Technology

Sadly, it might actually pass this time.

“Senator Blackburn and I made a promise to parents and young people when we started fighting together for the Kids Online Safety Act – we will make this bill law. There’s undeniable awareness of the destructive harms caused by Big Tech’s exploitive, addictive algorithms, and inescapable momentum for reform,” said Senator Blumenthal. “I am grateful to Senators Thune and Schumer for their leadership and to our Senate colleagues for their overwhelming bipartisan support. KOSA is an idea whose time has come – in fact, it’s urgently overdue – and even tech companies like X and Apple are realizing that the status quo is unsustainable. Our coalition is bigger and stronger than ever before, and we are committed to seeing this measure protecting children on the internet signed into law.”

“Big Tech platforms have shown time and time again they will always prioritize their bottom line over the safety of our children, and I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories to count from parents who have lost a child because these companies have refused to make their platforms safer by default,” said Senator Blackburn. “We would never allow our children to be exposed to pornography, sexual exploitation, drugs, alcohol, and traffickers in the physical space, but these platforms are allowing this every single day in the virtual space. Congress must not cave to the wills and whims of Big Tech, and we must not be bullied into submission. Now is the time to stand up and protect future generations from harm by passing KOSA.”

“I have been a longtime advocate for holding Big Tech accountable for its manipulative algorithms,” said Majority Leader Thune. “Consumers deserve more transparency about how these platforms amplify and suppress content, which is why I’m proud to support the Kids Online Safety Act. Senator Blackburn has done a tremendous amount of work to deliver a bill that takes real steps to empower families and mitigate the harm social media can do to children, and I’m grateful for her leadership on the issue.”

“I am proud to support this bipartisan legislation which provides necessary guardrails to protect our kids. Too many kids have had their personal data collected and used nefariously. Too many families have lost kids after they took their own lives because of what happened to them on social media. I thank these brave parents and families for sharing their stories. Keeping our kids safe from online threats should not be a partisan issue, I thank my Senate colleagues for championing these bills and I look forward to swift passage,” said Minority Leader Schumer.

• Robot chefs are replacing humans at some South Korean highway restaurants.
• Tech companies say robots can help solve labor shortage in an aging nation.
• Workers say their roles have been downgraded from chefs to cleaning staff.

• The new class of vulnerabilities in Intel processors arises from speculative technologies that anticipate individual computing steps.
• Openings enable gradual reading of entire privilege memory contents of shared processor (CPU).
• All Intel processors from the last 6 years are affected, from PCs to servers in data centres.

researchers have developed a novel wearable device that can monitor the flux of vapors through the skin, offering new insights into skin health and wound healing.

OpenAI has released a new benchmark for testing AI systems in healthcare. Called HealthBench, it's designed to evaluate how well language models handle realistic medical conversations. According to OpenAI, its latest models outperform doctors on the test.

• Xinbi Guarantee is a Chinese-language, Telegram-based marketplace serving fraudsters in South East Asia, including those responsible for so-called “pig butchering” scams.
• Merchants on the marketplace sell technology, personal data and money laundering services. The USDT stablecoin is the primary payment method, with the market having received $8.4 billion in transactions to date. Some transactions can be linked to funds stolen by North Korea.
• Xinbi Guarantee claims to operate through Xinbi Co. Ltd, incorporated in Colorado.

Starting May 12, with All In Prices, you’ll be able to find tickets within your budget right away, with no surprises at checkout. That’s because you’ll see the cost of your ticket—including fees, before taxes—from the moment you start shopping for any Ticketmaster event in the U.S.

More importantly, we’re all in on putting fans first. We’ve long advocated for all-in pricing laws worldwide, and support a consistent ticket-buying experience for fans.

Aerospace giants Boeing and Rolls-Royce have hired lobbyists to try to prevent the US Congress from introducing further sanctions against Russia, Novaya Gazeta Europe has discovered after analysing the information published on the US House of Representatives’ lobbying disclosure website.

• Mexico has filed a lawsuit against Google for relabelling the Gulf of Mexico in its Maps app.
• The big tech firm did so after receiving instructions to do so by the Trump administration.
• The region’s name is displayed as Gulf of Mexico with Gulf of America in brackets for Maps users outside the US.

App-based digital salary payments are yet to gain traction in Japan two years after being introduced, with only a fraction of workers choosing the option despite the nation slowly trending towards a cashless future.