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The top US health official on Tuesday issued a stark warning to parents, tech companies and regulators, saying the evidence is growing that social media use may seriously harm children. In a lengthy advisory, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy said that while not without benefits, “there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” Social media use by young people in the United States is nearly universal, with up to 95 percent of adolescents reporting using a social platform and more than a third saying they do so “almost constantly,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Murthy’s report said social media can help children and adolescents find a community to connect, but that it also contains “extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content,” which can “normalize” self-harm and suicide. It can perpetuate body dissatisfaction, eating disorders and depression and expose chi...

ISLAMABAD, May 23 (APP): Pakistan earned US$ 1,941.350 million by providing different Information Technology (IT) services to various countries during the first nine months of the current fiscal year 2022-23. This shows a decline of 0.45 percent as compared to US$ 1,950.080 million earned through the provision of services during the corresponding months of the fiscal year 2021-22, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) reported. During July-March (2022-23), the export of computer services grew by 0.09 percent as it surged from US$ 1,566.870 million last fiscal year to US$ 1,568.270 million this year. Among the computer services, the exports of software consultancy services witnessed a decrease of 0.85 percent, from US$ 578.454 million to US$ 573.544 million while the exports of hardware consultancy services rose by 148.69 percent from US$ 1.645 million to US$ 4.091 million. The export and import of computer software-related services surged by 6.05 percent, from US$ 420.169 millio...

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence bot that became a global sensation for its powers to churn out human-like content and provide answers on all subjects, is now available in the Apple app store. Watch ARY News live on  live.arynews.tv OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, on Thursday said the release came after it heard from users that they “love using ChatGPT on the go.” By moving to smartphones, OpenAI continues its encroachment on the search market, massively dominated by Google, which has been put under pressure by the rise of generative AI. Related – Google launches ChatGPT rival Bard AI chatbot in these countries Offered free of charge, the app will allow users to “get precise information without sifting through ads or multiple results,” OpenAI said on its website, in a subtle dig at Google’s search engine. The app can also give “guidance on cooking, travel plans, or crafting thoughtful messages,” the company added. Related – Meta says ChatGPT-related...

WASHINGTON: Montana Governor Greg Gianforte on Wednesday signed legislation to ban Chinese-owned TikTok from operating in the state to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China, making it the first US state to ban the popular short video app. Montana will make it unlawful for Google and Apple’s app stores to offer TikTok within the state, but will not impose any penalties on individuals using the app. The ban is to take effect Jan. 1, 2024, and is almost certain to face legal challenges. TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, did not respond to a Reuters question asking if it planned legal action. Earlier, TikTok issued a statement saying that the new law “infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok,” and said it will “continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.” TikTok, which has over 150 million American users, has faced growing calls from U.S. lawmakers and sta...

SAN FRANCISCO: Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) boss Elon Musk, who has never used traditional advertising to sell cars, said on Tuesday that the automaker would try it and see whether it produced results. Musk said it was “ironic” that as CEO of Tesla, he now owns Twitter. The social media platform is highly dependent on ads and will soon be led by advertising veteran Linda Yaccarino, who he hired last week. “So I guess I should say advertising is awesome, and everyone should do it,” Musk said at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas. “We’ll try out a little advertising and see how it goes.” It underscores his efforts to shore up investor confidence in the car maker’s prospects at a time when rising competition and a slow economy has forced Tesla to slash prices. Read more: ELON MUSK SAYS TESLA WILL PUT SALES GROWTH AHEAD OF PROFIT Since Musk acquired Twitter in October, advertisers have fled the social media platform, worried that their ads could appear ...

LinkedIn, the social media network owned by Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) that focuses on business professionals, said on Monday it would cut 716 jobs as demand wavers, while also shutting down its China-focused job application. LinkedIn, which has 20,000 employees, has grown revenue each quarter during the last year, but it joins other major technology companies including its parent in laying off workers amid a weakening global economic outlook. In the past six months, more than 270,000 tech jobs globally have been cut, according to Layoffs.fyi, which has been tracking the fallout. LinkedIn makes money through ad sales and also by charging for subscriptions to recruiting and sales professionals who use the network to find prospects. In a letter to employees, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky said the move to cut roles in its sales, operations and support teams was aimed at streamlining the company’s operations and would remove layers to help make quicker decisions. “With the market...

 Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) results beat expectations on Thursday, showing off the tech giant’s resilience in a slowing global economy thanks to better-than-expected iPhone sales and notable inroads in India and other newer markets. Shares of the largest US company by market value rose 2% after Apple exceeded Wall Street’s expectations for revenue and profit for the April 1 quarter. The company’s results contrast with disappointing figures out of big chipmakers due to a slower-than-expected rebound in China’s economic growth. Apple executives on Thursday said gross profit margins for the current quarter would be better than forecast despite an expected dip in revenue as supply-chain issues have improved. Apple said sales for its fiscal second quarter ended April 1 fell 2.5% to $94.8 billion, ahead of expectations for a 4.4% decline, according to Refinitiv data. Profit was flat at $1.52 per share, compared with estimates of $1.43 per share. IPhone sales were up 1.5% to $51....

OpenAI is introducing what one employee called an “incognito mode” for its hit chatbot ChatGPT that does not save users’ conversation history or use it to improve its artificial intelligence, the company said Tuesday. The San Francisco-based startup also said it planned a “ChatGPT Business” subscription with additional data controls. The move comes as scrutiny has grown over how ChatGPT and other chatbots it inspired manage hundreds of millions of users’ data, commonly used to improve, or “train”, AI. Italy last month banned ChatGPT for possible privacy violations, saying OpenAI could resume the service if it met demands such as giving consumers tools to object to the processing of their data.  France and Spain  also began probing the service. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told Reuters the company was compliant with European privacy law and is working to assure regulators. The new features did not arise from Italy’s ChatGPT ban, she said, but from a mon...

The Chief Executive Officer of the social media platform Meta Mark Zuckerberg announced that the users of messaging service WhatsApp can use the same account on four smartphones. Watch ARY News live on  live.arynews.tv Mark Zuckerberg announced the new upgrade on his social media handles. He stated, “Starting today, you can log into the same WhatsApp account on up to four phones.” The new feature will be available for all users within the coming weeks. Through the new feature, the messages on their account would get synced across different gadgets, that included smartphones and other devices. It is pertinent to mention WhatsApp users could only use the same account on one smartphone and multiple computers. Related – WhatsApp unveils new features to secure accounts on iOS, Android WhatsApp is one of the most popular online messaging applications with two billion users worldwide. But it was criticized because of its lack of calls and messaging privacy.   Vi...

Manufacturers are hoping for the artificial intelligence revolution to reach their factories, envisaging robots being used to repair complex machinery. There has been an explosion of interest in uses of AI across many sectors since the launch last year of chatbot ChatGPT from US startup OpenAI. And at last week’s Hanover Fair on industrial technology in Germany, the potential for artificial intelligence in the manufacturing sector was firmly in focus. Via the tablet in his hands, a young employee of American IT services provider HPE chatted with an AI-equipped virtual assistant, asking it to operate the arm of a robot. In order to solve a technical problem, “factory workers no longer need to get a qualified expert on site: the artificial intelligence takes charge” of guiding the repairs, said Thomas Meier, a data analyst from HPE who was presenting the prototype. The US firm, which has some 60,000 employees, has been working for the past year with Aleph Alpha, a German startup wi...

BOCA CHICA: Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, exploded during its first flight on Thursday, but Elon Musk congratulated his SpaceX team on an “exciting” test of the spacecraft designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond. The uncrewed rocket disintegrated minutes after successfully blasting off at 8:33am Central Time (1333 GMT) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The Starship spacecraft that will eventually carry crew and cargo had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the flight, but separation failed to occur and the rocket blew up in a ball of fire over the Gulf of Mexico. Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/4t8mRP37Gp — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023 Despite the failure to complete the full 90-minute flight test and reach orbit, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of the private space company, declared it a success. “Congrats SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk t...

WhatsApp has announced three new security features for both iOS and Android devices. The new security features are called Account Protect, Device Verification, and Automatic Security Codes. Besides the staple end-to-end encryption that prevents interception of messages on WhatsApp, the Meta-owned company’s three new features are supposed to offer further protection from threats. According to a WhatsApp press release, the first “Account Protect” feature is intended to verify it’s really the user trying to log in when a new device is registered. Essentially, your old device will be pinged for verification when you’re switching to a new device to provide an added layer of security, WhatsApp claims. The Meta-owned company stated that this feature can help alert you in case an unauthorised attempt is being made to transfer your WhatsApp account onto another device. The second feature that is new is called “Device Verification” which is designed to tackle malware, one of the biggest th...

SAN FRANCISCO: A California Tesla owner sued the electric carmaker in a prospective class action lawsuit accusing it of violating the privacy of customers. The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California came after Reuters reported on Thursday that groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras between 2019 and 2022. The lawsuit, filed by Henry Yeh, a San Francisco resident who owns Tesla’s Model Y, alleges that Tesla employees were able to access the images and videos for their “tasteless and tortious entertainment” and “the humiliation of those surreptitiously recorded.” “Like anyone would be, Mr Yeh was outraged at the idea that Tesla’s cameras can be used to violate his family’s privacy, which the California Constitution scrupulously protects,” Jack Fitzgerald, an attorney representing Yeh, said in a statement to Reuters. “Tesla needs t...

