Technology

The State Department accused China on Thursday of using “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment, by acquiring stakes in foreign newspapers and television networks, using major social media platforms to promote its views and exerting pressure on international organizations and media outlets to silence critics of Beijing.The accusations, detailed in a report by the department’s Global Engagement Center, reflect worry in Washington that China’s information operations pose a growing security challenge to the United States and to democratic principles around the world by promoting “digital authoritarianism.”China not only pushes its own propaganda, the report said, but exports digital surveillance tools to police information and people online. Although many ...

In 2014 Jony Ive, then the chief design officer of Apple, came to Paris Fashion Week with his Big New Product, the Apple Watch, to convince the fashion crowd that wearables were the future of fashion. That turned out to be not exactly true (at least style-wise), but it hasn’t stopped two former Apple designers, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, from returning nine years later to try again.This time around, the product is the Ai Pin — a stand-alone smart assistant that attaches to clothing via a magnet and so can be worn pretty much wherever you want it — which made its runway debut on the jackets and pant pockets at Coperni. The brand’s founders and designers, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, have become known during fashion week for their technology-based stunts: spray-painting fa...

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether Florida and Texas may prohibit large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express, setting the stage for a major ruling on how the First Amendment applies to powerful tech platforms.The laws’ supporters argue that the measures are needed to combat what they called Silicon Valley censorship, saying large platforms had removed posts expressing conservative views on issues like the coronavirus pandemic and claims of election fraud. In particular, they objected to the decisions of some platforms to bar President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Two trade groups, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, had challenged the laws, saying the First Amendment p...

Su Zhu, a founder of the cryptocurrency fund Three Arrows Capital, was arrested on Friday in Singapore while trying to leave the country, the liquidators of the company said.Mr. Zhu, 36, was arrested at Changi Airport, the liquidators said. A Singaporean court on Monday had issued what are known as “committal” orders for Mr. Zhu and another Three Arrows founder, Kyle Davies, sentencing both to four months in prison after they failed to cooperate with the liquidators investigating their failed hedge fund. Mr. Davies’s location is unknown, according to Teneo, the firm that is working on the fund’s liquidation.Last summer, Three Arrows, which is based in Singapore and managed $4 billion at its peak, filed for bankruptcy after the cryptocurrency markets melted down. When the fund collapsed, a ...

Surrounded by rooms filled with stacks of cluster munitions and half-made thermobaric bombs, a soldier from Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade recently worked on the final part of a deadly supply chain that stretches from China’s factories to a basement five miles from the front lines of the war with Russia.This is where Ukrainian soldiers turn hobbyist drones into combat weapons. At a cluttered desk, the soldier attached a modified battery to a quadcopter so it could fly farther. Pilots would later zip tie a homemade shell to the bottom and crash the gadgets into Russian trenches and tanks, turning the drones into human-guided missiles.The aerial vehicles have been so effective at combat that most of the drone rotors and airframes that filled the basement workshop would be gone by the end ...

A team of 11 scientists reported in March in the journal Nature that they had discovered a room-temperature superconductor. Eight of those scientists have now asked Nature to retract their paper.That pits them against the man who led the research: Ranga P. Dias, a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Rochester in New York. In the past few years, Dr. Dias has made several extraordinary scientific claims, but he has also been embroiled in a series of allegations of scientific misconduct.The retraction request will add to the scrutiny of Dr. Dias and Unearthly Materials, a company that Dr. Dias founded to turn the superconductivity discoveries into commercial products. Unearthly Materials has raised $16.5 million from investors.It also raises questions about ho...

It began with a £1 contract.In the hours after a pandemic was declared in March 2020, Palantir, the secretive American data analytics company, was invited to 10 Downing Street along with other tech groups, including Amazon, Google and Meta, to discuss how it could help the British government respond.Within days, Palantir’s software was processing streams of data from across England’s National Health Service, with Palantir engineers embedded to help. The company’s services, used by the C.I.A. and Western militaries for more than a decade, were deployed to track emergency room capacity and direct supplies of scarce equipment.Palantir charged the government just one pound.The deal provided the company with a valuable toehold. Since then, Palantir, which is chaired by Peter Thiel, the billiona...

On a muggy evening in July on the island of Príncipe, part of a volcanic archipelago 200 miles off the West African mainland, 11,000 mosquitoes dusted in fluorescent green powder flew together into the heavy equatorial air, tiny volunteers in the service of science.Over the next 10 nights, another group of volunteers, human ones, sat outside their houses in villages nestled in the rainforest, keeping their arms and legs exposed in the damp dark, waiting for the faint tickle of a mosquito in search of blood. Once one alighted, they switched on a headlamp and used a rubber tube attached to a glass vial to suck the insect up and seal it in a cup.The mosquitoes were raised from larvae, dusted green, then set free, by an international team of scientists who are trying to bring cutting-edge gene...

After President Biden won the election nearly three years ago, three of every 10 Americans believed the false narrative that his victory resulted from fraud, a poll found. In the years since, fact checkers have debunked the claim in lengthy articles, corrections posted on viral content, videos and chat rooms.This summer, they received a verdict on their efforts in an updated poll from Monmouth University: Very little has changed. Three of every 10 Americans still believed the false narrative.With a wave of elections expected next year in dozens of countries, the global fact-checking community is taking stock of its efforts over a few intense years — and many don’t love what they see.The number of fact-checking operations at news organizations and elsewhere has stagnated, and perhaps even f...

ChatGPT — viral artificial intelligence sensation, slayer of boring office work, sworn enemy of high school teachers and Hollywood screenwriters alike — is getting some new powers.On Monday, ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, announced that it was giving the popular chatbot the ability to “see, hear and speak” with two new features.The first is an update that allows ChatGPT to analyze and respond to images. You can upload a photo of a bike, for example, and receive instructions about how to lower the seat, or get recipe suggestions based on a photo of the contents of your refrigerator.The second is a feature that allows users to speak to ChatGPT and get responses delivered in a synthetic A.I. voice, the way you might talk with Siri or Alexa.These features are part of an industrywide push toward so-c...