Thousands of Spectrum customers across North and Central Texas experienced sudden internet, phone and TV disruptions on Friday, with outage reports peaking in the afternoon as users scrambled for answers. The outage — which hit major Dallas-area suburbs and other Texas cities — left many working from home, streaming viewers and small businesses temporarily offline. … Read more
San Francisco — Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI filed a lawsuit this week in a California federal court accusing OpenAI of orchestrating a campaign to poach employees and steal trade secrets — including source code for xAI’s chatbot Grok and sensitive information about data-center operations — to gain a competitive edge in the fast-moving AI … Read more
Beijing / Los Angeles — A wave of online anger has hit a Chinese distributor after viewers spotted that a same-sex couple in the new body-horror film Together was digitally altered to appear heterosexual for showings in mainland China. Audiences and critics say the change — reportedly made with AI face-replacement tools — erased an … Read more
Microsoft has disabled a set of cloud and artificial-intelligence services used by a unit within Israel’s Ministry of Defence after an internal review found elements of reporting that alleged the company’s Azure platform was being used in the mass surveillance of Palestinians. The company’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, told staff that Microsoft had “ceased … Read more
Quick rules before you start Silicone / Rubber / Sport bands Good for: sweat, workouts, swimming. Leather bands Good for: dress watches — be gentle. Metal bands (stainless steel, plated links) Milanese / mesh loops Nylon / Fabric / Woven bands Resin / TPU / Other plastics Treat like silicone: mild soap + water, soft … Read more
Here’s a concise, sourced update on the deal announced this week and the open questions that remain. Who the buyers are (so far): A group led by Oracle and private-equity firm Silver Lake — with participation from Abu Dhabi investor MGX and other investors — is set to acquire a controlling stake in TikTok’s U.S. … Read more
Short answer: Yes — but only if we build and deploy it deliberately.AI today can deliver big social and economic benefits (better healthcare diagnostics, smarter grids, climate modelling, efficiency gains across industry), but it also creates substantial environmental costs unless developers, operators, regulators and users adopt concrete technical and policy measures. Below is a compact, … Read more
Washington — Two bipartisan U.S. senators this week demanded detailed information from Match Group — the parent company of Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid — about the company’s efforts to detect and prevent romance scams, saying lawmakers are concerned the platforms’ design and algorithms may be enabling fraud. Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) … Read more
Under the hood, Nano Banana blends facial-landmark detection, pose estimation and neural rendering to infer depth and texture from flat images; the system then renders a toy-like object with polished surfaces, stylized lighting and an optional staged base. The model outputs are marked with an invisible SynthID watermark to indicate AI generation. Why it catches … Read more
London / Nairobi — Artificial intelligence is moving from experimental climate research into operational tools that help scientists, policymakers and industry actors model complex systems, accelerate monitoring, and design mitigation strategies. While AI is not a silver bullet for the climate crisis, it is proving to be a force multiplier across forecasting, emissions measurement, and … Read more