wireless
New York (AFP) - As people brace for the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence on jobs and everyday living, those in the world of audio books say their field is already being transformed. AI has the ability to create human-sounding recordings -- at assembly-line speed -- while bypassing at least part of the services of the human professionals who for years have made a living with their voices. Many of them are already seeing a sharp drop off in business. Tanya Eby has been a full-time voice actor and professional narrator for 20 years. She has a recording studio in her home. But in the ...
AFP
San Francisco (AFP) - A former US-based executive of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has sued it for wrongful dismissal, saying he was fired for sounding the alarm over what he called its "culture of lawlessness." The suit, filed by Yintao Yu in a San Francisco court, comes as political pressure has been growing in the US to ban TikTok. Critics say the popular platform allows Beijing to covertly collect users' data and influence their opinions -- something the company denies. In his suit, Yu says that he discovered shortly after being hired in 2017 that ByteDance "was steali...
AFP
New York (AFP) - Elon Musk's decision to pull Twitter off the stock market allows him to make major changes quickly, but it also takes the company more heavily into debt, a risky choice for a money-losing business. It is a long-established strategy with notable successes and failures, from computer manufacturer Dell (a success) to toy stores Toys "R" Us (a failure). But Twitter "is very different from a traditional buyout" of a company that delists from the market, said Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Most such takeovers are of companies with positive cash...
AFP
Frisco (United States) (AFP) - The little aircraft appeared out of the blue sky above a Texas home, deposited its payload of a mid-morning snack in the yard and zoomed off, as deliveries by drone start becoming a reality in America. Flying shipments of pizzas and birthday gifts have still not become the norm that tech leaders predicted, but the service is available in parts of the United States and government regulation is catching up. Skeptics question whether drone drop-offs can ever work on a large scale, but backers argue they are safer and better for the planet than hulking, greenhouse-g...
AFP
San Francisco (AFP) - Courted and then jilted by the world's richest person, Twitter looks well positioned to win a court battle with Elon Musk over a $1 billion breakup fee and more -- but the company will not emerge unscathed. The entire saga has left observers baffled by what Wedbush analyst Dan Ives described as "one of the craziest business stories ever." "I think it starts off as a circus show and it's ending as a circus show," Ives told AFP. Musk, the founder of electric car company Tesla, sent a letter to Twitter on Friday saying he was pulling out of the controversial deal he made in...
AFP
San Francisco (AFP) - Google announced Friday it would delete users' location history when they visit abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters and other places where privacy is sought. "If our systems identify that someone has visited one of these places, we will delete these entries from Location History soon after they visit," Jen Fitzpatrick, a senior vice president at Google, wrote in a blog post. "This change will take effect in the coming weeks." Other places from which Google will not store location data include fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, and weight loss cli...
AFP
San Francisco (AFP) - Twitter's newest board member and largest stakeholder Elon Musk tweeted Saturday to ask if the social media network was "dying" and to call out users such as singer Justin Bieber, who are highly followed but rarely post. "Most of these 'top' accounts tweet rarely and post very little content," the Tesla boss wrote, captioning a list of the 10 profiles with the most followers -- a list which includes himself at number eight, with 81 million followers. "Is Twitter dying?" he wrote. Former US President Barack Obama appears at the top with 131 million followers, followed by ...
AFP
San Francisco (AFP) - Twitter announced Tuesday it was introducing new measures against Russian government accounts to reduce the impact of official propaganda on the social network. The official accounts will no longer be "recommended" to Twitter users across all categories of the app, including in searches, the platform said in a statement. The California company, like its rival Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had already blocked the accounts of the Russian state-run media RT and Sputnik in the European Union. Moscow responded by restricting access to Twitter in the countr...
AFP
San Francisco (AFP) - Carlos Vasquez is a master of video fighting game "Mortal Kombat" despite being unable to see the action on screen because he is blind. The Texas resident -- who relies on sound to time punches, kicks and dodges -- is among a chorus of voices calling for better access to gaming for people with disabilities. "You have two characters across the screen fighting each other, left and right, and you just have to memorize the buttons," said Vasquez, explaining what drew him to "Mortal Kombat". Long neglected by the industry, the issue of accessibility is increasingly front of mi...
AFP
Washington (AFP) - The US national tax authority announced Monday that it will stop using facial recognition software to verify taxpayers' identities when they create online accounts, following a chorus of privacy concerns. Internal Revenue Service officials had put forth the authentication system as a security measure following years of growing fears over online scams and identity theft, but the program ended up also prompting worries. The initiative involved identity verification company ID.me, which won a nearly $90 million contract to make taxpayers' accounts more secure. The IRS said "it ...
AFP
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