All posts tagged: Technology News

Trump Media’s Newly Hired Auditing Firm Was Just Busted by the SEC for ‘Massive Fraud’

Trump Media’s Newly Hired Auditing Firm Was Just Busted by the SEC for ‘Massive Fraud’

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday charged an auditing firm hired by Trump Media and Technology Group just 37 days ago with “massive fraud” — though not for any work it performed for former President Donald Trump’s media company. The SEC charged the accounting firm BF Borgers and its owner, Benjamin F. Borgers, with “deliberate and systematic failures” in more than 1,500 audits. The charges include failing to abide by accounting rules, fabricating documentation to cover up its shortcomings, and falsely stating in audit reports that its work met audit standards. To settle the SEC charges, BF Borgers agreed to pay a $12 million fine while its owner agreed to pay a fine of $2 million, according to the SEC. Benjamin Borgers did not immediately return a call seeking comment. BF Borgers and Benjamin Borgers also agreed to permanent suspensions, effective immediately, that will prevent them handling SEC-related matters as accountants. The company had previously cycled through at least two other auditors — one that resigned the account in July …

Apple’s Quarterly IPhone Sales Plunge 10%, but Stock Price Surges on Dividend, Stock Buyback News

Apple’s Quarterly IPhone Sales Plunge 10%, but Stock Price Surges on Dividend, Stock Buyback News

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Apple on Thursday disclosed its steepest quarterly decline in iPhone sales since the pandemic’s outset, deepening a slump that’s increasing the pressure on the trendsetting company to spruce up its products with more artificial intelligence. The 10% drop in year-over-year iPhone sales for the January-March period is latest sign of weakness in a product that generates most of Apple’s revenue. It marked the biggest drop in iPhone sales since July-September period in 2020, when production bottlenecks caused by factory closures during the pandemic resulted in a delayed release of that year’s model. The current iPhone downturn was the main reason Apple’s revenue for the latest quarter decreased 4% from last year to $90.8 billion. It marked the fifth consecutive quarter that Apple’s revenue dipped from the previous year. Apple’s profit in the past quarter totaled $23.64 billion, or $1.53 per share, a 2% dip from last year. But both Apple’s revenue and earnings per share came in slightly above analysts projections, according to FactSet Research. Apple also predicted its revenue for the April-June quarter will …

Deepfake of Principal’s Voice Is the Latest Case of AI Being Used for Harm

Deepfake of Principal’s Voice Is the Latest Case of AI Being Used for Harm

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The case is yet another reason why everyone — not just politicians and celebrities — should be concerned about this increasingly powerful deep-fake technology, experts say. “Everybody is vulnerable to attack, and anyone can do the attacking,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on digital forensics and misinformation. Here’s what to know about some of the latest uses of AI to cause harm: AI HAS BECOME VERY ACCESSIBLE Photos You Should See – April 2024 Manipulating recorded sounds and images isn’t new. But the ease with which someone can alter information is a recent phenomenon. So is the ability for it to spread quickly on social media. The fake audio clip that impersonated the principal is an example of a subset of artificial intelligence known as generative AI. It can create hyper-realistic new images, videos and audio clips. It’s cheaper and easier to use in recent years, lowering the barrier to anyone with an internet connection. “Particularly over the last year, anybody — and I really mean anybody …

Indonesia’s GoTo Says on Track for Profitability Despite First-Quarter Loss

Indonesia’s GoTo Says on Track for Profitability Despite First-Quarter Loss

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JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s biggest tech company PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk posted a first-quarter underlying loss of 102 billion rupiah ($6.28 million), on Monday, but said it was on track for profitability, helped by its partnership with TikTok. It blamed the first-quarter loss, compared with 1.6 trillion rupiah a year ago and a 77 billion rupiah profit in the final quarter of last year, on planned investment and seasonal slowness in the on-demand services segment in January and February. “We expect even faster growth for the rest of the year, while also remaining committed to our profitability goals,” Group CEO Patrick Walujo said. China’s TikTok in December bought a majority stake in GoTo’s e-commerce unit Tokopedia. “Early results have been promising with compliance requirements fulfilled and early performance proving robust,” the company said in a statement. The company’s profitability, it said, will be driven by lower costs in running Tokopedia and increased income as Tokopedia is expected to grow faster compared with overall expansion in Indonesia. It also said GoTo expects to secure growth …

Social Media Platform X Back up After Outages, Downdetector Shows

Social Media Platform X Back up After Outages, Downdetector Shows

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(Reuters) -Social media platform X was back up on Monday after suffering outages earlier in the day, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users, showed 23 reports of outages in the U.S. as of 5:49 am ET (09:49 GMT) from 4,113 reports at its peak about two hours ago. X did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. (Reporting by Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Akanksha Khushi; Editing by Sonia Cheema) Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters. Source link

Exclusive-Elon Musk Heading to China for Visit to Tesla’s Second-Biggest Market, Sources Say

Exclusive-Elon Musk Heading to China for Visit to Tesla’s Second-Biggest Market, Sources Say

