All posts tagged: Breaking News: Technology

U.S. tightens its grip on AI chip flows across the globe

U.S. tightens its grip on AI chip flows across the globe

US President Joe Biden delivers remarks on advancing the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 30, 2023. Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images The U.S. government said on Monday it would further restrict artificial intelligence chip and technology exports, divvying up the world to keep advanced computing power in the U.S. and among its allies while finding more ways to block China’s access. The new regulations will cap the number of AI chips that can be exported to most countries and allow unlimited access to U.S. AI technology for America’s closest allies, while also maintaining a block on exports to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The lengthy new rules unveiled in the final days of outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration go beyond China and are aimed at helping the U.S. keep its dominant status in AI by controlling it around the world. “The U.S. leads AI now – both AI development and AI chip design, and …

Elon Musk endorses Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick for Treasury secretary

Elon Musk endorses Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick for Treasury secretary

Elon Musk at the tenth Breakthrough Prize ceremony held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on April 13, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. The Hollywood Reporter | The Hollywood Reporter | Getty Images On Saturday, Elon Musk shared who he is endorsing for Treasury secretary on X, a cabinet position President-elect Donald Trump has yet to announce his preference to fill. Musk wrote that Howard Lutnick, Trump-Vance transition co-chair and CEO and chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, BGC Group and Newmark Group chairman, will “actually enact change.” Lutnick and Key Square Group founder and CEO Scott Bessent are reportedly top picks to run the Treasury Department. Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, also included his thoughts on Bessent in his post on X. “My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice,” he wrote. “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt so we need change one way or another,” he added. Musk also stated it would be “interesting to hear more people weigh in on this for @realDonaldTrump to consider feedback.” Howard Lutnick, chairman and chief executive …

Microsoft report details Russia disinformation campaign against Harris

Microsoft report details Russia disinformation campaign against Harris

Mashabuba | Getty | Getty Images The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young Black woman who claimed Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago. In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent anymore” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon.” Immediately after the video was posted on Sept. 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary. The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarized articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals. And the video and the text story on the website spelled the alleged victim’s name differently. The caution was warranted, according to a new Microsoft threat intelligence report, which confirms the fabricated tale was disinformation from a Russia-linked troll farm. The tech giant’s report released Tuesday …

Biden to unveil .3 billion Microsoft AI investment in battleground Wisconsin

Biden to unveil $3.3 billion Microsoft AI investment in battleground Wisconsin

Construction at Foxconn complex in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin in August 2020. Brian Snyder | Reuters President Joe Biden will visit the political battleground state of Wisconsin on Wednesday to announce plans by Microsoft Corp to build a $3.3 billion high-tech data center that will create thousands of jobs, the White House said. The Microsoft facility in Racine County, in southeastern Wisconsin, will be built on the same land where Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn had planned to build a $10 billion factory that former President Donald Trump once called “the eighth wonder of the world,” before Foxconn drastically scaled back its plans. Microsoft’s plans will result in 2,300 union construction jobs and some 2,000 permanent jobs over time, the White House said. It said nearly 4,000 jobs had been added in Racine since Biden took office, while about 1,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the Trump administration. Microsoft will partner with Gateway Technical College to train 1,000 people for data center and other roles by 2030, and will work to train 1,000 business leaders to adopt …

Trump receives 36 million more shares of Trump Media as bonus

Trump receives 36 million more shares of Trump Media as bonus

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to Trump tower during the day of his trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, in New York City, U.S. , April 19, 2024.  Eduardo Munoz | Reuters Former President Donald Trump received 36 million more shares of Trump Media Technology Group on Friday, according to a newly filed disclosure Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The shares were part of a contractual “earnout bonus” that Trump’s eponymous media company agreed to shortly before it went public in March. At Tuesday’s closing price of $49.93, Trump’s newly awarded shares were worth around $1.8 billion, although he is prohibited from selling them until a six-month lockup period expires. The additional shares bring Trump’s total in the newly public company to 114,750,000. At Tuesday’s closing price, their value on paper is over $5.7 billion. The windfall for Trump comes as Trump Media’s stock price has rocketed up 50% in the past seven days, after …

