In November, Musk complained that Twitter had seen a “massive drop in revenue.”

    But Musk has stood by those policy changes, and has since been scrambling to reduce costs and find new revenue streams for the company. Those efforts include dramatically cutting staff, revamping its paid subscription service and, more recently, announcing the controversial move to charge researchers and developers reliant on Twitter’s API, which allows third parties to tap into Twitter’s systems.

    For now, however, Twitter remains reliant on advertising revenue as it reportedly struggles to grow its paid subscriber base.

    Even among the top advertisers that remain, many have dramatically reduced their ad spending on the platform, according to Pathmatics data. HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000. (HBO, which is owned by CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    A small number of Twitter’s top advertisers spent more on the platform in January than they did the month prior to Musk’s takeover, including ESPN, Salesforce and Apple, the latter of which Musk briefly and publicly feuded with for allegedly threatening to block Twitter from its app store. ESPN, Salesforce and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Musk said in a

    tweet     earlier this month that the previous three months had been “extremely tough, as had to save Twitter from bankruptcy,” but that the company “is now trending to breakeven if we keep at it.”

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  • The dark side of the sports betting boom | CNN Business

    The dark side of the sports betting boom | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The sports gambling gold rush is coming at a high cost.

    In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on commercial sports betting in most of the country. Thirty-three states have made sports gambling legal in the wake of the decision. Now, on Super Bowl Sunday, a record 50.4 million US adults are expected to bet on the game.

    The booming sports betting industry, lawmakers and even the professional sports leagues themselves are making it easier, faster and more tempting for people to bet on games — and develop gambling problems, say gambling researchers and addiction specialists.

    A flood of advertising, technology that allows for one-click betting at home, and nearly unlimited betting options during games have collided. There’s been a spike in inquiries to state gambling-addiction hotlines, states say.

    In the past five years, there has been an explosion of online sports betting apps from companies like DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars. These apps are often replacing illegal betting venues. At the same time, they also attract an influx of new gamblers who had never set foot in a casino or would have known how to place a bet with a bookie.

    During the Super Bowl, there will be an onslaught of advertisements — most starring celebrity sponsors and athletes — meant to encourage new sign-ups and grab market share. DraftKings will air a commercial featuring Kevin Hart and David Ortiz, while Rob Gronkowski will attempt a field goal kick live in a FanDuel ad. (Any customer who places a Super Bowl bet of five dollars or more on FanDuel will win a share of $10 million in “free bets” if Gronkowski makes it.)

    Hear why FanDuel CEO thinks this Super Bowl will be biggest day in company’s history

    Sports teams and leagues were once fiercely opposed to gambling on the games. Now, they’ve partnered with sportsbooks.

    These days, gamblers can also do much more than wager on the outcome of a game. There are options to bet in-game on every quarter, player, and event.

    Resources for gambling addiction programs have long been thin in the United States and have been stretched further by the current wave of sports betting. In 2020, there were 5.7 million Americans with a gambling disorder, according to a nationwide survey by the National Association of Administrators for Disordered Gambling Services.

    Focus on gambling disorders has historically been minimal in the United States, said Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and the co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program.

    This is in part because people with gambling disorders have been viewed as foolish or lacking willpower, he said. “We equate the ability to hold onto money and win money with success and equate losing with greed.”

    There is also sparse federal oversight of the gambling industry, and there are currently no federal funds designated for problem gambling treatment or research, unlike federal funding for alcohol, tobacco and drug addiction programs.

    DraftKings is one of the most popular sports betting apps.

    A patchwork of state legislation, lack of robust consumer protections in many states, and limited advertising restrictions are adding to the problems.

    “Many states naively or some other way went about legalizing sports betting without adequately estimating the costs on problem gambling resources,” said John Holden, an associate professor of management at Oklahoma State University who studies sports gambling regulation.

    “There is more that state lawmakers can do within the confines of commercial speech restrictions,” including authorizing extra funding to go after false and misleading advertising, Holden said.

    Betting on sports can be a way for some people to develop, maintain or accelerate gambling disorders.

    There are several features of sports betting that make it different from other forms of gambling and can lead to addictive behavior.

    Many sports bettors tend to perceive their wages on games are safer and more informed by their own expertise and skills than luck, researchers say. This may give them a false illusion of control.

    Additionally, live betting within games reduces the delay between risk and reward, and it’s increasing the speed and frequency of wagers, experts say.

    “I got caught up in a lot of the live betting,” said one 24-year-old man with a gambling disorder who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity. He started betting on sports seven years ago through a bookie, but upped his wagers once he started using apps.

    During football games, he would bet on the outcome of drives and which team would score the next touchdown. As he lost more during a game, he would try again to to win it back on the next play.

    “You see the way the game is going and you think you know,” he said. “It’s not like back in the day with a bookie betting on who wins.”

    He said he lost $100,000 on sports gambling, including money from student loans. He’s currently in recovery at Beit T’Shuvah, in Los Angeles, which provides inpatient and outpatient services for people struggling with gambling disorders.

    Casey Clark, the senior vice president at the American Gaming Association, a trade group for the gambling industry, said that the legalization of sports betting has moved the black market of sports gambling into regulated marketplaces, benefiting states.

    The gambling industry and sports betting operators work with regulators, professional sports leagues, media companies and advocates to set standards, provide gambling education for consumers and fund recovery efforts for people seeking treatment, Clark said.

    “We’ve had a really fast escalation and movement towards giving American consumers access to the legal market that they clearly want. And so we have to continue to evolve that marketplace,” he said.

    Advocates for people with gambling disorders say demand for help and treatment services has grown alongside the rapid expansion of legalized sports betting.

    Inquires to the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey’s help hotline about sports gambling have increased 60% since it became legal in the state in 2018, said Felicia Grondin, the organization’s executive director.

    Grondin feels helpless against the constant barrage of advertising encouraging betting on games.

    An advertisement for DraftKings is shown on the scoreboard during the game between the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park on July 7, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.

    “We consider it to be predatory advertising because it’s incessant and it glamorizes gambling,” she said.

    Clark from the American Gaming Association said the group has created a responsible marketing code to set industry-wide advertising standards.

    But self-enforcement by the industry cannot make up for robust oversight from regulators, said Keith Whyte, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

    “Self-regulation tends to dumb itself down to the lowest common denominator, not the highest,” he said. “Some operators are definitely taking advantage of weak regulatory environments in some states.”

    Every state where gambling is legal has a regulatory body that oversees it.

    But few have “really done more than the minimal amount to increase funding of problem gambling treatment,” said Holden. The sports gambling industry is most similar to financial markets, he said, but financial markets are much more regulated than banks.

    Most states require that sports betting ads disclose the minimum legal age to gamble and responsible gambling messages, such as problem gambling hotlines. Those messages are brief and usually run at the very end.

    DraftKings' Super Bowl ad with Kevin Hart, David Ortiz and Emmitt Smith.

    Regulators are wary of how tightly they can curtail messages in gambling advertising without running afoul of First Amendment protections on commercial speech.

    “A lot of state regulators have big First Amendment fears,” Holden said. “No one wants to fund litigation or lose a Supreme Court case over gambling.”

    In most states, the legal age for sports betting is 21 years old. But ads during games, in stadiums, and with star athlete sponsors normalizes sports betting for kids and teenagers, critics say. The United Kingdom last year banned top athletes and celebrities from appearing in ads endorsing or promoting gambling to try to curb underage gambling. That’s unlikely to happen in the United States.

    Additionally, researchers are troubled by the incentives and promotions some sports betting apps often provide to users, such as sign-up and referral bonuses, promo codes and bonus bets. One 2017 study of people with gambling addictions found that messages with an offer of risk-free kind of bonuses had a high impact.

    The Ohio Casino Control Commission in January fined DraftKings, Caesars and BetMGM $150,000 each for advertising promotions or bonuses as “free” or “risk-free” when, in fact, users were required to lose money or risk their own money to obtain the promotion.

    “I got more incentive to gamble with these apps that give you free play and match your deposit,” said the former sports bettor in Los Angeles currently in recovery. He enlisted friends to sign up to get referral fees, and looked at these enticements as free money. “I’d have to be an idiot to pass this up.”

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  • North Korean hackers extorted health care organizations to fund further cyberattacks, US and South Korea say | CNN Politics

    North Korean hackers extorted health care organizations to fund further cyberattacks, US and South Korea say | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    North Korean government-backed hackers have conducted ransomware attacks on health care providers and other key sectors in the US and South Korea and used the proceeds to fund further cyberattacks on government agencies in Washington and Seoul, US and South Korean officials warned Thursday.

    Some of those follow-on hacks have specifically targeted Pentagon networks and US defense contractors, according to the advisory from US and South Korean intelligence and security agencies.

    It’s the latest in a drumbeat of warnings from US officials that North Korea is adopting cybercriminal tactics to fund dictator Kim Jong Un’s ambitions, including the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

    The statement from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, US National Security Agency, South Korean National Intelligence Service and others does not mention Kim’s weapons programs, but US officials have previously warned that a portion of the money Pyongyang steals through hacking can go to weapons development.

    North Korea’s use of stolen cryptocurrency to fund its weapons programs is part of the regular set of intelligence products presented to President Joe Biden, a senior administration official told CNN this week.

    “They need money, so they’re going to keep being creative,” the official said. “I don’t think the North Koreans are ever going to stop looking for illicit ways to glean funds because it’s an authoritarian regime … under heavy sanctions.”

    The news comes as North Korea displayed nearly a dozen advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles at a nighttime military parade on Wednesday.

    The new US-South Korea advisory did not identify hospitals that the North Korean hackers had allegedly victimized. The Justice Department has previously accused Pyongyang-backed hackers of hitting a medical center in Kansas in 2021, encrypting computer systems the facility relied on to operate key equipment, and another medical provider in Colorado.

    The advisory follows a similar warning from US agencies in July that North Korean hackers had used ransomware to disrupt services at health organizations for “prolonged periods.”

    In the statement released Thursday, US and South Korean officials accused North Korean hackers of taking pains to try to hide their identities – even posing as a notorious Russian ransomware gang. The North Koreans are also emulating non-state criminals in dumping online the private data of victims who do not pay, officials said.

    The hackers have used a popular software used in small and medium-sized hospitals in South Korea to spread their malicious code with the aim of locking up computers, according to the advisory.

    In addition to hacking, suspected North Koreans have posed as other nationalities to apply for work at IT firms and send money back to Pyongyang, US agencies have publicly warned. A CNN investigation found at least one cryptocurrency entrepreneur who unwittingly paid a North Korean tech worker tens of thousands of dollars.

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  • Elon Musk pledged transparency at Twitter. But he’s walling off researchers | CNN Business

    Elon Musk pledged transparency at Twitter. But he’s walling off researchers | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    For years, Twitter, like other social media platforms, has freely given its platform data to independent researchers so that they can analyze everything from online trolling to the spread of misinformation. Those studies have been critical to understanding the tactics used by scammers, foreign influence campaigns and other malicious actors trying to manipulate social media.

    But now researchers fear the future of that work is under threat, after Twitter abruptly announced plans last week to restrict access to this data and charge money for it.

    The plan provided few details before it was delayed Wednesday amid a public backlash, but the company nonetheless intends to move forward with it. Twitter now says it will end free access to its application programming interface, or API, the software enabling third parties to tap into Twitter’s systems, on Feb. 13, and plans to replace it with paid access starting at $100 a month for “basic access” granting a “low level of API usage.”

