OnlyFans owner in talks to sell UK-based adult content platform for £5.9bn

The owner of OnlyFans, the subscription platform used by millions for its adult content, is in talks to sell the UK-based business for $8bn (£5.9bn).The site’s owner, Fenix International, is in discussions with a consortium led by the US investment firm Forest Road Company (FRC), whose board members include Kevin Mayer, who was an executive at Disney for nearly 15 years and also briefly ran TikTok.Fenix is owned by Leonid Radvinsky, a 43-year-old Ukrainian-American entrepreneur, who has received dividends of just under $1.3bn from the highly profitable site since 2020

Fear, hope and loathing in Elon Musk’s new city: ‘It’s the wild, wild west and the future’

Starbase in Texas, where the world’s richest man has a rocket-launching facility, was incorporated this week. Mars obsessives are flocking there – but some long-term locals are far from happyAlong a flat coastal highway in south-east Texas, surrounded by wetlands and open plains, the artefacts of a new American oligarchy appear in quick succession. Three towering rockets stand upright on the horizon. A fleet of Tesla Cybertrucks speeds by. A large mural of the Shiba Inu “doge” dog stares ahead, its arms crossed

iPhone design guru and OpenAI chief promise an AI device revolution

Everything over the last 30 years, according to Sir Jony Ive, has led to this moment: a partnership between the iPhone designer and the developer of ChatGPT.Ive has sold his hardware startup, io, to OpenAI and will take on creative and design leadership across the merged businesses. “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, to this moment,” he says in a video announcing the $6.4bn (£4.8bn) deal

OpenAI buys iPhone architect’s startup for $6.4bn

OpenAI is buying an untested startup for $6.4bn, the ChatGPT maker’s biggest acquisition yet. The hardware startup, called io, was founded by Apple design guru Jony Ive, known best as one of the principal architects of the iPhone. Ive and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said in a blog post that their partnership has been two years in the making.“A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition,” they wrote in the blog post, which offered scant details on upcoming devices

Scattered Spider is focus of NCA inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers

A hacker community known as Scattered Spider is a key suspect in a criminal inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers including Marks & Spencer, detectives have said.Scattered Spider, a loose collective of native English-speaking cybercriminals, has been strongly linked with hacks against M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. M&S said on Wednesday it will take an estimated £300m hit to profits after its systems were hacked last month.The UK’s National Crime Agency, whose remit includes combating cybercrime, said the group was a focus in its investigations.“We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we’ve got a range of different hypotheses and we’ll follow the evidence to get to the offenders,” Paul Foster, the head of the NCA’s national cybercrime unit, told the BBC

Most AI chatbots easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds

Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say.The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been “jailbroken” to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users’ questions.The engines that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – large language models (LLMs) – are fed vast amounts of material from the internet.Despite efforts to strip harmful text from the training data, LLMs can still absorb information about illegal activities such as hacking, money laundering, insider trading and bomb-making