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"JBS, the world's biggest meat processor, has paid an $11m (£7.8m) ransom after a cyber-attack shut down operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia and Canada. While most of its operations have been restored, the Brazilian-headquartered company said it hoped the payment would head off any further complications including data theft."

"Iqbal Khan works as a chauffeur in Lahore. His children are in his home village in a rural area north of Peshawar. Both of these very different areas of Pakistan have the same problem for many of their young people: no means of getting access to an education. Online learning was not an option for Khan's children as the pandemic locked down schools across cities and countryside. Even as he worked to pay the school fees, his two sons, aged 16 and 13, were unable to access any lessons as their schools went digital."

"Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached. On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users."

"This can make the technology easier to use for seniors who aren't comfortable with other forms of electronic payment, since they wouldn't have to lift a finger. As for the rest of us, this also means an end to standing in line to get off the bus while someone - often me - fumbles around for exact change."

"A major data breach at Phetchabun Hospital last week served as a loud wake-up call to state and private organisations to pay attention to their cybersecurity measures, as experts warned cybercrimes could become more commonplace in the years to come. The breach involved the data of 10,095 patients, including their names and dates of admission and discharge."

"Virtually every company and organisation now has - indeed has to have - an online presence. But many still take only rudimentary cybersecurity precautions and are sitting ducks for hackers. For most of companies, that's a matter for them and their boards of directors - it's their lookout if a ransomware attack makes them insolvent."

"Nor are car owners the only consumers learning that software can be tricksy in a way hardware cannot. In 2017, Apple admitted that its software was slowing down the performance of older iPhones. It said that the design was aimed at saving battery life, but critics said it was an example of "planned obsolescence" - artificially shortening the life of a device to make buyers upgrade sooner. In 2009, Amazon provided a perfect metaphor for the potentially dystopian implications of the subscription economy when, without warning, it revoked copies of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from all its Kindle e-readers."

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans will be forced to work, play, and learn from home for the foreseeable future. Such a massive shift will lean not only on shaky and expensive U.S. broadband networks, but popular teleconferencing programs that often don't quite work as advertised. Zoom in particular has seen a flood of new users, and the company's stock has jumped roughly 20 percent since the COVID-19 outbreak began. But as new users flock to the platform for work, they should be aware of a few things: namely, the company's data collection, its shaky privacy policy, and the fact your boss knows when you're not giving them your undivided attention."

"Over the next few months, Lipkin's assignments dwindled. Managers began referring to her as "Olivia/ChatGPT" on Slack. In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear. "Whenever people brought up ChatGPT, I felt insecure and anxious that it would replace me," she said. "Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those anxieties were warranted and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.""

"Some experts see platforms like Appen as a new form of data colonialism, says Saiph Savage, director of the Civic AI lab at Northeastern University. "Workers in Latin America are labeling images, and those labeled images are going to feed into AI that will be used in the Global North," she says. "While it might be creating new types of jobs, it's not completely clear how fulfilling these types of jobs are for the workers in the region." Due to the ever moving goal posts of AI, workers are in a constant race against the technology, says Schmidt. "One workforce is trained to three-dimensionally place bounding boxes around cars very precisely, and suddenly it's about figuring out if a large language model has given an appropriate answer," he says, regarding the industry's shift from self-driving cars to chatbots. Thus, niche labeling skills have a "very short half-life." "From the clients' perspective, the invisibility of the workers in microtasking is not a bug but a feature," says Schmidt. Economically, because the tasks are so small, it's more feasible to deal with contractors as a crowd instead of individuals. This creates an industry of irregular labor with no face-to-face resolution for disputes if, say, a client deems their answers inaccurate or wages are withheld. The workers WIRED spoke to say it's not low fees but the way platforms pay them that's the key issue. "I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when an assignment will come out, as it forces us to be near the computer all day long," says Fuentes, who would like to see additional compensation for time spent waiting in front of her screen. Mutmain, 18, from Pakistan, who asked not to use his surname, echoes this. He says he joined Appen at 15, using a family member's ID, and works from 8 am to 6 pm, and another shift from 2 am to 6 am. "I need to stick to these platforms at all times, so that I don't lose work," he says, but he struggles to earn more than $50

"Have you been looking forward to somniferous alkaloid compounds customized to your personal metabolic dependency profile? Good news! 23andMe is selling everyone's DNA to the pharmaceutical industry. GSK Plc will pay 23andMe Holding Co. $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications."

