NEW YORK Cryptoassets, peddled as the future of finance, have not only failed to deliver on their promise

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 28, 2023--

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Microsoft is killing off WordPad, its decades-old text editor in Windows. The company will no longer update the software. It will then remove it from a future version of Windows. WordPad has been around since Windows 95. It has stood somewhere between Word, its more fully-featured text editor, and the simplicity of Notepad. “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” Microsoft wrote in a support note. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.” WordPad has always been offered for free, in contrast to Microsoft Word, which requires the payment of a fee or subscription. But it lacked many features of Word such as a spellchecker, too, and is unable to save into some key formats. The support note did not explain why it would be removing the software. It added to a page of deprecated software that notes that “new versions [of Windows] also remove features and functionality, often because they’ve added a newer option”. Microsoft’s announcement came soon after it released new updates for Notepad, which also comes free but does not offer the same formatting or features as WordPad or Word. It will be getting autosave and other new features, after the recent addition of dark mode and other changes. As well as coming under competition from its more full-featured and more simplistic siblings, other third-party options such as Google Docs also offer many of the same tools – and much more besides. WordPad on the other hand has been barely touched in years. It was last updated with Windows 8, more than ten years ago, and even then received only a small redesign. Read More Microsoft makes big changes to takeover of Activision Blizzard SpaceX smashes rocket launch record as Musk eyes historic Starship mission Vodafone users say they can’t call people

WhatsApp will finally let people create group chats without having to come up with a clever name for them – or any name at all. Users will instead be able to just make a group and then have that group name itself after the people inside of it. WhatsApp suggested that the tool will be useful when “you need to create a group in a hurry, or you don’t have a group topic in mind”. It will be available for group chats with up to six people in them. The group names will be changed dynamically, depending on who is in the group. The group name will display differently for each user in it, depending on how they have people saved in their phone. If someone is added to a group with people who don’t have that person saved, then their phone number will show instead. Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature on Facebook. “Making it simpler to start WhatsApp groups by naming them based on who’s in the chat when you don’t feel like coming up with another name,” he wrote, sharing a picture of how the new groups will look. The feature is rolling out “globally over the next few days”, Meta said. It is one of a number of small tweaks that have been added to WhatsApp in recent weeks. Most recently, it fixed a major frustration that meant that pictures would be shrunk when they were sent within a group. The company is also quietly working on other features, including the addition of generative AI to create new stickers just by describing them. Read More WhatsApp update finally stops it ruining your photos WhatsApp rolls out AI tool for creating custom art Jury finds teenager responsible for computer hacking spree

Meta Platforms Inc.’s new social media app Threads has garnered 70 million users in just two days after

The boss of Spotify has said he would not completely ban content generated by artificial intelligence from the music streaming service. Daniel Ek told the BBC he thought there were legitimate use cases for the technology in music, but that it should not be used to impersonate real artists without their consent. He said there were three “buckets” of AI use in music: tools such as auto-tune, which he said was acceptable; software which impersonated artists, which was not; and a more controversial middle ground where AI-generated music was inspired by a specific artist but did not directly mimic them. But he said the issue would likely be debated for “many, many years”. “You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they’re not. We’ve seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system,” he said. “We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues.” Spotify does not allow content from its platform to be used to train AI models. Last month, Irish singer Hozier said he would consider striking over the threat of AI to the music industry, and a number of other artists have spoken out about their concerns about the use of technology in creating music. Regulators worldwide are stepping up their scrutiny of AI, given its explosion into general use worldwide and fears over its impact on jobs, industry, copyright, the education sector and privacy – among many other areas. We've seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system Daniel Ek, Spotify The UK will host a safety summit on the potential opportunities and threats posed by AI in November. Read More Spotify makes AI voice clones of podcasters and uses them to speak other languages Spotify CEO Daniel Ek denies existence of alleged artist streaming scheme Streaming service Deezer signs Universal Music royalty deal to prioritise musicians over AI

WILMINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--

The Biden administration is announcing an investment of $251 million in carbon capture and storage projects in seven states

Innovation by Japan’s companies to advance clean energy technology can speed up the country’s efforts to curb emissions,

Meta Platforms Inc. is giving marketers artificial intelligence tools to create ads and make them more effective. The