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Tesla CEO Elon Musk was on a flight heading to Beijing on Sunday to kick off a surprise trip in the electric vehicle maker’s second-biggest market, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Musk is seeking to meet senior Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss the rollout of Full-Self Driving (FSD) software in China and to obtain approval to transfer data collected in the country abroad to train algorithms for its autonomous driving technologies, one of the people said. Tesla has since 2021 stored all data collected by its Chinese fleet in Shanghai as required by Chinese regulators and has not transferred any back to the United States. The U.S. EV maker rolled out FSD, the most autonomous version of its Autopilot software, four years ago but has yet to make it available in China despite customers urging it to do so. Musk said this month Tesla may make FSD available to customers in China “very soon”, in response to a query on social media platform X. Rival Chinese automakers such …

How TikTok Grew From a Fun App for Teens Into a Potential National Security Threat

How TikTok Grew From a Fun App for Teens Into a Potential National Security Threat

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — If it feels like TikTok has been around forever, that’s probably because it has, at least if you’re measuring via internet time. What’s now in question is whether it will be around much longer and, if so, in what form? Starting in 2017, when the Chinese social video app merged with its competitor Musical.ly, TikTok has grown from a niche teen app into a global trendsetter. While, of course, also emerging as a potential national security threat, according to U.S. officials. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation requiring TikTok parent ByteDance to sell to a U.S. owner within a year or to shut down. It’s not clear whether that law will survive an expected legal challenge or that ByteDance would agree to sell. Here’s how TikTok came to this juncture: ByteDance is founded in China by entrepreneur Zhang Yimin. Its first hit product is Toutiao, a personalized news aggregator for Chinese users. Photos You Should See – April 2024 Startup Musical.ly, later known for an eponymous app used to post …

X Tells Brazil Court ‘Operational Faults’ Allowed Blocked Users to Remain Active

X Tells Brazil Court ‘Operational Faults’ Allowed Blocked Users to Remain Active

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BRASILIA (Reuters) – Lawyers representing X in Brazil told the Supreme Court on Friday that “operational faults” have allowed users who were ordered blocked to stay active on the social media platform. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week had asked the social media giant to explain why it allegedly did not fully comply with earlier rulings ordering the company, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, to block certain accounts. In a 20-page legal document, X’s lawyers said the owners of the accounts had sought to circumvent court-ordered restrictions to continue using the platform by making new accounts. It added it has not reactivated any of these users. A report by Brazil’s federal police seen by Reuters last week showed accounts on X that top courts had ordered blocked were still active on the platform by early April, being able to gain new followers and to live-stream videos. X said on Friday that the police report had tracked six accounts, from a total of over 200 accounts Brazilian top courts have ordered it to block …

India’s HCLTech Revenue Tad Lower Than View, CEO Signals Persistent Macro Overhang

India’s HCLTech Revenue Tad Lower Than View, CEO Signals Persistent Macro Overhang

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By Sai Ishwarbharath B and Haripriya Suresh BENGALURU (Reuters) -HCLTech, India’s No. 3 IT services player, reported smaller-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue on Friday, even as the company said it expected the current macroeconomic volatility tied to demand to continue into fiscal year 2025. The firm posted a 7.1% rise in revenue, to 284.99 billion rupees ($3.42 billion) for the three months ended March 31, compared with analysts’ average estimate of 286.07 billion rupees, according to LSEG data. Its technology and services vertical fell 8.7% year-on-year, while the healthcare and lifesciences vertical fell 1%. For financial year 2025, the company forecast a revenue growth of 3% to 5%, lower than Street expectations. “Broader macro continues to be quite volatile. We are cautiously optimistic and assume a similar macro environment that we saw in fiscal 2024 to also be there for a predominant part of fiscal 2025,” said CEO C Vijayakumar. This comes as deals in the industry are largely focussed on cutting costs, as clients continue to hold back on non-essential spending like upgrading existing software, cloud …

Google Parent Reports Another Quarter of Robust Growth, Rolls Out First-Ever Quarterly Dividend

Google Parent Reports Another Quarter of Robust Growth, Rolls Out First-Ever Quarterly Dividend

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Google’s corporate parent Alphabet Inc. on Thursday released a quarterly report showing it’s still reaping double-digit revenue gains from its digital advertising empire while sowing potentially lucrative new ground in artificial intelligence. Alphabet punctuated its renewed vigor by also disclosing plans to begin paying shareholders a quarterly dividend for the first time since since Google went public 20 years ago. It’s something that two older technology powerhouses, Microsoft and Apple, have been doing for years. Alphabet’s quarterly dividend of 20 cents per share will be paid June 17. Investing.com analyst Thomas Monteiro praised the decision to pay a dividend as “a breath of fresh air for the tech market” that should also make investors more likely to support the increased amounts that Google will likely need to spend on developing AI products that could take years to pay off. Alphabet earned $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, a 57% increase from last year’s comparable quarter. The earnings per share also eclipsed the analyst estimates that steer investors. Photos You Should See – April 2024 “We …