List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

Twitter unveiled a new data access tier on Thursday aimed at attracting startups, after its decision to erect a paywall for developers and researchers prompted widespread backlash. But the new tier already has some describing it as "too little, too late."

Captcha is trying to get people using Discord a to identify objects that do not exist. As reported by Vice, multiple people using the platform are being shown a “Yoko,” which looks like a mix between a snail and a yoyo, and has been generated by AI, or other AI generated images like puzzle cubes. Meanwhile, two months ago, a Redditor noticed Discord was asking it to distinguish AI generated soccer players amidst a group of pictures of people playing hockey and golf. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Others have complained that images being generated are just 'awful.' Discord’s captchas are run by a company called hCaptcha. “The technology that generates these prompts is proprietary to our third-party partner and Discord does not directly determine what is presented to users,” Discord told Motherboard. “While most hCaptcha interactions do not result in a visual challenge, many variants are used at any given time. “This particular question was a brief test seen by a small number of people, but the sheer scale of hCaptcha (hundreds of millions of users) means that when even a few folks are surprised by a challenge this often produces some tweets.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists have been left baffled by the discovery of the wreck of a 2,000-year-old “computer” that is amazingly complex. The Antikythera mechanism – an astronomical calendar – has been dubbed “‘the first computer” and has baffled scientists for generations after it was first discovered inside a Greek shipwreck in 1901. The device is a hand-powered time-keeping instrument that used a wing-up system to track the sun, moon and planets’ celestial time. It also worked as a calendar, tracking the phases of the Moon and the timing of eclipses. Despite sounding relatively simple, the mechanism was actually ahead of its time, being more technically sophisticated than any other tool that was invented over the next 1,000 years. In its current condition, the mechanism is in 82 separate fragments with only a third of its original structure remaining, including 30 corroded bronze gearwheels. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Research into the device from experts at University College London involved 3D computer modelling and helped them solve the mystery of how the device worked, revealing a “creation of genius”. Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL said at the time: “We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date.” They theorised that the device tracked the movement of the sun, moon and planets on concentric rings, as the ancient Greeks believed that the sun and planets revolved around Earth, rather than the sun. The researchers explained in Scientific Reports: “Solving this complex 3D puzzle reveals a creation of genius—combining cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy and ancient Greek astronomical theories.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A London court has rejected an attempt by the publisher of The Sun newspaper to throw out a lawsuit by actor Hugh Grant alleging that journalists and investigators it hired illegally snooped on him

By Blake Brittain A U.S. appeals court on Thursday vacated a $570 million award Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp

One unlucky guy lived out every man’s worst nightmare recently, after suffering a “triple penis fracture”. A man from Tanzania was hospitalised after hearing his penis “snap” during sex. Details of the grisly injury were recorded in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports. The “snap” happened “when the penis slipped out, lost the way” and struck his female partner “as he was trying to reinsert it”. It’s enough to make anyone wince, and the extent of his injury was revealed after he took himself to hospital. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Doctors took a look and found the penis to be severely swollen and covered in blood. They diagnosed him with having a “fractured” penis, which refers to a rupture in the fibrous connective tissue, called the tunica albuginea. Not only that, but an MRI scan also showed that there were three clear points of injury along the tunica albugine, with the main “fractures” in the erectile tissues known as the corpora cavernosa and the corpus spongiosum. The man was taken into surgery before being discharged three days later. He also had a catheter fitted in his urethra which was removed after three weeks. “He was seen at the clinic six months post-operative where he reported having resumed his sexual life with no any difficulties and the penile shaft looked OK,” his doctors said in the report. It sounds like all kinds of pain, and it’s an injury that is becoming more and more common. The NHS revealed stats in 2020 that showed 38 percent rise in such injuries from 2014 to 2020. Doctors speculated at the time that it could be down to pornography viewing habits leading to more couples trying unusual sexual positions, as well as an increase in the use of Viagra. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

UK's competition watchdog on Friday said social media giant Meta Platforms Inc had offered to limit the use

As concerns grow over increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, the nation’s financial watchdog says it’s working to ensure that companies follow the law when using AI

