ReportWire

Tag: Technology News

  • Following Australia’s Lead, Denmark Plans to Ban Social Media for Children Younger Than 15

    The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement by three governing coalition and two opposition parties in parliament to ban access to social media for anyone under the age of 15. Such a measure would be the most sweeping step yet by a European Union nation to limit use of social media among teens and children.

    The Danish government’s plans could become law as soon as mid-2026. The proposed measure would give some parents the right to let their children access social media from age 13, local media reported, but the ministry has not yet fully shared their plans.

    Many social media platforms already ban children younger than 13 from signing up, and a EU law requires Big Tech to put measures in place to protect young people from online risks and inappropriate content. But officials and experts say such restrictions don’t always work.

    Danish authorities have said that despite the restrictions, around 98% of Danish children under age 13 have profiles on at least one social media platform, and almost half of those under 10 years old do.

    The minister for digital affairs, Caroline Stage, who announced the proposed ban last month, said there is still a consultation process for the measure and several readings in parliament before it becomes law, perhaps by “mid to end of next year.”

    “In far too many years, we have given the social media platforms free play in the playing rooms of our children. There’s been no limits,” Stage said in an interview with The Associated Press last month.

    “When we go into the city at night, there are bouncers who are checking the age of young people to make sure that no one underage gets into a party that they’re not supposed to be in,” she added. “In the digital world, we don’t have any bouncers, and we definitely need that.”

    Under the new Australian law, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X and YouTube face fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove accounts of Australian children younger than 16.

    Some students say they are worried that similar strict laws in Denmark would mean they will losing touch with their virtual communities.

    “I myself have some friends that I only know from online, and if I wasn’t fifteen yet, I wouldn’t be able to talk with those friends,” 15-year-old student Ronja Zander, who uses Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, told the AP.

    Copenhagen high school student Chloé Courage Fjelstrup-Matthisen, 14, said she is aware of the negative impact social madia can have, from cyberbullying to seeing graphic content. She said she saw video of a man being shot several months ago.

    “The video was on social media everywhere and I just went to school and then I saw it,” she said.

    Line Pedersen, a mother from Nykøbing in Denmark, said she believed the plans were a good idea.

    “I think that we didn’t really realize what we were doing when we gave our children the telephone and social media from when they were eight, ten years old,” she said. “I don’t quite think that the young people know what’s normal, what’s not normal.”


    Age certificate likely part of the plan

    Danish officials are yet to share how exactly the proposed ban would be enforced and which social media platforms would be affected.

    However, a new “digital evidence” app, announced by the Digital Affairs Ministry last month and expected to launch next spring, will likely form the backbone of the Danish plans. The app will display an age certificate to ensure users comply with social media age limits, the ministry said.

    “One thing is what they’re saying and another thing is what they’re doing or not doing,” Stage said, referring to social media platforms. “And that’s why we have to do something politically.”

    Some experts say restrictions, such as the ban planned by Denmark, don’t always work and they may also infringe on the rights of children and teenagers.

    “To me, the greatest challenge is actually the democratic rights of these children. I think it’s sad that it’s not taken more into consideration,” said Anne Mette Thorhauge, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.

    “Social media, to many children, is what broadcast media was to my generation,” she added. “It was a way of connecting to society.”

    Currently, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took effect two years ago, requires social media platforms to ensure there are measures including parental controls and age verification tools before young users can access the apps.

    EU officials have acknowledged that enforcing the regulations aiming at protecting children online has proven challenging because it requires cooperation between member states and many resources.

    Denmark is among several countries that have indicated they plan to follow in Australia’s steps. The Southeast Asian country of Malaysia is expected to ban social media account s for people under the age of 16 starting at the beginning of next year, and Norway is also taking steps to restrict social media access for children and teens.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – December 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Congress Would Target China With New Restrictions in Massive Defense Bill

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration may have softened its language on China to maintain a fragile truce in their trade war, but Congress is charging ahead with more restrictions in a defense authorization bill that would deny Beijing investments in highly sensitive sectors and reduce U.S. reliance on Chinese biotechnology companies.

    Included in the 3,000-page bill approved Wednesday by the House is a provision to scrutinize American investments in China that could help develop technologies to boost Chinese military power. The bill, which next heads to the Senate, also would prohibit government money to be used for equipment and services from blacklisted Chinese biotechnology companies.

    In addition, the National Defense Authorization Act would boost U.S. support for the self-governing island of Taiwan that Beijing claims as its own and says it will take by force if necessary.

    “Taken together, these measures reflect a serious, strategic approach to countering the Chinese Communist Party,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. He said the approach “stands in stark contrast to the White House’s recent actions.”


    Congress moves for harsher line toward China

    The compromise bill authorizing $900 billion for military programs was released two days after the White House unveiled its national security strategy. The Trump administration dropped Biden-era language that cast China as a strategic threat and said the U.S. “will rebalance America’s economic relationship with China,” an indication that President Donald Trump is more interested in a mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing than in long-term competition.

    The China-related provisions in the traditionally bipartisan defense bill “make clear that, whatever the White House tone, Capitol Hill is locking in a hard-edged, long-term competition with Beijing,” said Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.

    If passed, these provisions would “build a floor under U.S. competitiveness policy — on capital, biotech, and critical tech — that will be very hard for future presidents to unwind quietly,” he said.

    The Chinese embassy in Washington on Wednesday denounced the bill.

    “The bill has kept playing up the ‘China threat’ narrative, trumpeting for military support to Taiwan, abusing state power to go after Chinese economic development, limiting trade, economic and people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S., undermining China’s sovereignty, security and development interests and disrupting efforts of the two sides in stabilizing bilateral relations,” said Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson.

    “China strongly deplores and firmly opposes this,” Liu said.

    U.S. policymakers and lawmakers have been working for several years toward bipartisan legislation to curb investments in China when it comes to cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing, aerospace, semiconductors and artificial intelligence. Those efforts flopped last year when Tesla CEO Elon Musk opposed a spending bill.

    The provision made it into the must-pass defense policy bill, welcomed by Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

    “For too long, the hard-earned money of American retirees and investors has been used to build up China’s military and economy,” he said. “This legislation will help bring that to an end.”

    Congress last year failed to pass the BIOSECURE Act, which cited national security in preventing federal money from benefiting a number of Chinese biotechnology companies. Critics said then that it was unfair to single out specific companies, warning that the measure would delay clinical trials and hinder development of new drugs, raise costs for medications and hurt innovation.

    The provision in the NDAA no longer names companies but leaves it to the Office of Management and Budget to compile a list of “biotechnology companies of concern.” The bill also would expand Pentagon investments in biotechnology.

    Moolenaar lauded the effort for taking “defensive action to secure American pharmaceutical supply chains and genetic information from malign Chinese companies.”

    The defense bill also would authorize an increase in funding, to $1 billion from $300 million this year, for Taiwan-related security cooperation and direct the Pentagon to establish a joint drone and anti-drone program.

    It comes amid mixed signals from Trump, who appears careful not to upset Beijing as he seeks to strike trade deals with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader has urged Trump to handle the Taiwan issue “with prudence,” as Beijing considers its claim over Taiwan a core interest.

