Judge halts attempt to retrieve £600m bitcoin wallet from Welsh dump

A computer expert’s decade-long battle to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he says has been lost in a council dump has been halted by a judge.James Howells, 39, launched a legal case to force Newport city council to allow him to search the site to retrieve a lost hard drive containing the bitcoins.The council sought to strike out the claim, and a judge has ruled in its favour. Sitting as a high court judge, Judge Keyser KC said on Thursday that Howells’s claim had “no realistic prospect of succeeding” if he allowed the case to continue to trial.He said: “I consider that the particulars of the claim do not show any reasonable grounds for bringing this case

Musk ‘lying like hell’ over AfD interview, says ex-EU tech leader

A former EU leader on tech has accused Elon Musk of “lying like hell” by claiming the bloc was trying to stop an interview the owner of X had set up with the co-leader of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland.Thierry Breton, who quit as a European commissioner in September, having overseen the passage of ambitious legislation designed to regulate big tech, said Musk had been disingenuous in claiming the EU was trying to censor his discussion with Alice Weidel, due to take place on Thursday evening.The US billionaire claimed on Wednesday on his social media platform: “First, the EU tried to stop me from having an online conversation with president @realDonaldTrump. Now they want to prevent people from hearing a conversation with Alice Weidel, who might be the next chancellor of Germany. These guys really hate democracy

Meta has ‘heard the message’ from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen

Mark Zuckerberg has “heard the message” from Donald Trump on restricting online content and his Meta platforms will intervene “less and less” on users during the president-elect’s administration, according to the whistleblower Frances Haugen.Haugen, who revealed the Facebook and Instagram owner’s struggles with user safety in 2021, said the US president-elect thought “the right way to run social media is with no restrictions”.Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday that Meta was dropping third-party factcheckers in the US and making other moderation changes reflected this view, she added.“The announcement from Mark is him basically saying: ‘Hey I heard the message, we will not intervene in the United States,’” said Haugen.Announcing the changes on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he would “work with President Trump” on pushing back against governments seeking to “censor more”, pointing to Latin America, China and Europe, where the UK and EU have introduced online safety legislation

Meta’s factchecking partners brace for layoffs

Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end factchecking on Facebook and Instagram in the US already has factchecking journalists bracing for cuts at their organizations, given the size of Meta’s funding.The social media giant has provided more than $100m for outside organizations certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to conduct factchecks on its social networks since 2016, which would result in posts receiving accuracy ratings and having their reach reduced if false. Major outlets like USA Today and Reuters have partnered with the social media company for these factchecks, as have factcheck specific sites like FactCheck.org. In all, 10 outlets are listed by Meta as current partners in the US

AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi

How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. We’re talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. That’s exactly what a bot would say, isn’t it? I guess you’re just going to have to trust me on this.I’m taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days

Meta’s changes to policing will lead to clash with EU and UK, say experts

Sweeping changes to the policing of Meta’s social media platforms have set the tech company on a collision course with legislators in the UK and the European Union, experts and political figures have said.Lawmakers in Brussels and London criticised Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to scrap factcheckers in the US for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, with one labelling it “quite frightening”.The changes to Meta’s global policies on hateful content now include allowing users to call transgender people “it”, with the guidelines stating: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.”Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP and chair of the science and technology committee for the House of Commons, which is investigating how online disinformation fuelled last summer’s riots, said Zuckerberg’s decision to replace professional factcheckers with users policing the accuracy of posts was “concerning” and “quite frightening”.“To hear that Meta is removing all its factcheckers [in the US] is concerning … people have a right to be protected from the harmful effects of misinformation,” she said