    Such a change would chill civic research on Twitter manipulation and have devastating consequences for transparency, accountability and the public good, said Rebekah Tromble, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics.

    “It’s just abundantly clear that the impact is going to be profound on the research community, profound on civil society organizations that rely on free access to the API in order to provide a vitally important public service,” Tromble told CNN. “Twitter essentially has gone, in a blink of an eye, from being an industry leader in transparency to the bottom of the barrel.”

    The plan highlights the tension between new owner Elon Musk’s vows to bolster transparency on Twitter’s platform and the pressure he faces to shore up revenue through subscription products in order to improve the company’s bottom line, particularly in the face of an advertiser revolt.

    Twitter’s plan to restrict access to data also comes as it boasted to European Union authorities, in a report made public Thursday, that it provides “industry-leading access to data.”

    “Since 2006, academic researchers have used data from the public conversation to study topics as diverse as the conversation on Twitter itself,” the report said, “from state-backed efforts to disrupt the public conversation to floods and climate change, from attitudes and perceptions about COVID-19 to efforts to promote healthy conversation online.”

    “Today, academic researchers are one of the largest groups of people using the Twitter API,” the report added. But Twitter’s changes erecting a paywall for API access may jeopardize all that, Tromble and other researchers said.

    The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Musk has framed Twitter’s API restrictions as part of his wider effort to stamp out spammy, automated accounts. The data interface “is being abused badly right now by bot scammers and opinion manipulators,” he tweeted last week. “There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things.”

    But Musk’s proposed cure — putting a price on platform access — triggered a backlash from third-party software developers behind so-called “good” Twitter bots that also could be harmed by the change. Two days later, Musk seemed to soften his stance, but his concession only appeared to address the concerns of developers who use the API to write automated tweets, said Tromble, not those of researchers who use the API to collect and analyze large volumes of platform data.

    Musk’s allegations about the prevalence of bots on Twitter were a centerpiece of his attempt last year to back out of buying Twitter, an ultimately unsuccessful effort. Ironically, however, Musk’s looming changes to the Twitter API might make it harder to study bot behavior on Twitter.

    One of the third-party applications that depends on Twitter’s API is Botometer, a tool developed by Indiana University researchers and that was heavily cited by Musk’s team in court to defend his claims that Twitter was ridden with “bad” bots.

    Kaicheng Yang, one of the creators of Botometer, told CNN Thursday that Twitter’s coming API changes “would definitely make my work harder” and raise the project’s costs. Yang said he would attempt to find funding to keep the project going, but that users could ultimately have to bear the costs of Botometer’s use of Twitter’s API, which he said could be “prohibitive” and drive people away from the tool.

    “We also teach students in the classroom about how to use our tools to study social media and understand online manipulation. With the paid API, we won’t be able to do that anymore,” Yang said. He also added that even if Botometer can somehow continue, other researchers with smaller budgets, particularly in developing countries, likely won’t be able to afford Twitter’s API.

    While it’s no surprise that Twitter might ask researchers to chip in for data access, the company has made little effort to understand researchers’ constraints and whether paying $100 a month is even feasible, said Tromble.

    “There’s been no conversation with the affected community,” she said. “$100 a month is affordable to scholars at Ivy League institutions; it’s not affordable to under-resourced academic and civil-society researchers. If Twitter had that community in mind, it would be absolutely appropriate for them to reach out and have some conversations and perhaps introduce a sliding scale approach to this.”

    Given the breadth of research worldwide based on Twitter data, dealing with topics ranging from elections to the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact on smaller research organizations could be substantial. Last week, more than 100 civil society groups and more than 500 individuals signed an open letter urging Twitter to keep its API easily accessible to researchers.

    “Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has promised to make the platform more transparent and to reduce the prevalence of spam and manipulative accounts,” the letter said. “In fact, the independent research community has developed many of the most cutting-edge techniques used to manage bots. API access has provided a critical resource for that work. Twitter’s new barriers to data access will reduce the very transparency that both the platform and our societies desperately need.”

    The impending API paywall also follows Twitter’s decision to eliminate a partnership with researchers known as the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium. The initiative was launched as recently as last year and had just gotten off the ground when Musk took over the company and axed the program, said Tromble, who described the consortium as an industry-leading push for transparency.

    “The team is gone,” she said. “The researchers who were signed up to the program have heard nothing from the company in months, since Musk’s acquisition.”

    Beyond the immediate impact to researchers, Twitter’s transparency issues could land the company in hot water with policymakers.

    Last week, Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Lori Trahan called Twitter’s API plans “the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”

    “Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” Trahan said in a statement, citing a briefing her staff received from Twitter in December in which Twitter committed not to limit researcher access to the platform.

    US policymakers have broadly called for expanding researcher access to social media data as a way of holding platforms accountable. Several other platforms that filed reports to the European Union — reports that were also made public Thursday alongside Twitter’s — indicated a commitment to growing that access, said Tromble.

    “Meta was able to point to new programs they were developing,” Tromble said. “TikTok was able to point to specific, new APIs they’re developing. Twitter simply had blanks. There was nothing they could say, and in fact what they did say was, ‘We’re already better than everyone else,’ which was true until a week ago.”

    The reports to the EU are seen as an important baseline marker for compliance with the Code of Practice on Disinformation, a voluntary set of self-regulatory commitments that can reduce a tech company’s potential liability under the Digital Services Act, a recently passed EU content moderation law that will be enforced beginning in 2024. Violations of the Digital Services Act can lead to fines of up to 6% of a platform’s global annual revenue.

