Technology

Google will soon let children use Android phones to make in-person purchases. It says there will be sufficient safeguards and controls for parents. The changes will be to Google Wallet. That's an app that lets users store card details and make ... payments in the real world without the card. The app also lets users store electronic versions of tickets and passes. The payments are contactless and use the NFC (near-field communication) chip in the phone. Users must authenticate the app through a security measure such as a PIN, passcode, fingerprint or facial recognition. Previously the app was only ... (view more)

Running app Strava made it possible to track the locations of world leaders and high-profile political candidates according to a newspaper investigation. Security services say the vulnerability did not put people at risk but are reviewing their ... guidelines on using the app. Le Monde investigated the movements of bodyguards for politicians including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Emannuel Macron and Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump plus partners Jill Biden and Melania Trump. (Source: lemonde.fr ) Secret Trip Revealed The newspaper was able to discover the names of the presidential bodyguards and find ... (view more)

The makers of an AI model claim it can take control of a computer and complete tasks such as completing forms. The latest version of "Claude" takes a screenshot and counts pixels to figure out how far to move the cursor. Anthropic, which made ... Claude, say this is the first time a publicly released AI model has the capability of "computer use". It defines this as "looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. The goal is to allow the model to carry out tasks which go beyond simply generating text or images in line with a user's instructions. Instead, it could actually ... (view more)

Harvard students have demonstrated that "smart glasses" can be used to look at somebody in public and reveal their identities and personal information. Meta, which made the glasses used in the demonstration, say they have adequate security ... safeguards in place. The Ray-Ban smart glasses, produced by Facebook owner Meta, connect wirelessly to a smartphone. They include a camera, speaker and microphone and allows a range of hands-free actions such as filming, taking photos and making calls. (Source: meta.com ) Facial Recognition Abused AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio of Harvard University ... (view more)

Facebook and Instagram's attempts to avoid users being misled by AI-generated photos have backfired. Several users report photographs they took themselves as being falsely labeled as made by AI tools. Meta, which owns both sites plus social ... discussion tool Threads, has started adding a "Made with AI" label to images. In some cases it's there because the users has ticked a box to say they used AI to make the image. In other cases, it's because Meta's detection tools have flagged the image. The site has felt pressure to clearly indicate AI-generated images that could be designed to fool and ... (view more)

A new approach to computer processing could double speeds while halving power consumption, according to researchers. The approach could work on existing hardware without needing physical modifications. The research builds on the existing technique ... of multithreading. That's an attempt to overcome the major limitation of computer processors (CPUs). They are broken down into cores (often 2, 4 or 8 cores) but each core can only carry out one task at any specific split-second. Workload Optimized Threading means breaking bigger tasks down into a list of individual steps known as a thread. The ... (view more)

Researchers in China have found a way to make flexible computer memory using liquid metal. It could one day revolutionize the physical design of computer devices. Anyone who has handled either internal computer RAM or a flash memory device will know ... that bending them even slightly would not end well. That's partly because the electronics is housed on often-brittle plastics, but partly because those electronics need to be flat and inflexible themselves. In very simple terms, RAM uses flat, two-dimensional electronic grids. Each point where a horizontal and vertical line crosses is a cell that ... (view more)

A physical limitation in traditional computers could be harnessed to power artificial intelligence according to a start-up business. They've demonstrated what they call a "thermodynamic computer." The research is all about the way that computers use ... a physical process to carry out a digital, mathematical operation. All traditional computing boils down to a circuit board using electronic switches to represent and process data as either a 1 (for "true") or a 0 (for "false"). The physical aspect can lead to problems, however. New Scientist gives the example of a component ... (view more)

WhatsApp users on Android could hit storage limits thanks to a change in Google policy. However, claims it could mean a "shock new fee" are misleading at best. Users of the popular messaging app can have their messages, including videos and images, ... automatically backed up from an Android device. However, WhatsApp itself does not handle the backup or store the data. Instead the backup is on Google Drive. Because WhatsApp doesn't hold backups itself, the Google Drive backup may be the only way to restore data when moving to a new phone, particularly when the old handset is broken or unavailable ... (view more)

A marketing company claims it can listen in to private conversations in peoples' homes and gather data for targeted advertising. It's not clear if Cox Media Group (CMG) is "revealing" a poorly kept secret or exaggerating its capabilities to boost ... business. The claims were made by CMG's marketing team in a pitch to other marketers. The details were revealed through a leak to 404 Media. (Source: 404media.co ) According to the report of the leak, CMG promoted the technology as "Active Listening" and asked potential clients "What would it mean for your business if you could target potential ... (view more)