Technology

Strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying, a study has found.

Researchers at US universities including Stanford and Duke looked at nearly 1,800 US schools where students’ phones were kept in locked pouches and found little or no differences in outcomes compared with similar schools without strict bans.

The report concluded that among schools instituting a ban: “For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”

The results will come as a disappointment to teaching unions and campaigners in England who backed the government’s recent move to restrict the use of mobile phones in schools. A ban is likely to come into force next year.

Bringing back the good old days

US video games retailer GameStop has offered to buy eBay for $55.5bn (£41bn) in an unsolicited bid that its boss warned could turn hostile if the proposal is rebuffed by eBay’s board.

GameStop, which has quietly accumulated a 5% stake in eBay, said it was willing to pay $125 a share, split 50-50 between cash and stock.

It is an ambitious move by the games company, which catapulted to fame during the meme-stock craze of 2021 but is worth far less than its takeover target. GameStop had a market valuation of roughly $12bn on Friday before its bid, while eBay – originally launched as a side hobby by its founder Pierre Omidyar in 1995 – is worth about $46bn.

Just what the company needs ... tens of billions in more debt.

The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high. Also, the AI informed me that I wear glasses—revelatory!

The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you. If it isn’t already: Morphcast, for example, has licensed its technology to a mental-health app, a program that monitors schoolchildren’s attention, and McDonald’s, which launched a promotional campaign in Portugal that scanned app users’ faces and offered them personalized coupons based on their (supposed) mood. It is one of many, many such companies doing similar work—the industry term is emotion AI or sometimes affective computing.

Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment. Sometimes, the emotion AI is baked in as a feature in multiuse software, or sold as part of an expensive analytics package marketed to businesses. But it’s also available as a stand-alone product, and the barrier to entry is shin-high: I used MorphCast at no cost, taking advantage of a free trial, and with no special software. At no point was I compelled to ask my interlocutors if they consented to being analyzed in this way (though I did ask, because of my good personality).

So, there’s a piece in Jacobin arguing that data center moratoria are a “terrible idea” making the rounds on social media and beyond. It’s pretty easy to see why this makes for some good discourse; naturally, there’s going to be frisson among AI optimists when a perceived opponent—here, the nation’s most influential socialist magazine—makes a case for aligning with the tech industry’s goals.

While I’m pretty unconvinced on all but one or two of the points that the piece itself raises, and I think it seriously misconstrues the class politics of data center fights, I do think it’s worth litigating this idea. Because I do believe we should be thinking about what a broader and more engaged politics of resisting, regulating, and ultimately governing AI might look like. It’s a good occasion, in other words, to ask:

• Who is fighting data centers?
• Why are they fighting them?
• Are anti-data center movements a dead end—or a starting point?

Its fans just don't want to let go.

Lawmakers in Congress are moving quickly on the GUARD Act, an age-gating bill restricting minors’ access to a wide range of online tools, with a key vote expected this week. The proposal is framed as a response to alarming cases involving “AI companions” and vulnerable young users. But the text of the bill goes much further, and could require age gates even for search engines that use AI.

If enacted, the GUARD Act won’t just target a narrow category of risky chatbots. It would require companies to verify the age of every user — then block anyone under 18 from interacting with a huge range of online systems. It would block minors from everyday online tools, undermine parental guidance, and force adults to sacrifice their privacy. In the process, it would require services to implement speech-restricting and privacy-invasive age-verification systems for everyone—not just kids.

Under the GUARD Act’s broad definitions, a high school student could be barred from asking homework help tools questions about algebra problems. A teenager trying to return a product could be kicked out of a standard customer-service chat.

More than half of “long-shot” bets on military action made on Polymarket are successful, according to a new report that suggests prediction markets could pose a bigger threat than previously recognized to the security of sensitive information.

Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

The research is likely to add to growing concerns among regulators and lawmakers about insiders placing bets on the timing and success of military actions, amid fears that this could reveal classified information in advance.

It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

Crane said customers of PocketOS’s car rental clients were left in a lurch when they arrived to pick up vehicles from businesses that no longer had access to software that managed reservations and vehicle assignments.

Maryland has become the first state in the US to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores.

Maryland’s law bans grocers and third-party delivery services from using a person’s personal data to set higher prices. Wes Moore, the governor, signed the measure into law on Tuesday. “At a time when technology can predict what we need, when we need it, when we’ll pay for it and also – when we’ll pay more for it, and at a time when we’re watching how big companies are then using these analytics against us to make record profits, Maryland is not just pushing back. Maryland is pushing forward because we are going to protect our people,” Moore said at the bill signing ceremony.

When engaging in surveillance pricing, stores rapidly change the cost of products based on consumer data, including their location, internet search history and demographics. That means buyers are paying different prices for the same items purchased around the same time. Critics of this method – also known as dynamic pricing – say that in doing so, businesses are effectively charging each person the most that they’re willing to pay.