    “More work is needed when it comes to providing access to data for researchers,” said Věra Jourová, the European Union’s vice-president for values and transparency, in a statement. “We must have more transparency and cannot rely on the online platforms alone for the quality of information. They need to be independently verifiable. I am disappointed to see that Twitter’s report lags behind others and I expect a more serious commitment to their obligations stemming from the Code.”

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  • Alibaba is launching a ChatGPT rival too | CNN Business

    Alibaba is launching a ChatGPT rival too | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Alibaba says it will launch its own ChatGPT-style tool, becoming the latest tech giant to jump on the chatbot bandwagon.

    The Chinese behemoth said it was testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot internally. It did not share details of when it would launch or what the application would be called.

    “Frontier innovations such as large language models and generative AI have been our [focus] areas since the formation of DAMO in 2017,” an Alibaba

    (BABA)     spokesperson told CNN in a Thursday statement, referring to an acronym for the company’s research arm that focuses on machine intelligence, data computing and robotics.

    “As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users.”

    Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares ticked up 1.4% on Thursday morning.

    Companies around the world are racing to develop and release their own versions of ChatGPT, the application that allows users to automatically write essays or pass tests.

    The tool is built on a large language model, which is trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts have long warned that these tools have the potential to spread inaccurate information.

    This week, Google

    (GOOGL)     and Chinese search engine giant Baidu

    (BIDU)     both unveiled plans to launch similar services of their own.

    Google’s tool, named “Bard,” will roll out to the public in the coming weeks, while Baidu’s bot, called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese or “ERNIE Bot” in English, will launch in March.

    Bard suffered an embarrassing setback this week, however, after producing an incorrect response during a public demonstration.

    Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell nearly 8% Wednesday following the news.

    Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , too, has gotten in the game. The firm announced a makeover for its Bing search engine on Tuesday, saying it would update the platform to answer questions, chat with users and produce content in response to prompts using artificial intelligence.

    The company is also investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

    — CNN’s Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report.

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  • Twitter users briefly unable to tweet, send messages | CNN Business

    Twitter users briefly unable to tweet, send messages | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Twitter users on Wednesday briefly encountered various issues with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.

    Some users trying to send new tweets received a pop-up saying they had reached the “daily limit” for sending tweets; for others, it simply said, “we’re sorry, we weren’t able to send your Tweet.” Likewise, follow attempts were met with a message saying, “Limit reached. You are unable to follow more people at this time.” And direct messages also failed to send.

    Some users said they were only able to send tweets by using Twitter’s tweet scheduling function.

    Outage tracker DownDetector showed more than 9,000 Twitter issue reports as of 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, although reports began to decline within half an hour and the ability to tweet appeared to quickly return for some users.

    Twitter

    (TWTR)     has experienced a range of technical glitches since Elon Musk took over the company and laid off more than half its staff late last year. Users have previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.

    Some former employees raised concerns that the mass layoffs under Musk could cause the platform to break in big or small ways, after workers with knowledge of Twitter’s key systems were ousted.

    It’s not clear what caused Wednesday’s apparent glitch. Twitter, which eliminated much of its media relations staff last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the outage.

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  • US senators seek answers from Meta on whether user data was accessed by China, Russia and others | CNN Business

    US senators seek answers from Meta on whether user data was accessed by China, Russia and others | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Top US lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee want answers from Meta on a newly disclosed internal investigation it conducted in 2018 that found tens of thousands of software developers in China, Russia and other “high-risk” countries may have had access to detailed Facebook user data before the company clamped down on that access beginning in 2014.

    In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the chair and vice-chair of the Senate committee, cited a document unsealed last week in an ongoing privacy lawsuit involving the company.

    That document, an internal slide presentation from 2018, suggested that nearly 87,000 developers in China, 42,000 in Russia and a handful based in Cuba, Iran and North Korea had access to Facebook user information through an earlier version of the company’s programming interfaces. The presentation provides an interim update on the probe, which found, among other things, that Iran was home to a “significant number of seemingly Russian developers” of Facebook apps.

    The document does not explicitly outline what types of information the developers could have accessed, but it focuses on a period prior to 2014, before Facebook had restricted third-party access to data such as political views, relationship statuses and education history, among other things.

    The congressional letter seeks more information about the outcome of the investigation, with a particular focus on whether Facebook users’ data could have ended up in the hands of Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies.

    “We have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity, ranging from foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence activity,” the lawmakers wrote.

    The findings are “especially remarkable given that Facebook has never been permitted to operate in [China],” they added.

    Meta’s investigation, launched after the company’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, had focused on third-party app developers with access to “large amounts of information” and whose software had exhibited “suspicious activity.”

    On Tuesday, Meta told CNN in a statement that the document cited in the letter references data practices that are no longer in effect at the company.

    “These documents are an artifact from a different product at a different time,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone. “Many years ago, we made substantive changes to our platform, shutting down developers’ access to key types of data on Facebook while reviewing and approving all apps that request access to sensitive information.”

    Meta declined to answer whether the app developer investigation is still ongoing or how many apps have been reviewed since the 2018 slide presentation, which was unsealed in court last week. The document had projected the probe would continue at least through 2020.

    In recent years, policymakers have increasingly sounded the alarm about data leakages to foreign adversaries. Hostile governments could seek to use Americans’ personal information to spread disinformation or identify intelligence targets, US officials have said.

    Those fears have culminated most visibly in tensions with the short-form video app TikTok, whose links to China through its parent company have prompted the US government and numerous states to ban the app from official devices. US officials have also sought to block Chinese telecom firms from the US market over similar concerns.

    But the lawmakers’ letter highlights how worries about data access by foreign adversaries extends beyond TikTok and encompasses some of the largest social media platforms.

    Although Meta has moved on with different, more restrictive policies for developers, Warner and Rubio called for the company to explain what information may have been transferred to China, Russia and other nations in the past, and for any evidence the company may have that the data has been abused to target Americans or engage in propaganda campaigns.

