Technology

2024 was "a year of growth," according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that's not an entirely good thing.

The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60 percent increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.

Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.31-011236/https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-elon-musk-satellite-cell-phone-services-ed2d2730

Apple AAPL -2.66%decrease; red down pointing triangle is clashing with Elon Musk in its push to eliminate cellphone dead spots with satellite technology.

The iPhone maker is investing heavily in satellite-based communications that keep users connected in places where traditional wireless signals aren’t available. Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile, has launched more than 550 satellites that provide cellphone connectivity via its Starlink service.

To build capacity, the companies are competing for valuable spectrum rights—airwaves to carry their signals—which are in limited supply. Apple’s outer-space investments have drawn Musk’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. SpaceX has pushed federal regulators to stall an Apple-funded satellite expansion effort.

The conflict intensified in recent months after SpaceX and its partner, T-Mobile, sought Apple’s cooperation to offer Starlink on iPhones, some of the people said. The companies engaged in tense discussions and eventually reached an agreement that allows the SpaceX and T-Mobile satellite cellphone service, which will debut this summer, to appear seamlessly on newer iPhones. Apple retains tight control over the iPhone’s largely closed software ecosystem.

After adding in-app English translations and bilingual subtitles, Xiaohongshu recently opened a Hong Kong office, and posted a role for global business development based in Hong Kong on its official LinkedIn account. The city is often the first step for Chinese companies expanding overseas. Earlier this month, it also launched a global e-commerce pilot program for mainland Chinese merchants that initially targets the U.S., Hong Kong, and Macau.

“RedNote’s pivot signals an evolution to take markets outside China seriously,” Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, told Rest of World. While the company had been trying to expand overseas, the “TikTok refugee phenomenon likely made this pivot a must-have rather than simmering on the back burner.”

The unexpected surge of global users in January due to fears of a TikTok ban could provide a windfall for Xiaohongshu. But for the platform to compete with Western social media apps, it must retain these users, build cross-border e-commerce functions, and clarify its overseas business strategy, experts and business owners told Rest of World.

After years of companies promising that their quantum dot light-emitting diode TVs use quantum dots (QDs) to boost color, some industry watchers and consumers have recently started questioning whether QLED TVs use QDs at all. Lawsuits have been filed, accusing companies like TCL of using misleading language about whether their QLED TVs actually use QDs.

In this article, we'll break down why new conspiracy theories about QLED TVs are probably overblown. We'll also explore why misleading marketing from TV brands is responsible for customer doubt and how it all sets a bad precedent for the future of high-end displays, including OLED TVs and monitors.

By 2012 — one year after joining Facebook — Wynn-Williams had ample evidence of the platform's role in enabling violence and harm upon its users, and state-sanctioned digital repression, yet her memoir neither mentions these events nor the repeated warnings to her team from civil society groups in Asia before the situation escalated... In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities.

She briefly mentions how Facebook's local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook's vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil. Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook's leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore.

Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook's "lower-level employees."

There’s a popular adage in policy circles: “The party can never fail, it can only be failed.” It is meant as a critique of the ideological gatekeepers who may, for example, blame voters for their party’s failings rather than the party itself.

That same fallacy is taking root among AI’s biggest backers. AI can never fail, it can only be failed. Failed by you and me, the smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t get it. (To be sure, even AI proponents will acknowledge available models’ shortcomings — no one would argue that the AI slop clogging Facebook is anything but, well, slop — but there is a dominant narrative within tech that AI is both inevitable and revolutionary.)

Tech columnists such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose have suggested recently that Apple has failed AI, rather than the other way around.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.28-144842/https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

A concert on Monday night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall was a special occasion for Frank Miller: his parents’ wedding anniversary. He didn’t end up seeing the show — and before he could even get past security, he was informed that he was in fact banned for life from the venue and all other properties owned by Madison Square Garden (MSG).

After scanning his ticket and promptly being pulled aside by security, Miller was told by staff that he was barred from the MSG properties for an incident at the Garden in 2021. But Miller says he hasn’t been to the venue in nearly a decade.

“They hand me a piece of paper letting me know that I’ve been added to a ban list,” Miller says. “There’s a trespass notice if I ever show up on any MSG property ever again,” which includes venues like Radio City, the Beacon Theatre, the Sphere, and the Chicago Theatre.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.29-000347/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-28/musk-loses-bid-to-thwart-investor-suit-over-twitter-purchase

Elon Musk failed to fend off an investor lawsuit claiming he manipulated the stock price of Twitter Inc. months before he bought the company in 2022 by concealing how much stock he’d acquired.

A Manhattan federal judge on Friday said investors can move forward with claims that Musk committed securities fraud by failing to make timely disclosures to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, posting “misleading tweets about Twitter’s future” and carrying out “a coordinated trading strategy to silently build up” his position in the social media company.

Lawyers for Musk and the investors didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/z7vik

March 28 (Reuters) - Elon Musk said on Friday that his xAI has acquired X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock transaction for $45 billion, including $12 billion debt.

"xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent," Musk said in a post on X, adding that the combined company would be valued at $80 billion.

Neither X nor xAI immediately responded to a request for comment.

An examination of a large number of ChatGPT responses found that the model consistently exhibits values aligned with the libertarian-left segment of the political spectrum. However, newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. The paper was published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.

Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence systems trained to understand and generate human language. They learn from massive datasets that include books, articles, websites, and other text sources. By identifying patterns in these data, LLMs can answer questions, write essays, translate languages, and more. Although they don’t think or understand like humans, they predict the most likely words based on context.

Often, the responses generated by LLMs reflect certain political views. While LLMs do not possess personal political beliefs, their outputs can mirror patterns found in the data they were trained on. Since much of that data originates from the internet, news media, books, and social media, it can contain political biases. As a result, an LLM’s answers may lean liberal or conservative depending on the topic. This doesn’t mean the model “believes” anything—it simply predicts words based on previous patterns. Additionally, the way a question is phrased can influence how politically slanted the answer appears.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.28-172526/https://www.ft.com/content/b1e962a8-ec26-41f8-a491-ad127349c1b4

CoreWeave shares fell on their US debut after the data centre operator downsized its initial public offering over concerns about its business model and waning exuberance in groups linked to artificial intelligence. 

The cloud computing provider dropped 2.5 per cent on Friday to $39 as it started trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market following the largest US tech IPO since chipmaker Arm Holdings went public in September 2023. 

CoreWeave raised $1.5bn when it floated its shares at $40 a piece on Thursday evening. It had initially targeted raising $4bn and dropped that figure to $2.7bn when it began a roadshow to generate interest for its shares last week.  

“I don’t really think of the market as friendly or unfriendly,” CoreWeave chief executive Michael Intrator told the Financial Times on Friday. “We have definitely been doing this during a bit of a challenging time with regards to the AI trade in financial markets.”

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.28-120233/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-28/reddit-s-50-plunge-fails-to-entice-dip-buyers-as-growth-slows

The gloomy sentiment around Reddit Inc. has failed to dissipate after its shares fell 50% from a February high, with volatile technology stocks under pressure. 

The social media platform has struggled to recover since an earnings report in February showed that it is failing to keep up with larger digital advertising peers such as Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Reddit’s outlook seemed precarious because its traffic took a hit from a change in Google’s search algorithm.

In recent weeks, the short interest in Reddit — a proxy for the volume of bets against the company — has ticked up, and forecasts for the company’s share price have fallen. One analyst opened coverage of Reddit this month with a recommendation that investors sell the shares, in part due to the company’s heavy reliance on Google.

“It’s been super overvalued,” Bob Lang, founder and chief options analyst at Explosive Options said of Reddit shares. “Their growth rate is very strong, but they still are not making any money”

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.26-091405/https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/26/1113802/china-ai-data-centers-unused/

A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze. 

At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of high-performing Nvidia GPUs that were subject to US export restrictions. Many were smuggled through overseas channels to Shenzhen. At the height of the demand, a single Nvidia H100 chip, a kind that is essential to training AI models, could sell for up to 200,000 yuan ($28,000) on the black market. 

Now, his WeChat feed and industry group chats tell a different story. Traders are more discreet in their dealings, and prices have come back down to earth. Meanwhile, two data center projects Li is familiar with are struggling to secure further funding from investors who anticipate poor returns, forcing project leads to sell off surplus GPUs. “It seems like everyone is selling, but few are buying,” he says.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.28-060326/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-28/taiwan-probes-china-chipmaker-smic-for-allegedly-poaching-staff

Taiwan is investigating whether China’s leading chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. illegally poached local engineers as part of an effort to access the island’s cutting-edge chip technology.

SMIC set up a branch in Taiwan posing as a Samoa-based company and tried to hire local talent, prosecutors from****Taiwan’s Investigation Bureau said Friday in a statement.

Local investigators raided 34 locations and conducted 90 interrogations this month as part of a large-scale probe into 11 Chinese tech companies including SMIC, according to the bureau, which is part of the justice ministry. A SMIC representative did not respond to requests for comment.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.27-121252/https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/03/27/virginia-speed-limit-device/

Virginia is set to become the first state in the country to require some reckless drivers to put devices on their cars that make it impossible to drive too fast.

D.C. passed similar legislation last year. Several other states, including Maryland, are considering joining them. It’s an embrace of a technological solution to a national problem: Speeding contributes to more than 10,000 deaths a year.

Under the Virginia legislation, a judge can decide to order drivers to install the speed limiters in their vehicles in lieu of taking away their driving privileges or sending them to jail. It takes effect in July 2026.

Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington) said various advocacy groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the National Safety Council, gave him the idea. He drove a car outfitted with the technology and was impressed. “It was easy to use, and once you’re engaged it’s impossible to go over the speed limit,” he said. “It will make our streets safer.”