Science and technology

Elon Musk on Saturday announced a plan for his Twitter platform to allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with a single click. “This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article,” the billionaire entrepreneur said on Twitter, adding, “Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.” He said the plan would begin next month, but provided no details on exact pricing or what cut Twitter would take. The announcement came as Musk has been struggling, amid frequent controversy, to make Twitter profitable. Media organizations have wrestled for years with how to formulate subscription plans that pay their operating costs even as readers have grown accustomed to getting news free on the internet. The Musk plan raises questions about how exactly he hopes to make the micro-payment approach work when others have failed. British journalist James Ball list

For a team of Canadian and French researchers, dark clouds on the horizon are potentially ominous not because they signal an approaching storm — but because they were found in a recent study to carry drug-resistant bacteria over long distances. “These bacteria usually live on the surface of vegetation like leaves, or in soil,” lead author Florent Rossi said in a telephone interview Friday. “We found that they are carried by the wind into the atmosphere and can travel long distances — around the world — at high altitudes in clouds,” he told AFP. The discovery was published in last month’s edition of the journal Science of The Total Environment. The researchers from Laval University in Quebec City and Clermont Auvergne University in central France searched for antibiotic-resistant genes from bacteria found in cloud samples. The samples were taken from an atmospheric research station perched 1,465 meters (4,806 feet) above sea level atop the Puy de Dome summit, a dormant volcano i

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Friday that the social media platform will take a 10% cut on content subscriptions after the first year, as the company looks to monetize content on the website in a bid to diversify its revenue sources. Earlier this month, billionaire owner Musk  said  users of the social media platform will be able to offer their followers subscriptions to content, including long-form text and hours-long video. He had also said that the company will not take a cut for the first 12 months on content subscriptions. Musk has been bringing in changes at Twitter to boost revenue after the platform saw advertising income drop last year in the run up to his $44 billion acquisition that closed in October. We will keep 10% after 12 months, but iOS/Android subscription fees drop from 30% to 15% in year 2, so still a net gain to creators — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2023 He added that the company’s cut from subscriptions on iOS and Android platforms will drop to 15%

Companies deploying generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems, according to an early EU agreement that could pave the way for the world’s first comprehensive laws governing the technology. The European Commission began drafting the AI Act  nearly two years ago  to regulate emerging artificial intelligence technology, which underwent a boom in investment and popularity following the release of OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT. Members of the European Parliament agreed to push the draft through to the next stage, the trilogue, during which EU lawmakers and member states will thrash out the final details of the bill. Under the proposals, AI tools will be classified according to their perceived risk level: from minimal through to limited, high, and unacceptable. Areas of concern could include biometric surveillance, spreading misinformation or discriminatory language. While high-risk tools will not be banned,

ISLAMABAD: Google has launched its first-ever App Growth Lab in Pakistan, a four-month programme designed to identify high-potential app developers, studios and companies that are looking to grow their businesses, ARY News reported on Thursday. With intensive education and support phases, the programme will allow app developers to learn from Google experts in areas such as Ads, AdMob, Firebase, gTech, and Play as well as Industry leaders. In a statement, Farhan Qureshi – Google’s Regional Director for Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – said: “Today, we are proud to announce the launch of App Growth Lab to support up-and-coming local developers and help them expand their offerings to an international audience. The programme will commence in June and run for four months. Interested organisations, app, and development studios may apply until May 22, 2023. The App Growth Lab programme is based on four core pillars: uncover the global app and gaming opportunity to understand differe

OpenAI is introducing what one employee called an “incognito mode” for its hit chatbot ChatGPT that does not save users’ conversation history or use it to improve its artificial intelligence, the company said Tuesday. The San Francisco-based startup also said it planned a “ChatGPT Business” subscription with additional data controls. The move comes as scrutiny has grown over how ChatGPT and other chatbots it inspired manage hundreds of millions of users’ data, commonly used to improve, or “train”, AI. Italy last month banned ChatGPT for possible privacy violations, saying OpenAI could resume the service if it met demands such as giving consumers tools to object to the processing of their data.  France and Spain  also began probing the service. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told Reuters the company was compliant with European privacy law and is working to assure regulators. The new features did not arise from Italy’s ChatGPT ban, she said, but from a months-long

The Chief Executive Officer of the social media platform Meta Mark Zuckerberg announced that the users of messaging service WhatsApp can use the same account on four smartphones. Watch ARY News live on  live.arynews.tv Mark Zuckerberg announced the new upgrade on his social media handles. He stated, “Starting today, you can log into the same WhatsApp account on up to four phones.” The new feature will be available for all users within the coming weeks. Through the new feature, the messages on their account would get synced across different gadgets, that included smartphones and other devices. It is pertinent to mention WhatsApp users could only use the same account on one smartphone and multiple computers. Related – WhatsApp unveils new features to secure accounts on iOS, Android WhatsApp is one of the most popular online messaging applications with two billion users worldwide. But it was criticized because of its lack of calls and messaging privacy.   View this p