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  • Microsoft unveils revamped Bing search engine using AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT | CNN Business

    Microsoft unveils revamped Bing search engine using AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT | CNN Business

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    Seattle
    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft on Tuesday announced a revamp of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser powered by artificial intelligence, weeks after it confirmed plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

    With the updates, Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries, Microsoft said at a press event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.

    The updates come as the viral success of ChatGPT has sparked a wave of interest in AI chatbot tools. Multiple tech giants are now competing to deploy similar tools that could transform the way we draft e-mails, write essays and search for information online. A day before the event, Google announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT in the coming weeks.

    In partnership with OpenAI, Bing will run on a more powerful large language model than the one that underpins ChatGPT. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts and queries.

    “It’s a new paradigm for search, rapid innovation is going to come,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Tuesday’s event. “In fact, a race starts today … everyday we want to bring out new things, and most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating in search because it’s high time.”

    The updated Bing is expected to be made available for the public to try on Tuesday for limited queries, with a small group of users having unlimited access. The company said full access will roll out to millions of users in the coming weeks, and it also hopes to implement the tools into other web browsers in the future.

    Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said his company’s goal is “to make the benefits of AI to as many people as possible.” That, he said, is “why we worked with Microsoft.”

    Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, said last month it plans to expand its existing partnership with the company as part of a greater effort to add more artificial intelligence to its suite of products. In a separate blog post, OpenAI said the multi-year investment will be used to “develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”

    “This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category that we know,” Nadella said Tuesday.

    The tech giant had already said it would incorporate ChatGPT into products, including its cloud computing platform Azure.

    “While Bing today only has roughly 9% of the search market, further integrating this unique ChatGPT tool and algorithms into the Microsoft search platform could result in major share shifts away from Google and towards Redmond down the road,” Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush, said in an investor note on Monday about the upcoming event.

    With the new Bing, a user could search for TVs to buy in a new way. Once the results come up, the user can click to the chat section and ask Bing for additional information, such as which TVs are best for gaming and which are the least expensive.

    The tool could also create a vacation itinerary for a family in a certain city, and then generate an email with that itinerary for the user to send around to their family. It could even translate the email into other languages if necessary.

    When the tool generates written answers, it will provide references for the sources of information and links to click through to the original source from the web.

    “With answers, we go far beyond what Search can do today,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer.

    The updated Microsoft Edge browser will have the Bing capabilities built in, allowing users to chat with the search tool on the side of a web page, to ask questions about the page or compare it with content from across the web. It could also, for example, help users draft a post on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn on a certain topic. The company describes the new capabilities as a sort of “co-pilot” to help users navigate the web.

    Many have speculated the AI technology behind ChatGPT could cause a massive shake-up in the online search industry. In the two months since it launched to the public, the viral tool has been used to generate essays, stories and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might previously have searched for on Google or other search engines.

    Microsoft's updated Bing search engine revealed at a news event at Microsoft's Washington headquarters on February 8.

    The immense attention on ChatGPT in recent weeks reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. On Monday, Google unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.

    Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.

    “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models … It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” Pichai wrote.

    While AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly gaining traction among both users and tech companies, they’ve also raised some concerns, including about their potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation.

    Microsoft executives acknowledged the potential shortcomings of its new tool.

    “We know we wont be able to answer every question every single time,” Mehdi said. “We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn.”

    Executives said the tool is trained in part by sample conversations mimicking bad actors who might want to exploit the tool.

    “With a technology this powerful,” said responsible AI lead Sarah Bird, “I also know that we have an even greater responsibility to make sure that it’s developed, deployed and used properly.”

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  • What is doxxing? | CNN

    What is doxxing? | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: This story is part of ‘Systems Error’, a series by CNN As Equals, investigating how your gender shapes your life online. For information about how CNN As Equals is funded and more, check out our FAQs.



    CNN
     — 

    In 2017, Kyle Quinn enjoyed the anonymity any engineering professor typically would until he became a target of doxxing. Angry social media users mistakenly identified him as having attended a White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. His pictures, home address and employer’s name quickly made rounds across social networks, frightening Quinn and his wife and sending them to a colleague’s home for refuge, the New York Times reported.

    Quinn is one of many victims of doxxing, a form of online invasion of personal privacy that can lead to devastating consequences.

    According to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, doxxing is the intentional revelation of a person’s private information online without their consent, often with malicious intent. This includes the sharing of phone numbers, home addresses, identification numbers and essentially any sensitive and previously private information such as personal photos that could make the victim identifiable and potentially exposed to further harassment, humiliation and real-life threats including stalking and unwanted encounters in person.

    There are multiple etymologies for the term, but the cybersecurity firm Kapersky reports that one explanation is that doxxing came from the phrase ”dropping documents” and gradually ”documents” became ”dox” which has been used as a verb to refer to the practice. Originally a form of online attack used by hackers, the firm wrote, doxxing has been around since the 1990s.

    Doxxing can happen in many ways online and on other platforms.

    According to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, in 2014, the gaming industry experienced a watershed moment known as Gamergate, a year-long culture war led by far right trolls online. After Eron Gjoni, ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn uploaded a blog post about their break up, accused her of cheating on him, and shared screenshots of their private communications on an online forum, Quinn became one of many gamers to be a high-profile target of doxxing and rape threats, followed by many other female game developers who raised their voices, according to The Guardian.

    One of the victims, the American game developer Brianna Wu wrote in the magazine Index on Censorship: ”The truth is there is no free speech when speaking about your experiences leads to death threats, doxxing and having armed police sent to your house.”

    In 2014, Wu tweeted about escaping her home out of fear for her safety along with screenshots of death threats sent to her account.

