Technology

The South Korean government unleashed a wave of panic across the internet industry: The country’s antitrust regulator said it would enact the toughest competition law outside Europe, curbing the influence of major technology companies.The Korea Fair Trade Commission, with the backing of President Yoon Suk Yeol, said in December that it planned to make a proposal modeled after the 2022 Digital Markets Act, the European Union’s landmark law to rein in American tech giants. This bill also seemed to target South Korea’s own internet conglomerates just as much as the Alphabets, Apples and Metas of the world.The commission said the law would designate certain companies as dominant platforms and limit their ability to use strongholds in one online business to expand into new areas.Then last week,...

Another month, another try at the moon.A robotic lunar lander launched into space early Thursday morning. If all goes well, in nine days, it will become the first American spacecraft to gently set down on the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.It would also become the first private effort to reach the surface of the moon in one piece. Three earlier attempts, by an American company, a Japanese company and an Israeli nonprofit, failed.The company in charge of this mission, Intuitive Machines of Houston, is optimistic.“I feel fairly confident that we’re going to be successful softly touching down on the moon,” Stephen Altemus, the president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in an interview. “We’ve done the tests. We tested and tested and tested. As much test...

Another month, another try at the moon.A robotic lunar lander is scheduled to launch in the early morning hours of Wednesday. If all goes well, it will become the first American spacecraft to set down softly on the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.It is also the latest private effort to send spacecraft to the moon. Earlier attempts have all ended in failure. But the company in charge of the latest effort, Intuitive Machines of Houston, is optimistic. “I feel fairly confident that we’re going to be successful softly touching down on the moon,” said Stephen Altemus, the president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines. “We’ve done the testing. We’ve tested and tested and tested. As much testing as we could do.”When is the launch and how can I watch?The Intuitive Mac...

In the darkest moments of a family tragedy, when the playwright Mona Pirnot couldn’t find the strength to verbalize her feelings to her boyfriend or her therapist, she tried something a little unorthodox: She typed her thoughts into her laptop, and prompted a text-to-speech program to voice them aloud.It was a coping mechanism that also sparked a creative pivot: Pirnot’s then-boyfriend, now-husband, Lucas Hnath, is also a playwright, with a longtime interest in sound and a more recent history of building shows around disembodied voices. His last play, “A Simulacrum,” featured a magician re-creating his side of a conversation with Hnath, whose voice was heard via a tape recording; and his play before that, “Dana H.,” featured an actress lip-syncing interviews in which the playwright’s mothe...

“I never really thought about the fact that it’s connected to the internet,” she said. “Being Gen Z, I feel like sex is so connected to technology already that it didn’t feel weird having something that’s a bit more technological than just say, watching something online.”While the pitch for products like Lovense and WeVibe, another popular brand of remote controlled vibrators and stimulation rings, might seem self-evident — to create pleasure — much of the latest sex tech often has a loftier goal in mind. Make Love Not Porn, a user-generated social sex platform, aims to eradicate the unrealistic standards created by hard core pornography by showing unrehearsed, consensual, “real world” sex, said Cindy Gallop, the company’s founder and a veteran sex educator.Meanwhile, products like the VDO...

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday outlawed unwanted robocalls generated by artificial intelligence, amid growing concerns over election disinformation and consumer fraud facilitated by the technology.The unanimous decision by the F.C.C. cited a three-decade-old law aimed at curbing junk phone calls, clarifying that A.I.-generated spam calls are also illegal. By doing so, the agency said it expanded the ability of states to prosecute creators of unsolicited spam robocalls.“It seems like something from the far-off future, but it is already here,” the F.C.C. chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said in a statement. “Bad actors are using A.I.-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities and misinform voters.”Concerns about the u...

Videos being shared across social media this week depict an almost dystopian, futuristic scene: drivers of Teslas in Autopilot mode while wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets, seemingly unaware of the road in front of them.The videos led federal transportation officials to issue warnings.But are people really mindlessly riding around in Teslas in Autopilot mode, wearing Apple’s futuristic new goggles? Or is it all just a bit? Part of a never-ending cycle of people doing silly things for clicks, likes, views and clout?The new goggles have a feature that merges digital apps and one’s surroundings into one immersive space, and videos of people wearing them in strange settings have started to crop up across the internet since they were released on Feb. 2.Several of the videos taken in cars appear...

Images of Taylor Swift that had been generated by artificial intelligence and had spread widely across social media in late January probably originated as part of a recurring challenge on one of the internet’s most notorious message boards, according to a new report.Graphika, a research firm that studies disinformation, traced the images back to one community on 4chan, a message board known for sharing hate speech, conspiracy theories and, increasingly, racist and offensive content created using A.I.The people on 4chan who created the images of the singer did so in a sort of game, the researchers said — a test to see whether they could create lewd (and sometimes violent) images of famous female figures.The synthetic Swift images spilled out onto other platforms and were viewed millions of ...

On a sweltering July evening, the din from thousands of computers mining for Bitcoins pierced the night. Nearby, Matt Brown, a member of the Arkansas legislature, monitored the noise alongside a local magistrate.As the two men investigated complaints about the operation, Mr. Brown said, a security guard for the mine loaded rounds into an AR-15-style assault rifle that had been stored in a car.“He wanted to make sure that we knew he had his gun — that we knew it was loaded,” Mr. Brown, a Republican, said in an interview.The Bitcoin outfit here, 45 minutes north of Little Rock, is one of three sites in Arkansas owned by a network of companies embroiled in tense disputes with residents, who say the noise generated by computers performing trillions of calculations per second ruins lives, lower...

Last May, Fabuwood, a kitchen cabinet manufacturer in Newark, instituted a new company policy: No phones allowed during meetings.To enforce it, the company installed “device shelves” outside each of its six glass-walled conference rooms. On a recent Wednesday morning, there were animated meetings in three of the conference rooms, and the shelves outside were full of smartphones, tablets and ’90s-style flip phones. The 1,200-person company pays the cost of a flip phone for employees who give up their smartphone, and 80 people have acted on the offer.Surprisingly, employees say they like it. Rena Stoff, a project manager, said that while at first she hated the idea of being deprived of her smartphone, she found that it had made meetings — that she once found boring and unnecessary — engaging...