    In the new national security strategy, the White House says the U.S. does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and stresses that the U.S. should seek to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict.

    “But the American military cannot, and should not have to, do this alone,” the document says, urging Japan and South Korea to increase defense spending.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – December 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Trump Signs Executive Order for AI Project Called Genesis Mission to Boost Scientific Discoveries

    President Donald Trump is directing the federal government to combine efforts with tech companies and universities to convert government data into scientific discoveries, acting on his push to make artificial intelligence the engine of the nation’s economic future.

    Trump unveiled the “Genesis Mission” as part of an executive order he signed Monday that directs the Department of Energy and national labs to build a digital platform to concentrate the nation’s scientific data in one place.

    It solicits private sector and university partners to use their AI capability to help the government solve engineering, energy and national security problems, including streamlining the nation’s electric grid, according to White House officials who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to describe the order before it was signed. Officials made no specific mention of seeking medical advances as part of the project.

    “The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization,” the executive order says.

    Trump is increasingly counting on the tech sector and the development of AI to power the U.S. economy, made clear last week as he hosted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The monarch has committed to investing $1 trillion, largely from the Arab nation’s oil and natural gas reserves, to pivot his nation into becoming an AI data hub.

    For the U.S.’s part, funding was appropriated to the Energy Department as part of the massive tax-break and spending bill signed into law by Trump in July, White House officials said.

    As AI raises concerns that its heavy use of electricity may be contributing to higher utility rates in the nearer term, which is a political risk for Trump, administration officials argued that rates will come down as the technology develops. They said the increased demand will build capacity in existing transmission lines and bring down costs per unit of electricity.

    Data centers needed to fuel AI accounted for about 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption last year, and those facilities’ energy consumption is predicted to more than double by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. That increase could lead to burning more fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, which release greenhouse gases that contribute to warming temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather.

    The project will rely on national labs’ supercomputers but will also use supercomputing capacity being developed in the private sector. The project’s use of public data including national security information along with private sector supercomputers prompted officials to issue assurances that there would be controls to respect protected information.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Frustrations Grow in Russia Over Cellphone Internet Outages That Disrupt Daily Life

    TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When Russians look back at 2025, they might remember it as the year when the government took even tighter control of the internet.

    Credit cards that won’t buy a ticket on public transport. ATMs that don’t connect to a network. Messaging apps that are down. Cellphones that don’t receive texts or data after a trip abroad. Mothers of diabetic children even complain with alarm that they can’t monitor their kids’ blood glucose levels during outages.

    The cellphone internet shutdowns, ostensibly to thwart Ukrainian drone attacks, have hit dozens of Russian regions for months. Popular messaging apps also are restricted, with the government promoting a state-controlled app seen by critics as a possible surveillance tool.

    Although broadband and Wi-Fi internet access remain unaffected, Russians contacted by The Associated Press described digital disruptions to their daily lives. All spoke on condition of not being fully identified for their own safety.


    Blackouts and ‘white lists’ are part of Russian strategy

    Widespread cellphone internet shutdowns began in May and persisted through summer and into the fall. In November, 57 Russian regions on average reported daily disruptions to cellphone links, according to Na Svyazi, an activist group monitoring shutdowns.

    Authorities say these outages are designed to prevent Ukrainian drones from tapping mobile networks for navigation.

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said they are “absolutely justified and necessary,” but analyst Kateryna Stepanenko of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said they haven’t been effective in curbing the intensity of Ukraine’s drone attacks, “given the amount of strikes we’ve seen in recent months on Russian oil refineries.”

    In many regions, only a handful of government-approved Russian websites and online services — designated as being on “white lists” — are available during connectivity blackouts.

    What’s available on the “white lists” varies by provider and includes official websites, email and social media platforms, two online markets, and the Russian search engine Yandex and its services. One provider offers access to a banking app, but others don’t. Authorities have promised to expand the lists.

    Marina, who lives in the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok, described her anxiety when she discovered only one app for a government-controlled bank was working during a mobile internet outage and she wondered what this meant for the future.

    “For me, this is the scariest thing,” she said. “The loss of information, the loss of freedom, essentially, is the most depressing thing for me.”

    In the Volga River city of Ulyanovsk, about 700 kilometers (435 miles) east of Moscow, one resident described how his credit card didn’t work when he tapped it on the payment terminal on a tram during an outage. He wasn’t carrying enough cash.

    Families with diabetic children say they can’t monitor their children’s glucose levels via special apps when they are at school and cellphone internet is down. Mothers in social media posts explain that children often can miss the moment when their blood sugar levels change, requiring an intervention, and special apps allowed parents to see that remotely and warn them. Connection outages disrupt that.

    Authorities have tried touting the joys of reconnecting with a technology-free lifestyle.

    Internet regulatory agency Roskomnadzor posted a cartoon on social media showing two views of a young man: one in a dark apartment staring at his phone and another strolling happily in a park, carrying a cup of coffee and a book.

    Going offline “doesn’t mean losing touch. Sometimes it means getting in touch with yourself,” the cartoon advised.

    But the post mostly drew angry and sarcastic comments.


    Restrictions set on SIM cards

    One recent anti-drone restriction sets 24-hour “cooling periods” during which data and texts are blocked from SIM cards that were carried abroad or have been inactive for 72 hours. The owner can unblock it via a link received by text message.

    Unblocking becomes impossible, however, if a SIM card is used in internet-connected appliances or equipment without interfaces for receiving text messages, like portable Wi-Fi routers, cars or meter boxes.

    Lawmaker Andrei Svintsov noted that Russia has many electricity meters with SIM cards that transmit readings once a month.

    “Does this mean they’ll all die? All the heating boilers will shut down, and all the Chinese cars will stop working? This is a massive problem, and I don’t know if the government is even aware of it,” he said.


    Messaging apps are targeted

    Other restrictions targeted two popular messaging apps: WhatsApp, with about 96 million monthly users in October, and Telegram, with 91 million, according to media monitoring group Mediascope.

    Authorities began restricting calls on these apps in August, supposedly to stop phone scams, and are throttling them in some parts of Russia. Yelena, in the southern city of Krasnodar, recalled a time in October when Telegram wasn’t available at all, affecting the work of her and her colleagues.

    Neither app is on the government “white list.”

    On the list is Russian messaging service MAX. Authorities actively promote it and since September the service is required to be preinstalled on all smartphones in Russia. Critics see it as a surveillance tool as MAX openly declares it will share user data with authorities upon request. Experts also say it doesn’t use end-to-end encryption.

    State institutions, officials and businesses are being encouraged to move communications and blogs to MAX. Marina, the Vladivostok resident, said her employers are insisting on people using MAX, to little enthusiasm. She said she doesn’t plan to install it, and neither do others contacted by the AP.

    MAX developers boast of about 50 million users registering on the platform that it says provides messaging and other services.

    Mediascope said MAX had about 48 million monthly users in October, but only 18.9 million average daily users, which is far less than the average daily totals of 81 million for WhatsApp and 68 million for Telegram.


    Russians shrug at restrictions

    Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s top independent pollster, said many Russians regard the restrictions the same way they feel about the weather: Ultimately, you can do nothing about it.

