Category: Technology

WASHINGTON: A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the Sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It may sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1% chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists aren’t panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this…

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A joint effort by authorities of the United States and the Netherlands has led to the seizure of 39 domains and their associated servers used by a Pakistan-based cybercrime network comprising online marketplaces selling hacking and fraud-enabling tools. The hacking tools, according to the affidavit submitted in relation to the seizures, were operated by a group known as Saim Raza alias “HeartSender” which used crime-related websites since at least 2020 “to sell phishing toolkits and other fraud-enabling tools to transnational organised crime groups”, read a press release issued by the US…

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OpenAI chief Sam Altman recently acknowledged that his artificial intelligence tech firm is “on the wrong side of history” regarding the ChatGPT maker’s transparency abouts its technology. During a Ask Me Anything session on Reddit on Friday, Altman expressed his support for the idea of publishing OpenAI’s research, indicating that the topic is under discussion at San Francisco-based OpenAI. “I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy,” Altman said. “Not everyone at OpenAI shares this…

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OpenAI is seeking to raise $40 billion in a new funding that could elevate its valuation to an astonishing $430 billion, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Japan’s SoftBank is leading the investment, in talks to contribute between $15 billion and $25 billion, potentially becoming the largest financial supporter of the maker of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. This announcement follows concerns triggered by Chinese startup DeepSeek, which recently unveiled a powerful chatbot at a fraction of the cost of its American rivals, causing ripples…

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Meta-owned platform WhatsApp has released a fix in order to address a bug with the chat bar and the emoji keyboard, and it is available to everyone. While trying to use the chat feature smoothly, several beta testers experienced significant issues with the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.25.3.2 update, reported WABetaInfo. Specifically, the chat bar was incorrectly placed underneath the emoji picker when users opened the emoji keyboard making it complicated to transition quickly between these two elements. As users could not easily return to typing in the chat after using…

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Leading White House advisers this week raised concern that China’s DeepSeek might have derived benefits from a technique called “distillation”, in which the system purportedly piggybacked off the advancements of US competitors. Investor and executive sources in Silicon Valley believe it might be hard to prevent the method wherein one AI system learns from another AI system. DeepSeek this month rocked the technology sector with a new AI model that appeared to rival the capabilities of US giants like OpenAI, but at much lower cost. And the China-based company gave…

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BEIJING: Alibaba, a renowned Chinese tech company, on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. DeepSeek’s popularity and meteoric rise in the past three week has placed both overseas and local rivals under pressure and it is highlighted with Qwen 2.5-Max’s unusual release timing on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most people are off work and with their families. “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms […] almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit…

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UK experts have expressed apprehensions over the rapid increase in the use of DeepSeek, urging users to remain vigilant of the Chinese artificial intelligence platform. The experts cited concerns about the chatbot spreading misinformation and alleged that the Chinese state can possibly exploit information and data handed over by the users. Joining the bandwagon, the British government has left it up to the people to use the new AI but it says the officials are monitoring anything that might threaten the national security and added that necessary actions will be…

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WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX will “soon” begin a mission to repatriate two American astronauts who have been stranded for months on the International Space Station. In June, veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner, and were due to spend only eight days on the orbiting laboratory, but technical problems on the spacecraft prompted Nasa to change plans. The US space agency announced in August that Boeing rival SpaceX would bring the crew home in…

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WASHINGTON: Amid looming uncertainty surrounding the future of TikTok, there is a glimpse of hope for millions of users over the possibility of an American TikTok owned by a US-based company. The possibility exists in light of United States President Donald Trump’s statement who has said that ech giant Microsoft was in talks to acquire popular video-sharing platform. Asked late Monday if Microsoft was in discussion for acquiring TikTok, Trump told reporters: “I would say yes”. “There’s a lot of interest in TikTok, there’s great interest in TikTok,” he added…

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