Science and Technology

A lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria sat down to watch the nightly news on Monday, expecting to see herself featured as a prominent opponent of duck hunting.But the member of Parliament, Georgie Purcell, noticed that in one photo used on 9News, the tattoos on her midriff were missing.“I saw the image come up on the screen and I thought, ‘That’s really odd,’ because my stomach is heavily tattooed,” Ms. Purcell said on Wednesday.She compared the image with the original photo, which was taken last year by a local newspaper and realized that not only had her tattoos been…

Amazon said on Monday that it was abandoning plans to buy iRobot, the maker of the self-driving Roomba vacuum, after regulators raised concerns the deal would hurt competition.The announcement is a rare admission of defeat by Amazon, which has in recent years acquired an eclectic mix of companies such as Whole Foods and MGM Studios, and is a sign of how the world’s largest tech companies are being forced to adjust their business practices, products and policies as a result of stiffening regulatory scrutiny globally, particularly in the European Union.In November, E.U. antitrust regulators warned Amazon that they might try…

The genetic testing company 23andMe is being accused in a class-action lawsuit of failing to protect the privacy of customers whose personal information was exposed last year in a data breach that affected nearly seven million profiles.The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in federal court in San Francisco, also accused the company of failing to notify customers with Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage that they appeared to have been specifically targeted, or that their personal genetic information had been compiled into “specially curated lists” that were shared and sold on the dark web.The suit was filed after 23andMe submitted…

Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeLayoffs are hitting newsrooms and publishers again, as tech platforms, ad markets and artificial intelligence reshape the internet. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton have ideas for solutions. Then, one of the most influential investors in crypto companies lays out where the industry went wrong, and why he still thinks blockchains are the future. And finally, a round of HatGPT with the week’s tech headlines, including a spicy LinkedIn post and an A.I. test that disturbs Kevin and Casey’s sense of reality.Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton…

Back in the 1980s, it seemed as if everyone with a spare quarter was playing the arcade game Donkey Kong, scooting up ramps and climbing ladders while avoiding barrels hurled by a giant ape.For most players, the video game provided a few minutes of excitement before inevitable defeat. But a handful of top players had the superhuman ability to rescue Pauline, the damsel in distress, over and over again, earning one of the high scores not just in their own arcade but in the whole world.Now a settlement has been reached in a long-running disagreement over disputed world records set…

Voters in New Hampshire received robocall messages over the weekend in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to impersonate President Biden’s, urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office.The fake recordings, which told listeners that “your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” were manipulated to seem as if they had been sent by an officer of a Democratic committee, the office said.The attorney general’s office stressed that voting in the primary would not rule out voters from also casting ballots in the general election in November.“These messages…