A top engineer at Twitter has announced he is quitting his role with the company following the glitch-ridden launch of Florida governor Ron Desantis’s 2024 presidential campaign on the social media platform. “After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday,” Foad Dabiri, who was an engineering chief at Twitter, tweeted on Thursday. The Twitter engineer’s exit from the company comes a day after Mr DeSantis’s long-anticipated 2024 campaign bid for the White House on a Twitter livestream. Mr DeSantis’s campaign launch announcement on Twitter Spaces – the platform’s audio group-chat feature – was marred by a a host of glitches, including long silences and persistent echoes. The Twitter app reportedly crashed for several users who tuned in to listen to the announcement and at one point the Republican governor himself disappeared from the livestream. Mr Musk – who had boasted about several overhauls to the microblogging site since his takeover of the company to make Spaces better – shut the initial Spaces event and started a new one. The second event where Mr DeSantis read a short speech, reportedly gathered fewer listeners than the first, attracting about 161,000 people, according to Twitter’s public-facing data. The buggy event, according to many users on the social media platform, is a reflection of how Twitter under Mr Musk is far from operating smoothly. Since Mr Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he has laid off nearly three-fourths of the company’s workforce, following which the platform has faced several technical issues. Earlier this week, a bug caused tweets deleted by some users in the past to resurface on their timelines, and weeks earlier, many users complained that they were unable to post images and share external links. Mr Dabiri was the engineering lead at Twitter’s Growth Organisation. He tweeted on Thursday that during his stint with the company, he “experienced two distinct eras” before and after Mr Musk’s takeover. “And then came ‘2.0.’ What an extraordinary journey it has been. To say it was challenging at the outset would be an understatement,” Mr Dabiri said. The engineering chief however did not comment on why he was leaving Twitter, and whether it is linked to the problems with the DeSantis livestream. Both Twitter and Mr Dabiri did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment. “Working with Elon Musk has been highly educational, and it was enlightening to see how his principles and vision are shaping the future of this company,” he tweeted. Read More Ron DeSantis news – live: DeSantis floats pardoning Trump and Jan 6 rioters after ‘train wreck’ Twitter launch AOC jokes more people watched her gaming online than listened to glitch-ridden DeSantis launch DeSantis pushes past embarrassing campaign start, outlines travel schedule for early state visits AOC jokes more people watched her gaming online than listened to DeSantis launch What is Twitter Spaces and why did it go so wrong during DeSantis’s 2024 launch? What are Elon Musk’s political beliefs?

Saturn’s rings might disappear pretty soon astronomically speaking, according to new research. A new analysis of data captured by NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited the planet between 2004 and 2017, has revealed new insights into when the seven rings were formed and how long they might last. During Cassini’s Grand Finale, when the spacecraft completed 22 orbits in which it passed between Saturn and its rings, the researchers observed that the rings were losing many tons of mass per second, which means the rings will only be around another few hundred million years at most. “We have shown that massive rings like Saturn’s do not last long,” said Paul Estrada, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a coauthor of the studies, in a statement. “One can speculate that the relatively puny rings around the other ice and gas giants in our solar system are leftover remnants of rings that were once massive like Saturn’s. Maybe some time in the not-so-distant future, astronomically speaking, after Saturn’s rings are ground down, they will look more like the sparse rings of Uranus.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Saturn’s rings are made mostly of ice but have a small amount of rocky dust created by broken asteroid fragments and micrometeoroids colliding with the rings. The research also found that the rings appeared long after Saturn’s initial formation, and were still forming when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. “Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a few hundred million years old,” said Richard Durisen, professor emeritus of astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington and lead author of the studies in a statement. “If you look at Saturn’s satellite system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened there in the last few hundred million years. If Saturn’s rings are not as old as the planet, that means something happened in order to form their incredible structure, and that is very exciting to study.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Supantha Mukherjee OpenAI has no plans to leave Europe, CEO Sam Altman said on Friday, reversing a

By Samuel Shen and Tom Westbrook SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE The trademark Chinese patriotism is back at play in markets. As