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Elon Musk said Thursday he has found a new CEO for Twitter, or X Corp. as it's now called — and it's a woman. He did not name her but said she will be starting in about six weeks. Musk, who bought Twitter last fall and has been running it since, has long insisted he is not the company's permanent CEO. The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet Thursday that his role will transition to being Twitter's executive chairman and chief technology officer. In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying the social media platform for $44 billion, he told a D...
NEW YORK (AP) — Countless artists have taken inspiration from "The Starry Night" since Vincent Van Gogh painted the swirling scene in 1889. Now artificial intelligence systems are doing the same, training themselves on a vast collection of digitized artworks to produce new images you can conjure in seconds from a smartphone app. The images generated by tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be weird and otherworldly but also increasingly realistic and customizable — ask for a "peacock owl in the style of Van Gogh" and the...
The U.S. Commerce Department said Friday it will ban Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat from U.S. app stores on Sunday and will bar the apps from accessing essential internet services in the U.S. — a move that could effectively wreck the operation of both Chinese services for U.S. users. TikTok won't face the most drastic sanctions until after the Nov. 3 election, but WeChat users could feel the effects as early as Sunday. The order, which cited national security and data privacy concerns, follows weeks of dealmaking over the video-sharing s...
The owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle over Microsoft as its preferred suitor to buy the popular video-sharing app, according to a source familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. Microsoft announced Sunday that its bid for TikTok was rejected, removing the tech giant from the running a week before President Donald Trump promises to follow through with a plan to ban the Chinese-owned app in the U.S. over spying concerns. TikTok and the White House declined to comment Sunday. Oracle didn't return a request for...
Apple and Google are trying to get more U.S. states to adopt their phone-based approach for tracing and curbing the spread of the coronavirus by building more of the necessary technology directly into phone software. That could make it much easier for people to get the tool on their phone even if their local public health agency hasn't built its own compatible app. The tech giants on Tuesday launched the second phase of their "exposure notification" system, designed to automatically alert people if they might have been exposed to the...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia has rolled out a smartphone app to automatically notify people if they might have been exposed to the coronavirus, becoming the first U.S. state to use new pandemic technology created by Apple and Google. The free Covidwise app is available in Apple and Android app stores as of Wednesday. State officials, who emphasized that the app doesn't track user location or collect personal information, announced public campaigns encouraging people to download and use it. "We're using every possible approach to fight this v...
Honeywell no longer sells its iconic home thermostats, but it's still in the business of making control systems for buildings and aircraft. That's put the 114-year-old conglomerate in a tough spot as workplaces have gone vacant and flights grounded in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Darius Adamczyk, who became CEO in 2017, spoke with The Associated Press about how the business is adjusting to the pandemic, diverting resources to build personal protective equipment and continuing a quest for a powerful quantum computer that works by...
NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon on Wednesday banned police use of its face-recognition technology for a year, making it the latest tech giant to step back from law-enforcement use of systems that have faced criticism for incorrectly identifying people with darker skin. The Seattle-based company did not say why it took action now. Ongoing protests following the death of George Floyd have focused attention on racial injustice in the U.S. and how police use technology to track people. Floyd died May 25 after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed h...
On one side of this fraught moment: the president of the United States, facing multiple crises less than six months before the election. On the other: Twitter, the social media giant, which has grappled for years with how to handle its most prominent — and divisive — user. Caught in the middle: reality itself, and whose version gets heard over all the noise. Twitter's decision this week to stand up to President Donald Trump by attaching warnings to some of his many tweets has been years in the making, a culmination of American divisions pla...
On one side of this fraught moment: the president of the United States, facing multiple crises less than six months before the election. On the other: Twitter, the social media giant, which has grappled for years with how to handle its most prominent — and divisive — user. Caught in the middle: reality itself, and whose version gets heard over all the noise. Twitter's decision this week to stand up to President Donald Trump by attaching warnings to some of his many tweets has been years in the making, a culmination of American divisions pla...
Apple and Google fueled hopes for digital technology's promise against a fast-moving, invisible killer, announcing a joint effort to help public health agencies worldwide leverage smartphones to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. New software the companies plan to add to phones would make it easier to use Bluetooth wireless technology to track down people who may have been infected by coronavirus carriers. The idea is to help national, state and local governments roll out apps for so-called "contact tracing" that will run on iPhones and Android...
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday ordered a temporary halt of Microsoft's work on a $10 billion military cloud contract, a win for Amazon, which sued the U.S. government last year for awarding the contract to its rival. Amazon's lawsuit, filed in November, alleged that President Donald Trump's bias against the company hurt its chances to win the project. Amazon and Microsoft were finalists for the lucrative contract, for which Amazon was considered an early front-runner. The project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense I...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two groups of states are targeting Facebook and Google in separate antitrust probes, widening the scrutiny of Big Tech beyond sweeping federal and congressional investigations into their market dominance. Facebook and Google are two of the world's largest and most ubiquitous tech companies. The billions who use their services for making social media posts, uploading videos or searching ads are targeted by the tech companies for their personal data — a prized asset that enhances the companies' power. Regulators are exa...