    In 2019, the South African journalist and broadcaster Karima Brown missent a message meant for her producer to a WhatsApp group run by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party in which journalists are able to get media statements from the EFF, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ). Julius Malema, the party leader, accused her of spying on the party, and reacted by tweeting her phone number to his 2.3 million followers. Brown reportedly received rape and murder threats, including graphic messages 7]. The high court in Johannesburg later ruled the doxxing was a violation of the country’s Electoral Act, according to the CPJ, with Brown telling the non-profit that the court’s ruling was “a victory for democracy and media freedom, and a blow against misogyny and toxic masculinity.”

    Facebook’s parent company Meta does not explicitly use the term ”doxxing” in its privacy violations policy, but said in a statement to CNN that it considers users sharing ”personally identifiable information” about others a violation of its community standards. The company says it reviews any piece of content against its community standards and may remove private information such as home addresses that could result in tangible harm unless this information is publicly available through news coverage, press releases or other sources. Facebook users can use a specific reporting channel when they are concerned about their image privacy on the platform.

    TikTok clearly defines doxxing in its community guidelines which ban both the collection and publication of individuals’ personal information for malicious intent. Users can report a specific item on the platform and follow the instructions.

    Twitter’s app and desktop versions allow you to report other users who tweet private information and media about themselves or somebody else without permission by clicking on the three dots in the corner of an offending tweet, then Report Tweet and following the instructions. Users found in violation of the policy are required to remove the content in question and temporarily locked out of their account. Twitter says permanent suspension may result from a second violation. Users can also file a separate form to report such violations.

    It depends on the jurisdiction. In Asia, Singapore outlawed most forms of intentional harassment or distress in 2014, which includes doxxing, and violators can be fined up to SGD $5,000 (nearly $3,800 US) and/or jailed for up to 6 months.

    In Indonesia, activists told CNN that doxxing cases have been on the rise, especially those targeting women human rights defenders and journalists. Damar Juniarto, the executive director of Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, a network of digital rights activists, said the term doxxing ”is not known in the Indonesia legal system” causing some doxxing cases to not be taken seriously by police. But he explained that the Personal Data Protection law, passed in September, punishes people who use and share personal information without a person’s consent, which can include doxxing.

    In the UK, there are clear guidelines for prosecutors to handle cases, particularly cases of violence against women and girls, which involve threats to post personal information on social media and the disclosure of private sexual images without consent, and the punishments vary.

    In the US, measures to combat doxxing vary across states. Last year, Nevada passed a bill that bans doxxing and allows victims to bring a civil action against the perpetrators. In California, cyber harassment including doxxing with the intent to put others and their immediate family in danger can put violators in county jail for up to one year or impose a fine of up to $1,000, or both.

    In 2021, Hong Kong authorities amended the data privacy law to include doxxing, with people facing jail sentences of up to five years and fines of up to HK$1 million ($129,000 US). This followed the doxxing of many officials and police officers during the 2019 protests against the Hong Kong government’s proposed bill to allow extraditions to mainland China. Critics argued that doxxing can be legally defended if sharing information about government officials out of public interest.

    Lauren Krapf, the technology policy and advocacy counsel for the Anti-Defamation League in the US, said whether doxxing is criminal depends on the intent.

    ”I think in certain circumstances, it is probably appropriate that [doxxers] have some level of criminal liability or civil liability,” Krapf told CNN, but emphasized that doxxing is not a black and white situation. The activity itself can be an empowerment tool for people engaging in protests to share information about extremists to others, she explained.

    Across the US, “state laws vary greatly and there is no federal statute outlawing doxxing,” Krapf told CNN, meaning “there isn’t currently one specific standard codified.”

    While anyone can be doxxed, experts believe women are more likely to be targets of mass online attacks, leaks of their sensitive media, such as sexually explicit imagery that was stolen or shared without consent and unsolicited and sexualized messages.

    A 2020 report by UN Women focusing on India, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Korea found that women experience many forms of online violence simultaneously such as trolling, doxxing and social media hacks.

    A 2020 global report by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), found that online violence against women is startlingly prevalent in the 51 countries surveyed, with 45% of Generation Z and Millennial women reporting being affected, compared to 31% of Generation X women and Baby Boomers, while 85% of women surveyed overall report witnessing online violence against women. While online violence is alarmingly common globally, the study shows significant regional differences, with Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East showing at least 90% of women surveyed having been affected.

    While the responsibility to prevent doxxing rests with those who would violate another’s privacy, and not with the victim, it is useful to take some preventative steps to protect yourself online.

    It can help to be familiar with doxxing-related policies on the online platforms you use as well as how to report abuse more generally. Consider making it harder for people to track you online by restricting the accessibility of any information that can identify you online and offline. For example, check who can see your personal email, phone number, home addresses and other physical locations on your social media accounts.

    The University of Berkeley, PEN America and Artist at Risk Connection provide thorough online privacy guides.

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  • Chinese search engine giant Baidu announces ChatGPT-style AI bot | CNN Business

    Chinese search engine giant Baidu announces ChatGPT-style AI bot | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Chinese search engine giant Baidu says it will be launching its own ChatGPT-style service.

    It will launch a new artificial intelligence chatbot called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese, or “Ernie Bot” in English, a spokesperson told CNN on Tuesday.

    Baidu

    (BIDU)     is currently testing the project internally and will likely roll out the service to users in March, the person said.

    The company did not provide further details, such as how the tool would look or whether it would appear as a feature within its popular search engine.

    Baidu’s AI investments can be seen as “both an offensive and defensive strategic move in China,” Daniel Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, told CNN. “Chinese Big Tech is battling in this AI race, with Baidu [being] a key player.”

    The news follows Google’s announcement Monday that it would unveil a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.

    In a blog post, Google

    (GOOGL)     CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard was opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”

    Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model.