Manufacturers are hoping for the artificial intelligence revolution to reach their factories, envisaging robots being used to repair complex machinery. There has been an explosion of interest in uses of AI across many sectors since the launch last year of chatbot ChatGPT from US startup OpenAI. And at last week’s Hanover Fair on industrial technology in Germany, the potential for artificial intelligence in the manufacturing sector was firmly in focus. Via the tablet in his hands, a young employee of American IT services provider HPE chatted with an AI-equipped virtual assistant, asking it to operate the arm of a robot. In order to solve a technical problem, “factory workers no longer need to get a qualified expert on site: the artificial intelligence takes charge” of guiding the repairs, said Thomas Meier, a data analyst from HPE who was presenting the prototype. The US firm, which has some 60,000 employees, has been working for the past year with Aleph Alpha, a German startup wi

Twitter has dropped “state-affiliated” and “government-funded” labels from media accounts, according to a review by AFP on Friday of many high-profile pages on the platform. Many major media outlets from Western nations, Russia, China and other countries that previously had either of those tags no longer displayed them, according to AFP. They included the accounts of National Public Radio in the United States, China’s official Xinhua news agency, RT from Russia, and Canada’s CBC, as of 0600 GMT. Twitter, acquired by the mercurial billionaire Elon Musk last year, had long labelled accounts linked to state media or government officials, especially from China and Russia. It said that policy focused on entities that “are the official voice of the nation state abroad”. Recently, however, the labels were applied to news organisations that received public funding but were not controlled by any governments. NPR stopped using Twitter thereafter, and CBC followed suit. Radio New Zealand

After weeks of uncertainty, Billionaire Elon Musk made good on his threats to remove blue checkmarks from the accounts of verified Twitter users on Thursday. From former President Donald J. Trump to celebrities LeBron James and William Shatner, users who didn’t pay up to retain the blue badge lost them. The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure they are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system — many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific Time. Converting what was once a signal of authenticity into a revenue stream has ca

BOCA CHICA: Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, exploded during its first flight on Thursday, but Elon Musk congratulated his SpaceX team on an “exciting” test of the spacecraft designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond. The uncrewed rocket disintegrated minutes after successfully blasting off at 8:33am Central Time (1333 GMT) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The Starship spacecraft that will eventually carry crew and cargo had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the flight, but separation failed to occur and the rocket blew up in a ball of fire over the Gulf of Mexico. Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/4t8mRP37Gp — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023 Despite the failure to complete the full 90-minute flight test and reach orbit, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of the private space company, declared it a success. “Congrats SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk t

The world could breach a new average temperature record in 2023 or 2024, fuelled by climate change and the anticipated return of the El Nino weather phenomenon, climate scientists say. Climate models suggest that after three years of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly, the world will experience a return to El Nino, the warmer counterpart, later this year. During El Nino, winds blowing west along the equator slow down, and warm water is pushed east, creating warmer surface ocean temperatures. “El Nino is normally associated with record breaking temperatures at the global level. Whether this will happen in 2023 or 2024 is yet known, but it is, I think, more likely than not,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Climate models suggest a return to El Nino conditions in the late boreal summer, and the possibility of a strong El Nino developing towards the end of the year, Buontem

US tech giant Apple could double or triple investments in India, along with exports, over the next few years, a minister said, as the company opened a second store in the world’s biggest smartphone market after China. Apple mainly assembles iPhones in India through Taiwan contract manufacturers but plans to expand into  iPads and AirPods , as it looks to cut reliance on China. Its iPhones made up more than half of total smartphones worth about $9 billion exported from India between April 2022 and February, data from the India Cellular and Electronics Association shows. “I am very confident that this Apple-India partnership has a lot of headroom for investments, growth, exports and jobs – doubling and tripling over coming years,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the deputy minister for information technology, told Reuters. His comments came after a meeting on Wednesday with Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook in the capital, New Delhi. Cook, who also met  Prime Minister Narendra Modi , said Apple

SpaceX is to make a second attempt on Thursday to carry out the first test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond. A planned liftoff Monday of the gigantic rocket was aborted less than 10 minutes ahead of the scheduled launch because of a pressurization issue in the first-stage booster. The new window for liftoff from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas, opens on Thursday at 8:28 am Central Time (1328 GMT) and lasts for about an hour, SpaceX said. SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has sought to play down expectations for the risk-laden inaugural test flight, cast some doubt on whether the launch will actually go ahead on Thursday. “The team is working around the clock on many issues,” Musk tweeted late Tuesday. “Maybe 4/20, maybe not.” The US space agency NASA has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 — a mission known as Artemis III — for the first time si

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) boss Elon Musk on Wednesday doubled down on the price war he started at the end of last year, saying the electric vehicle (EV) maker would prioritize sales growth ahead of profit in a weak economy. The company posted its lowest quarterly gross margin in two years, missing market estimates, as it slashed prices aggressively in markets including the United States and China to spur demand and fend off rising competition. Shares in the Austin, Texas-based automaker were down 6% in after-hours trading. “It’s better to shift a large number of cars at lower margin and harvest that margin in the future as we perfect autonomy,” Musk told analysts on a conference call. He said although the economy remained uncertain, the EV maker’s orders exceeded production. Musk, who had said earlier that he would have liked to achieve 2 million vehicle deliveries this year, declined to reaffirm that on Wednesday but stood by the company’s official target of 1.8 million deliveries. “Te