    The authorities’ strategy appears to be to make it difficult for average users to access “alternative content” so that they eventually stop seeking it, Volkov said. Those “who are not that interested will pick simpler channels and ways” to navigate the internet, he said.

    That sentiment was echoed by the Ulyanovsk resident who said he uses a virtual private network to access some of the blocked websites and platforms, but VPNs also are routinely blocked, so he must install a new one every few months.

    His tight circle of friends trade recommendations on VPNs, but he believes most people won’t make that much effort.

    Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society activist group, says the internet is tied to too many economic activities to shut it totally.

    “Groceries are being shipped to stores — this is being done via internet, the ordering, the processing, and so on,” he said. “A truck is on the road, it is connected to an information system, maps, navigation, all of it.”

    But he forecasts more stifling of websites, VPNs and platforms including totally blocking messenger apps Telegram and WhatsApp and possibly other, unexpected measures.

    “Honestly, I’m watching it all with raised eyebrows. They seem to have come up with everything already, and they’re still coming up with something more,” he said.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Disney Reaches New Deal With YouTube TV, Ending Dayslong Blackout for Customers

    Disney and YouTube TV reached a new deal to bring channels like ABC and ESPN back to the Google-owned live streaming platform Friday, ending a blackout for customers that dragged on for about two weeks.

    “As part of the new deal, Disney’s full suite of networks and stations – including ESPN and ABC – have already begun to be restored to YouTube TV subscribers,” The Walt Disney Co. said in a statement.

    “We are pleased that our networks have been restored in time for fans to enjoy the many great programming options this weekend, including college football.”

    Disney content had gone dark on YouTube TV the night of Oct. 30, after two sides failed to reach a new licensing deal. In the days that followed, YouTube TV subscribers were left without Disney channels on the platform — notably disrupting coverage of top U.S. college football matchups and professional sports games, among other news and entertainment offerings.

    Beyond ESPN and ABC, other Disney-owned content removed from YouTube TV during the impasse included channels like NatGeo, FX, Freeform, SEC Network, ACC Network and more.

    At the time the carriage dispute reached its boiling point, YouTube TV said that Disney was proposing terms that would be too costly, resulting in higher prices and fewer choices for its subscribers. And the platform accused Disney of using the blackout “as a negotiating tactic” — claiming that the move also benefited Disney’s own streaming products like Hulu + Live TV and Fubo.

    Disney, meanwhile, said that YouTube TV had refused to pay fair rates for its channels. The California entertainment giant also accused Google of “using its market dominance to eliminate competition.” And executives blasted the platform for pulling content “prior to the midnight expiration” of their deal last month.

    On Nov. 3, Disney also asked YouTube TV to restore ABC programming for Election Day on Nov. 4 to put “the public interest first.” But YouTube TV said this temporary reprieve would confuse customers — and instead proposed that the entertainment giant agree to restore both its ABC and ESPN channels while the two sides continue negotiations.

    The blackout marked the latest in growing list of licensing disputes in today’s streaming world. And consumers often pay the price.

    From sports events to awards shows, live programming that was once reserved for broadcast has increasingly made its way into the streaming world over the years as more and more consumers ditch traditional cable or satellite TV subscriptions for content they can get online. But amid growing competition, renewing carriage agreements can also mean tense contract negotiations — and at times service disruptions.

    YouTube TV and Disney have been down this road before. In 2021, YouTube TV subscribers also briefly lost access to all Disney content on the platform after a similar contract breakdown between the two companies. That outage lasted less than two days, with the companies eventually reaching an agreement.

    Meanwhile, YouTube TV has removed other networks from its platform after expired agreements. Spanish-language broadcaster Univision has been unavailable on YouTube TV since Sept. 30, for example. At the time, its parent company TelevisaUnivision decried Google’s move — noting it would strip “millions of Hispanic viewers of the Spanish-language news, sports, and entertainment they rely on every day” and called on the platform to reverse course.

    YouTube TV’s base subscription plan costs $82.99 per month — which, beyond Disney content, currently includes live TV offerings from networks like NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS and more. The platform previously said it would give subscribers a $20 credit its dispute with Disney lasted “an extended period of time” — which it reportedly allowed customers to start claiming on Nov. 9.

    Disney also doles out live TV through both traditional broadcasting and its own lineup of streaming platforms. ESPN launched its own streamer earlier this year, starting at $29.99 a month. And other Disney content can be found on platforms like Hulu, Disney+ and Fubo. Disney currently allows people to bundle ESPN along with Hulu and Disney+ for $35.99 a month — or $29.99 a month for the first year.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • The Congressional Budget Office Was Hacked. It Says It Has Implemented New Security Measures

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday confirmed it had been hacked, potentially disclosing important government data to malicious actors.

    The small government office, with some 275 employees, provides objective, impartial analysis to support lawmakers during the budget process. It is required to produce a cost estimate for nearly every bill approved by a House or Senate committee and will weigh in earlier when asked to do so by lawmakers.

    Caitlin Emma, a spokeswoman for the CBO said in a written statement that the agency “has identified the security incident, has taken immediate action to contain it, and has implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems going forward.”

    The Washington Post first wrote the story on the CBO hack, stating that the intrusion was done by a suspected foreign actor, citing four anonymous people familiar with the situation.

    The CBO did not confirm whether the data breach was done by a foreign actor.

    “The incident is being investigated and work for the Congress continues,” Emma said. “Like other government agencies and private sector entities, CBO occasionally faces threats to its network and continually monitors to address those threats.”

    The CBO manages a variety of massive data sources that relate to a multitude of policy issues — from the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans, to the unprecedented implementation of sweeping tariffs on countries around the world, to massive tax and spending cuts passed into law this summer.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Denmark Eyes New Law to Protect Citizens From AI Deepfakes

    COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — In 2021, Danish video game live-streamer Marie Watson received an image of herself from an unknown Instagram account.

    She instantly recognized the holiday snap from her Instagram account, but something was different: Her clothing had been digitally removed to make her appear naked. It was a deepfake.

    “It overwhelmed me so much,” Watson recalled. “I just started bursting out in tears, because suddenly, I was there naked.”

    In the four years since her experience, deepfakes — highly realistic artificial intelligence-generated images, videos or audio of real people or events — have become not only easier to make worldwide but also look or sound exponentially more realistic. That’s thanks to technological advances and the proliferation of generative AI tools, including video generation tools from OpenAI and Google.

    These tools give millions of users the ability to easily spit out content, including for nefarious purposes that range from depicting celebrities Taylor Swift and Katy Perry to disrupting elections and humiliating teens and women.

    In response, Denmark is seeking to protect ordinary Danes, as well as performers and artists who might have their appearance or voice imitated and shared without their permission. A bill that’s expected to pass early next year would change copyright law by imposing a ban on the sharing of deepfakes to protect citizens’ personal characteristics — such as their appearance or voice — from being imitated and shared online without their consent.

    If enacted, Danish citizens would get the copyright over their own likeness. In theory, they then would be able to demand that online platforms take down content shared without their permission. The law would still allow for parodies and satire, though it’s unclear how that will be determined.

