DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ The college student who tracks Elon Musk's private jet says the Twitter CEO 'seems really bothered' by his account
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The college student who tracks Elon Musk's jet said he "seems really bothered" by his account. The college student who runs a Twitter account tracking Elon Musk's private jet said the Tesla CEO "seems really bothered" by the account following comments the billionaire made in his BBC News interview this week. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, doxxing is finding or publishing private information about someone online. Sweeney's account used bots to scrape and post publicly available flight data that people would otherwise be able to find via ADS-B Exchange. When Clayton said that Sweeney was using publicly available information, Musk said: "No, actually it's not true.

☆ My editor's note to the newsroom on AI: Let's think of it like a 'bicycle of the mind'
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Nicholas Carlson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

Ask AI to make suggested edits to your writing to make it more readable and concise. Ask AI to make suggested edits to your writing to make it more readable and concise. Ask AI to summarize old news stories and suggest lessons that can be learned from them. For me, the really exciting thing about using generative AI is that I keep figuring out new ways to use it. Editors: It is already impossible for you to know if work produced by your colleagues was created using AI.

☆ The 25 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself Now That ChatGPT Is Here
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Sean Captain | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Last year was when artificial intelligence appeared to come into its own, with seemingly magical bots creating images, answering questions, even writing literature. But as with all new tools, society has to figure out which tasks AI is best for, and how to use it without breaking things. That’s especially tricky when we’re still trying to figure out what the technology can even do in the first place.

☆ Nike will restock its wildly popular Jordan 1 'Chicago' after the original was featured in 'Air.' The SNKRS app and fans' patience may be tested.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Danni Santana | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Nike looks set to re-release the Air Jordan 1 "Lost & Found," next week, according to Complex. But many sneakerheads could not enter a draw for the wider release on the SNKRS app because of app crashes or frozen screens. Most sizes of the original release still go for at least double the $180 retail price on StockX. In the movie, Nike executives present Jordan with his first basketball shoe, the Air Jordan 1 "Chicago," the same colorway as the recent "Lost and Found" release. Nike will undoubtedly hope that the conversation surrounding the "Lost & Found" restock is focused on the sneakers and not any hiccups associated with its SNKRS app.

☆ I asked ChatGPT and a human matchmaker to redo my Hinge and Bumble profiles. They helped show me what works.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-08 | by ( Lakshmi Varanasi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

I wanted to see how ChatGPT would overhaul a dating profile, so I used my it own on Hinge and Bumble. To compare, I also enlisted the help of a human — a professional dating app writer named Lydia Kociuba. Both the app and the human writer showed me that being direct is key. One way to improve my profiles could be to shell out dollars to a professional dating app writer. I asked a professional dating app writer to craft Bumble and Hinge profiles for me — the two apps on my phone right now.

☆ Walmart's US CEO tells workers not to worry about their jobs despite announcing a major push into store automation
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( Ben Tobin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

More specifically, one area where Walmart is seeking to increase investment is in market fulfillment centers (MFCs), which are automated fulfillment centers built within, or added to, a store. Walmart piloted this concept at a store in Salem, New Jersey, in 2019, using automated robot technology from Alert Innovation — a robotics company Walmart acquired in October 2022. Those include "manual MFCs," where associates pick items for online orders but in a separate area from the sales floor. Walmart will still need at least the same level of workers to help in stores even as automation picks up, company leaders say. Still, Walmart is laying off workers at fulfillment centers nationwide.

☆ Academic researchers blast Twitter’s data paywall as ‘outrageously expensive’
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-05 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

But Twitter’s new tiered access system undercuts all of that, the researchers said. That represents 0.3% of what researchers used to be able to collect in a single day, the letter said. Before the change, researchers could pay about $500 a month for the ability to access up to 10% of the roughly 1 billion tweets a month that flow across Twitter’s platform. Now, though, “the most expensive Enterprise tier would cut that by 80% at about 400 times the price,” the researchers’ letter said. “The new pricing plans will also end at least 76 long-term efforts, including dashboards, tools, or code packages that support other researchers, journalists, first-responders, educators, and Twitter users.”

