Square, the digital payments company, experienced outages on several services Thursday.

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The universe went in “extreme slow motion” at its beginning, and has dramatically sped up since, scientists have found. The discovery, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, was finally confirmed after scientists observed the universe soon after the Big Bang. Einstein’s theory suggests that we should be able to see the distant universe, when it was much older than it is today, running much more slowly. But scientists have not been able to actually look that far and confirm the theory. Now scientists have used bright quasars as a sort of space clock, allowing them to measure time when the universe was much older than it is today. “Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower,” said Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, lead author on the new research. “If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.” Professor Lewis and other researchers gathered data from 200 quasars for the research. Quasars are very active supermassive black holes that sit in the middle of early galaxies, and hence provide a reliable way to look back at a much younger universe. Previous researchers have done the same using supernovae, or massive exploding stars. Those are useful but they are also difficult to see at the very very long distances of the early universe, meaning that the confirmation was limited only to about half the age of the cosmos. Now by using quasars scientists were able to look much further back, to just a tenth of the age of the universe, when it was only a billion years old. “Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding,” Professor Lewis said. “This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today. “In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang.” The work is described in a new paper, ‘Detection of the cosmological time dilation of high-redshift quasars’, published in Nature Astronomy. Read More Astronomers discover ‘shooting stars’ on the Sun Tonight’s ’supermoon’ will be biggest full moon of 2023 so far – here’s how to see it Euclid: UK-backed space mission takes off to uncover mysteries of dark universe Astronomers discover ‘shooting stars’ on the Sun Tonight’s ’supermoon’ will be biggest full moon of 2023 so far – here’s how to see it Euclid: UK-backed space mission takes off to uncover mysteries of dark universe

By Helen Coster NEW YORK The head of engineering for the company that operates former U.S. President Donald

Slack, the popular workplace chat app, has broken in the middle of the day. The outage means that colleagues are unable to talk to each other. Attempting to send messages showed an error that indicated they had not been delivered – though users were still able to see old conversations. Many of the world’s biggest companies rely on Slack to connect colleagues both within and across companies. As many workplaces have gone at least partly remote, it is now a significant part of workplace communication. The outage began around 10am UK time on Thursday. Tracking website Down Detector showed a rapid spike in the number of reports of problems. The official Slack status page had not been updated at the time of publication. It had also not posted on its official Twitter accounts, which it sometimes uses to provide updates on outages. Read More Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand ‘blocked in Indonesia’ Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg

TikTok has been fined 345 million euro (£296 million) by Ireland’s data watchdog following an investigation into how the social media platform processed children’s data. The fine was imposed on TikTok Technology Limited (TTL) by the Data Protection Commission (DPC) after the probe into how certain privacy settings and features complied with obligations under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The DPC inquiry examined age verification as part of the registration process and the processing of the personal data of children by the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform between July 31 and December 31 2020. Tiktok said that it “respectfully disagreed” with the level of the fine imposed and stated that it related to features and settings which were in place three years ago. The DPC adopted its final decision regarding its inquiry into TTK on September 1. We respectfully disagree with the decision, particularly the level of the fine imposed TikTok spokesperson The DPC ruling described how child users progressed through the sign-up to the TikTok platform in such a manner that their accounts were set to public by default. It said this meant that videos that were posted to child users’ account were public-by-default and comments were enabled publicly by default. In the Family Pairing feature, the DPC said a child user’s accounts could be “paired” with an unverified non-child. It said that that the non-child user had the power to enable direct messages for child users above the age of 16, thereby making this feature less strict for the child user. As part of the inquiry, the DPC also examined some of TTL’s transparency obligations, including the extent of information provided to child users in relation to default settings. The DPC has issued a reprimand as well as an order requiring TTL to bring its processing into compliance by taking specified action specified within three months and administrative fines totalling 345 million euro. A spokesperson for TikTok said: “We respectfully disagree with the decision, particularly the level of the fine imposed. “The DPC’s criticisms are focused on features and settings that were in place three years ago, and that we made changes to well before the investigation even began, such as setting all under 16 accounts to private by default.” It is the latest in a series of fines handed out by the DPC in Ireland to social media giants. Earlier this year, Facebook’s parent company Meta Ireland was fined 390 million for breaches of EU data privacy rules, one of a number of fines the DPC has imposed on the company. In Januar,y WhatsApp was fined more than five million euro over data protection breaches and last year Instagram was fined 405 million euro over the way in which it handled teenagers’ personal data. Earlier this year in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office fined TikTok £12.7 million because it “did not do enough” to make sure underage children were not using its platform and ensure that their data was used correctly. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Stadiums and tourism hotspots to test new 5G networks in £88 million scheme Chatbots ‘able to outperform most humans at creative thinking task’ Information Commissioner urges people to share data to protect at-risk children

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