All posts tagged "It"

Employees with the Pentagon's digital technology unit, dubbed the "SWAT team of nerds," have decided to resign together rather than deal with changes being brought about by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, according to new reporting from Politico.

The report states that the Defense Digital Services unit was once considered the Pentagon's "fast-track tech development arm" and "one of the department’s earliest efforts to inject Silicon Valley ethos into its massive bureaucracy."

Created in 2015, DDS helped the Pentagon "adopt fast tech fixes during national security crises" and pushed "Silicon Valley-style innovation inside the Pentagon," according to reporter Mohar Chatterjee. "It built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid," and "drone detection technologies," among other projects....

San Francisco (AFP) - Artists outraged by artificial intelligence that copies in seconds the styles they have sacrificed years to develop are waging battle online and in court. Fury erupted in the art community last year with the release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs that can convincingly carry out commands such as drawing a dog like cartoonist Sarah Andersen would, or a nymph the way illustrator Karla Ortiz might do. Such style-swiping AI works are cranked out without the original artist's consent, credit or compensation -- the three C's at the heart of a fight to change......

San Francisco (AFP) - A shareholder lawsuit filed late Monday accuses board members of Instagram and Facebook parent Meta of shirking their duties by ignoring human and sex trafficking on the tech giant's social platforms. The suit filed in the Court of Chancery in the US state of Delaware calls for Mark Zuckerberg, along with other executives and board members, to be ordered to institute reforms and pay damages. Meta board members and senior executives named in the suit "turned a blind eye to sex/human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and other predatory conduct occurring on Meta's onl......

New York (AFP) - The video game giant Activision Blizzard said Monday it has fired nearly 40 employees and disciplined more than 40 others since July as it deals with allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct. Over the past seven months the company has received about 700 reports of employee concerns over sexual assault or harassment or other misconduct, in some cases separate reports about the same incident, The Wall Street Journal reported. A summary of the personnel action that the maker of "Call of Duty," "World of Warcraft" and other blockbuster games has taken was scheduled to......

San Francisco (AFP) - Texas on Thursday made it illegal for popular social media platforms to ban users "simply based on their political viewpoints." Political conservatives have accused Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants of stifling their voices, providing no evidence to support the claims. Social media platforms have consistently defended themselves against such accusations. Former US president Donald Trump was booted from Facebook and Twitter after a group of his supporters attacked the Capitol in January in an attempt to prevent his rightly elected successor from taking office......

San Francisco (AFP) - Facebook on Tuesday said it shut down a disinformation operation which sought to spread Covid-19 vaccine hoaxes by duping social media influencers into backing false claims. The leading social network labeled the operation a "disinformation laundromat" which sought to legitimize false claims by pushing them through people with clean reputations. Influencers who caught onto the sham turned out to be the undoing of a deceitful influence campaign orchestrated by marketing firm Fazze in Russia, according to Facebook. "The assumption was the influencers wouldn't do any of thei......