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"Sony Ericsson has landed in hot water over the way it advertised its Satio smartphone. The company "exaggerated" the handset's ability to access Facebook, according to the Advertising Standards Authority(ASA)." Gotta be careful with what ya promise =P

"However, there's a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, that will allow for the creation of realistic looking footage of public figures appearing to say, well, anything. Trump declaring his proclivity for water sports. Hillary Clinton describing the stolen children she keeps locked in her wine cellar. Tom Cruise finally admitting what we suspected all along … that he's a Brony."

"The bionic leaf is an outgrowth of Nocera's artificial leaf, which efficiently splits water into hydrogen and oxygen gas by pairing silicon - the material that makes up solar panels - with catalyst coatings. The hydrogen gas can be stored on site and used to drive fuel cells, providing a way to store and use power that originates from the sun."

"It sounds complicated, but the upside is how robust this write-once storage medium is. Microsoft claims the glass can be boiled in water, baked at 500 degrees in an oven, blasted in a microwave, and demagnetized, but the data it contains will survive. The lifetime is also incredibly long and measured in thousands of years."

"The model takes a two-pronged approach. First, it focuses on trends present in the region, looking at geostatistics and historical data from Prodes, the annual government monitoring system for deforestation in the Amazon. Understanding what has happened can help make predictions more precise. When already deforested areas are recent, this indicates gangs are operating in the area, so there's a higher risk that nearby forest will soon be wiped out. Second, it looks at variables that put the brakes on deforestation - land protected by Indigenous and quilombola (descendent of rebel slaves) communities, and areas with bodies of water, or other terrain that doesn't lend itself to agricultural expansion, for instance - and variables that make deforestation more likely, including higher population density, the presence of settlements and rural properties, and higher density of road infrastructure, both legal and illegal."

"At first glance, the change might seem relatively benign. Often, all folks surfing the web want is a quick-hit summary or snippet of something anyway. But it's not unfair to say that Google, which in April, according to data from SimilarWeb, hosted roughly 91 percent of all search traffic, is somewhat synonymous with, well, the internet. And the internet isn't just some ethereal, predetermined thing, as natural water or air. The internet is a marketplace, and Google is its kingmaker. As such, the demo raises an extremely important question for the future of the already-ravaged journalism industry: if Google's AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?"

"Data centers are mushrooming worldwide to meet AI demand, but particularly in Latin America, seen as strategically located by Big Tech. One of the largest data center hubs is in Querétaro, a Mexican state with high risk of intensifying climate change-induced drought. Farmers are already protesting their risk of losing water access."

"She said: "I don't think it should ever be used. It is one of, if not the, greatest threats to individual freedom, partly because of the intimacy of the information it takes and hands to the state without your consent, and without even your knowledge, and partly because you don't know what is done with that information.""