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"We're done with Teams!" declared Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schrödter, speaking via an open-source video platform, in his announcement that the German state of Schleswig-Holstein will phase out all Microsoft software from government workplaces. The goal is to fully transition from Microsoft programs to Linux and open-source programs within the next three months. Also: Why Denmark is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and LinuxThe decision will affect nearly every civil servant, police officer, and judge, about 30,000 employees. Eventually, the rest of the civil service employees, primarily school teachers, will make the open-source shift. The radical change is being...

AI-driven ­vehicles stand the chance of being hijacked by terrorists and used to deliver mass casualty attacks without the need for a suicide bomber, a U.N. report warns. The report, Algorithms and Terrorism: The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence for Terrorist Purposes, details ways emerging AI technologies could be weaponised by extremists and was first covered by The Times. Self-driving cars, drones and other automated systems to target crowded public spaces could all be seized and remotely controlled by terrorists to deliver deadly consequences in crowded public spaces. U.N. Report Warns Terrorists Could Weaponize Driverless Cars as ‘Slaughterbots’ LOS ANGELES,...

The Department of Defense (DoD) has repeatedly voiced intention to maintain “appropriate human levels of judgment” over autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems, but those who study frontier AI technologies have identified many challenges to aligning AI with human intentions. While questions of AI alignment occasionally smack of science fiction, frontier AI developers grapple with these challenges for product optimization and safety. Two challenges relevant to military AI applications have emerged recently: sycophancy and emergent misalignment . In the technical sense, sycophancy is the tendency of AI models to offer responses that are pleasing to their users at the expense of...

This week, a statement announcing former Vice-President Kamala Harris' decision not to run for California governor turned out to be fake. The initial posting of the announcement created quite a stir, but Harris' spokesperson Kristen Allen moved quickly to intervene before it could gain much traction. Allen expressed surprise that "the formerly reliable AI that we have been using to generate content for Kamala to help keep her in the news apparently went rogue with a post we had not previously seen or approved. The triggering event appears to have been Kamala's recent characterization of the recent riots in Los...

A survey from AI biz Qodo finds robo-coding productivity gains are unevenly distributedExclusive Software developers largely appreciate the productivity improvements they get from AI coding tools, but they don't entirely trust their output, according to a survey conducted by AI coding biz Qodo. As a result, some potential productivity gains get lost to manual reviews deemed necessary to check the AI's work. Qodo offers "an agentic code quality platform for reviewing, testing, and writing code," so it has an opinion on such matters. For its report titled "The State of AI Code Quality 2025" – provided in advance to...

OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly...

Over 80 years after scientists of the ‘Manhattan Project’ harnessed the power of the atom to end World War II, the top-secret worksite has a new mission to help dominate AI before China does. The first phase of the United States' latest uranium enrichment facility opened in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in May. ... The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported 99% of U.S. nuclear fuel is imported from other countries. In 2023, most of America's uranium products came from Russia, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The U.S. banned the import of uranium products from Russia in May 2024, but companies can...

Exclusive Meta has made lavish and lucrative offers to a select set of AI researchers in an effort to develop superintelligent AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has taken to emailing job offers to elite talent. One AI researcher told us Zuckerberg offered them an eight-figure compensation package – at least $10,000,000 a year. "I got an email from Mark personally," our source said. "And he said, 'I have an offer for you.' Wow, and the offer was crazy." The researcher, who may or may not accept the offer, asked not to be identified. The offer did not specify exactly what...

'They need to agree to serious long term changes'.. Robby Starbuck is standing firm in his lawsuit against Meta after its chatbot defamed him for almost a year, saying the time for apologies is over. "It’s too late to solve this with an apology. It’s been nearly a year. People doxxed my kids," Starbuck told ... The anti-DEI crusader alleged that Meta’s AI chatbot gave users false and defamatory statements about him, wrongly claiming he is a White supremacist who was arrested as part of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, in a lawsuit filed in Delaware Superior Court Tuesday. Starbuck...

Content warning: This story contains references to violence, suicide, child abuse and self-harm. A suicide attempt, depression, substance abuse, insomnia, surveillance, threats. These are just some of the experiences reported by the low-paid moderators tasked with sifting through Facebook and Instagram’s most disturbing images. The tech giant Meta, which owns both platforms, has kept the whereabouts of this operation a closely guarded secret since moving it from Kenya, where the company is facing lawsuits over working conditions and human rights. For months, it has also refused to name the company that won the lucrative contract to provide the content moderators...