    Experts and officials say the Danish legislation would be among the most extensive steps yet taken by a government to combat misinformation through deepfakes.

    Henry Ajder, founder of consulting firm Latent Space Advisory and a leading expert in generative AI, said that he applauds the Danish government for recognizing that the law needs to change.

    “Because right now, when people say ‘what can I do to protect myself from being deepfaked?’ the answer I have to give most of the time is: ‘There isn’t a huge amount you can do,’” he said, ”without me basically saying, ‘scrub yourself from the internet entirely.’ Which isn’t really possible.”

    He added: “We can’t just pretend that this is business as usual for how we think about those key parts of our identity and our dignity.”


    Deepfakes and misinformation

    U.S. President Donald Trump signed bipartisan legislation in May that makes it illegal to knowingly publish or threaten to publish intimate images without a person’s consent, including deepfakes. Last year, South Korea rolled out measures to curb deepfake porn, including harsher punishment and stepped up regulations for social media platforms.

    Danish Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said that the bill has broad support from lawmakers in Copenhagen, because such digital manipulations can stir doubts about reality and spread misinformation.

    “If you’re able to deepfake a politician without her or him being able to have that product taken down, that will undermine our democracy,” he told reporters during an AI and copyright conference in September.

    The law would apply only in Denmark, and is unlikely to involve fines or imprisonment for social media users. But big tech platforms that fail to remove deepfakes could face severe fines, Engel-Schmidt said.

    Ajder said Google-owned YouTube, for example, has a “very, very good system for getting the balance between copyright protection and freedom of creativity.”

    The platform’s efforts suggest that it recognizes “the scale of the challenge that is already here and how much deeper it’s going to become,” he added.

    Twitch, TikTok and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    Engel-Schmidt said that Denmark, the current holder of the European Union’s rotating presidency, had received interest in its proposed legislation from several other EU members, including France and Ireland.

    Intellectual property lawyer Jakob Plesner Mathiasen said that the legislation shows the widespread need to combat the online danger that’s now infused into every aspect of Danish life.

    “I think it definitely goes to say that the ministry wouldn’t make this bill, if there hadn’t been any occasion for it,” he said. “We’re seeing it with fake news, with government elections. We are seeing it with pornography, and we’re also seeing it also with famous people and also everyday people — like you and me.”

    The Danish Rights Alliance, which protects the rights of creative industries on the internet, supports the bill, because its director says that current copyright law doesn’t go far enough.

    Danish voice actor David Bateson, for example, was at a loss when AI voice clones were shared by thousands of users online. Bateson voiced a character in the popular “Hitman” video game, as well as Danish toymaker Lego’s English advertisements.

    “When we reported this to the online platforms, they say ‘OK, but which regulation are you referring to?’” said Maria Fredenslund, an attorney and the alliance’s director. “We couldn’t point to an exact regulation in Denmark.”


    ‘When it’s online, you’re done’

    Watson had heard about fellow influencers who found digitally-altered images of themselves online, but never thought it might happen to her.

    Delving into a dark side of the web where faceless users sell and share deepfake imagery — often of women — she said she was shocked how easy it was to create such pictures using readily available online tools.

    “You could literally just search ‘deepfake generator’ on Google or ‘how to make a deepfake,’ and all these websites and generators would pop up,” the 28-year-old Watson said.

    She is glad her government is taking action, but she isn’t hopeful. She believes more pressure must be applied to social media platforms.

    “It shouldn’t be a thing that you can upload these types of pictures,” she said. “When it’s online, you’re done. You can’t do anything, it’s out of your control.”

    Stefanie Dazio in Berlin, Kelvin Chan in London, and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco, contributed to this report.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Indians Who Fled a Myanmar Cyberscam Center Are Being Flown Home From Thailand

    MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — India is repatriating on Thursday the first batch of hundreds of its nationals who last month fled to Thailand from Myanmar, where most had been working at a notorious center for online scams.

    An Indian air force transport plane left Thailand en route to India and another plane was to leave later in the day, with about 270 out of 465 Indians who are to be repatriated. The remainder will leave Thailand next Monday, according to Maj. Gen. Maitree Chupreecha, commander of the Thai army’s northern region Naresuan Task Force.

    In March, India repatriated 549 nationals after an earlier crackdown on cybercrime operations at the Myanmar-Thai border.

    Those currently being repatriated are among more than 1,500 people from 28 nations who fled the raid in Myawaddy. Across the border in the Thai town of Mae Sot, Thai authorities had set up temporary facilities for housing and processing not just Indians, but also Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Ethiopians and Kenyans, among other nationalities.

    In April, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that hundreds of industrial-scale scam centers generate just under $40 billion in annual profits.

    Southeast Asia is the world epicenter for online scams, and hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have been lured to work in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, where many were forced to perpetrate global scams involving false romances, fraudulent investments, and illegal gambling.

    Human trafficking is another major criminal aspect of such operations as many of the workers were recruited under false pretenses offering legitimate jobs, only to find themselves trapped in virtual slavery.

    State media in military-run Myanmar said the raid on KK Park was part of operations starting in early September to suppress cross-border online scams and illegal gambling. Since the raid, witnesses and the Thai army have said that that parts of KK Park were demolished by explosions.

    However, independent Myanmar media, including The Irrawaddy, an online news service, have reported that organized criminal scams in Myanmar continue to operate in the Myawaddy area.

    The cybercrime problem received major attention last month when the United States and Britain enacted sanctions against organizers of a major Cambodian cyberscam gang, and its alleged ringleader was indicted by a U.S. federal court in New York.

    In South Korea, the case of a young man, killed after apparently being lured to work at a cyberscam operation in Cambodia, caused an uproar.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Microsoft to Ship 60,000 Nvidia AI Chips to UAE Under US-Approved Deal

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Microsoft said Monday it will be shipping Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates as part of a deal approved by the U.S. Commerce Department.

    The Redmond, Washington software giant said licenses approved in September under “stringent” safeguards enable it to ship more than 60,000 Nvidia chips, including the California chipmaker’s advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell chips, for use in data centers in the Middle Eastern country.

    The agreement appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s remarks in a “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday that such chips would not be exported outside the U.S.

    Asked by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell if he will allow Nvidia to sell its most advanced chips to China, Trump said he wouldn’t.

    “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced,” Trump said. “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States.”

    The UAE’s ability to access chips is tied to its pledge to invest $1.4 trillion in U.S. energy and AI-related projects, an outsized sum given its annual GDP is roughly $540 billion.

    The UAE ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, said in a statement earlier this year that the arrangement was “setting a new ‘Gold Standard’ for securing AI models, chips, data and access.”

    Microsoft’s announcement Monday was part of the company’s planned $15.2 billion investment in technology in the UAE, which is says has some of the highest per-capita usage of AI. Microsoft had already accumulated in the UAE more than 21,000 of Nvidia’s graphics processor chips, known as GPUs, through licenses approved under then-President Joe Biden.

    “We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers, and Microsoft itself,” said a company statement.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Microsoft Enters Approximately $9.7B Contract With IREN That Gives It Access to Nvidia Chips

    Microsoft has entered into a $9.7 billion cloud services contract with artificial intelligence cloud service provider IREN that will give it access to some of Nvidia’s chips.