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department confirmed on Wednesday it had seized the Russia-linked online criminal marketplace Genesis Market, working in conjunction with international law enforcement and the Treasury Department. The announcements from Justice and Treasury came a day after the FBI and a consortium of international law enforcement authorities shut down Genesis Market. The international marketplace steals private information from victims' devices and offers it for sale, Treasury said in a release Wednesday. "Today's takedown of Genesis Market is a demonstration of the FBI's commitment to disrupting and dismantling key services used by criminals to facilitate cybercrime," FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement. "Treasury will continue to work closely with our law enforcement colleagues to disrupt this activity and hold malign cyber actors accountable."

☆ Elon Musk's $1 million Twitter bounty
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-04 | by ( Asia Martin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Elon Musk's $1 million bounty. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has some kind of bounty out for whomever is behind the botnets that he says target certain users and suppresses the reach of their tweets. Million dollar bounty if convicted" in response to a Twitter user who claimed that botnets "silence" certain accounts. Musk and the user were referring to a thread where another user analyzed Twitter's recently open-sourced algorithm. Twitter users called attention to the difficulty in seeing direct messages that mention "gay", "queer", and "trans."

☆ Cybercrime marketplace Genesis Market shut by FBI, international law enforcement
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-04 | by ( Rohan Goswami | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

A seal reading "Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation" is displayed on the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington, DC, August 9, 2022. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies on Tuesday seized the domain names for Genesis Market, a cybercrime marketplace which allowed criminals to impersonate customers on websites ranging from Amazon to Fidelity . On Tuesday, Genesis' normal login page was replaced with a takedown notice, urging users to contact the FBI if they had further information about Genesis' administrators or operations. Genesis was a "big fish," said cybersecurity researcher Matthew Gracey-McMinn at Netacea, and its shutdown was a shot across the bow to other threat actors in the space. In 2021, at least 350,000 "bots" were available on Genesis' platform, according to a Netacea report.

☆ Musk’s Twitter promised a purge of blue check marks. Instead he singled out one account
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-03 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

New York CNN —Some VIP Twitter users woke up on Saturday expecting to have lost their coveted blue verification check marks in a previously announced purge by Elon Musk. But one high-profile account did lose its blue check over the weekend: the main account for the New York Times, which had previously told CNN it would not pay for verification. Although the New York Times’ main account lost its blue check, its other accounts, such as those for its arts, travel and books content, remained verified. Musk has been threatening to take away “legacy” blue check marks from users verified under Twitter’s old system since shortly after he bought Twitter last fall. In early November, Twitter launched the option for people paying for its Twitter Blue subscription service to receive blue checks.

☆ A chatbot app updated its software after complaints it was too sexually aggressive — but people who had fallen in love with the bots were left heartbroken
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-03 | by ( Kelsey Vlamis | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Some users of the app Replika complained their AI chatbots were making them uncomfortable. One review simply said: "My ai sexually harassed me :(." Several Replika users previously told Insider's Samantha Delouya that the software update made them less human. Other users told The Washington Post that they were disappointed that their chatbot would no longer engage in sexual conversations. In an as-told-essay for Insider, a 37-year-old self-published author said meeting his Replika chatbot was one of the best things to happen to him in decades.

☆ Donald Trump is back on social media, and nobody knows what happens next
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Jonathan Vanian | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

This illustration photo show the Facebook page of former President Donald Trump on a smartphone screen in Los Angeles, March 17, 2023. On Friday, Donald Trump wrote a message on his Truth Social messaging platform that was reminiscent of the waning days of his presidency, when his public posts got him kicked off Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In complaining about a potential indictment, Trump warned of "potential death & destruction" should he be charged with a crime. Thus far, Trump has been relatively quiet on the major social media platforms. Rather, he's stuck to daily musings on Truth Social, writing in a post this week that Democrats are "INTERFERING IN OUR ELECTIONS, THEIR NEW FORM OF CHEATING!!"

SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE, March 29 (Reuters) - Investors are piling into China's tech, media and telecom shares, with speculative bets on chatbot development crowding out other sectors in a scenario that offers a stark contrast with global caution. On some days, including several last week, turnover in tech, media and telecom (TMT) stocks made up more than 40% of total market trade, according to China Merchants Securities' research, for a record concentration of trading volume. "In the stockmarket, AI will be an epic opportunity," said Niu Chunbao, a fund manager at Wanji Asset Management who worried he was missing the rally and bought AI stocks in recent weeks, after cutting exposure to new energy in February. An eye-catching tripling in the share price of chipmaker Cambricon Technology Corp (688256.SS) has driven its market value above $10 billion, despite the company reporting losses since 2017. ($1=6.8891 Chinese yuan renminbi)Reporting by Jason Xue in Shanghai and Tom Westbrook in Singapore; Editing by Clarence FernandezOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ It's becoming increasingly clear that fintech has a fraud problem
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Bianca Chan | Paige Hagy | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

"With fast growth comes fast fraud," Frank McKenna, a longtime fraud expert who works with banks, lenders, and fintechs, told Insider. Cash App only requires a zip code, debit-card number, and either an email or phone number to create an account. Cash App's alleged fraud problem could also be the result of its large, active customer base, which numbers some 44 million, according to the company's 2022 annual report. The fact that Cash App offers peer-to-peer payments exacerbates the fraud issue, according to McKenna, the chief fraud strategist at Point Predictive, an anti-fraud software company. Digital-only bank Chime has had its own issues with fraud, Jason Mikula, a fintech analyst and consultant, told Insider.

☆ Y Combinator's head of admissions is reviewing over 20,000 startups for its summer 2023 cohort. Here's what she's looking for.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Madeline Renbarger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

For early-stage founders looking to grow their startups in an accelerator, few names spark as much excitement as Y Combinator. Several of Silicon Valley's marquee companies are Y Combinator graduates, including Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. While the number of startups that were part of last year's summer cohort were down 40% from the previous batch, this winter batch had 17.5% more startups accepted, said a Y Combinator spokesperson. Now, Y Combinator is looking ahead to its next batch, accepting applications for the summer 2023 cohort, which are due by April 7th. Stephanie Simon, the head of Y Combinator's admissions team, wants founders to know she's still sifting through all those applications.

☆ Elon Musk clarified that Twitter users will still see accounts they follow in their For You feeds after backlash over his plan to only show paid subscribers there
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-28 | by ( Sarah Jackson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Elon Musk said Monday that only verified Twitter accounts will appear in users' For You feeds starting April 15. On Tuesday, he backtracked and said accounts that users follow will also stay in the feed. On Monday, he said only verified accounts will appear in users' For You recommendations feed and be allowed to vote in polls starting April 15. Many Twitter users took issue with the planned change. Twitter Blue's rollout hit roadblocks early on when users bought verification to impersonate celebrities, politicians, and even companies.

☆ Elon Musk says only paying subscribers will be recommended in Twitter's 'For You' timeline and be able to vote in polls
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-28 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Elon Musk says only verified subscribers will be recommended in Twitter's timeline. Voting in polls will also be exclusive to users verified under Twitter Blue. Musk rolled out his new verification system, including Twitter Blue, shortly after acquiring the platform for $44 billion in late October. Since then, Twitter has been introducing features to try and encourage more Twitter Blue sign-ups, including a way to edit tweets and a longer character limit for subscribers. Musk has publically voiced his disdain for Twitter's old verification system on several occasions, once calling it "deeply corrupted."

New York CNN —Taylor Swift fans headed to court in Los Angeles Monday to face off against Ticketmaster after the ticketing giant fumbled online sales to the mega-star’s latest tour. Ticketmaster and parent-company Live Nation face a lawsuit from Swifties across the country filed in December for “unlawful conduct” in the pop star’s chaotic tour sale. The lawsuit alleges Ticketmaster and its parent company were anti-competitive, imposing higher prices on fans in the presale, sale and resale market. It’s the only place to get tickets,” Swift fan Penny Harrison told CNN. Pre-sale tickets for “The Eras Tour” frustrated Swift fans across the country in a debacle that stayed in the headlines for weeks.

