Technology News

After four days in the custody of French police, Telegram’s CEO has been charged with complicity in spreading sexual images of children and other alleged crimes.

Responding to this meme image of a wizard with an orb from the I.C.E. book Middle-earth: Valar and Maiar, Midjourney's founder joked that the new hardware form factor might be an orb. (credit: I.C.E.)

Midjourney, a company best known for its robust AI image-generation tool, has publicly announced that it's "getting into hardware" and has invited job-seekers to apply to join its new hardware division.

The company shared the announcement on its official X account earlier today.

Midjourney founder David Holz previously worked at a hardware company; he was CTO of Leap Motion. A few months ago, he hired Ahmad Abbas,  whom he worked with at Leap Motion. Abbas also worked at Apple for five years as a hardware manager working on the Vision Pro headset. His LinkedIn profile now lists his current title as "Head of Hardware, Midjourney."

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Enlarge (credit: Catherine McQueen | Moment)

An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok by reversing a lower court's ruling that Section 230 immunity shielded the short video app from liability after a child died taking part in a dangerous "Blackout Challenge."

Several kids died taking part in the “Blackout Challenge," which Third Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz described in her opinion as encouraging users "to choke themselves with belts, purse strings, or anything similar until passing out."

Because TikTok promoted the challenge in children's feeds, Tawainna Anderson counted among mourning parents who attempted to sue TikTok in 2022. Ultimately, she was told that TikTok was not responsible for recommending the video that caused the death of her daughter Nylah.

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The ESPN app on an iPhone 11 Pro. (credit: ESPN)

Too often, new tech product or service launches seem like solutions in search of a problem, but not this one: ESPN is launching software that lets you figure out just where you can watch the specific game you want to see amid an overcomplicated web of streaming services, cable channels, and arcane licensing agreements. Every sports fan is all too familiar with today's convoluted streaming schedules.

Launching today on ESPN.com and the various ESPN mobile and streaming device apps, the new guide offers various views, including one that lists all the sporting events in a single day and a search function, among other things. You can also flag favorite sports or teams to customize those views.

"At the core of Where to Watch is an event database created and managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group (SIG), which aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms," ESPN's press release says.

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Self-driving cars have started all-day pickups and drop-offs in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s great news for Alphabet’s bottom line, and a step forward for robotaxis.

Enlarge / Ukrainian FPV drone hunting Russian army assets along a road.

Imagine receiving a traffic ticket in the mail because you were speeding down a Russian road in Kursk with a Ukrainian attack drone on your tail. That's the reality facing some Russians living near the front lines after Ukraine's surprise seizure of Russian territory in Kursk Oblast. And they're complaining about it on Telegram.

Rob Lee, a well-known analyst of the Ukraine/Russia war, comments on X that "traffic cameras are still operating in Kursk, and people are receiving speeding fines when trying to outrun FPVs [first-person-view attack drones]. Some have resorted to covering their license plates but the traffic police force them to remove them."

The Russian outlet Mash offers more details from a local perspective:

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Enlarge / Welders at SpaceX's Starbase launch site work on the launch pad's "chopstick" catch arms this week. (credit: LabPadre)

Pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks, workers wielding welding guns and torches have climbed onto SpaceX's Starship launch pad in South Texas to make last-minute upgrades ahead of the next test flight of the world's largest rocket.

Livestreams of the launch site provided by LabPadre and NASASpaceflight.com have shown sparks raining down two mechanical arms extending from the side of the Starship launch tower at SpaceX's Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast east of Brownsville, Texas. We are publishing several views here of the welding activity with the permission of LabPadre, which runs a YouTube page with multiple live views of Starbase.

If SpaceX has its way on the next flight of Starship, these arms will close together to capture the first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, as it descends back to Earth and slows to a hover over the launch pad.

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We’ve spent years testing dozens of bed-in-a-box hybrid, foam, innerspring, and certified organic mattresses.

Enlarge / Does Mono fit between the Chilean cab sav and Argentinian malbec, or is it more of an orange, maybe? (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft has donated the Mono Project, an open-source framework that brought its .NET platform to non-Windows systems, to the Wine community. WineHQ will be the steward of the Mono Project upstream code, while Microsoft will encourage Mono-based apps to migrate to its open source .NET framework.

As Microsoft notes on the Mono Project homepage, the last major release of Mono was in July 2019. Mono was "a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems" and was the first implementation of .NET on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems.

Ximian, Novell, SUSE, Xamarin, Microsoft—now Wine

Mono began as a project of Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the GNOME desktop. De Icaza led Ximian (originally Helix Code), aiming to bring Microsoft's then-new .NET platform to Unix-like platforms. Ximian was acquired by Novell in 2003.