    The five-year deal, which includes a 20% prepayment, will help Microsoft as it looks to keep up with AI demand. Last week the software maker reported its quarterly sales grew 18% to $77.7 billion, beating Wall Street expectations while also surprising some investors with the huge amounts of money it is spending to expand its cloud computing infrastructure and address the growing need for AI tools.

    Microsoft spent nearly $35 billion in the July-September quarter on capital expenditures to support AI and cloud demand, nearly half of that on computer chips and much of the rest related to data center real estate.

    “IREN’s expertise in building and operating a fully integrated AI cloud — from data centers to GPU stack — combined with their secured power capacity makes them a strategic partner,” Jonathan Tinter, president of business development and ventures at Microsoft, said in a statement. “This collaboration unlocks new growth opportunities for both companies and the customers we serve.”

    Microsoft also announced new deal with OpenAI last week that pushed the Redmond, Washington, company to $4 trillion in valuation for the second time this year. The agreement gives the software giant a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit corporation but changes some of the details of their close partnership. Microsoft’s $135 billion stake will be just ahead of the OpenAI nonprofit’s $130 billion stake in the for-profit company.

    IREN also said Monday that it signed a deal with Dell Technologies to buy the chips and ancillary equipment for about $5.8 billion. The Australian company anticipates the chips being deployed in phases through next year at its Childress, Texas campus.

    Shares of IREN jumped 22% before the opening bell in the U.S. Shares of Microsoft rose slightly,.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Nvidia Partners With South Korean Government, Companies to Boost AI Development

    GYEONGJU, South Korea (AP) — Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia plans to supply hundreds of thousands of its graphics processing units for projects with South Korean businesses and the government to advance the country’s artificial intelligence infrastructure and technologies.

    The government, Nvidia and leading South Korean chip maker Samsung Electronics announced the plan after South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met Friday with Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang.

    Huang has gotten rockstar treatment reminiscent of Apple’s Steve Jobs since arriving in South Korea on Thursday to attend meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Gyeongju. As APEC host, South Korea is using the gathering of world leaders to showcase its ambitions in AI.

    Lee’s office said Nvidia will supply around 260,000 GPUs to support South Korea’s AI computing capabilities. The company will also work with Samsung and other South Korean technology firms including SK Hynix and Hyundai to improve manufacturing processes using AI and to accelerate the development of new technologies.

    Santa Clara-based Nvidia, whose GPU chips power much of the global AI industry, featured in talks Thursday between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Gyeongju, where the leaders agreed to take steps to ease their escalating trade war.

    Following the meeting, Trump said he discussed sales of computer chips to China. Trump and former President Joe Biden have imposed restrictions on China’s access to the most advanced chips, including those used for AI. Trump said China will speak with Nvidia about purchasing their chips, but not the company’s latest Blackwell AI chips.

    In August, Trump announced a deal with Nvidia and AMD, another chipmaker, to lift export controls on sales of advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of the revenue, despite concerns among national security experts that such chips will end up in the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services.

    Nvidia earlier this week confirmed that it has become the first $5 trillion company, just three months after the company broke through the $4 trillion mark. The milestone underscores the upheaval driven by the AI craze, widely seen as the biggest technological shift since Apple co-founder Jobs unveiled the first iPhone 18 years ago.

    But there are also concerns over a potential AI bubble. Officials at the Bank of England warned earlier this month that tech stock prices fueled by the AI boom could collapse, and the head of the International Monetary Fund has issued a similar warning.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Meta Shares Slide After Company Projects Higher Expenses for 2026

    Meta’s stock slid in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the tech giant posted strong third-quarter results but warned that its expenses will be significantly higher in 2026 than this year.

    Like its rivals, Meta Platforms Inc. has been on an artificial intelligence spending spree and said its costs will grow much faster next year, driven by infrastructure costs and employee compensation as it has hired AI experts at eye-popping compensation levels.

    “Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add technical talent in priority areas,” Meta said.

    Menlo Park, California-based Meta Platforms Inc. earned $2.71 billion, or $1.05 per share, in the July-September period. Excluding tax-related special expenses, the company would have earned $7.25. Revenue rose 26% to $51.42 billion from $40.59 billion.

    Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of $6.72 per share on revenue of $49.51 billion, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet Research.

    Meta’s daily active user base on its apps — Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads — was 3.54 billion on average for September, up 8% year-over-year.

    For the current quarter, Meta is forecasting revenue in the range of $56 billion to $59 billion. Analysts are forecasting $57.36 billion for the October-December quarter.

    Meta also cautioned that it is facing a slew of legal and regulatory issues in the U.S. and the European Union that could hurt its bottom line.

    “In the U.S., a number of youth-related trials are scheduled for 2026, and may ultimately result in a material loss,” the company said.

    In the U.S., Meta is facing an antitrust case that’s now awaiting a judge’s decision and could force the company to break off WhatsApp and Instagram, startups Meta bought more than a decade ago that have since grown into social media powerhouses.

    Meta’s shares fell $57.67, or 7.7%, to $694 in after-hours trading. The stock had closed up slightly at $751.67.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Sex Is a Big Market for the AI Industry. ChatGPT Won’t Be the First to Try to Profit From It

    ChatGPT will be able to have kinkier conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the artificial intelligence company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in “erotica for verified adults.”

    OpenAI won’t be the first to try to profit from sexualized AI. Sexual content was a top draw for AI tools almost as soon as the boom in AI-generated imagery and words erupted in 2022.

    But the companies that were early to embrace mature AI also encountered legal and societal minefields and harmful abuse as a growing number of people have turned to the technology for companionship or titillation.

    Will a sexier ChatGPT be different? After three years of largely banning mature content, Altman said Wednesday that his company is “not the elected moral police of the world” and ready to allow “more user freedom for adults” at the same time as it sets new limits for teens.

    “In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here,” Altman wrote on social media platform X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has also introduced an animated AI character that flirts with paid subscribers.

    For now, unlike Musk’s Grok chatbot, paid subscriptions to ChatGPT are mostly pitched for professional use. But letting the chatbot become a friend or romantic partner could be another way for the world’s most valuable startup, which is losing more money than it makes, to turn a profit that could justify its $500 billion valuation.

    “They’re not really earning much through subscriptions so having erotic content will bring them quick money,” said Zilan Qian, a fellow at Oxford University’s China Policy Lab who has studied the popularity of dating-based chatbots in the U.S. and China.

    There are already about 29 million active users of AI chatbots designed specifically for romantic or sexual bonding, and that’s not counting people who use conventional chatbots in that way, according to research published by Qian earlier this month.

    It also doesn’t include users of Character.AI, which is fighting a lawsuit that alleges a chatbot modeled after “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen formed a sexually abusive relationship with a 14-year-old boy and pushed him to kill himself. OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old ChatGPT user who died by suicide in April.

    Qian said she worries about the toll on real-world relationships when mainstream chatbots, already prone to sycophancy, are primed for 24-hour availability serving sexually explicit content.