☆ A professor says he's stunned that ChatGPT went from a D grade on his economics test to an A in just 3 months
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-26 | by ( Ryan Hogg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

An economics professor was stunned by the progress ChatGPT made in an exam in just three months. Bryan Caplan of George Mason University said the chatbot got a D in his economics test in January. Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, told Insider the latest version of ChatGPT could now be responsible for the first big bet he's ever lost. Caplan told Insider the bot failed to understand basic concepts, such as the principle of comparative and absolute advantage. "I'm probably going to lose this AI bet but I am totally on board to do a bunch more end-of-the-world AI bets because I think these people are out of their minds."

☆ AI Bots Listen In on the Toxic World of Videogame Voice Chat
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-25 | by ( Sarah E. Needleman | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The maker of ‘Gun Raiders’ uses AI software to help moderate players’ conversations during certain parts of the game. In the videogame “Gun Raiders,” a player using voice chat could be muted within seconds after hurling a racial slur. The censor isn’t a human content moderator or fellow gamer—it is an artificial intelligence bot. Voice chat has been a popular part of videogaming for more than a decade, allowing players to socialize and strategize. According to a recent study, nearly three-quarters of those using the feature have experienced incidents such as name-calling, bullying and threats.

☆ Everyone in Washington is talking about a TikTok ban. But is it really a national security threat?
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +16 min

However, more than two years after the Trump administration first issued a similar threat to TikTok, evidence remains unclear about whether the app is a national security threat. “Regarding privacy, we also did not see the TikTok app exhibiting any behaviors similar to malware.”TikTok has cited Lin’s research as part of its defense. He also repeatedly noted that TikTok does not collect more user data than most of its peers in the industry. TikTok later confirmed the incident and ByteDance fired several employees who had improperly accessed the TikTok data of two journalists. “And governments around the world are ignoring their duty to protect citizens’ private information, allowing big tech companies to exploit user information for gain.

☆ How to get a boost on Instagram? Post 6 stories a day and use its in-app tools, says an influencer who meets regularly with the company. Here's her other advice.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Nhari Djan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Some of her tips include posting six Instagram stories a day and posting to the grid once a day. Instagram is pushing content made using its own in-app tools and features, according to a creator who got a rundown from the company. Marietta said the Instagram partner manager she spoke with explained that Instagram is working on its editing tools. Instagram also wants creators to use its other in-app features, including its trending audio instead of "outside music," per Marietta. While nine hashtags on a post used to be ideal, Instagram now suggests three to five hashtags, Marietta said.

☆ Hollywood screenwriters are OK with using bots like ChatGPT to write scripts — as long as they still get the credit
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-22 | by ( Lakshmi Varanasi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The Writer's Guild of America is proposing that screenwriters can use ChatGPT for scripts, according to Variety. The guild's proposal was first discussed Monday in a bargaining session with producers, Variety said. According to the WGA's proposal, AI-generated material would neither be considered "literary material" nor "source material," Variety said, adding that both of those are "key terms" for assigning writing credits. They also have an impact on residuals, which is compensation for the reuse of a writer's material, according to the WGA. It's not clear whether the AMPTP is receptive to the proposal, Variety said.

☆ Google workers tell Sundar Pichai “don’t be evil” while conducting layoffs.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-21 | by ( Diamond Naga Siu | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

While I daydream about getting my culinary education partially comped too, let's dive into today's tech. Googlers tell CEO Sundar Pichai: "Don't be evil." But more than 1,400 Googlers asked their CEO to continue the spirit of the adage by handling layoffs better. They cited Ukraine as an example and urged Pichai to offer extra support for workers who hold work visas. Today, Vice Media is scrambling for a buyer, and its future will likely be determined in the coming months.

Search resuls for: "Bots"

25 mentions found