    These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.

    In the two months since it launched, ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might previously have searched for on Google.

    Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , too, is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI. Details of the investment are set to be announced later on Tuesday, with the tie-up estimated to be in the $10 billion range, according to Ives.

    The deal “is a game changer in our opinion for Nadella & Co as the ChatGPT bot is one of the most innovative AI technologies in the world today,” he wrote in a Monday note, referring to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

    — CNN’s Catherine Thorbecke and Juliana Liu contributed to this report.

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  • Google unveils its ChatGPT rival | CNN Business

    Google unveils its ChatGPT rival | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Google on Monday unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.

    Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”

    Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model. These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.

    “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” Pichai wrote. “It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”

    The announcement comes as Google’s core product – online search – is widely thought to be facing its most significant risk in years. In the two months since it launched to the public, ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might previously have searched for on Google.

    The immense attention on ChatGPT has reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. In a tweet last year, Paul Buchheit, one of the creators of Gmail, forewarned that Google “may be only a year or two away from total disruption” due to the rise of AI.

    Microsoft, which has confirmed plans to invest billions OpenAI, has already said it would incorporate the tool into some of its products – and it is rumored to be planning to integrate it into its search engine, Bing. Microsoft on Tuesday is set to hold a news event at its Washington headquarters, the topic of which has yet to be announced. Microsoft publicly announced the event shortly after Google’s AI news dropped on Monday.

    The underlying technology that supports Bard has been around for some time, though not widely available to the public. Google unveiled its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA) some two years ago, and said Monday that this technology will power Bard. LaMDA made headlines late last year when a former Google engineer claimed the chatbot was “sentient.” His claims were widely criticized in the AI community.

    In the post Monday, Google offered the example of a user asking Bard to explain new discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in a way that a 9-year-old might find interesting. Bard responds with conversational bullet-points. The first one reads: “In 2023, The JWST spotted a number of galaxies nicknamed ‘green peas.’ They were given this name because they are small, round, and green, like peas.”

    Bard can be used to plan a friend’s baby shower, compare two Oscar-nominated movies or get lunch ideas based on what’s in your fridge, according to the post from Google.

    Pichai also said Monday that AI-powered tools will soon begin rolling out on Google’s flagship Search tool.

    “Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web,” Pichai wrote, “whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner.”

    If Google does move more in the direction of incorporating an AI chatbot tool into search, it could come with some risks. Because these tools are trained on data online, experts have noted they have the potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation.

    “It’s critical,” Pichai wrote in his post, “that we bring experiences rooted in these models to the world in a bold and responsible way.”

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  • House Oversight chairman and former Twitter employees strike deal on subpoenas in exchange for testimony | CNN Politics

    House Oversight chairman and former Twitter employees strike deal on subpoenas in exchange for testimony | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has subpoenaed three former Twitter employees who will testify before the panel in relation to their investigation into Twitter’s decision to temporarily suppress a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, three sources familiar with the documents tell CNN.

    Twitter’s former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, former Deputy General Counsel James Baker and former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth requested they be subpoenaed in order to compel their testimony, the sources told CNN, given the legal complications of publicly sharing privileged information from Twitter before the committee.

    The hearing comes after Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk, released some internal communications from Twitter staff about the decision to censor the New York Post story in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election campaign season.

    Comer, who met privately with Musk last month when the billionaire visited the Capitol, told CNN last week that the hearing may “incorporate some private conversations with some high-level people at Twitter” who support the belief that the US government may have played a role in the suppression of the New York Post story.

    When asked specifically if Musk has conveyed this sentiment to him, the Kentucky Republican told CNN: “I cannot answer that but that may come out in the hearing.”

    Comer’s belief that the government may have been involved in the suppression of the story is rooted in the so-called “Twitter files” that Musk made publicly available. Comer added his panel so far has only had access to the files that have been released publicly.

    “Americans deserve answers about this attack on the First Amendment and why Big Tech and the Swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit. Accountability is coming,” Comer said in a statement regarding the hearing.

    CNN has previously reported that allegations the FBI told Twitter to suppress the story are unsupported, and a half a dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, all denied any such directive was given in interviews with CNN.

    Republicans on the panel are especially eager to grill Baker, who previously served as general counsel at the FBI during the investigation into whether former President Donald Trump had colluded with Russia. Baker joined Twitter just five months before the 2020 election.

    Gadde, Baker and Roth did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • More than 500 dead as 7.8-magnitude earthquake hits southern Turkey and Syria | CNN

    More than 500 dead as 7.8-magnitude earthquake hits southern Turkey and Syria | CNN

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    Istanbul, Turkey
    CNN
     — 

    Rescuers are racing to find survivors trapped beneath rubble either side of the Turkey-Syrian border as the death toll from one of the strongest earthquakes to hit Turkey in 100 years rose beyond 500 people.

    Nearly 3,000 others were injured as the 7.8-magnitude quake shook residents from their beds around 4 a.m. Monday morning, sending tremors as far away as Lebanon and Israel.

    The earthquake’s epicenter was 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

    Video from the scene in Turkey showed day breaking over rows of collapsed buildings, some with apartments exposed to the elements as people huddled in the freezing cold beside them, waiting for help.

    In Turkey, at least 284 people were killed and more than 2,300 injured, according to Vice President Fuat Oktay. In neighboring Syria, at least 237 people died and more than 630 were injured, Syrian state news agency SANA reported citing a Ministry of Health official. The deaths were reported in Aleppo, Latakia, Hama and Tartus.

    Dozens of people are trapped under rubble, according to the “White Helmets” group, officially known as Syria Civil Defense, a humanitarian organization formed to rescue people injured in conflict. Much of northwestern Syria, which borders Turkey, is controlled by anti-government forces amid a bloody civil war that began in 2011.

