China charity boss investigated over sex-for-cash demand to desperate mother of sick child, multiple accusations surface online

The boss of a charity organisation in China has been accused of seeking sexual favours from a desperate mother in exchange for donations to help her seriously ill child. A female charity worker, surnamed Zheng, who helped set up the 9958 Project under the China Charities Aid Foundation for Children, publicly accused Lei Ke, the regional...

Opinion: The ‘paedophile problem’ in kids’ video games

When my husband bought the then-5-year-old a Nintendo Switch, I made a list articulating all my reservations about my child having a gaming console so young. I worried about the dopamine of it all, about my son becoming accustomed to getting the immediate gratification that comes from a game and how it would impact his...

Google works to reduce non-consensual deepfake porn in search

Google is making adjustments to its search engine to reduce the prevalence of sexually explicit fake content high in results, responding to the explosion in non-consensual unsavory content people have created using generative artificial intelligence tools. When that AI-generated content features a real person’s face or body without their permission, that person can request its removal...

Kakao billionaire arrested in K-pop market manipulation case

South Korean authorities have arrested Kakao Corp founder Brian Kim over allegations of market manipulation, making the Internet entrepreneur the most prominent business figure in the country in years to wind up in jail. The Seoul Southern District Court made the decision to take the 58-year-old into custody, citing “concerns of evidence destruction and flight”. The...

Malicious actors trying to exploit global tech outage for their own gain

As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals about new phishing schemes that involve...

Spending time online may boost your well-being, the results of a large international study revealed May 13. Researchers at the University of Oxford examined 16 years of data from 2.4 million people, tracking things like life satisfaction and sense of purpose. They found that people with access to the web scored 8% higher in measures of well-being compared...

How you address ChatPT can affect your response

“Compose a message to customer service about a lost package”, “Can you rewrite this paragraph to make it more concise?”... It’s not always easy to know how to talk to ChatGPT. However researchers at the University of Southern California have found that conversational robots like ChatGPT perform much better when addressed politely. Abel Salinas and Fred...

LONDON: Instagram says it’s deploying new tools to protect young people and combat sexual extortion, including a feature that will automatically blur nudity in direct messages. The social media platform said in a blog post April 11 that it’s testing out the features as part of its campaign to fight sexual scams and other forms of “image...

A school removed bathroom mirrors to keep students from making TikToks. Will it work?

Administrators at Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, NC, recently removed bathroom mirrors after discovering students were spending copious amounts of classroom time in front of them creating TikTok videos. Some students were asking to use the bathroom five or more times a day and spending upwards of five minutes out of class during each excused...

Chief metaverse officers are out. AI is in

Advertising giant Publicis Groupe SA made an unusual executive hire in mid-2022 – a lion-headed digital avatar named Leon who would serve as “chief metaverse officer”, guiding clients through the virtual realm that had seized real-world attention. His moment in the spotlight didn’t last long. Five months later, ChatGPT debuted, and the buzz that had surrounded the...