Exclusive: Meta created flirty chatbots of Taylor Swift, other celebrities without permission Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.

Can't imagine why Meta is finding it so difficult to hire AI researchers www.reuters.com/business/met...

Rounding off an uncharacteristically long Telegraph Births column today

The one shaking hands

Somehow they made the robot more creepy by giving it clothes

This is all a huge vindication of the UK's decades-long move towards becoming a nation of lawyers, hairdressers and PR consultants that no longer makes things that can be tariffed

Elon Musk’s SpaceX pleads with Trump for tariff exemptions Rocket company asks US government to waive trade levies on Chinese-made manufacturing equipment

SpaceX asks Trump for tariff exemptions www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

Nice solidarity here when Greene calls on an American: "I'm an American journalist, and I'd like to hear your answer to what she's asking."

Relaxing Sunday trading laws feels like a popular, fiscally-neutral policy that would do a lot more for growth than increasing the contactless limit or whatever. Weird that there appears to be zero momentum behind it

I see all these stories about advertisers like Disney and Apple returning to X but my feed is all stuff like this

Sure, but does the picture caption need to mention his politics?

Feel like this government is about to get a strong sense of what treating tech giants like nation states means in practice

Meta ditching fact checkers might be a result of a wider shift in society’s approach to acceptable speech boundaries encapsulated by the US election. But if you asked me on a deeper level, I’d say Mark Zuckerberg would really like Trump to keep the TikTok ban

Hi Lewis. I do! Mentioned as a promising solution but needs to happen faster

Wings over London

The actual use is running Chrome with all my tabs open

How Whitehall blundering created an ‘unfixable’ £14bn scandal In a country notorious for delays and spiralling costs, the emergency services network upgrade still stands out

Wrote about the HS2 of the telecoms world, the Emergency Services Network, which still hasn't been switched on a decade after being announced www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

Seasonal reminder that contrary to popular belief, sharing your Spotify Wrapped is NOT mandatory

The tax on EV owners without a driveway feels like something that’s going to need intervention sooner rather than later

Knew I'd seen that somewhere

I’m sorry, what?

At least one item on his wishlist has been granted: Bluesky has decided to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100, the company told Platformer. The move comes in response to Bluesky’s rapid growth since this month’s US presidential election, which triggered a fresh exodus of users away from Elon Musk’s X and over the weekend took the platform past 22 million total users.

Some news: amid rapid growth and some over-enforcement of its community guidelines, Bluesky trust and safety chief @aaron.bsky.team tells me the company will quadruple the size of its content moderation team www.platformer.news/bluesky-grow...

Black Friday has really gentrified. Used to be a day when people queued up to lamp each other for a cheap telly and now it's a fortnight where you can renew your Economist subscription and phone contract for half price

The year is 2070, only the roaches and underground people survive. Apple is developing a more conversational Siri to catch up in AI

👋🏻

Bluesky does a good job with the starter packs but remember when you could just do this to build your social graph

The Bluesky juice is real but these Similarweb charts going round showing it overtake Threads are for *website visits* which isn’t a particularly meaningful metric in 2024

UK falls to record low in world supercomputer ranking as Starmer pulls funding Lack of investment threatens Britain’s position in global tech race

Britain has fallen to a record low in the global TOP500 supercomputer rankings

The UK's most powerful supercomputer comes in at 62nd in November's list

Comes after new government suspended funding for new exascale machine

www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

No way? You just stop getting emails?

Gmail has sent me a weekly 98% warning for 18 months now. Being cut off feels pretty unlikely at this point

How the foundation of Bluesky was built is so crucial for the future of social — so much so that @rmac.bsky.social & I wrote a whole chapter about it in our book. From day 1, @jay.bsky.team was insistent on independence, a decision that was extraordinarily prescient. (1/2)