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On Tuesday, researchers from Google and Tel Aviv University unveiled GameNGen, a new AI model that can interactively simulate the classic 1993 first-person shooter game Doom in real time using AI image generation techniques borrowed from Stable Diffusion. It's a neural network system that can function as a limited game engine, potentially opening new possibilities for real-time video game synthesis in the future.

For example, instead of drawing graphical video frames using traditional techniques, future games could potentially use an AI engine to "imagine" or hallucinate graphics in real time as a prediction task.

"The potential here is absurd," wrote app developer Nick Dobos in reaction to the news. "Why write complex rules for software by hand when the AI can just think every pixel for you?"

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From the sports to the mascots and venues, here's everything you need to know about the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.

Enlarge (credit: Artur Debat | Moment)

An Australian man who pretended to be a famous teenage YouTuber has been sentenced to 17 years for orchestrating what police are calling "one of the worst sextortion cases in history."

Twenty-nine-year-old Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed blackmailed hundreds of victims across 20 countries, ultimately pleading guilty to 119 charges involving 286 people. Most victims were children, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a press release confirming that Rasheed targeted at least 180 kids under 16.

AFP coordinated with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and INTERPOL to catch Rasheed before more victims could be harmed. Their investigation started in 2019 when cops in Leon County, Florida, were tipped off to a sextortion scammer "masquerading as a YouTuber," an ICE press release said. He was first charged in 2020 and was then hit with more charges in 2021.

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Enlarge / The Apple Books icon on a Mac. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple will cut 100 jobs, all in its digital services teams. Laid off employees will have 60 days to find another job in the company before it cuts ties with them altogether, according to a Bloomberg report.

Compared to some other big tech companies, layoffs are relatively uncommon at Apple. This is the fourth wave this year, but cuts so far (including this one) have been laser-focused and small in scope—a contrast with companies like Intel, Cisco, or Microsoft, which have recently made more drastic cuts of anywhere from 7 to 15 percent of their workforces.

The current set of cuts chiefly affects the Books team. Digital services like this have been a big part of Apple's financial success in recent quarters; in just the past year, services revenue is up 14 percent. However, Books has no subscription offering, and Apple was subject to a US Department of Justice price-fixing lawsuit.

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Enlarge / Human driver will continue to be a job at the Boring Company Las Vegas Loop for the foreseeable future. (credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Image)

Autonomous driving capabilities are a central component of Tesla's stratospheric share price, with CEO Elon Musk repeatedly telling investors that they're the difference between "being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero." But real-world performance on the road lags far behind Musk's claims, with the latest data point coming from another Musk venture, the Boring Company, and its tunnels under Las Vegas.

The Boring Company might be Elon Musk's strangest side hustle. Whether it was sparked by a desire to avoid traffic commuting to SpaceX or part of an insidious plan to undermine rail projects, the results for the sewer-sized tunnels have been about what you'd expect: Proposed tunnels between Washington DC and Baltimore, underneath I-405 in Los Angeles, and from Chicago to its major airport remain literal pipe dreams.

So far, there's just a 2.2-mile loop with three stations serving the Las Vegas Convention Center, albeit with the potential to expand the subterranean system to 68 miles (110 km) in total.

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As the Trump campaign overtly appeals to the manosphere, a WIRED investigation shows that the view of women espoused by alleged rapist and trafficker Andrew Tate matches perfectly with that of Trump and his allies.

New updates for Gemini include custom Gems and improved image generation with Imagen 3.New updates for Gemini include custom Gems and improved image generation with Imagen 3.

Learn more about AI tools from Google for exploring while you travel.Learn more about AI tools from Google for exploring while you travel.

ByteDance’s Gauth app scans math homework and provides thorough, often correct, answers using AI. Millions have already downloaded it for free.

ByteDance’s Gauth app scans math homework and provides thorough, often correct, answers using AI. Millions have already downloaded it for free.

Enlarge / Telegram CEO Pavel Durov at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is heading to court for a possible indictment after being released from police custody, authorities in France said on Wednesday. "An investigating judge has ended Pavel Durov's police custody and will have him brought to court for a first appearance and a possible indictment," according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor's office that was quoted in an Associated Press article.

Durov was arrested in Paris on Saturday and questioned by police for several days. The French investigative judge will "decide whether to place him under formal investigation following his arrest as part of a probe into organized crime on the messaging app," Reuters wrote today.

"Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates that judges consider there is enough to the case to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or shelved," Reuters wrote. The judge's decision on a formal investigation is expected today, the article said.

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