    “ChatGPT has voice chat versions. I would expect that in the future, if they were to go down this way — voice, text, visual — it’s all there,” she said.

    Humans who fall in love with human-like machines have long been a literary cautionary tale, from popular science fiction of the last century to the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion, obsessed with a woman he sculpted from ivory. Creating such a machine would seem like an unusual detour for OpenAI, founded a decade ago as a nonprofit dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI.

    Altman said on a podcast in August that OpenAI has tried to resist the temptation to introduce products that could “juice growth or revenue” but be “very misaligned” with its long-term mission. Asked for a specific example, he gave one: “Well, we haven’t put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”

    Idaho-based startup Civitai, a platform for AI-generated art, learned the hard way that making money off mature AI won’t be an easy path.

    “When we launched the site, it was an intentional choice to allow mature content,” said Justin Maier, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview last year.

    Backed by the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in OpenAI, the Idaho startup was one of several that tried to capitalize on the sudden popularity of tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney that enabled people to type a description and conjure up almost any kind of image. Part of Stable Diffusion’s initial popularity was the ease with which it could generate a new kind of synthetic and highly customized pornography.

    “What we had seen was that there was a lot of interest in mature content,” Maier said. Training these AI systems, known as models, on “mature themes actually made it so that these models were more capable of human anatomy and resulted in actually better models,” he said.

    “We didn’t want to prevent the kind of growth that actually increased everything for the entire community, whether you were interested in mature content or Pixar,” Maier said. “So we allowed it early on and have always kind of had this battle of making it so that we can keep things filtered and safe, if that’s not what you’re interested in. We wanted to ultimately give the control to the user to decide what they would see on the site and what their experience would be.”

    That also invited abuse. Civitai last year implemented new measures to detect and remove sexual images depicting children, but it remained a hub for AI-generated pornography, including fake images of celebrities. Confronting increasing pressure, including from payment processors and a new law against nonconsensual images signed by President Donald Trump, Civitai earlier this year blocked users from creating deepfake images of real people. Engagement dropped.

    Another company that hasn’t shied away from mature content is Baltimore-based Nomi, though its founder and CEO Alex Cardinell said its companion chatbots are “strictly” for users over 18 and were never marketed to kids. They are also not designed for sex, though Cardinell said in an interview earlier this year that people who build platonic relationships with their chatbot might find it veering into a romantic one.

    “It’s kind of very user-dependent for where they’re kind of missing the human gap in their life. And I think that’s different for everyone,” he said.

    He declined to guess how many Nomi users are having erotic conversations with the chatbot, comparing it to real-life partners who might do “mature content things” for some part of their lives but “all sorts of other stuff together as well.”

    “We’re not monitoring user conversations like that,” Cardinell said.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Angry With Their Governments, the World’s Young Are Filling the Streets as ‘Gen Z’ Protesters

    NEW DELHI (AP) — From the Andes to the Himalayas, a new wave of protests is unfolding across the world, driven by generational discontent against governments and anger among young people.

    On Monday Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina was forced out of power and out of the country after a military mutiny, the culmination of weeks of demonstrations led by young protesters referring to themselves as “Gen Z Madagascar.”

    The rage against the political establishment in the Indian Ocean island country mirrors other recent protests across the world, in countries like Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya, Peru and Morocco. These protests have been sparked by specific grievances but are driven by long-simmering issues like widening inequality, economic uncertainty, corruption, and nepotism of leaders.

    But they have one thing in common: Mostly leaderless, they are made up primarily of young people who brand themselves as “Gen Z,” defined as those born roughly between 1996 and 2010 — the first generation to grow up entirely in the internet age.

    “What connects these youth-led protests is a shared sense that traditional political systems aren’t responsive to their generation’s concerns, whether that’s corruption, climate change, or economic inequality. Protest then becomes the logical outlet when institutional channels feel blocked,” said Sam Nadel, director of Social Change Lab, a U.K.-based nonprofit that researches protests and social movements.


    Protesters take cues from each other

    Though their specific demands differ, most of these protests have been sparked by government overreach or neglect. Some have also confronted harsh treatment by security forces and brutal repression.

    In Morocco, a leaderless collective called Gen Z 212 — named after Morocco’s dialing code — has taken to the streets to demand better public services and increased spending on health and education. In Peru, protests over a pension law exploded into broader demands, including action to tackle rising insecurity and widespread corruption in the government. In Indonesia, deadly protests have erupted over lawmakers’ perks and the cost of living, forcing the president to replace key economic and security ministers.

    The most widely recognized movement to be dubbed as a “Gen Z” protest was a deadly uprising in Nepal that culminated with the resignation of the prime minister in September. Protesters drew inspiration from successful anti-government movements elsewhere in South Asia — Sri Lanka in 2022 and Bangladesh in 2024 — which led to the ouster of incumbent regimes.

    In Madagascar in turn, protesters say they were particularly inspired by the movements in Nepal and Sri Lanka.

    The protests began against regular water and electricity cuts but quickly morphed into wider discontent, as demonstrators called for the president and other ministers to step down. On Wednesday, Madagascar’s military coup leader said he is “taking the position of president.”


    Uniting behind a manga pirate flag

    Across multiple countries, a singular pop culture symbol has emerged: a black flag showing a grinning skull and crossbones wearing a straw hat. The flag comes from a cult Japanese manga and anime series called “One Piece,” which follows a crew of pirates as they take on corrupt governments.

    In Nepal, protesters hung the same flag on the gates of the Singha Durbar, the seat of the Nepalese government, and on ministries, many of which were torched in protests. It was also hoisted by crowds in Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco and Madagascar.

    Last week in the Peruvian capital, Lima, 27-year-old electrician David Tafur stood with the same flag in San Martín Square, now the stage for weekly protests.

    “We’re fighting the same battle — against corrupt officials who, in our case, are also killers,” he said, recalling that President Dina Boluarte’s government held on to power since December 2022 despite more than 500 protests and the deaths of 50 civilians.

    “In my case, it’s outrage over abuse of power, corruption, the deaths,” Tafur said, referring to the sharp rise in murders and extortion plaguing the South American country since 2017, amid new laws that have weakened efforts to fight crime.

    Boluarte had been under investigation for months over various allegations including bribery and involvement in a deadly crackdown on protesters in 2022. She was replaced last week by interim President José Jerí.

    Tafur said that wasn’t enough.

    “The president is an ally of Congress and has to go,” he said.


    Harnessing social media for mobilization and awareness

    Many significant protests in the past, like Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the Arab Spring between 2010 and 2012, and the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, have been led by younger people. While they also used the internet and social media for mass mobilization, the “Gen Z” protesters are taking it to another level.

    “Digital platforms are powerful tools for information sharing and building connections, but the most effective movements often combine digital mobilization with traditional in-person organizing, as we’ve seen in these recent protests,” said Nadel from Social Change Lab.

    Days before the deadly protests began in Nepal, the government announced a ban on most social media platforms for not complying with a registration deadline. Many young Nepalese viewed it as an attempt to silence them and began accessing social media sites through virtual private networks to evade detection.

