Met police to more than double use of live facial recognition

Britain’s biggest police force is to more than double its use of live facial recognition to up to 10 deployments a week.The move by the Metropolitan police comes as it restructures to cover the loss of 1,400 officers and 300 staff amid budget shortages.Live facial recognition – which involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time – will now be used up to 10 times a week across five days, up from the current four times a week across two days.The tactic will be deployed at the Notting Hill carnival over the August bank holiday.An older form of the technology was trialled at the event in 2016 and 2017

Zuckerberg claims ‘superintelligence is now in sight’ as Meta lavishes billions on AI

Whether it’s poaching top talent away from competitors, acquiring AI startups or proclaiming that it will build data centers the size of Manhattan, Meta has been on a spending spree to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities for months now.The massive splurge is paying off, according to Meta’s chief executive. In a new memo posted on Wednesday ahead of the company’s quarterly earnings report, Mark Zuckerberg, describes his ambitions for developing what he calls “superintelligence”.“Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable

Wall Street delighted with Microsoft as it spends $100bn on AI

Microsoft, the world’s second-most valuable company, is dumping enormous sums of money into its artificial intelligence efforts. At the same time, the company is earning money hand over fist. Investors are thrilled.The enterprise software giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that exceeded expectations on Wednesday as the company races to acquire datacenters and talent, which continues to be investigated by investors. The company predicted its capital expenditure for the next fiscal year would top $100bn, a 14% increase from the year prior

YouTube to gauge US users’ ages with AI after UK and Australia add age checks

YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will begin to use artificial intelligence to estimate the ages of users in the US, in order to show them age-appropriate content.The rollout of the new feature comes one day after Australia’s government announced it would ban children under 16 from using YouTube and less than a week after the UK implemented sweeping age checks on content on social networks.YouTube’s AI age verification on its home turf indicates it is putting into place a form of compliance with the Australian and UK requirements, despite its persistent opposition to age-check requirements.“Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults,” wrote James Beser, director of product management for YouTube Youth, in a blogpost titled Extending our built-in protections to more teens on YouTube.YouTube was promised an exemption from Australia’s social media ban last year by the then communications minister, but the Australian government said on Monday that the platform would, in fact, be included in the country’s ban on children under 16 using social networks

UK online safety law leads to 5m extra age checks a day for pornography sites

Five million extra online age checks a day are being carried out in the UK since the introduction of age-gating for pornography sites, according to new data.The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) said there had been a sharp increase in additional age checks in the UK since Friday, when age verification became mandatory for accessing pornography under the Online Safety Act.“As a result of new codes under the Online Safety Act coming into force on Friday, we have seen an additional 5m age checks on a daily basis, as UK-based internet users seek to access sites that are age-restricted,” said Iain Corby, the executive director of the AVPA.The UK has also seen a surge in popularity of virtual private networks, which obscure a user’s real location and thus allow them to access sites blocked in their own country. Four of the top five free apps on the Apple download store in the UK are VPN apps, with Proton, the most popular, reporting a 1,800% increase in downloads

People in the UK: have you been the victim of phone theft recently?

According to data compiled by an insurance firm, nearly two in every five mobile phones stolen in Europe are taken in the UK. Claims made to the American insurance company SquareTrade showed 39% of all phone thefts across the company’s 12 European markets were in Britain.The data revealed that phone theft claims in the UK had increased by 425% since June 2021 and 42% of phone thefts in the UK occurred in London.We’d like to hear from people who have been the victim of phone theft in the UK in the last six months? Has your phone been snatched out of your hands? What happened next and how easy was it to secure your data and accounts? Did you report it to the police? Has it changed your behaviour using your phone or sense of safety on the streets? Why do you think that the UK is the phone theft capital of Europe.You can tell us if you have been the victim of phone theft in the UK by filling in the form below