French protestors says Windows 10's ESU will only leave users in the lurch, potentially rendering millions of PCs obsolete as they upgrade to Windows 11.

Many people are hoping—nay, praying—that the potential AI bubble will burst soon.

But to hear Google tell it, generative AI is the future, and the company’s products have to change to keep up with the technical reality. As a result, Gemini is seeping into every nook and cranny of the Google ecosystem. Generative AI feeds on data, and Google has a lot of your data in products like Gmail and Drive. What does that mean for your privacy, and what happens if you don’t want Gemini peeking over your shoulder? Well, it’s kind of a mess.

The amount of data Gemini retains depends on how you access the AI, and opting out of data collection can mean running straight into so-called “dark patterns,” UI elements that work against the user’s interest.

This is the future?

I heard that it has proprietary components like the init system (launchd).

Since Pinterest has been a disaster for me for a long while, I have now decided to keep everything locally through EagleCool software.

Wondering whether there’s a way to have multiple sites/ platforms like Pinterest into a feed and to see all images in there. I have tried through RSS (Reeder, Reeder+ and InoReader) but that did not work out for me.

So kind of hoping someone here has a way to recommend. Would like to get Pinterest and Cosmos into it.

Apologies if this is not the right community post, was not sure which of the tech communities I should be posting.

If you're tired of interacting with a bot that spews Nazi propaganda or refers to itself as MechaHitler, you could sign off of Elon Musk's xAI. Or, just to be sure, use an LLM whose training data ends in 1930, three years before the Nazis took power in Germany and nine years before World War II started.

A trio of AI researchers has released a 13-billion-parameter "vintage" language model they call Talkie, which has been trained solely on digital scans of English-language books, newspapers, periodicals, scientific journals, patents, and case law that were published before the end of 1930. Pre-1931 works were chosen because 1930 is the current public domain year in the United States.

In other words, if you're looking for information on World War II, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart's solo Atlantic flight, or how a microwave oven works, you're out of luck. Ask it about Betty Boop, flappers, the state of the US economy as the Great Depression began, or the sociological effects of the introduction of car radios, and you've come to the right place.

This isn't the first vintage AI model to appear, mind you, with others trained on Victorian literature and pre-1900 scientific texts already out in the world. It is, according to its creators, the largest they are aware of.

They had one job.

These days, the hype is all about AI and robots, but almost a decade ago, the tech du jour was self-driving. You couldn’t swing a lanyard at CES for the latter half of the last decade without hitting a robotaxi; post-COVID, the number of startups has shrunk, but the technology has definitely matured. Go to the right cities—San Francisco and Austin, Texas, spring to mind—and you might see dozens of sensor-festooned vehicles among the downtown traffic.

The pod-like robotaxis belonging to Zoox stand out. Other robotaxi developers are retrofitting existing vehicles like Hyundai Ioniq 5s with sensors and the computing power necessary for self-driving. Zoox, which was bought by Amazon in 2020, did that with its test fleet, but as it starts to offer ride-hailing services—currently in Las Vegas and San Francisco—it’s doing so with a purpose-built design that looks like it just drove off the set of a big-budget sci-fi production.

“A robotaxi is not a car; it’s not a human-driven vehicle, and the requirements are wildly different, although it has to live in that world,” explained Chris Stoffel, director of robot industrial design and studio engineering at Zoox.

It all starts with the sensors, each perched on a little ledge projecting from the top four corners of the robotaxi’s body. From up there, each has an unobstructed, high-level view, giving the Zoox robotaxi good situational awareness, particularly straight ahead. “Because we don’t have a traditional hood, we’ve optimized our frontal coverage in a way that would be nearly impossible on a retrofitted vehicle,” said Zoox director of sensor engineering Ryan McMichaels.

I've yet to see one of these in the wild, so I'm guessing they're geofencing to downtown and UT. Waymos, on the other hand ... I see multiple ones a day, and I don't get out all that much.

Japan’s famously conscientious but overburdened baggage handlers will soon be joined by extra staff at Tokyo’s Haneda airport – although their new colleagues will need to take regular recharging breaks.

Japan Airlines will introduce humanoid robots on a trial basis from the beginning of May, with a view to deploying them permanently as a solution to the country’s chronic labour shortage.

The Chinese-made humanoids will move travellers’ luggage and cargo on the tarmac at Haneda, which handles more than 60 million passengers a year.

JAL and its partner in the initiative, Japan Airlines GMO Internet Group, hope the experiment – which ends in 2028 – will lessen the burden on human employees amid a surge in inbound tourism and forecasts of more severe labour shortages.

In a demonstration for the media this week, a 130cm-tall robot manufactured by Hangzhou-based Unitree was seen tentatively “pushing” cargo on to a conveyer belt next to a JAL passenger plane and waving to an unseen colleague.