For years Paula Thompson, vice president of client strategy at the US digital ad agency Optimal, has been helping Plunge sell baths to soak in chilling water by buying ads on Google search and Microsoft Bing. The ads appear atop results for searches such as “ice bath” and invite users …
Read More »LinkedIn’s AI Career Coaches Will See You Now
Many burned-out workers have likely dreamed of hiring a career coach or résumé writer. Now, LinkedIn is introducing chats with generative AI career experts based on real people. Other new AI tools within the platform will help people write résumés and cover letters or evaluate their qualifications for jobs posted. …
Read More »Behind That Viral LA Billboard That Trolled Microsoft and Other Game Companies
Last week, while Summer Game Fest attendees shuffled between game reveals and demos in Los Angeles, an unusual digital billboard captured the attention of millions of people online and off. “Gone but not forgotten,” it read, listing shuttered studios like Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and Volition, “+ everyone laid off, …
Read More »Microsoft’s Recall Feature Is Even More Hackable Than You Thought
Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has hailed the company's new Recall feature, which stores a history of your computer desktop and makes it available to AI for analysis, as “photographic memory” for your PC. Within the cybersecurity community, meanwhile, the notion of a tool that silently takes a screenshot of your …
Read More »Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash
When Microsoft named its new Windows feature Recall, the company intended the word to refer to a kind of perfect, AI-enabled memory for your device. Today, the other, unintended definition of “recall”—a company's admission that a product is too dangerous or defective to be left on the market in its …
Read More »Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election
Microsoft’s and Google’s AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked “Who won the 2020 US presidential election?” Microsoft’s chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, responds by saying: “Looks like …
Read More »This Hacker Tool Extracts All the Data Collected by Windows’ New Recall AI
When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the new Windows AI tool that can answer questions about your web browsing and laptop use, he said one of the “magical” things about it was that the data doesn’t leave your laptop; the Windows Recall system takes screenshots of your activity every five …
Read More »AI Is Your Coworker Now. Can You Trust It?
Generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are rapidly evolving, fueling concerns that the technology could open the door to multiple privacy and security issues, particularly in the workplace. In May, privacy campaigners dubbed Microsoft’s new Recall tool a potential “privacy nightmare” due to its ability to …
Read More »The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here
Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project …
Read More »How to Record Everything on Your Laptop Screen Without Microsoft Recall
Microsoft is continually adding new features to Windows, but the recent announcement of a tool called Recall has raised a few eyebrows: It's designed to work like browsing history does in your web browser, but for everything on your PC. Whenever you need to retrace your steps on the Windows …
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