    Over the next few days, they used TikTok, Instagram and X to spotlight the lavish lifestyles of politicians’ children, highlighting disparities between Nepal’s rich and poor, and announce planned rallies and venues. Later, some of them also used the gaming chat platform Discord to suggest who to nominate as an interim leader for the country.

    “Whatever movement happens, whether against corruption or injustice, it spreads through digital media. The same happened in Nepal. The changes that took place after the Gen Z protests in Nepal spread globally through digital platforms, influencing other countries as well,” said protester Yujan Rajbhandari.

    He said the protests in Nepal awakened not only the youth but also other generations.

    “We realized that we are global citizens and the digital space connects us all and plays a powerful role across the world,” Rajbhandari said.

    Associated Press journalists Franklin Briceño in Lima, Peru, and Niranjan Shrestha in Kathmandu, Nepal, contributed to this report.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Waymo Plans to Bring Its Driverless Taxis to London in 2026

    LONDON (AP) — Robotaxi pioneer Waymo plans to expand to London next year, marking the company’s latest step in rolling out its driverless ride service internationally.

    Waymo said Wednesday that it will start testing its self-driving cars on London streets in the coming weeks — with a human “safety driver” behind the wheel — as it seeks to win government approval for its services.

    In a blog post, Waymo said it will “lay the groundwork” for its London service in the coming months. The company said it will “continue to engage with local and national leaders to secure the necessary permissions for our commercial ride-hailing service.”

    Waymo’s self-driving taxis have been operating in the United States for years, and currently serve the cities of Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Austin. This year, the company made its first moves to expand internationally by teaming up with local partners in Japan for testing, though no launch date has been set for commercial service there.

    The company began as a secret project within Google and was then spun out from the tech giant.

    Waymo will have to follow new U.K. regulations on self-driving cars that pave the way for autonomous vehicles to take to the country’s roads. They require self-driving cars to have a safety level “at least as high as careful and competent human drivers” and meet rigorous safety checks.

    The company will be able to take part in a pilot program for “small-scale” self-driving taxi and bus services that the government plans for spring 2026.

    Waymo will also have to stick to rules from Transport for London, the city’s transport authority, which oversees licensing for its famous traditional black cabs as well as other taxi operators like Uber.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • OpenAI Partners With Walmart to Let Users Buy Products in ChatGPT, Furthering Chatbot Shopping Push

    In an Tuesday announcement, Walmart said the new offering will give customers the option to “simply chat and buy.” That means the retailer’s products would be available through instant checkout in ChatGPT — allowing users to buy anything from meal ingredients or household items, to other goods they might be discussing with the chatbot.

    “For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a prepared statement. “That is about to change.”

    Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, added that the partnership would “make everyday purchases a little simpler.”

    The companies didn’t immediately specify when ChatGPT users would be able to start purchasing Walmart products within the platform. Tuesday’s announcement from Walmart just noted that the offering would be available “soon.”

    But the partnership marks OpenAI’s latest expansion into online commerce. The company has recently launched similar offerings for Shopify and Etsy sellers.

    Teaming up with Walmart — the nation’s largest retailer — marks an even more sizeable leap for OpenAI in this space. And competing with the likes of Amazon and Google for purchase fees from digital shopping could be a new source of money for the company. OpenAI hasn’t made a profit and has relied on investors to back the costs of building and running its powerful AI systems.

    When announcing its Etsy and Shopify partnerships last month, OpenAI said it worked with payments company Stripe on the technical standards to enable purchases through its “Instant Checkout” system.

    Separately, Walmart has worked to boost its own integration of AI across operations and its consumer-facing offerings in recent years. On Tuesday, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company pointed to its AI shopping assistant named Sparky — as well as other uses of AI technology in product catalogues and customer care for both Walmart and Sam’s Club. Members of Sam’s Club, which is owned by Walmart, will also be able to shop through the coming ChatGPT offering.

    Shares of Walmart were up more than 5% by Tuesday afternoon trading.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Google’s Play Store Shake-Up Looms After Supreme Court Refuses to Delay Overhaul of the Monopoly

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to protect Google from a year-old order requiring a major makeover of its Android app store that’s designed to unleash more competition against a system that a jury declared an illegal monopoly.

    The rebuff delivered in a one-sentence decision by the Supreme Court means Google will soon have to start an overhaul of its Play Store for the apps running on the Android software that powers most smartphones that compete against Apple’s iPhone in the U.S.

    Among other changes, U.S. District Judge James Donato last October ordered Google to give its competitors access to its entire inventory of Android apps and also make those alternative options available to download from the Play Store.

    In a filing last month, Google told the U.S. Supreme Court that Donato’s order would expose the Play Store’s more than 100 million U.S. users to “enormous security and safety risks by enabling stores that stock malicious, deceptive, or pirated content to proliferate.”

    Google also said it faced an Oct. 22 deadline to begin complying with the judge’s order if the Supreme Court didn’t grant its request for a stay. The Mountain View, California, company was seeking the protection while pursuing a last-ditch attempt to overturn the December 2023 jury verdict that condemned the Play Store as an abusive monopoly.

    In a statement, Google said it will continue its fight in the Supreme Court while submitting to what it believes is a problematic order. “The changes ordered by the U.S. District Court will jeopardize users’ ability to safely download apps,” Google warned.

    Google had been insulated from the order while trying to overturn it and the monopoly verdict, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that attempt in a decision issued two months ago.

    In its filing with the Supreme Court, Google argued it was being unfairly turned into a supplier and distributor for would-be rivals.

    Donato concluded the digital walls shielding the Play Store from competition needed to be torn down to counteract a pattern of abusive behavior. The conduct had enabled Google to to reap billions of dollars in annual profits, primarily from its exclusive control of a payment processing system that collected a 15-30% fee on in-app transactions.

    Those commissions were the focal point of an antitrust lawsuit that video game maker Epic Games filed against Google in 2020, setting up a month-long trial in San Francisco federal court that culminated in the jury’s monopoly verdict.

    Epic, the maker of the Fortnite game, lost a similar antitrust case targeting Apple’s iPhone app store. Even though U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rodgers concluded the iPhone app store wasn’t an illegal monopoly, she ordered Apple to begin allowing links to alternative payment systems as part of a shake-up that resulted in the company being held in civil contempt of court earlier this year.

    In a post, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney applauded the Supreme Court for clearing the way for consumers to choose alternative app payment choices “without fees, scare screens, and friction.”

    Although the Play Store changes will likely dent Google’s profit, the company makes most of its money from a digital ad network that’s anchored by its dominant search engine — the pillars of an internet empire that has been under attack on other legal fronts.

    A federal judge in the search engine case earlier this year rejected a proposed break-up outlined by the Justice Department i n a decision that was widely seen as a reprieve for Google. The government is now seeking to break up Google in the advertising technology case during proceedings that are scheduled to wrap up with closing arguments on Nov. 17 in Alexandria, Virginia.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • Trump’s Team Keeps Posting AI Portraits of Him. We Keep Clicking

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Here he is, depicted at six months in office, chiseled and brawny, as mighty as the very nation. Here he is as a Star Wars Jedi wielding a patriot-red lightsaber, rescuing our galaxy from the forces of evil. Here he is taking over Gaza, transforming the strip into a luxury resort complete with a golden effigy of himself.

