A Child of Hope video: Mary's story

 

Mary is a Child of Hope pupil who, after losing her mum, found herself caring for her younger siblings while still at school. This video follows our welfare team as they visit Mary at home and hear her story. Stories like Mary's are why Child of Hope exists. Our welfare team works hard to make sure no child falls through the cracks — and your kind sponsorship makes that possible.

Call to action: please consider supporting this wonderful Christian charity - by Prayer, donating or sponsoring one of the children. Thank you!

www.childofhopeuganda.org

Debt-laden TalkTalk offloads customers in scramble to raise funds

TalkTalk has offloaded swathes of customers to a start-up rival as it scrambles to raise cash.

The deal to sell 120,000 customers to fledgling provider Rise Fibre marks the latest effort by the debt-ridden broadband provider to shore up its balance sheet. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

It comes as the broadband firm, which was founded by Sir Charles Dunstone, struggles under a £1.4bn debt pile.

TalkTalk secured a £115m lifeline from Ares Management and other shareholders, including £65m in fresh debt, earlier this year.

This was less than 12 months after backers were forced to provide a £235m emergency bailout to avoid a looming debt default.

The deal with Rise Fibre marks the latest whittling down of TalkTalk’s customer base after it reached an agreement to sell 29,000 subscribers to Utility Warehouse for £5m earlier this year.

Is TalkTalk currently your Internet Service Provider? If so - do not wait for the inevitable to happen. Contact Donline about moving to a quality ISP. 

www.telegraph.co.uk

The OpenAI Bubble

Ed Zitron Writes: How much do you trust Sam Altman? The stock market and (to some extent) the global economy rests on your answer.

You see, OpenAI has become one of the largest liabilities in recent economic history. You can argue that OpenAI’s no longer the focal point of the AI bubble — you can talk all you want about open source models or Anthropic or any number of other elements — but without OpenAI, the AI industry doesn’t exist, and the justification for trillions of dollars of capex evaporates. 

The AI bubble isn’t a result of any actual return on investment — whether that be in purely monetary terms, like revenue or profitability , productivity gains, or anything tangible or measurable. Rather, it’s an episode of cult-like psychosis that infected the brains of some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals and institutions, where the powerful mythology of a company inspired — and been used to inspire — the greatest capital misallocation in history. READ MORE...

www.wheresyoured.at

Anthropic's Claude AI escapes tests to hack three organisations

US technology firm Anthropic says its artificial intelligence (AI) models hacked into the systems of three organisations during a cybersecurity test due to an error that gave them access to the internet.

It comes just days after rival OpenAI said that its models had breached the systems of other companies, including AI tools hub Hugging Face.

The announcement prompted Anthropic to check whether its own models had carried out similar attacks. It says it uncovered three cases that have since been reported to the affected companies.

Anthropic, which did not name the organisations, urged other AI labs to perform similar reviews to better understand the risks of their models' capabilities.

Anthropic said in a statement, external that it reviewed more than 140,000 tests to find evidence that Claude - its family of AI models - could access the internet from testing environments that were designed to be sealed off.

www.bbc.co.uk

Microsoft faces claims it tricked people into AI subscriptions

Microsoft is facing an investigation over claims it tricked users into paying for more expensive AI subscriptions.

The competition watchdog is examining whether the US tech giant failed to give clear information when it added new features, including its AI tool Copilot, to existing plans.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigation concerns Microsoft 365, a bundle of products that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Copilot. READ MORE...

www.telegraph.co.uk

1.7 million planned satellites to have ‘devastating’ impact on astronomy

In almost 60 years of space activities, more than 5200 launches have placed some 7500 satellites into orbit, of which about 4300 remain in space. This number is set to skyrocket.

For the first time, a European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has quantified the threat to astronomy posed by a large number of highly reflective satellites planned to launch in the coming years.

In the paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut argues that no more than 100,000 faint satellites – invisible to the naked eye – should orbit Earth.

Enforcing that guideline would preserve the darkness of the night sky and allow astronomers to continue cutting-edge science using modern telescopes.

Instead, there are existing proposals for more than 1.7 million satellites. These would have “devastating consequences for astronomy,” Hainaut claims.

The most disruptive of these, he argues, will be Reflect Orbital’s mirror-like satellites, which are designed to beam concentrated sunlight down to Earth at nighttime.

www.newatlas.com

eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers it terrorized in 2019

 

One of the most bizarre episodes in e-commerce history has come to a close. eBay and several former eBay employees have agreed to pay $56 million to a newsletter-writing couple who were targeted by the company’s former executives in a horrific targeted harassment campaign that took place in 2019.

Ina and David Steiner, a married couple and the co-authors of EcommerceBytes, inspired the ire of high-level eBay executives after occasionally criticizing the company in their newsletter. In 2019, a plot was concocted to intimidate the couple into halting their negative coverage.

Executives used sock puppet social media accounts to harass the couple, while also sending them anonymous threatening letters and bizarre items in the mail — including live spiders and cockroaches, pornographic magazines, a bloody pig mask, a funereal wreath, and a book about surviving the death of a spouse.

According to previously released court documents, a plan that was attempted but never successfully carried out involved affixing a GPS tracking device to the couple’s car. Yet another internally broached plan involved sending a “Samoan gang” to the Steiners’ home. READ MORE...

www.techcrunch.com