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"Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others. "Scamming the scammers, if you like." The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot. Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny. Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers. With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation."

"In amongst the numerous reports of privacy infringements, there have been a handful of genuine issues. Reports of Microsoft utilizing your computer as a P2P node for update sharing were completely founded, and the 13 pages of privacy settings are also no joke."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It's a world of broken links and missing files-often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for "the inconvenience." Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine's most unnerving or charming or "iconic" six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down. It doesn't help that the internet has no attention span and no loyalty: What isn't erased or deleted can still be quickly forgotten, buried under a pile of new platforms, new subcultures, and new joke formats. The feed refreshes, and so does the entire topography of the web."

" A new AI pair programmer that helps you write better code. It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet. As you type, it adapts to the way you write code - to help you complete your work faster. In other words, Copilot will sit on your computer and do a chunk of your coding work for you. There's a long-running joke in the coding community that a substantial portion of the actual work of programming is searching online for people who've solved the same problems as you, and copying their code into your program. Well, now there's an AI that will do that part for you."

"This is the dystopian nightmare that Russell fears if his discipline continues on its current path and succeeds in creating super-intelligent machines. It's the scenario implicit in the philosopher Nick Bostrom's "paperclip apocalypse" thought-experiment and entertainingly simulated in the Universal Paperclips computer game. It is also, of course, heartily derided as implausible and alarmist by both the tech industry and AI researchers. One expert in the field famously joked that he worried about super-intelligent machines in the same way that he fretted about overpopulation on Mars."

"Musician Ashley Beauchamp, 30, was trying to track down a missing parcel but was having no joy in getting useful information from the chatbot. Fed up, he decided to have some fun instead and began to experiment to find out what the chatbot could do. Beauchamp said this was when the "chaos started". To begin with, he asked it to tell him a joke, but he soon progressed to getting the chatbot to write a poem criticising the company. With a few more prompts the chatbot also swore."

"This election is the first time we face the danger of post-ChatGPT AI in a high-stakes sociopolitical scenario. That is new. Bots pass the Turing test (which means they write and speak indistinguishably from real people). They're also more persuasive. Image and video generators can make realistic faces, which people use mostly to make jokes but also to plant doubt. We will eventually adapt to perception-altering algorithms but for now, they're a big unsolved problem. Here are five ways the bad guys can weaponize AI to influence the US democratic election."

"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."