Author: Toby Shapshak

Not since the valiant Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island swore at a Russian warship, has the phrase “go fuck yourself” reverberated so loudly around the world. This time, it was Twitter/X.com owner Elon Musk saying it – not to a warship that threatened to bomb the soldiers (who it turns out were taken hostage) – but to the source of his business’s revenue. As a way to draw attention to himself and make him the centre of that attention – like going to Israel to the site of a massacre, but not apologising for an antisemitic tweet – it has…

Roaming on cellular data overseas can be a painful and costly experience. Most people, burnt by bill shock, have found alternatives – like using free Wi-Fi hotspots or buying local SIM cards. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Free Wi-Fi is, well, free. But it is hardly secure and can easily be used to syphon off your passwords and other personal details. If you are using free public Wi-Fi, you should always be using a VPN. Read More: A VPN is a crucial addition when travelling – Here’s why and which to consider Buying a SIM is just technical enough…

One of the most useful travel tricks I have discovered over the last few years (except for all of 2022 and 2021) is Google Maps’ offline maps. This setting lets you download maps for cities and countries to your smartphone and use them while travelling. As much as I have now solved my travel connectivity through that clever KnowRoaming.com services and its eSIMs, there is no point downloading the maps themselves when you can save them offline. But it’s a waste of cellular data to be pulling the data down when you can preload it using Wi-Fi, which is what…

Although late to the chatbot party, Amazon has unveiled a newcomer in the artificially intelligent space called Q. Unlike ChatGPT, Amazon’s attempt is aimed at Amazon Web Services (AWS) business customers, using their own data securely. “We think Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions and millions of people in their work life,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky told The New York Times. Enter Q https://youtu.be/1r3MVD1xVRk AWS is the largest cloud computing provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure, which calls its own AI offering Copilot. This is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Microsoft’s 49% shareholding through its $13…

Surprise, surprise. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are now worthless. Hands up who didn’t see that coming? Let’s recall that an NFT is a digital thing – in this case an image – that could still be replicated and copied but for which the owner, held the artwork’s letter of authenticity via a token on a blockchain. For a short while some entrepreneur so-called creators (of questionable artistic merit, let’s be honest) made some mediocre digital art and made millions of dollars. Good for them. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the greatest example of this mind-boggling trend where fictitious art…

By amplifying an antisemitic conspiracy theory, Elon Musk has arguably killed off X.com, the once-thriving social platform formerly called Twitter. But because he’s in such an ivory tower – and convinced of his own rectitude – he doesn’t realise how far his arrogance and impulsiveness have taken him over the edge. Last week when Musk retweeted this nonsense and claimed it is “the actual truth” – he crossed a line that Twitter will never recover from. Having already halved its value from the $44 billion he paid for it last October, Musk has effectively wiped out the rest. Twitter makes…

After five days of turmoil at the poster child of artificial intelligence, OpenAI has rehired CEO Sam Altman after unexpectedly – and inexplicably – firing him. All those people who have come to rely on ChatGPT for its advice can relax, the generative AI company will not implode – as it seemed likely to just a day ago. The four-person board that fired him for not being “consistently candid” in communicating with it – whatever that means, and still hasn’t been revealed – has itself been ousted, bar Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. Altman returns “We have reached an agreement in…

After inexplicably firing CEO Sam Altman, the board of OpenAI has proved one thing: AI can easily be smarter than humans. Last Friday, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm that rocked the world a year ago when it launched its ChatGPT chatbot, made the sudden announcement it was firing Altman because it “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities”. Sam Altman, who co-founded the AI firm in 2015 with backing from Elon Musk and Microsoft, was shown the door for these nebulous reasons – causing a sudden crisis…

Sam Bankman-Fried is not the only guilty person involved in crypto’s fall from grace. There are many others who have made small fortunes off of the rapid rise and just as rapid fall of this new form of money and people’s lust for lucre. For some, it might just have been a hope for a better return on investment, for others a weird middle finger to the establishment. Investors in the FTX Exchange that Bankman-Fried built and ran were assured of many things when placing their bets – er, investing their bitcoin – but not that a backdoor to these…

It’s been a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter promising to rejuvenate the “digital town square”. By all measures, it has been an obscene failure. After paying an inflated $44 billion, Twitter is now worth half that, Musk has admitted. Most of its advertisers have fled – in no small part because the self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” retrenched the actual human beings doing the moderation and it’s now a disinformation quagmire. Last month the European Union launched an investigation into X over “the alleged spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech” relating to the Hamas-Israel war. Musk is suing…