    You can be anything, perhaps you were told growing up. Doctor. Astronaut. Maybe, one day, the president. But even the chief executive of the United States, the free world’s leader, frames himself as something more epic — as someone not entirely himself.

    On the social media accounts of Donald Trump and his second-term administration, a new official image of the president is emerging bit by bit: one generated artificially.

    A sign of the times, certainly — when the appeal of reimagining yourself with artificial intelligence has trickled up from us everyday citizens. Bored with your selfies? Join a viral trend: There’s an image generator or a chatbot that can turn you into a Renaissance-style painting, a Studio Ghibli character or an action figure with box art and accessories.

    The AI images of Trump posted by him and his team opt for the alternative — not deceptive but self-evident in their fictitiousness. Pope Francis dies, and Trump jokes to reporters that he’d like to be pope. A week later, he is, but in an AI-generated image that he posts, reposted by the White House. Trump likens himself to a king in a Truth Social post in February, and AI makes him one in an X post by the White House less than an hour later.

    The artifice arrives in Trump’s usual style — brassy, unabashed, attention-grabbing — and squares with his social media team’s heavy meme posting, which it has promised to continue. The administration’s official social media accounts have grown by more than 16 million new followers across platforms since Inauguration Day, a White House official told NBC News.

    The White House recognizes the appeal. In July, it posted to its X account: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.” Attached to the post, a photo of a sign on the White House lawn parodying the naysayers: “oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHis?”

    Behind the commander in chief’s desire to craft an AI self — not itself uncommon — an infantry of official communications channels stands at his ready. And we, the people, can’t help but tune in.


    Feelings don’t care about your facts

    Like so much on the internet these days, Trump’s AI portraits are primed for people to react, says Evan Cornog, a political historian and author of “The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush.”

    “By the time you’ve seen it, you’ve understood it. And that’s, of course, the efficacy,” Cornog said. “It requires no effort, either for the person generating it, but particularly for the person consuming it.”

    The expressive power of political imagery, regardless of the truth of its message, has long been understood by politicians and their detractors.

    President William Henry Harrison’s log cabin and hard cider campaign symbols, representing him as a “man of the people,” helped him win the election of 1840. Thirty years later, political cartoonist Thomas Nast would turn public opinion against William Marcy “Boss” Tweed with his scathing portrayals of the politician, whom he depicted satirically overweight from greed. “Let’s stop those damned pictures!” Tweed once said, or so the story goes.

    The decades since witnessed the birth of photo, film, TV, the internet, computer printers, image-editing software and digital screens that shrank until they could fit in our pockets, making it increasingly easy to create and disseminate — and manipulate — imagery.

    By contrast, today’s generative AI technology offers greater realism, functionality and accessibility to content creation than ever before, says AI expert Henry Ajder. Not to mention, of course, a capacity for endless automated possibility.

    Past presidents “had to actually have fought in a war to run as a war hero,” Cornog says. Now, they can just generate an image of themselves as one. On a horse — or no, a battlefield. With an American flag waving behind him and an eagle soaring.

    The AI images of Trump shared by him and his administration chase a similarly heroic vision of the president. Potency — his and the country’s — is a consistent theme, Cornog added.

    Indeed, generative AI allows for an exposure of perhaps uncomfortably intimate inner worlds as people use such technology to illustrate and communicate their “fantasy lives” or cartoonish versions of themselves, says Mitchell Stephens, author of “The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.”

    But it can just as easily fulfill an inverse desire: to depict or reinforce a subjective concept of reality.

    “Quite a lot of people are sharing AI-generated content, which is clearly fake but is almost seen as a revelatory kind of representation of someone,” Ajder said. This content feeds a mentality that mutters, “We all know they’re really like this.”

    “And so, even if people know it’s fake,” Ajder said, “they still see it as kind of reflecting and satisfying a kind of truth — their truth about what the world is like.”


    Commenters take up the mantle

    The lack of subtlety in Trump’s AI images of himself helps explain their consistent virality.

    Commenters can be found lamenting the demise of presidential decorum (“I never thought I’d see the day when the White House is just a joke. This is so embarrassing.”) or relishing those very reactions (“Watching the left explode over this has been a treat.”).

    Other responses, even from the president’s base, remain unconvinced (as one X user griped under the White House post of Trump as pope: “I voted for you, but this is weird and creepy. More mass deportations and less of whatever this is.”).

    But that is tradition for Trump, who finds no trouble cashing the currency of our attention economy: Whether you cracked a smile or clutched your pearls, he still made you look.

    “In his first administration, he used Twitter in a way no president had,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, an organization that facilitates the transition between presidents. “What they do in this administration is taking it further, as you’ve had an increase in what can be done online.” Or, as one Reddit user referred to the president: “Troll in Chief.”

    Does Trump really think he should be pope? Does the White House really think him a king? Accuracy isn’t the point, not for a man who frequently arbitrates what counts as truth. Trump’s use of AI sticks to a familiar recipe for bait: crude comedy sprinkled with wishful thinking.

    “It’s fine,” Trump said in May, when asked whether the AI-generated post of him as pope diminished the substance of the official White House account.

    “Have to have a little fun, don’t you?”

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

    Associated Press

    Source link

  • NASA Northrop Grumman resupply mission faces delay in reaching space station

    A delivery headed for astronauts on the space station has been delayed.

    Launched at 6:11 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 14, fromLaunch Complex 40 in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft was set to dock to the International Space Station Wednesday morning with more than 11,000 pounds of supplies and science.

    But the docking did not happen on time.

    NASA announced Sept. 16 that the spacecraft had experienced engine trouble on its way to the space station, with the main engine cutting off earlier than planned.

    “NASA and Northrop Grumman are delaying the arrival of the Cygnus XL to the International Space Station as flight controllers evaluate an alternate burn plan for the resupply spacecraft. The Cygnus XL will not arrive to the space station on Wednesday, Sept. 17, as originally planned, with a new arrival date and time under review,” a statement by NASA read.

    NASA said that everything else is performing as expected with the spacecraft.

    Once the Cygnus spacecraft does arrive at the International Space Station, astronauts Jonny Kim and Zena Cardman will use the space station’s robotic Canadarm2 to grab and dock it.

    When is the next launch? Is there a launch today? Upcoming SpaceX, NASA, ULA, rocket launch schedule at Cape Canaveral

    This mission — refrred to as NG-23 — is the first flight of the company’s new Cygnus XL spacecraft. It is described as solar-powered, larger and a more capable cargo spacecraft compared to previous Cygnus models, which have flown multiple NASA resupply missions in the past.

    It is not the first time a Cygnus spacecraft experienced an issue in flight. In 2022, a Cygnus spacecraft flying as part of the NG-18 mission failed to deploy a solar array, putting the spacecraft’s power levels at risk. Northrop Grumman and NASA were able to work around the issue, and the spacecraft was successfully captured by astronauts onboard the station.

    As of the morning of Sept. 17, NASA had not released an update on the current issue.

    Brooke Edwards is a Space Reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at bedwards@floridatoday.com or on X: @brookeofstars.

    Source link