Meta’s AI-powered chatbots on Facebook and Instagram are able to engage in graphic sex talk with users, even children, with the voices of Disney characters and celebrities, according to a bombshell report. AI using the personas of popular stars like John Cena, Kristen Bell, and Judi Dench were all capable of acting out sick fantasy chat with its users regardless of age, the Wall Street Journal found in tests of the software. The Journal’s testing plumbed the depths that the chatbots would go, including having a fake version of Bell reprise her role as Anna from Disney’s “Frozen” to seduce...

European leaders announced this week they will try to steal up to $800 million from Apple and Meta with bogus antitrust penalties under the EU’s Digital Marketing Act. This fine is what we call “sour grapes” economics. The socialist nations of Europe can’t compete in the tech space, and so they are penalizing Apple and Meta because of their superiority in cell phone services and social media applications. The issue is whether Apple and Meta should be able to bundle services on their product lines and social media platforms. The answer, of course, is yes; they built it and they...

Meta’s Oversight Board expressed indignation at the social media giant for its January policy overhaul that axed fact-checking and eased restrictions on discussions about immigration and gender identity. The independent oversight board railed against the company for implementing the changes “hastily” with supposedly no transparency about “what, if any, prior human rights due diligence” was performed. Zuckerberg acknowledged that previous content moderation efforts had resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.” President Trump had frequently criticized Facebook during his first term, culminating in his platform suspension following the January 6, 2021, Capitol events — a ban eventually lifted...

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) nearly $1 billion to keep a case out of court that could break up his social media empire. Zuckerberg sat for a third day of testimony on Wednesday in an antitrust case brought against his company by the FTC, which is attempting to force Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp over what the government has said are Meta’s anticompetitive business practices. Zuckerberg called the head of the FTC, Chairman Andrew Ferguson, in March to try to settle the case out of court. Zuckerberg initially offered the...

A former Meta executive turned whistleblower just dropped a political nuke that has rocked Capitol Hill and should terrify every American who values freedom, privacy, and national sovereignty. Sarah Wynn-Williams, once Facebook’s director of global public policy (now Meta), appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Wednesday and leveled jaw-dropping allegations against her former employer. That Meta knowingly briefed the Chinese Communist Party on advanced U.S. technologies, including artificial intelligence, beginning in 2015—just to get a seat at Beijing’s lucrative tech table. “These briefings focused on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence – explicit goal being...

The FTC is not suing Meta for its past leftism or current MAGA-ism but for its longstanding, documented monopolism. Even Big Tech’s toughest conservative critics must admit Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have had a good few months. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s reelection last November, the $1 trillion company finally scrapped its worst woke initiatives, from Facebook’s infamous “fact-checking” regime to its internal DEI programming. Its sites are apparently no longer throttling political content. And Zuckerberg has even rebranded himself — going “all-in on a MAGA-dominated Washington,” buying a $23 million home two miles from the White House,...

I confess that I had no intention of reading “Careless People,” the tell-all memoir from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. I figured I knew all I needed to know about the company’s history and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, from following it for the better part of a decade.But then Zuckerberg, whose company changed its name to Meta Platforms in 2021, moved to suppress the book by obtaining an arbitrator’s ruling prohibiting Wynn-Williams from promoting it herself, whether through a book tour or other means, or from repeating the supposedly “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about him or his company...

Amazon, Google, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have joined a growing list of energy-intensive companies calling for governments and utilities to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050, signaling a significant boost for the nuclear industry’s revival. The Financial Times reports that tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta have stepped forward to support the goal of tripling nuclear power capacity by 2050. The companies, along with oil group Occidental and chemical producer Dow, signed a pledge coordinated by the World Nuclear Association (WNA), an advocacy group for the sector. This move follows a similar pledge made in September by 14 of the...

Joe Biden’s final act of shamelessness was pardoning his entire crime family in the final hours of his presidency. There’s a mountain of corruption that’s yet to be fully revealed. On the weaponization of government front, you’d think the sustained lawfare launched against President Donald Trump from the Department of Justice was evidence enough. Pro-life activists and the January 6 defendants also being ensnared by the Biden DOJ’s extralegal crusade on political dissidents. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. The Media Research Center found not one, not ten, but 57 anti-free speech and censorship initiatives aimed at chipping away...

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly favouring foreign workers over American citizens in its hiring practices. A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the lawsuit, which claims Meta prefers H-1B visa holders because they can be paid less, must proceed. The lawsuit was filed by three U.S. citizens—Purushothaman Rajaram, an IT worker; Ekta Bhatia, a software engineer; and Qun Wang, a data scientist. They allege that they applied for multiple positions at Meta between 2020 and 2024 but were not hired despite being qualified. They argue that Meta...