Meta Platforms on Wednesday carried out another round of job cuts, this time hitting engineers and adjacent tech teams, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg further moved to streamline the business in a bid to make 2023 a “year of efficiency.” Meta in March became the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs, which it said would take place in three main batches over several months and impact 10,000 employees. Wednesday’s cuts, though expected, prompted expressions of frustration from Meta employees. Layoffs were the subject of the most popular questions posted on an internal company forum on Wednesday ahead of an upcoming employee town hall. “You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?” read one question seen by Reuters. The question references comments Zuckerberg made last year urging employees to work with more “intensity” to meet the Facebook and Instagram parent com

Using cutting edge technology, ARTEMIS, which stands for Advanced Robotic Technology for Enhanced Mobility and Improved Stability, can maintain its balance against heavy kicks and shoves, withstand objects being thrown at it and is capable of running. But what sets ARTEMIS apart on top of that is its ability to kick a ball. “If your robot cannot even play a game of soccer, how would you be able to use these robots for more important things, such as saving people’s lives?” said Dennis Hong, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at UCLA, which developed ARTEMIS. The technologies used for soccer playing robots are also being used for other applications like firefighting and disaster relief, said Hong. While ARTEMIS may not be at the next FIFA World Cup, Hong’s team will be unveiling its full soccer capabilities at RoboCup in Bordeaux, France, in July. The robot’s major innovation is that the engineers custom

Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) beat Wall Street earnings estimates for the first quarter but offered a lighter-than-expected forecast on Tuesday, demonstrating the challenges the mature streaming service faces in its pursuit of growth. The company said it shifted a wider launch of a plan to crack down on unsanctioned password sharing into the second quarter to make improvements, delaying some financial benefits, but said it was pleased with results so far. As the streaming video pioneer faces signs of market saturation, it is looking to new ways to make money, such as the password crackdown and a new ad-supported service. Revenue and earnings for the first quarter came in roughly in line with the average analyst estimates from Refinitiv. Earnings per share hit $2.88 with revenue of $8.162 billion. “We are growing and we are profitable,” Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos said in the company’s post-earnings video interview. “We have a clear path to accelerate growth in both revenue and profit,

ISLAMABAD: The National Database & Registration Authority (NADRA) on Tuesday launched its cutting-edge Automated Finger Identification System (AFIS), branded as “NADIR”, for biometric identification, ARY News reported.   With the launching of its cutting-edge AFIS technology for civil purposes, NADRA has joined the ranks of premier biometric identification technology providers worldwide. ‘NADIR’ represents a major advancement in the field of biometrics, utilising the unique characteristics of fingerprints to establish a robust and reliable method of identity verification. Based on the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC), an internationally acclaimed benchmarking conducted in Italy, NADIR has achieved an impressive accuracy rate exceeding 99.5%. NADRA has always been a trailblazer in the field of advanced digital technologies related to identity management, biometrics, border control, and e-governance. The organization has consistently been at the forefront of innovation,

WhatsApp and other messaging services have united to oppose Britain’s plan to force tech companies to break end-to-end encryption in private messages in its proposed internet safety legislation. Meta-owned WhatsApp, Signal and five other apps signed an open letter saying the law could give an “unelected official the power to weaken the privacy of billions of people around the world”. Britain’s Online Safety Bill was originally designed to create one of the toughest regimes for regulating platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. The proposals were watered down in November, when a requirement to stop “legal but harmful content” was removed to protect free speech, and instead the focus was put on illegal content, particularly related to child safety. The British government said the bill in “no way represented a ban on end-to-end encryption, nor would it require services to weaken encryption”. But it wants regulator Ofcom to be able to make platforms use accredited

About 300 people queued at Apple’s store in Mumbai on Tuesday, as fans took selfies with Chief Executive Tim Cook, who inaugurated the first retail store run by the tech giant in India, underscoring the importance of its market. “The energy, creativity, and passion in Mumbai is incredible!” Cook, who is making his first visit to India in seven years, said on Twitter. “We are so excited to open … our first store in India.” People flocked to the store from across India, hoping to be among the first to enter, in an opening event featuring local music and folk dancers. Some queued outside from the previous night to get their hands on Apple products, even though they are available online in India. “The fanboy inside me would not listen,” Purav Mehta, 30, told Reuters, as he waited to get Cook’s signature on his boxed mint-condition iPod Touch, which he had bought on eBay, as well as waiting to buy the Apple Watch Ultra. Many visitors wore T-shirts in the style favoured by co-founder

SAN FRANCISCO: Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Google (GOOGL.O). He criticised Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source”, “for-profit” organisation “closely allied with Microsoft”. He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously. “I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday. He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans”. “It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said. Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests