Sdorn Provides Timely and Accurate Technology News, Covering APP, AI, IoT, Cybersecurity, Startup and Innovation.
⎯ 《 Sdorn • Com 》
Arm shares eye third straight day of losses as post-IPO buzz fizzles
Arm shares eye third straight day of losses as post-IPO buzz fizzles
(Reuters) -Shares in Arm Holdings were down 5.4% on Tuesday, on track for their third decline out of the stock's
2023-09-20 00:56
Ring in spooky season with thrilling video game deals from Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation
Ring in spooky season with thrilling video game deals from Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation
It's the most ghoulish time of the year — which means it's the ideal time
2023-10-21 00:18
Climate Costs Mount for Poorer Nations Already Burdened by Debt
Climate Costs Mount for Poorer Nations Already Burdened by Debt
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif warned world leaders at the COP27 climate talks last November that developing nations
2023-05-30 12:25
A Week In Rockland County, NY, On A $70,000 Salary
A Week In Rockland County, NY, On A $70,000 Salary
Welcome to Money Diaries where we are tackling the ever-present taboo that is money. We’re asking real people how they spend their hard-earned money during a seven-day period — and we’re tracking every last dollar.
2023-06-21 23:15
TikTok ban in numbers: Charting the controversial rise of the world’s most popular app
TikTok ban in numbers: Charting the controversial rise of the world’s most popular app
Less than six years after launching in the US, TikTok is now facing a reckoning. After amassing more than 150 million users in the country, lawmakers are now making moves to roll out a complete ban. The biggest ever Chinese tech success in the US is accused of mishandling user data and holding too much influence over Americans, with Montana becoming the first state to sign a bill into law to make it illegal for TikTok to operate there from January 2024. Fears around national security have been countered with questions about censorship, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation describing the prospect of a ban as a “seed of genuine security concern wrapped in a thick layer of censorship”. The US digital liberties group has called on people to “resist a governmental power to ban a popular means of communication and expression”, while the FBI claims Chinese state ties to parent company ByteDance could allow the app to “manipulate content” in order to spread harmful propaganda. The US is not the first major market to consider a total ban of the social media platform, with India issuing a complete TikTok ban in 2020. Other countries and areas, including the EU, have put partial bans in place. Various federal and state TikTok bans are already in place in the US, banning government workers and military personnel from using the app on official devices. This has done little to stem its growth in the US, with TikTok proving to be the most popular app both in America and globally last year with 672 million total downloads. This has helped bring the total number of TikTok users around the world to above 1.5 billion, with only India’s ban nearly three years ago slightly slowing its growth – but only temporarily. Despite the warnings surrounding TikTok, the app is viewed positively by the majority of young users, which may cause the Biden administration to hesitate on ordering an outright ban given younger demographics typically skew towards voting Democrat. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew defended the app and its intentions when he appeared before Congress earlier this year. The former Facebook intern downplayed ties to the Chinese government while trying to convince members of Congress that the app is safe for US users and poses no threat to national security. After Montana signed a TikTok ban into law on 17 May, 2023, a TikTok spokesperson said that the company would “work to defend the rights of our users” in all regions. Read More TikTok gains 50 million users in US as ban looms Schoolboy almost dies from swallowing magnets for TikTok challenge Woman shares honest review of New York City apartment TikTok mom slammed after making 5-year-old son run in 104 degree heat
2023-05-18 20:55
Lies of P Lie System: How to Unlock True Ending
Lies of P Lie System: How to Unlock True Ending
Here's how to unlock the true ending in Lies of P.
2023-09-22 05:58
Westinghouse Welcomes Canadian Suppliers to Symposium for Global Advanced Reactor Fleet
Westinghouse Welcomes Canadian Suppliers to Symposium for Global Advanced Reactor Fleet
MISSISSAUGA, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 20, 2023--
2023-07-20 22:29
REMNANT II Passes One Million Units Sold Milestone
REMNANT II Passes One Million Units Sold Milestone
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 1, 2023--
2023-08-01 18:26
Reining In Bureaucracy Starts With a Text Message: Big Take Podcast
Reining In Bureaucracy Starts With a Text Message: Big Take Podcast
Listen to The Big Take podcast on iHeart, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Terminal. Millions of Americans depend on public
2023-06-27 17:57
Salem Media Announces New Podcast with Ben Taatjes and Jerrid Sebesta on the Senior Resource Podcast Network
Salem Media Announces New Podcast with Ben Taatjes and Jerrid Sebesta on the Senior Resource Podcast Network
IRVING, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 20, 2023--
2023-07-20 21:23
Grand Theft Auto 6 - everything we know so far
Grand Theft Auto 6 - everything we know so far
How do you follow the biggest game of the last decade? That’s the dilemma Rockstar games have to deal with as they prepare to release Grand Theft Auto 6. The fifth instalment of the hugely popular video game series was released in 2013 and went on to sell 185 million copies, bringing us one of the most immersive open worlds ever created. It’s been a mainstay for gamers over the last decade and now developers have put fans on high alert after announcing the release of a new trailer due later this year. Here’s everything we know so far about Grand Theft Auto VI. Trailer Rockstar Games delighted GTA fans recently by announcing that a forthcoming trailer for GTA 6 will be unveiled in December. Many have shared the theory that the trailer release has been designed to coincide with the company’s 25th anniversary. Rockstar Games President Sam Houser wrote via the developer’s official social media account: “We are very excited to let you know that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. We look forward to many more years of sharing these experiences with all of you.” In fact, it’s made such a big impact in the gaming world that the post announcing the trailer has become the most-viewed gaming tweet in the social media site’s history with more than 143m views. It gives a small indication of the excitement out there for the upcoming instalment of the game. A date for the trailer drop has yet to be announced, but it’s thought that the new clip could arrive during the Game Awards on 7 December. Posting a message to fans, Rockstar Games wrote: “Next month marks the 25th anniversary of Rockstar Games. Thanks to the incredible support of our players worldwide, we have had the opportunity to create games we are truly passionate about. “Without you, none of this would be possible, and we are so grateful to all of you for sharing this journey with us. In 1998, Rockstar Games was founded on the idea that video games could come to be as essential to culture as any other form of entertainment, and we hope that we have created games you love in our efforts to be part of that evolution.” Release date We don’t know the release date yet, of course, but we do know that people have been speculating about a release by March 2025. Why? Well, Rockstar is hinting that major things are planned for the fiscal year of 2025. Strauss Zelnick is the CEO and chairman of Rockstar owners Take-Two. He previously said in a statement: “We remain confident that we are positioning our business for a significant inflection point in fiscal 2025, which we believe will include new record levels of operating performance. “We would like to thank all of our stakeholders for their continued support, and we look forward to delivering on this exciting next chapter.” If the theory is true, it means that the game would be released by March 2025 at the latest, but things are far from certain. The previous game could also give us some indication of when to expect the release. People are also looking back to the GTA 5 trailer, which was released in November 2011 - nearly two years before the game came out on 17 September 2013. A bizarre 'moon theory' is also being used by hopeful fans to predict a release date. Leaks A huge leak at Rockstar showcased a number of details about the game.Hints about the gameplay, setting and characters are focused on in the next section of this article, but some of the other leaks relate to the GTA 6 map. It'll likely be bigger than GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, way bigger.Fans also noticed 12 leaked details relating to GTA 6 that could be game changers involving NPC interactions and the weather details. Gameplay, features and setting According to a report in Bloomberg, the series will return to Vice City, the setting for iconic 00s game GTA Vice City based on Miami, for the new instalment. The report also claims that the new game will feature more interior locations than ever before. The report also claimed that the game is said to feature two bank robbers as playable main characters, a man and a woman, who have a Bonnie and Clyde-like relationship. It will mark the first time a woman would be a playable character in the game franchise since the release of Grand Theft Auto III. We're still in the dark about many of the features, but fans hope that more dynamic robberies and better NPC interactions are a part of the new game. They're also expecting better graphics. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings
2023-11-21 00:21
Why isn’t Twitter working? How Elon Musk finally broke his site – and why the internet might be about to get worse
Why isn’t Twitter working? How Elon Musk finally broke his site – and why the internet might be about to get worse
It started like any other outage: unexplained error messages that told users they had hit their “rate limit”, and Twitter posts refusing to load. But as the weekend progressed, it became clear that these weren’t just any old technical problems, but rather issues that could define the future not only of Twitter but of the internet. Elon Musk took to Twitter on Saturday and announced that he would be introducing a range of changes “to address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation”. Users would only be able to see a limited number of posts, and those who are not logged in wouldn’t be able to see the site at all. That decision triggered those error messages, since users were hitting the “rate limit” that meant they were requesting too many posts for Twitter to be able to handle. The new limits – apparently temporary, though still in effect – meant that users were being rationed on how many tweets they were able to see, and would see frustrating and unexplained messages when they actually hit that limit. In many ways it was yet another perplexing and worrying decision by Mr Musk, whose stewardship of Twitter has lurched from scandal to scandal since he took over the company in October last year. (He appointed a chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, last month, but is still seemingly deciding, executing and communicating the company’s strategy.) But something seems different about the chaos this time around. For one, it is not one of the many content policy issues or potentially hostile ways of encouraging people to sign up for Twitter’s premium service that have marked Mr Musk’s leadership of Twitter so far; for another, it seemed to be part of a broader issue that is rattling the whole internet, and which Twitter might only be one symptom. It remains unclear whether Mr Musk’s latest decision really has anything to do with scraping by artificial intelligence systems, as he claimed. But the explanation certainly makes sense: AI systems require vast corpuses of text and images to be trained on, and the companies that make them have generated that by scraping and regurgitating the text that can be easily found across the web. Every time someone wants to load a web page, their computer makes a request to that company’s servers, which then provide the data that can be reconstructed on the user’s web browser. If you want to load Elon Musk’s Twitter account, for instance, you direct your browser to the relevant address and it will show his Twitter posts, pulled down from the internet. That comes with costs, of course, including the price of running those servers and the bandwidth required to be sending vast amounts of data quickly across the internet. For the most part on the modern internet, that cost has been covered by also sending along some advertising, or requiring that people sign up for a subscription to see the content they are asking for. AI companies that are scraping those sites make frequent requests for that data, however, and quickly. And since the system is automated, they are not able to look at ads or pay for subscriptions, meaning that companies are not paid for the content they are providing. That issue looks to be growing across the internet. Companies that host text discussions, such as Twitter, are very aware that they might be serving up the same data that could one day render them obsolete, and are keen to at least make some money from that process. It also looks to be some of the reason behind the recent fallout on Reddit, too. That site is especially useful for feeding to an AI – it includes very human and very helpful answers to the kinds of questions that users might ask an AI system – and the company is very aware that it is, once again, giving up the information that might also be used to overtake it. To try and solve that, it recently announced that it would be charging large amounts of access to its API, which serves as the interface through which automated systems can hoover up that data. It was at least partly intended as a way to generate money from those AI companies, though it also had the effect of making it too expensive for third-party Reddit clients – which also rely on that API – to keep running, and the most popular ones have since shut down. There is good reason to think that this will keep happening. The web is increasingly being hoovered up by the same AI systems that will eventually be used to further degrade the experience of using it: Twitter is, in effect, being used to train the same bots that will one day post misleading and annoying messages all over Twitter. Every website that hosts text, images or video could face the same problems, as AI companies look to build up their datasets and train up their systems. As such, all of the internet could become more like Mr Musk’s Twitter did over the weekend: actively hostile to actual users, as it attempts to keep the fake users away. But just as likely is that it is Mr Musk’s explanation for why the site went down conveniently chimes with the zeitgeist, and helpfully shifts blame to the AI companies that he has already voiced significant skepticism about. The truth may be that Twitter – which has fired the vast majority of its staff, including those in its engineering teams – might finally be running into problems with infrastructure that happen when fewer people are around to keep the site online. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, is perhaps the best qualified person to suggest that is the case. He said that Mr Musk’s argument for the new limits “doesn’t pass the sniff test” and instead suggested that it was the result of someone mistakenly breaking the rate limiter and then having that accident passed off by Mr Musk as being intentional, whether he knows that or not. “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter,” Mr Roth wrote on Twitter rival Bluesky. “There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.” Mr Roth also said that Twitter has long been aware that it was being scraped – and that it was OK with it. He called it the “open secret of Twitter data access” and said the company considered it “fine”. And he too suggested that the events of the weekend could be a hint about what is coming to the internet, offering an entirely different alternative. It’s not Twitter, Reddit and other companies who should really be upset about what is going on, he suggested. “There’s some legitimacy to Twitter and Reddit being upset with AI companies for slurping up social data gratis in order to train commercially lucrative models,” Mr Roth said. “But they should never forget that it’s not *their* data — it’s ours. A solution to parasitic AI needs to be user-centric, not profit-centric.” Read More Twitter to stop TweetDeck access for unverified users Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads to be launched this week – report Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand Twitter is breaking more and more Twitter rival sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’ What does Twitter’s rate-limiting restriction mean?
2023-07-04 15:49