Elon Musk said in a post on Sunday that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a “criminal organization” that should “die.” His remarks came after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team reportedly accessed the agency’s systems and […]
The post Elon Musk: USAID a ‘criminal organization’ that should ‘die’ first appeared on Tech Startups.
The new Replay playlist is now available on Apple Music. Users are noticing today that the Replay 2025 playlist is now showing up in their libraries.
Apple Music Replay continuously aggregates your top songs, albums, and artists. The playlist updates throughout the year, culminating in a full-year-in-review feature in December.
more…If you’re using the Microsoft Defender VPN on Mac or iPhone as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription, there’s bad news. The company has revealed in a support document that the privacy feature will cease to work at the end of this month …
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If you own an iPhone 11 or later, it includes some tech which does very little right now but is set to quickly become an extremely useful feature: Ultra Wideband (UWB).
Smart door locks incorporating UWB tech are now starting to hit the market, and these will offer the most convenient and secure unlocking experiences of all …
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Samsung's executive chairman Jay Y. Lee has been cleared of criminal charges by South Korea's second-highest court, Bloomberg reported. Earlier on Monday, the Seoul High Court upheld an earlier decision acquitting Lee of stock manipulation and accounting fraud charges over a 2015 merger. The ruling will allow Lee to focus on Samsung's mobile and chip businesses, which have seen declining profits over the past couple of years. Yee has consistently denied committing any crimes.
The prosecution can still appeal to the Korea's Supreme Court, but that would be unlikely to succeed since no new arguments could be presented, experts say. "It has been a very long time in the investigation and trial of this case," said Samsung lawyer Kim You Jin in a statement. "We hope that with this verdict, the defendants can now focus on their work."
Back in 2017, prosecutors accused Lee of manipulating the share price of two Samsung subsidiaries to smooth the way for a merger that allowed him to consolidate his power. In early 2024, however, the court ruled that the prosecutors failed to prove that. "It is hard to say that Lee Jae-yong [aka Jay Y. Lee]... spearheaded the merger, and that the merger was done just for the sake of Lee’s succession," a judge stated in the ruling.
At the time, the decision was hailed by business groups, but not everyone in the country agreed. "The ruling will free Lee of legal risks, but I am at a loss for words in terms of the country’s economic justice," Park Ju-geun, head of corporate thinktank Leaders Index, told The Financial Times in February 2024. "This goes totally against all previous court rulings on the merger."
Lee was originally sentenced to five years in prison in 2017 after being found guilty of bribing public officials over the same merger, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision and ordered the case to be retried. In that retrial, Lee was sentenced to two-and-a-half years of prison time in early 2021, then paroled half a year later (Korea's former president Park Geun-hye also went to jail for her role in the same affair.) In 2022, Lee was pardoned by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was himself recently impeached and charged with insurrection over a martial law attempt.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/samsung-leader-cleared-of-fraud-charges-after-winning-appeal-130056498.html?src=rss
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French startup Riot has raised a $30 million Series B round after reaching $10 million in annual revenue in 2024. Originally focused on educating employees about cybersecurity risks, the company now wants to go one step further and nudge employees so that they minimize their attack surface. Left Lane Capital is leading today’s round with […]
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A Seoul appeals court on Monday upheld the acquittal of Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee in accounting fraud and stock manipulation in a case related to a controversial 2015 merger of two Samsung affiliates, Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T. The Seoul High Court dismissed the prosecution’s appeal in the case involving Lee, who […]
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Tests by security researchers revealed that DeepSeek failed literally every single safeguard requirement for a generative AI system, being fooled by even the most basic of jailbreak techniques.
This means that it can trivially be tricked into answering queries that should be blocked, from bomb recipes to guidance on hacking government databases …
more…Over the weekend, Apple announced that it is making Swift Build open source. This is the build engine used by both Xcode and for the company’s internal projects.
Apple has also made a tiny name change to Swift Playgrounds, the app that helps people learn to code in Swift on iPad and Mac …
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The Beatles have won their eighth competitive Grammy award thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence. The 2023 track “Now and Then” — which Billboard reports is the first song knowingly created with AI assistance to earn a Grammy nomination — was awarded Best Rock Performance on Sunday, beating out competition from Green Day, Pearl Jam, The Black Keys, Idles, and St. Vincent.
The track was pieced together using a demo that John Lennon recorded in the late 1970s, with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison later providing their own contributions in the mid-‘90s, with the aim of including the final song in The Beatles Anthology project. “Now and Then” wasn’t released, however, due to technical limitations at the time preventing Lennon’s vocals and piano from being separated from the original lo-fi demo.
McCartney and Starr later managed to complete the song in 2021 with help from filmmaker Peter Jackson and his sound team, who developed machine-learning technology (a type of AI that uses algorithms to learn from data) capable of isolating and cleaning up different components of Lennon’s recording. This greatly differs from generative AI tech that can be used to create music that mimics an artist’s style and vocals, but confusion around AI terminology led to some backlash online when the track was released.
“To be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it,” McCartney said in 2023, addressing speculation about AI’s role in development. “We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.”
