Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

Apple has asked shareholders to vote against a proposal to scrap its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, as tech rivals scale back similar schemes before Donald Trump’s return to the White House.The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative thinktank, wants the iPhone maker to end its DEI efforts because they expose companies to “litigation, reputational and financial risks”. The proposal will be voted on at Apple’s annual general meeting on 25 February.In a notice to shareholders, Apple’s board has recommended investors vote against the proposal because, it says, it already has the right compliance procedures to deal with any risks and because the proposal “inappropriately attempts to restrict Apple’s ability to manage its own ordinary business operations, people and teams, and business strategies”.DEI schemes are sets of measures designed to make people of all backgrounds – regardless of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender – feel supported and included in the workplace

Stay on top of tech: five ways to take back control, from emails to AI

Asking ChatGPT to write your emails is so two years ago. Generative AI tools are now going beyond the basic text-prompt phase. Take Google’s NotebookLM, an experimental “AI research assistant” that lets you upload not just text but also videos, links and PDFs. It will provide a summary of the content, answer questions about it, and even make a podcast-like “AI overview” if you want it to – all while organising your original sources and notes. As AI tools advance, expect more features like this to be baked into everyday software

NBN’s $3bn fibre revamp is great news but don’t Australians now care more about price than higher speeds?

The announcement of the demise of NBN’s fibre-to-the-node technology will be welcomed by those who have endured poor speeds and service for the past few years, but making the internet more affordable would have a much bigger impact.When Tony Windsor sided with Labor in the 2010 election, he put the NBN as one of the key issues, saying famously: do it once, do it right, and do it with fibre.It’s taken nearly 15 years but we have just about met Windsor’s last point, with the Albanese government announcing on Monday that about 95% or 622,000 homes currently accessing the NBN via fibre-to-the-node (FTTN, which uses existing copper lines from the node to the premise for connection) will be able to upgrade to full fibre by 2030 at an additional cost of $3bn.The Coalition’s promise (which we can see echoes of in the nuclear debate today) when they came to power in 2013 was that the multi-technology mix, as it was called, would be rolled out quicker (it wasn’t) and would be more affordable (it also was not). Years of successive governments giving NBN Co funding injections, or loans, has meant that incrementally the NBN by 2030 will now more closely resemble the original plan but has ended up costing a lot more

Why Starmer and Reeves are pinning their hopes on AI to drive growth in UK

The spectre of last week’s bond market sell-off hangs over the government’s artificial intelligence strategy. Investors, and voters, want to know where the growth is in the UK economy.Keir Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, believes AI is a significant part of the answer.The UK has considerable strengths in AI, which can be loosely defined as computer systems performing tasks that typically require human intelligence (ranging from summarising a document to assessing a medical patient’s symptoms and writing emails).Those strengths include the high-quality research and engineering talent coming out of UK universities and the fact that the country already hosts a number of leading AI companies, led by the UK-founded Google DeepMind

Fears for UK boomer radicalisation on Facebook after Meta drops factcheckers

Experts fear the decision by Meta to drop professional factcheckers from Facebook will exacerbate so-called boomer radicalisation in the UK.Even before what Keir Starmer described as “far-right riots” in England last summer, alarm bells were ringing amid fears older people were even more susceptible to misinformation and radicalisation than younger “digital natives”.Suspects were generally older than those charged in the 2011 unrest, according to a Guardian analysis of hundreds of defendants that found that as many as 35% were in their 40s or older.However, after Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta would replace factcheckers with a crowdsourced system and recommend more political content, there is now new concern about the potential radicalisation risks on Facebook, the social media platform of choice for many older people.“It’s clearly a retrograde step that comes with all sorts of risks,” said Dr Sara Wilford of De Montfort University, a lead researcher on a pioneering Europe-wide project called Smidge (Social Media Narratives: Addressing Extremism in Middle Age)

UK online safety laws ‘unsatisfactory’ and ‘uneven’, says science minister

Online safety legislation is “unsatisfactory” and “uneven”, the science secretary has said as he expressed hopes for parliament to learn to legislate faster on the issue.Peter Kyle said he had given a “very personal commitment to making sure that everybody – particularly people with vulnerabilities, and every child is vulnerable – has protection”, after Ian Russell, whose daughter killed herself after viewing harmful content on social media, told Keir Starmer the UK was “going backwards” on online safety.Russell, who is also the chair of the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), said in his letter to the prime minister on Saturday that the regulator Ofcom’s implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023 had been a “disaster”.The act is the UK’s first major legislation to regulate social media, search engine, messaging, gaming, dating, pornography and filesharing platforms.The legislation gives Ofcom the power to fine firms that fail to meet these duties – potentially up to billions of pounds for the largest sites – and in serious cases seek clearance to block access to a site in the UK