Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I and many others have been looking for alternatives. Who wants to share a platform with the likes of Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson?

I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon , but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.

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Annual survey highlights growing concern about platform content and trust in information disseminated

More than a quarter of advertisers are planning to cut spending on Elon Musk’s X over concerns about the social media platform’s content and trust in the information disseminated, according to new global research.

Advertising revenue flowing to X has been in freefall since Musk bought the site, then known as Twitter, for $44bn (£38bn) in October 2022 , claiming it had not lived up to its potential as a platform for “free speech”.

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Fitted with robotic arms and navigation cameras, the rovers are being developed for mooted missions to the moon and Mars

Two space rover prototypes that could be used to help search for life on Mars are being trialled at a quarry in Bedfordshire. The robots are being put through their paces by the European aerospace giant Airbus, which is considering using the technology to aid missions to the moon.

A four-wheeled rover, named Codi, features navigation cameras and a robotic arm that it can use to collect rocks sealed in small tubes without the need of a human operator.

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After judge freezes assets of billionaire’s internet service provider, company flip-flops to block social media platform

Elon Musk ’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink backtracked late on Tuesday and said it would accept and enforce a Brazilian supreme court justice’s order to block the billionaire’s social media platform, X, formerly Twitter.

Previously, Starlink informally told the telecommunications regulator Anatel that it would not comply until Justice Alexandre de Moraes reversed course. Now, Starlink has said in a statement posted on X that it will heed de Moraes’s order despite him having frozen the company’s assets.

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Meta rules that blanket ban on pro-Palestine slogan would hinder free speech

Meta’s content moderation board has backed the company’s decision to allow Facebook posts containing the phrase “From the River to the Sea” after ruling that a blanket ban on the pro-Palestine slogan would hinder free speech.

The Oversight Board reviewed three cases involving Facebook posts that featured “From the River to the Sea” and found they did not break Meta’s rules involving restrictions on hate speech and incitement, while an outright ban on the phrase would interfere with political speech in “unacceptable ways”.

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Big brands already know far too much about us. But Cox Media Group’s ‘Active Listening’ software adds a whole new layer of creepiness

Conspiracy theorists of the world, rip off that tinfoil hat and take a bow: you were (kinda) right. Despite the fact pretty much everyone has a story involving chatting about something only to see an ad for that something pop up on a device, the idea that your phone actively listens to you has long been dismissed as silly. After all, brands don’t need to eavesdrop like that – they already have access to millions of data points that build up a detailed picture of your habits and predicted purchases.

But just because brands don’t need to listen to your conversations, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t companies figuring out creepy new ways to mine your data. 404 Media, a tech-focused news site, recently got hold of a pitch deck from Cox Media Group (CMG), touting its “Active Listening” software , which targets adverts based on what people say near their device microphones. The presentation doesn’t specify whether this voice data comes from smart TVs, smart speakers, or smartphones but the slide where it extols “the power of voice (and our devices’ microphones)” has a picture of people looking at their phones.

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Nvidia dominates the chips at the center of the AI boom. It wants to conquer almost everything else that makes those chips tick, too. From a report: Chief Executive Jensen Huang is increasingly broadening his company's focus -- and seeking to widen its advantage over competitors -- by offering software, data-center design services and networking technology in addition to its powerful silicon brains. More than a supplier of a valuable hardware component, he is trying to build Nvidia into a one-stop shop for all the key elements in the data centers where tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT are created and deployed -- or what he calls "AI factories." Huang emphasized Nvidia's growing prowess at data-center design following an earnings report Wednesday that exceeded Wall Street forecasts. The report came days after rival AMD agreed to pay nearly $5 billion to buy data-center design and manufacturing company ZT Systems to try to gain ground on Nvidia. "We have the ability fairly uniquely to integrate to design an AI factory because we have all the parts," Huang said in a call with analysts. "It's not possible to come up with a new AI factory every year unless you have all the parts." It is a strategy designed to extend the business success that has made Nvidia one of the world's most valuable companies -- and to insulate it from rivals eager to eat into its AI-chip market share, estimated at more than 80%. Gobbling up more of the value in AI data centers both adds revenue and makes its offerings stickier for customers. [...] Nvidia is building on the effectiveness of its 17-year-old proprietary software, called CUDA, which enables programmers to use its chips. More recently, Huang has been pushing resources into a superfast networking protocol called InfiniBand, after acquiring the technology's main equipment maker, Mellanox Technologies, five years ago for nearly $7 billion. Analysts estimate that InfiniBand is used in most AI-training deployments. Nvidia is also building a business that supplies AI-optimized Ethernet, a form of networking widely used in traditional data centers. The Ethernet business is expected to generate billions of dollars in revenue within a year, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said Wednesday. More broadly, Nvidia sells products including central processors and networking chips for a range of other data-center equipment that is fine-tuned to work seamlessly together.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia Takes an Added Role Amid AI Craze: Data-Center Designer

Brazilian president made comments after supreme court voted to uphold ban on X over refusal to obey court orders

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has said he hopes the crisis surrounding the social network X in Brazil might teach the world that “it isn’t obliged to put up with [Elon] Musk’s far-right free-for-all just because he is rich”.

Lula’s comments to the network CNN Brasil came after the supreme court voted unanimously on Monday to uphold the ban on X, which is now largely inaccessible in one of its biggest global markets.

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Some 63 studies from 1994 to 2022 have been analysed by Australian researchers commissioned by the World Health Organization

Mobile phones are not linked to brain and head cancers, a comprehensive reviewof the highest quality evidence available commissioned by the World Health Organization has found.

Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.

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