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" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."

"The conference acquired 30 machines for hackers to toy with. Every voting machine in the village was hacked. Though voting machines are technologically simple, they are difficult for researchers to obtain for independent research."

"Participants in a virtual paleontology session found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place last week, when a profanity filter prevented them from using certain words - such as bone, pubic, stream and, er, beaver - during an online conference."

"Meet GIST, a gesture-controlled wearable device that helps the visually impaired navigate the world around them. University of Nevada computer scientists Vinitha Khambadkar and Eelke Folmer recently debuted GIST at a technology conference."

Apple is offering a free case to tackle the iPhone 4's antenna problem, but will the fault damage the technology giant's reputation?Apple called a press conference at which the case offer was made in response to ongoing speculation about the phone's problems, and boss Steve Jobs also offered a full refund for the handset.

The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at this year's BETT conference.They must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking, according to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell.Schools should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, he argued.The gap between those schools embracing technology and those not is getting bigger, he said.Prof Heppell was speaking to delegates at BETT, the world's biggest educational technology show.

"The UK is opposing an international ban on so-called "killer robots" at a United Nations conference that is this week examining future developments of what are officially termed lethal autonomous weapons systems (Laws)."

"As Reuters reports, on March 28 SpaceX sent out an email to all of its 6,000+ employees telling them access to the Zoom video chat service had been disabled. The email stated, "We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support ... Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication." The stated reason given for disabling access to the service is, "significant privacy and security concerns.""

"How can we help kids excel at the things that humans will always do better than AI?" Great talk - she also presented at recent IB conference in Yokohama.

"He sits down at a computer keyboard, fires up his monitor, and begins typing. After a few lines of text, he pushes the keyboard away, exposing the white surface of a conference table in the midtown Manhattan headquarters of his startup. He resumes typing. Only this time he is typing on…nothing. Just the flat tabletop. Yet the result is the same: The words he taps out appear on the monitor."

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

"This is the dark, flamboyant humour beloved of the "stan" culture of pop superfans, and in this case, quite funny. But another attack on Jillian Mapes, Pitchfork's reviewer, was very serious: "Contact info both old and current was leaked, down to a photo of my home," she wrote on Twitter. "I've gotten too many emails saying some version of, 'you are an ugly fat bitch who is clearly jealous of Taylor, plz die' … It sucks to be scared of every person milling about outside or feel like you can't answer the phone." Her overwhelmingly positive review nevertheless tarnished the numerical perfection conferred by Metacritic, hence the attack."

"Researchers at Columbia University sought to shed light on the problem by tasking 400 AI engineers with creating algorithms that made over 8.2 million predictions about 20,000 people. In a study accepted by the NeurIPS 2020 machine learning conference, the researchers conclude that biased predictions are mostly caused by imbalanced data but that the demographics of engineers also play a role."

"Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of "bad actor" mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence."

""I would reverse the permanent ban," Musk said on Tuesday, speaking via video link at a car industry conference organised by the Financial Times. "I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," he said. "I think that was a mistake. It alienated the country and did not result in Donald Trump not having a voice."

"But for many scientists, Twitter has become an essential tool for collaboration and discovery - a source of real-time conversations around research papers, conference talks and wider topics in academia. Papers now zip around scientific communities faster thanks to Twitter, says Johann Unger, a linguist at Lancaster University, UK, who notes that extra information is also shared in direct private messages through the site. And its limit on tweet length - currently 280 characters - has pushed academics into keeping their commentary pithy, he adds."

"Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord."