Tech chiefs tell Trump to call off troops – will Firefox go ‘full AI’?
Hello, and welcome to TechScape.I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, confounded by the ending of Bugonia and looking forward to seeing Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.In this week’s newsletter: the head of Firefox talks AI-integrated browsers; the tech billionaires’ support of Trump and their successful request to defer national guard deployment to San Francisco; and the growing prevalence of face-scanning in online dating.Thank you for reading.Do you need an assistant for your online activities?Multiple major players in artificial intelligence are moving on from chatbots like ChatGPT and are now focusing their efforts on new browsers with deep AI integrations.
Those could take the form of an agent that shops for you or an omnipresent chatbot that follows you around and summarizes what you’re seeing, looks up related stuff, or answers related questions,Last week alone, OpenAI released the ChatGPT Atlas browser, and Microsoft showed off Edge’s new Copilot Mode, both of which heavily feature chatbots,At the start of October, Perplexity made its Comet browser free,In mid-September, Google rolled out Chrome With Gemini, integrating its AI assistant with the most popular browser in the world,In the wake of these releases, I phoned the general manager of Firefox, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, for his thoughts on whether AI-first browsers will catch on, if his own browser will go full AI, and whether users maintain any expectation of privacy in this new era of personalized, agentic browsing.
Read my Q&A with the head of Firefox,‘I’m suddenly so angry!’ My strange, unnerving week with an AI ‘friend’US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gunAI can help authors beat writer’s block, says Bloomsbury chiefLabor rules out giving tech giants free rein to mine copyright content to train AILast week, Donald Trump said he would not deploy the US national guard to San Francisco after proclaiming he would for weeks,What exempts SF from federal occupation but not Washington DC, Chicago or Los Angeles? The presence of tech billionaire donors, going by Trump’s Truth Social Post,“Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great,They want to give it a ‘shot.
’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday,” Trump wrote on Thursday, referring to the threatened “surge” of national guard troops.Read more: Trump says tech chiefs convinced him to call off troop ‘surge’ to San FranciscoThe Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who has protested against the deployment of the national guard to Chicago for weeks, is also a billionaire.He is also an avowed Democrat and no friend of Trump.One can surmise why his phone calls to the White House didn’t have the same result as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang’s did.Huang has traveled with the president to the United Arab Emirates to announce a gargantuan AI deal, agreed to pay the US government 15% of his company’s revenue from chip sales in China, and donated to Trump’s inauguration.
Marc Benioff has been at the center of the controversy from the start.The co-founder and CEO of Salesforce said in a controversial interview with the New York Times that Trump should make good on his threat and send in the troops.That was at the start of Salesforce’s major yearly conference, Dreamforce, which takes over downtown San Francisco like a homecoming reunion takes over a college town in the US.A few days of backlash later, Benioff walked back the remarks and rationalized them by saying he was only worried about conference security.Then he intervened with Trump to prevent the national guard’s deployment.
The image that emerges is a billionaire who wants to have his cake (be close to Trump) and eat it too (seem a savior to San Francisco).The tech billionaires are getting what they paid for when donating to Trump, a direct line and an exemption for their home turf from his capricious use of force.Around the same time Huang and Benioff were gabbing with Trump on the phone, the East Wing of the White House met the business end of a backhoe.Backing that demolition is a coalition of tech companies and billionaires gifting hundreds millions of dollars to Trump for his grand ballroom project.What special treatment will they request after paying for a direct line to the president?Donors for Trump’s $300m White House ballroom include Google, Apple and PalantirTrump pardons founder of Binance, world’s largest crypto exchangeMelania Trump’s meme coin architects accused of pump-and-dump fraud in lawsuitUS and China reach ‘final deal’ on TikTok sale, treasury secretary saysSign up to TechScapeA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesafter newsletter promotionPut succinctly, it was a bug in a piece of automation software.
My colleague Josh Taylor reports on the cloud computing blackout that took everything from Signal to smart beds offline:In a lengthy outline of the cause of the outage, Amazon revealed a cascading set of events that brought down thousands of sites and applications that host their services with the company,AWS said customers were unable to connect to DynamoDB, an AWS database service that maintains hundreds of thousands of domain name system (DNS) records,It uses automation to monitor the system to ensure that records are updated frequently,The root cause of the issue, Amazon said, was an empty DNS record for the Virginia-based US-East-1 datacentre region,The bug failed to automatically repair and required manual operator intervention to correct.
Read more: Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world togetheriPhone 17 review: the Apple smartphone to get this yearApple Watch Ultra 3 review: the biggest and best smartwatch for an iPhoneTinder made a face-scan a requirement for new users in the US last week.Match Group, the app’s parent company, had already mandated facial verification when signing up in California.The US requirement made headlines in the largely US-based tech press, but Match Group also rolled out its voluntary face check feature in Australia, Canada and India.In each of those markets, Tinder ranks among the most popular dating apps.Match, which also owns Hinge and a slew of dating websites, plans to roll out the face-scanning feature to its other dating apps soon, paving the way for facial verification to become a near-universal requisite for online dating.
Any pretense of anonymity on Tinder is gone.The change poses substantial questions of privacy but also promises significant safety benefits.If Tinder is hacked, facial scans can’t be changed like passwords.Biometric personal data is immutable.Or will law enforcement enjoin Match to hand over users’ faces en masse? On the other side of the coin, serial rapists have been able to use Tinder as a hunting ground, seemingly unhindered by the app’s safety features.
Victims’ families have blamed Match for failing to verify users.A face scan might have been a shocking requirement for a signup in 2012, when Tinder debuted.Apple’s Face ID didn’t launch until 2017, although Samsung phones featured facial recognition features as far back as 2011.Users’ expectations of privacy and their willingness to trade it for new, more personalized features evolve over time, as Firefox’s Enzor-DeMeo said.Read more: Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate owner chose profits over safetyMore than a million people every week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT, OpenAI estimatesAmazon plans to cut 30,000 corporate jobs in response to pandemic overhiringAmazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document showsUltra-HD televisions not noticeably better for typical viewer, scientists say‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?Tesla reports steep drop in profits despite US rush to buy electric vehiclesGoogle hails breakthrough as quantum computer surpasses ability of supercomputers
BT ‘considering low-cost mobile brand’ as Revolut and Monzo plan launches
BT is reportedly considering the launch of new a low-cost mobile brand, as the telecoms group explores ways to compete with new rivals in the market including the fintech companies Revolut and Monzo.The group is exploring options to enter the budget market, which could involve creating a new brand in-house or buying an existing virtual network operator, according to the Financial Times.The move would mark a strategy shift from the former state-owned company, which now only offers mobile services through its premium EE brand. BT owns Plusnet, but decided last year to use the low-cost brand only for its broadband services.However, it is now looking at how it can stay competitive as new rivals, including from the fintech sector, start taking slices of the UK mobile market as virtual network operators, which piggyback on the existing networks of other mobile services
HSBC warns it could take years to settle Madoff case as bank takes $1.1bn hit
HSBC has warned it could take years to finally settle a lawsuit over the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, as the bank’s profits fell 14% after it took a $1.1bn (£830m) hit on the 2009 scandal.The London-headquartered bank’s finance chief issued the warning as the provision for the case dragged on HSBC profits, offsetting a jump in income in the three months to the end of September.HSBC has so far taken a $1.1bn provision to cover a lawsuit by investors who lost money in the largest Ponzi scheme in history
Steeper UK productivity cut of more than £20bn makes tax rises more likely
Rachel Reeves will have to account for a bigger-than-expected £20bn hit to the UK public finances in next month’s budget, increasing the likelihood that the chancellor will breach a key Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise income tax.The Treasury’s forecaster is preparing a steeper than anticipated cut to UK productivity for the next five years, the Guardian understands.The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is planning to cut its trend productivity growth prediction by 0.3 percentage points after a downgrade of the UK’s economic momentum since the 2008 financial crash.Reeves is understood to be furious that the OBR has chosen her second budget to downgrade the figure, which indicates how effectively workers can do their jobs and underpins forecasts of economic growth
After my car was damaged in a Tesco car wash it has washed its hands of my complaint
The tail spoiler and brake light of my car were ripped off in an automated car wash which I use regularly at my local Tesco superstore. Staff there commented on the frequency with which cars are damaged. The repair cost has been estimated at £750, but Tesco is refusing to accept liability. It cites a maintenance report, prepared by the company it contracts to provide and maintain the car washes, which apparently found no fault. It refused to let me see the report because of “company policy”
CSL share price plummets amid shareholder revolt over executive pay plans
The Australian biotech company CSL has been delivered a “second strike” by shareholders over its executive pay plans, but has survived a push to spill its board.Amid frustration over its depressed share price, which fell even further on Tuesday, the blood plasma therapy firm saw more than 40% of votes cast against its executive pay plans at its annual general meeting in Melbourne on Tuesday.The result was well above the 25% threshold required to trigger a “strike”, the company’s second in a row.Despite hitting the two-strikes trigger – which opened the door for a board spill resolution – shareholders voted overwhelmingly against removing the board of the former commonwealth entity –.“We passed that hurdle,” said the CSL chair, Brian McNamee, in reaction to the spill vote
RBA governor dismisses jobs fears but hints at rates hold after inflation uptick
The Reserve Bank governor has dismissed warnings of rising unemployment and hinted at an interest rate hold, saying the labour market will not “fall off a cliff”.Michele Bullock said the RBA had been surprised by September’s jump in joblessness and an uptick in inflation but emphasised job creation was slowing broadly as the RBA expected.“There are still jobs being created, just not as many,” Bullock said on Monday night.“We’d always thought [unemployment] would drift up a bit. Maybe it’s drifted up a bit further than we thought, but it’s not a huge amount yet
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