Facebook-owner Meta (META.O) published an artificial intelligence model on Wednesday that can pick out individual objects from within an image, along with a dataset of image annotations that it said was the largest ever of its kind. The company’s research division said in a blog post that its Segment Anything Model, or SAM, could identify objects in images and videos even in cases where it had not encountered those items in its training. Using SAM, objects can be selected by clicking on them or writing text prompts. In one demonstration, writing the word “cat” prompted the tool to draw boxes around each of several cats in a photo. Big tech companies have been trumpeting their artificial intelligence breakthroughs since Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot became a sensation in the fall, triggering a wave of investments and a race to dominate the space. Meta has teased several features that deploy the type of generative AI popularized by ChatGPT, wh...

SAN FRANCISCO: Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) investors are waiting to see how much Elon Musk’s price cuts will pay off: the electric vehicle (EV) maker is expected this weekend to report record sales as cheaper sticker prices, helped by US subsidies, spurred demand. Musk’s action in January kicked off a price war that was especially heated in China, betting that Tesla’s industry-leading profit margins would let it rebuff growing competition and appease customers in a weak economy. Tesla may have handed over 430,000 vehicles in the quarter ended March 31, according to analysts’ estimates collected by Refinitiv. That would be up 6% from the previous quarter, and up 39% from a year earlier. Production is expected to have risen as the automaker ramped up production at new factories in Texas and Berlin, and as China production recovered from a COVID-19 lockdown hit. Analysts expect Tesla to further lower prices as many automakers have matched the price cuts and concerns about a weakening economy ...

Elon Musk on Friday defended his controversial pay model for Twitter, claiming that any social media platform that didn’t follow suit would fail because they would be swarmed by bots. Musk made his prediction on the eve of Twitter’s April 1 ultimatum that verified accounts with the cherished blue tick that had not forked over cash would lose it. “The fundamental challenge here is that it’s (easy) to create literally 10,000 or 100,000 fake Twitter accounts using just one computer at home and with modern AI (artificial intelligence),” Musk told a question and answer session on Twitter. “That’s the reason for really pressing hard on verified where the verified requires a number from a reputable phone carrier and a credit card,” Musk said. “My prediction is that any so-called social media network that doesn’t do this will fail,” Musk added. The change in system puts pressure on companies, journalists and celebrities who used Twitter as their main channel of communication and relied o...

After the availability of ChatGPT on Siri, Apple Watch and other places, now WhatsApp users can also use the AI bot on the app without any complicated steps. By following the below-mentioned simple steps the ChatGPT can easily be used on Whatsapp. 1. On your mobile, visit the official Shmooz AI  website  using the link here. Tap the “Start Shmoozing” button, and your WhatsApp will automatically open. 2. Here, tap the “Continue to chat” button, and you will be led to the chat screen right away. 3. A message will be auto-typed in the message box for you. Simply send it, and the bot will respond. 4. And that’s it! You can now talk to Shmooz AI in WhatsApp like you would with ChatGPT, and it will respond. Use ChatGPT on Whatsapp Without Complicated Steps We hope this guide helped you in setting up ChatGPT on your WhatsApp account without any problems. As mentioned above, you have 20 free messages so make them count! Once done there, hop on to your PC and have fun ...

Apple on Tuesday launched its “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) service in the United States, a move that threatens to disrupt the fintech sector dominated by firms like Affirm Holdings and Swedish payments company Klarna. The service, Apple Pay Later, will allow users to split purchases into four payments spread over six weeks with no interest or fees, the company said. It will initially be offered to select users, with plans of a full roll-out in the coming months. Users can get loans between $50 and $1,000 for online and in-app purchases made on iPhones and iPads with merchants that accept Apple Pay, according to the company. More than 85% of U.S. retailers accept Apple Pay, the company said. “Apple Pay Later will absolutely wallop some of the other players. Other companies would’ve taken a look at Apple’s announcement today because they are an ubiquitous name. This will take a bite out of the market share of other players,” said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell. ...

PARIS: A large asteroid will safely zoom between Earth and the Moon on Saturday, a once-in-a-decade event that will be used as a training exercise for planetary defence efforts, according to the European Space Agency. The asteroid, named 2023 DZ2, is estimated to be 40 to 70 metres (130 to 230 feet) wide, roughly the size of the Parthenon, and big enough to wipe out a large city if it hit our planet. At 19:49 GMT on Saturday it will come within a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, said Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA’s planetary defence office. Though that is “very close”, there is nothing to worry about, he told AFP. Small asteroids fly past every day, but one of this size coming so close to Earth only happens around once every 10 years, he added. The asteroid will pass 175,000 kilometres (109,000 miles) from Earth at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,400 miles per hour). The moon is roughly 385,000 kilometres away. An observatory in La Palma, one of ...

WASHINGTON: TikTok’s chief executive will tell lawmakers the Chinese-owned short video app with more than 150 million American users has never, and would never, share United States user data with the Chinese government amid growing US national security concerns. “TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, US user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever made,” CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify on Thursday, according to written testimony posted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. He added that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is not owned or controlled by any government or state entity. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew will say to the committee. TikTok’s critics fear that its US user data could be passed on to China’s government by the app and prompted growing calls to ban the app by US lawmakers. Last week, TikTok said the ...