Technology

An open letter urging Spotify to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation has gained the signatures of more than a thousand doctors, scientists and health professionals spurred by growing concerns over anti-vaccine rhetoric on the audio app's hit podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has revealed that hackers have stolen data on over 515,000 "highly vulnerable people," recipients of aid and services from at least 60 affiliates of the charitable organization worldwide.

During the investigation into the extent of the attack, which targeted a contractor in Switzerland that was storing the data, the Red Cross has been forced to temporarily halt a program that reunites families torn apart by violence, migration or other tragedies.

Happy first anniversary to when sea shanties briefly took over the internet.

NPR was among the media organizations hyping the charming online phenomenon in January 2021 of people belting out maritime folk songs. After the inevitable wave of remixes and parodies, the trend quickly died.

Wireless carriers Verizon and AT&T say they will go ahead with plans to switch on high speed 5G service nationwide Wednesday, except near airports and runways, due to worries that high tech radio signals could interfere with navigational systems on some aircraft.

In the aftermath of a 13-mile-wide volcanic eruption in Tonga, it could take weeks to repair an undersea communications cable that connected the South Pacific archipelago to the rest of the world.

DETROIT — California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019.

The defendant appears to be the first person to be charged with a felony in the United States for a fatal crash involving a motorist who was using a partially automated driving system. Los Angeles County prosecutors filed the charges in October, but they came to light only last week.

Israeli police have used spyware from controversial Israeli company NSO Group to hack the cell phones of Israeli citizens without judicial oversight, including activists protesting former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli newspaper reported Tuesday.

Microsoft says it is set to buy games behemoth Activision Blizzard. According to a press release, the move allows Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, to take up space in the mobile gaming space as well as the oncoming metaverse.

The science behind making machines talk just like humans is very complex, because our speech patterns are so nuanced.

"The voice is not easy to grasp," says Klaus Scherer, emeritus professor of the psychology of emotion at the University of Geneva. "To analyze the voice really requires quite a lot of knowledge about acoustics, vocal mechanisms and physiological aspects. So it is necessarily interdisciplinary, and quite demanding in terms of what you need to master in order to do anything of consequence."

A month-old ransomware attack is still causing administrative chaos for millions of people, including 20,000 public transit workers in the New York City metro area, public service workers in Cleveland, employees of FedEx and Whole Foods, and medical workers across the country who were already dealing with an omicron surge that has filled hospitals and exacerbated worker shortages.

Dozens of Ukrainian government sites have been hit by an ominous cyberattack, with hackers warning people to "be afraid and expect the worst."

The attack took over websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cabinet of ministers and security and defense council, posting a message on screens in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish that read: "Ukrainian! All your personal data was uploaded to the public network. All data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore it."

SANTA FE, N.M. — When the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools announced earlier this week a cyberattack would lead to the cancellation of classes for around 75,000 students, he noted that the district's technology department had been fending off attacks "for the last few weeks."

Albuquerque is not alone, as five school districts in the state have suffered major cyberattacks in the past two years, including one district that's still wrestling with a cyberattack that hit just after Christmas.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes will be sentenced in late September, according to an order from the federal judge overseeing her case.

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila set Sept. 26 as the day the onetime Silicon Valley superstar will be punished following a jury convicting her on Jan. 3 of four fraud-related charges in connection with the collapse of her former blood-testing company, Theranos.

More than half a trillion dollars. That's the estimated value of all the stuff that U.S. shoppers bought last year only to return it — more than the economy of Israel or Austria.

There's a direct link from returns to the eye-popping scale of U.S. shopping overall. In 2021, U.S. shoppers likely spent a record $4.4 trillion.

A simple word game is the newest social media and pop culture phenomenon: Wordle.

The task is to guess a five-letter word. You have six tries. After each guess, the tiles change colors to show which letters are not in the word (gray), which letters are in the word but in the wrong position (yellow) and which ones are correctly in the word and in the right position (green).

The Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Facebook can proceed, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday, delivering a major win for the agency after its first attempt at targeting the company's alleged monopoly power was dismissed for lack of evidence.

An appeals court in California has upheld the firing of two former Los Angeles Police Department officers for playing Pokémon Go rather than responding to a nearby robbery.

Up until recently, the idea of sucking gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to reverse climate change was solidly in the realm of science fiction. For believers, it's been an exciting fantasy in which human ingenuity and technology triumph in saving the planet. For naysayers, it's been a fantastical distraction from the urgent work of cutting emissions. Climate activists fear that focusing on carbon removal might lull us into a false sense of complacency as humanity careens a fossil-fuel-powered locomotive off a cliff.

It's been called the Great Deplatforming. In the hours and days after the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan.

The sister of a federal security officer who was fatally shot while guarding a courthouse during George Floyd-related protests has sued Facebook, accusing the tech giant of playing a role in radicalizing the alleged shooter.

When Elizabeth Holmes jury deliberations entered its second week, Tyler Shultz got the jitters.

"I decided to deal with it by playing my guitar superloud. I probably disturbed my neighbors," said Shultz, an ex-Theranos employee who helped expose the once-hyped blood-testing startup. "I had a lot of nervous energy."

For Shultz, the moment had been building for some time. He blew the whistle on Theranos when he was just 22 years old. Now 31, he was ready for closure.

Genshin Impact is an award-winning role-playing game created by Chinese video game developer miHoYo. A year after its September 2020 release, the game managed to amass a total revenue of more than $2 billion.