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"Peter Chen, CEO of the robot software company Covariant, sits in front of a chatbot interface resembling the one used to communicate with ChatGPT. "Show me the tote in front of you," he types. In reply, a video feed appears, revealing a robot arm over a bin containing various items-a pair of socks, a tube of chips, and an apple among them. The chatbot can discuss the items it sees-but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby."

"Much of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures. The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear. The African subsea cable operator Seacom confirmed that services on its west African cable system were down and that customers who relied on that cable were being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses."

""Once these technical photographic limitations of the image are determined, we can then zoom in as closely as possible to every edge of the subjects, in order to highlight where detail has been altered, knowing what should be sharp and what shouldn't. "As per the annotations, this reveals sharp transitions of detail, usually from hard edged selections [in the image editing programme Adobe Photoshop], which can be either straight or worked around curved areas of detail. "It's the juddering of straight-line detail that is the biggest telltale sign of multiple frames being composited together. This can be seen extensively around the hair, arms, and especially at the zip midway down the princess's jacket. Seeing repetition of detail in the finer areas also reveals the likely use of the cloning tool in Photoshop."

"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."

"Other far more sinister real-world effects of algorithms are well documented. In the US, pedestrians have been mowed down by robotaxis; prisoners denied bail on the advice, in part, of software; in Australia, welfare recipients incorrectly and illegally hounded by an algorithmic debt collector that came to be known as robodebt. In the UK, students took to the streets in 2020 after being denied places at universities by the calculations of digital minions - their chants of "fuck the algorithm" proving a "defining moment" for Kowalkiewicz and an inspiration for his book."

"During a Q&A in September 2015, Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook was working on a "dislike" button. "I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years," he said, adding that Facebook had been working on the feature for awhile and wanted to implement it in a way that didn't feel like you were down-voting a post. "

"Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?"

"Amy and Ano are identical twins, but just after they were born they were taken from their mother and sold to separate families. Years later, they discovered each other by chance thanks to a TV talent show and a TikTok video. As they delved into their past, they realised they were among thousands of babies in Georgia stolen from hospitals and sold, some as recently as 2005. Now they want answers. Amy is pacing up and down in a hotel room in Leipzig. "I'm scared, really scared," she says, fidgeting nervously. "I haven't slept all week. This is my chance to finally get some answers about what happened to us." Her twin sister, Ano, sits in an armchair, watching TikTok videos on her phone. "This is the woman that could have sold us," she says, rolling her eyes. "

"T The footage wouldn't look out of place on many of the world's news channels. For 22 minutes, a variety of polished news anchors stand in front of the camera and run down the day's news in a video posted on social media. But none of them are real. Instead, the anchors are generated by artificial intelligence (AI)."

"AI-generated voices are extremely convincing and can converse without the obvious repetitions and scripted lines, making a dream tool for fraudsters, marketers and political campaigns. The Federal Communications Commission sees the costs of all this coming and is banning their use in robocalls. "Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities and misinform votes," said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a press release. "State attorneys general will now have new tools to crack down on these scams and ensure the public is protected from fraud and misinformation.""

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."

" With more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages "endangered and at risk of extinction", an army of tiny publishers is fighting an unsung battle to save them. UK press Diglot Books is one of them, and this week took on the might of Amazon to get its Cornish children's story out to readers. Told by the internet giant that Matthew and the Wellington Boots (Matthew ha'n Eskisyow Glaw in Cornish, or Kernewek) would not be made available through Kindle Direct Publishing because it was in a language that is "not currently supported" by the platform, Diglot petitioned the retailer."

"That Crisis Strategy Draft included the line: "At the risk of appearing hyperbolic, this could be the end of Bitcoin, at least for most of the public.""

Talking about CISCO - Wikileaks is big in the news again...

"Wired recently started an anti-ad-blocking campaign that attempts to prevent ad-blocked users from reading articles unless they pay a monthly subscription fee. On the heels of this decision comes a roundup of the major ad-blockers, some of which are pretty dodgy indeed. Adblock Plus comes off the worst of the lot. The company charges publishers fees to allow their ads through its filters, based on criteria about size and placement. Ghostery blocks trackers, but by default gathers "anonymized" data about your browsing habits (it's very hard to conclusively describe any deep data set as anonymized). "

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."