If you're one of Facebook's more than 2 billion users, are you any better off now than you were before the Federal Trade Commission imposed new privacy restrictions and a $5 billion fine on the company this week? Facebook's settlement with the FTC after the agency's yearlong investigation provides a detailed account of the company's sneaky behavior and secures a handful of new safeguards, many of them backward-looking. They limit how Facebook shares some data with third-party app developers, circumscribe the collection of phone numbers for adve...
The woodsy community of Wolcott, Connecticut, doesn't see a lot of crime. But when the police chief heard about an opportunity to distribute doorbell cameras to some homes, he didn't hesitate. The police who keep watch over the town of 16,000 raffled off free cameras in a partnership with the camera manufacturer. So far, the devices have encountered more bears than criminals, but Chief Ed Stephens is still a fan. "Anything that helps keep the town safe, I'm going to do it," he said. But as more police agencies join with the company known as...
Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first "war cloud" computing system. But Amazon's early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away. Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military's computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all...
The operator of a video-sharing app popular with teenagers agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle federal allegations it illegally collected personal information from children . The Federal Trade Commission said the Wednesday penalty against lip-syncing app Musical.ly, now known as TikTok, is the largest ever obtained in a children's privacy case. The FTC said the app violated the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires kid-oriented websites to get parents' consent before collecting personal information from children...
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The CES 2019 gadget show, which kicks off Sunday, will showcase the expanding influence and sway of China's rapidly growing technology sector. But some of its firms are stepping back from the spotlight amid rising U.S. national-security concerns over Chinese tech and a trans-Pacific trade war launched by President Donald Trump. Last year, a top executive of the Chinese telecom firm Huawei delivered a CES keynote address critical of AT&T's abrupt cancellation of plans to sell a Huawei phone following espionage concerns raised b...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Apple plans to build a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, that will create at least 5,000 jobs ranging from engineers to call-center agents while adding more luster to a Southwestern city that has already become a bustling tech hub. The decision, announced Thursday, comes 11 months after Apple CEO Tim Cook disclosed plans to open a major office outside California on the heels of a massive tax cut on overseas profits, which prompted the company to bring about $250 billion back to the U.S. The company said it will also open...
Google announced Thursday it had disabled dozens of YouTube channels and other accounts linked to a state-run Iranian broadcaster for a political influence campaign. The security firm FireEye, which alerted tech companies to some of the suspicious activity, said in a report this week that the overall operation originates from Iran and promotes Iranian interests to audiences in the U.S. and elsewhere. Google said its own forensic research shows the accounts were set up by people associated with the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran...
MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Facebook has taken the lion's share of scrutiny from Congress and the media about data-handling practices that allow savvy marketers and political agents to target specific audiences, but it's far from alone. YouTube, Google and Twitter also have giant platforms awash in more videos, posts and pages than any set of human eyes could ever check. Their methods of serving ads against this sea of content may come under the microscope next. Advertising and privacy experts say a backlash is inevitable against a "Wild West" i...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers that regulation of his company is "inevitable," but still came to Capitol Hill prepared to defend against proposals he thought went too far. He rarely had to. After about 10 hours of hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday, markets rallied and privacy advocates were disappointed at the prospect that Facebook appeared to emerge unscathed, left to its own devices to manage how it collects vast amounts of personal data and handles user privacy. "This is still very much an uphill battle for privacy reforms,"...
Facebook has begun alerting some users that their data was swept up in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Anthony Bagnetto was one of many people who woke up Tuesday morning to a notification on his Facebook feed informing him that "one of" his friends used Facebook to log into a now-banned personality quiz app called "This Is Your Digital Life." The notice says the app misused the information, including public profile, page likes, birthday and current city, by sharing it with the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica. "Anybody...
Read carefully through the fine print of YouTube's terms of service and you might notice that you've affirmed you are old enough to watch it. "If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the service," the terms say. "There are lots of other great web sites for you." It's a warning that goes unheeded by millions of children around the world who visit YouTube to watch cartoons, nursery rhymes, science experiments or videos of toys being unboxed. In a formal complaint being filed Monday, child advocates and consumer groups are asking...
BOSTON (AP) — Child development experts and advocates are urging Facebook to pull the plug on its new messaging app aimed at kids. A group letter sent Tuesday to CEO Mark Zuckerberg argues that younger children — the app is intended for those under 13 — aren't ready to have social media accounts, navigate the complexities of online relationships or protect their own privacy. Facebook launched the free Messenger Kids app in December, pitching it as a way for children to chat with family members and friends approved by parents. It doesn't give...
