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"ne YouTuber, Dan Duffy, joined the search just to post a video of himself joining it, and was fined on a public order offence, which he also filmed. One TikTok account, Curtis Cool Stuff, posted a video of a man digging up woodland, and another of him roaming around a derelict house opposite the bank where Bulley was last seen. Another group of men had to be dispersed from the house, having travelled there from Liverpool."

"Cyber conflicts are fought in the shadows, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is a group that calls itself Anonymous that has made the most public declaration of war. Late on Thursday the hacker collective tweeted from an account linked to Anonymous, @YourAnonOne, that it had Vladimir Putin's regime in its sights."

"Caroline, the 28-year-old behind a popular TikTok account where she posts satirical skits, found herself dropping the comedic tone when the child of a family vlogger sent her a letter and asked Caroline to share it with her 2.3 million followers. "To any parents that are considering starting a family vlog or monetizing your children's lives on the public internet, here is my advice: you shouldn't do it," the letter read. "Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering… your child will never be normal… I never consented to being online.""

"Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. But that's not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is "companies will buy our products so they can do more with less." It's not "business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.""

"The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience. For those sites with age checks, Ofcom will require algorithmic curation to be tweaked to limit the risks to younger users. That would require sites such as Instagram and TikTok to ensure the suggested posts and "for you" pages explicitly take account of the age of children."

"What bothered Jeff, however, was not so much the loot boxes or the skins in themselves but another phenomenon that they have spawned: skins gambling. This works like any other casino. You load up your account with funds, place a bet, watch the graphics spin and either win or lose. The big difference in this case is that the casino taking your bet has no gambling licence and, in some cases, no reliable mechanism to stop under-18s getting their first taste of gambling - via an online ecosystem that is, to many parents, a total mystery."

"That is, in a way, Orion's most powerful and dangerous feature: they're so normal that people will want to wear them; they're so normal that people won't notice them. On the other hand, Meta has created a new gadget that, like every other before, can be enhanced or modified for other purposes, for better or worse. Should Meta stop building tech because a small number of people will use it for evil? If they had served this use case on a silver platter then yes, they should be held accountable. They didn't. Sure, Zuck's no friend, but he's not the one sneaking into your privacy."

"Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out. Examples: 6.3% of YouTube users were responsible for 79.8% of exposure to extremist channels from July to December 2020, 85% of vaccine-sceptical content was consumed by less than 1% of US citizens in the 2016-2019 period. Conventional wisdom blames platform algorithms for spreading misinformation. However, evidence suggests user preferences play an outsized role. For instance, a mere 0.04% of YouTube's algorithmic recommendations directed users to extremist content. It's tempting to draw a straight line between social media usage and societal ills. But studies rigorously designed to untangle cause and effect often come up short. "

"How do the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram affect what you see in your news feed? To find out, Guardian Australia unleashed them on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address. Three months later, without any input, they were riddled with sexist and misogynistic content."

""It's an attack where someone has sent an AI generated image or a fake image and they have said if you don't send me money or don't send me another nude, I will then share this with other people," he said. In one case heard by a Childline counsellor, a 15-year-old girl said a stranger had made a "really convincing" fake nude of her that used her face and bedroom, having been apparently taken from their Instagram account. Childline said the "nude" images were typically made of the victim's face transposed on to someone else's body. In another apparent AI case, a 14-year-old boy sent some pictures of his face to a girl he had met online and they were used to make a deepfake pornography video. "This person has used some sort of deepfake AI thing to make a porn video with my face on it. Now they're demanding money from me, and they said if I don't pay my life will be over. I know it's not me in the video, but it looks so real," the boy told Childline."

"It seems pointless to ask whether the spreadsheet is a good or a bad thing. But one prominent contrarian, the technology columnist John C Dvorak, had no doubts last week as he contemplated VisiCalc's 30th anniversary. 'The spreadsheet', he fumed, 'created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society that questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything'. Worse still, he thinks, the spreadsheet has elevated the once-lowly bean-counter to the board and enabled accountants to run the world."

"The alleged cybercriminals are thought to have carefully planned out an elaborate and hyper-targeted phishing scam that went after employees of large companies like MGM and Twilio. In fact, Scattered Spider's breach at MGM, which involved a phone call to the company's help desk, resulted in a temporary shut down of the company's hotel and casino operations, costing the company $100 million. The Scattered Spider plan of attack involved sending text messages to employees at the targeted companies while pretending to be part of their employer's IT department. The texts urged the employees to login to a link provided in the text message, otherwise, the text message claimed, their employee accounts would be deactivated."

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"When "I can has cheezburger?" became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up. But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is "dark data", meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family - from "All your base are belong to us", through Ryan Gosling saying "Hey Girl", to Tim Walz with a piglet - are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis. Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced."

"The researchers found that the cost of the computational power required to train the models is doubling every nine months. This is a prodigious rate of growth-at this rate, the cost of the hardware and electricity needed to build cutting-edge AI systems alone would be in the billions by later this decade, without accounting for other costs such as employee compensation."

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

Albania has announced a one-year ban on TikTok following the killing of a teenager last month that raised fears over the influence of social media on children. Edi Rama, the prime minister, confirmed the ban, part of a broader plan to make schools safer, after meeting parents' groups and teachers from across the country. "For one year, we'll be completely shutting it down for everyone. There will be no TikTok in Albania," Rama said. TikTok, asked to comment on Saturday, requested "urgent clarity from the Albanian government" on the case of the stabbed teenager. The company said it had "found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have in fact confirmed videos leading up to this incident were being posted on another platform, not TikTok".

"Users who once came to Facebook to connect with friends and family are increasingly complaining of random, spammy, junk content - much of it apparently generated by artificial intelligence - showing up in their feeds. Sometimes it's obviously fake, AI-generated images, like the now-infamous "Shrimp Jesus." Other times, it's old posts from real creators that look like they're being reshared by bot accounts for engagement. In some cases, it's pages sharing streams of seemingly benign but random content - memes or movie clips, shared every few hours."

"Murky and misty streets, coughing townsfolk, and the distant toll of a plague doctor's bell all feature in Hogne's most-watched video, which has racked up 53 million views. It has sparked fascination among many, but historian Dr Amy Boyington describes the medieval-themed video as "amateurish" and "evocative and sensational" rather than historically accurate. "It looks like something from a video game as it shows a world that is meant to look real but is actually fake." She points out inaccuracies like the depiction of houses with large glazed windows and a train track running through the town which wouldn't have existed in the 1300s. Historian and archaeologist Dr Hannah Platts has also noticed significant inaccuracies in a video depicting the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii. "Due to Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of the eruption, we know that it didn't start with lava spewing everywhere so to not use that wealth of historical information available to us feels cheap and lazy.""