Germany’s AfD is finding success on TikTok as its youth vote grows

Germany’s AfD is finding success on TikTok as its youth vote grows

Cardboard stands with the AfD logo lie on the chairs in the Wiesenhalle before the start of the AfD Brandenburg state party conference. Monika Skolimowska/dpa | Picture Alliance | Getty Images Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has gone from the political fringes to the mainstream in recent years, consistently polling in the top three parties in the country. And data shows that younger voters now play a major role in the party’s growth. In Bavaria’s 2023 state election, analysis from polling company Infratest Dimap showed 16% of voters aged 18-24 supported the AfD — this was up by 9 percentage points from the previous election and bigger than the party’s broader result in the region. In Bavaria’s mock state election for under-18s in September, the AfD added over 6 percentage points to become the second biggest party with 14.9% of the vote, according to the organizers. The AfD also jumped by 8 percentage points to receive 18% of votes from 18-24-year-olds in the 2023 Hesse state election, Infratest Dimap data published by local media …

Biden signs Israel, Ukraine, TikTok bill into law

Biden signs Israel, Ukraine, TikTok bill into law

President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed into law measures to provide aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, as well as to compel Chinese TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a national ban. Biden’s official approval ends a six-month saga of tense political battles on Capitol Hill that led to a deadlock on the issue of foreign aid. “The path to my desk was a difficult path. It should have been easier and it should’ve gotten there sooner,” Biden said Wednesday after signing the bill. “But in the end we did what America always does, we rose to the moment.” Biden had signaled his intention to sign the bill into law after the House passed the proposal on Saturday. The Senate gave its own green light late Tuesday night in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 79-18 vote, sending it to Biden’s desk for his signature. US President Joe Biden speaks after signing the foreign aid bill at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 24, 2024.  Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images …

Trump Media CEO asks House GOP to launch stock manipulation probe

Trump Media CEO asks House GOP to launch stock manipulation probe

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, speaks during an impeachment inquiry hearing in Washington, Nov. 13, 2019. Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes on Tuesday urged House Republican committee leaders to investigate possible “unlawful manipulation” of the company’s stock. Nunes, himself a former House GOP chair, in a letter asked them to probe “anomalous trading” of the stock in order to gauge the extent of the alleged manipulation and “whether any laws including RICO statutes and tax evasion laws were violated.” The request doubles down on Nunes’ claim that Trump Media, which trades under the ticker DJT, is the apparent victim of “naked” short selling, the practice of selling a company’s shares without first borrowing them for that purpose. Trump Media, which began trading on the Nasdaq on March 26 after completing a lengthy public merger, was far and away the most expensive U.S. stock to short as of early April. Brokers therefore “have a significant financial incentive to lend non-existent shares,” Nunes wrote. The …

ByteDance, TikTok spent over  million on lobbying, ad campaign

ByteDance, TikTok spent over $7 million on lobbying, ad campaign

Omer Taha Cetin | Anadolu | Getty Images TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance combined to spend over $7 million so far this year to try and stop Congress from passing legislation that could ban the social media app in the United States. ByteDance alone spent a record $2.68 million on in-house TikTok lobbyists to target Congress and federal officials over the first three months of the year, according to new lobbying disclosure reports. TikTok spent over $4.5 million this year on a television and digital ad campaign pushing back on legislation that could ban the app, according to data from AdImpact. “This expenditure reflects work we do to educate policymakers about how legislation could affect our community of 170 million American users,” a TikTok spokesperson said about the spend. The disclosures show how TikTok officials lobbied Congress and President Joe Biden’s executive office last quarter. The Executive Office of the President features the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, among other divisions. …

Oracle met with Senate aides on TikTok data housing project

Oracle met with Senate aides on TikTok data housing project

A smartphone with the Tik Tok logo is seen in front of a displayed Oracle logo in this illustration taken, Septemeber 14, 2020. Dado Ruvic | Reuters Oracle’s top lobbyist in Washington met privately with Senate aides about the company’s data housing agreement with TikTok this spring, after a bill that could effectively ban the social media app in the United States passed the House in mid-March. Oracle acts as the data center for U.S. TikTok users. The House legislation would require TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to divest the social media app, or face an eventual ban in the United States. “We had four meetings, primarily to discuss the technical mitigations” of the data storage project, said Oracle EVP Ken Glueck, who described the previously unreported talks to CNBC on Monday. To set up the meetings, Oracle turned to two lobbying firms: Fierce Government Relations and Polaris Government Relations, according to newly filed disclosure reports. Glueck led discussions with staffers for the Senate Commerce Committee and the Intelligence Committee, he said. Two of the …