"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.""

""Elderly Chinese still often prefer to pay with cash and some struggle with using mobile payments." Less than a year ago, state media was lauding China's trajectory towards becoming the world's top country for cashless transactions. Xinhua reported cash had dropped to just 3.7% of the total money in circulation. But in recent months China's government has appeared to push back, with numerous announcements about "streamlining" payment systems for visitors and elderly people."

"A big leak of data from a Chinese cybersecurity firm has revealed state security agents paying tens of thousands of pounds to harvest data on targets, including foreign governments, while hackers hoover up huge amounts of information on any person or institution who might be of interest to their prospective clients. The cache of more than 500 leaked files from the Chinese firm I-Soon was posted on the developer website Github and is thought by cybersecurity experts to be genuine. Some of the targets discussed include Nato and the UK Foreign Office."

"It's hardly a surprise that Meta, owner of Facebook, is refusing to renew its deals with Australia's media companies. It was always grudging in its negotiations and never really accepted the principle that it should pay for the benefit of using the work of journalists. Facebook and Google were forced to the bargaining table by the news media bargaining code. That law allowed the government to "designate" digital platforms, which would force them to negotiate with media companies. The big stick was that if the parties could not agree, the decision would be made by an independent arbiter. In other words, Google and Facebook would lose control."

""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."

"Coca-Cola causes controversy with AI-made ad The video was meant to pay homage to a classic 1995 Coca-Cola commercial."

"Both industries are at an impasse: tech insisting that enforcing copyright laws on AI is unfeasible and regressive, creatives that opting out is unworkable and unjust. It is up to government to foster a fair agreement in which both flourish. This is a pivotal moment for our cultural future. The artistic community has spoken. Now ministers must listen, take their concerns seriously and respond. We must protect our creators at all costs."

"In the short term, generative AI will replace a lot of people because productivity increases while demand stays the same due to inertia. In the long term, the creation of new jobs compensates for the loss of old ones, resulting in a net positive outcome for humans who leave behind jobs no one wants to do. The most important aspect of any technological revolution is the transition from before to after. Timing and location matters: older people have a harder time reinventing themselves into a new trade or craft. Poor people and poor countries have less margin to react to a wave of unemployment. Digital automation is quicker and more aggressive than physical automation because it bypasses logistical constraints-while ChatGPT can be infinitely cloned, a metallic robot cannot. Writing and painting won't die because people care about the human factor first and foremost; there are already a lot of books we can't possibly read in one lifetime so we select them as a function of who's the author. Even if you hate OpenAI and ChatGPT for being responsible for the lack of job postings, I recommend you ally with them for now; learn to use ChatGPT before it's too late to keep your options open. Companies are choosing to reduce costs over increasing output because the sectors where generative AI is useful can't artificially increase demand in parallel to productivity. (Who needs more online content?) Our generation is reasonably angry at generative AI and will bravely fight it. Still, our offspring-and theirs-will be grateful for a transformed world whose painful transformation they didn't have to endure. Certifiable human-made creative output will reduce its quantity but multiply its value in the next years because demand specific for it will grow; automation can mimic 99% of what we do but never reaches 100%. The maxim "AI won't take your job, a person using AI will; yes, you using AI will replace yourself not using it" applies more in the long term than the

"A second major academic institution has accused Uber of using opaque computer code to dramatically increase its profits at the expense of the ride-hailing app's drivers and passengers. Research by academics at New York's Columbia Business School concluded that the Silicon Valley company had implemented "algorithmic price discrimination" that had raised "rider fares and cut driver pay on billions of … trips, systematically, selectively, and opaquely"."