    Monday’s quake is believed to be the strongest to hit Turkey since 1939, when an earthquake of the same magnitude killed 30,000 people, according to the USGS. Earthquakes of this magnitude are rare, with fewer than five occurring each year on average, anywhere in the world. Seven quakes with magnitude 7.0 or greater have struck Turkey in the past 25 years – but Monday’s is the most powerful.

    Karl Lang, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech University’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, told CNN the area hit by the quake Monday is prone to seismic activity. “It’s a very large fault zone, but this is a larger earthquake than they’ve experienced any time in recent memory,” Lang said.

    Several buildings were destroyed following the powerful earthquake in southern Turkey on February 6, 2023.

    Journalist Eyad Kourdi, who lives in Gaziantep and was staying with his parents when the earthquake struck early Monday, said “it felt like it would never be over.”

    When the shaking stopped, Kourdi and his parents walked out of their home still wearing their pajamas, he said.

    With several inches of snow on the ground, they waited outside in the rain for about 30 minutes before he could go back inside to grab coats and boots.

    Strong aftershocks have been felt in southern and central Turkey. About 11 minutes after the main quake hit, the strongest aftershock of 6.7 magnitude hit about 32 kilometers (20 miles) northwest of the main quake’s epicenter. Another intense aftershock with a magnitude of 5.6 then occurred 19 minutes after the main quake.

    A destroyed apartment and damaged vehicle in Yurt neighborhood of Cukurova district after the earthquake in Adana, Turkey, on February 6, 2023.

    Kourdi said there were up to eight “very strong” aftershocks in under a minute after the 7.8 magnitude quake struck, causing belongings in his home to fall to the ground. Many of his neighbors had left their homes following the quake, he said.

    Photos showing the true scale of the disaster emerged as day broke in Turkey. Entire buildings have been flattened, with metal rods scattered across the streets. Cars have toppled over, while bulldozers work to clear the debris.

    A winter storm in the region is exacerbating the disaster, according to CNN meteorologists.

    “Hundreds of thousands of people are impacted by this. It is cold. It is rainy. Roads could be impacted, that means your food, your livelihood, the care for your children, the care for your family,” CNN meteorologist Karen Maginnis said.

    “Anything as far as crops or anything growing across this region will be impacted as well. The ramifications of this are broad and will impact this region for weeks, and months.”

    A destroyed building after a powerful earthquake jolts Turkey on February 6, 2023.

    Search and rescue teams have been dispatched to the south of the country, Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, said. AFAD, the disaster agency, said it had requested international help through the Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC), the European Union’s humanitarian program.

    Nearly 1,000 search and rescue volunteers have been deployed from Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, along with dogs, trucks and aid, according to its governor, Ali Yerlikaya.

    “Sorry for our loss. I wish our injured a speedy recovery,” Yerlikaya wrote on Twitter.

    The governor of Gaziantep, Davut Gul, said on Twitter that “the earthquake was felt strongly in our city,” and advised the public to wait outside their homes and stay calm.

    “Please let’s wait outside without panic. Let’s not use our cars. Let’s not crowd the main roads. Let’s not keep the phones busy,” he said.

    Gaziantep province has a number of small- and medium-sized cities, with a sizable refugee population, according to Brookings Institute fellow Asli Aydintasbas.

    “Some of these areas are rather poor. Some are more richer, urban areas … but other parts that we’re talking about that seem to have been devastated, are relatively lower income areas,” she said.

    Video from the city of Diyarbakir, to the northeast of Gaziantep, shows rescue workers frantically trying to pull survivors out of the rubble.

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the quake was felt in many parts of the country.

    “I convey my best wishes to all our citizens who were affected by the earthquake that occurred in Kahramanmaraş and was felt in many parts of our country. All our relevant units are on alert under the coordination of AFAD,” Erdogan wrote on Twitter.

    Search and rescue operations are underway as many are fear trapped in the rubble.

    Messages of condolences and support started pouring in Monday morning as world leaders woke to the news of the deadly earthquake.

    White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the United States was “profoundly concerned” about the destruction in Syria and Turkey.

    “I have been in touch with Turkish officials to relay that we stand ready to provide any & all needed assistance. We will continue to closely monitor the situation in coordination with Turkiye,” Sullivan wrote on Twitter.

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  • Judge reportedly allows Meta to move forward with VR startup acquisition, in blow to FTC | CNN Business

    Judge reportedly allows Meta to move forward with VR startup acquisition, in blow to FTC | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge will not block Meta from buying a virtual reality tech startup, according to multiple reports, in a setback for the US government, which had alleged the deal would threaten competition in a nascent market.

    Tuesday’s decision, issued by the US District Court for the Northern District of California, is sealed. But according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the contents of the decision dealt Meta a victory by denying the US government’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have prevented the acquisition from closing. The New York Times cited two people with knowledge of the matter and the Wall Street Journal cited one person familiar with the ruling.

    CNN has not independently confirmed the contents of the court’s decision. The Federal Trade Commission, which had sued to block the deal last summer, declined to comment. Meta declined to comment, and several outside attorneys for the company didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

    The closely watched case involves Meta’s purchase of Within Unlimited, a virtual reality company and maker of a VR fitness app called “Supernatural.” The FTC’s suit had been seen as a major test for Chair Lina Khan, a critic of large tech platforms, as well as of the FTC’s unusual legal theory alleging that Meta’s deal would harm future competition in a rapidly evolving industry.

    According to the reports, the judge in the case also issued a separate order that delays Meta’s ability to close its deal for another week to allow the FTC to decide whether to appeal the ruling.

    A separate challenge to Meta’s deal is ongoing before an in-house administrative law judge at the FTC. That proceeding could continue despite Tuesday’s ruling, but whether agency officials intend to press ahead is unclear.

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