OTHER
The Rich Fight Different From You and Me
The cage fight saga pitting Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is stuck in the “is it happening or not” stage, to the amusement and fascination of millions. After saying the bout would be live-streamed on his social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), Musk announced he’d first undergo an MRI to make sure he didn’t need surgery to “strengthen” a titanium plate in his neck (the consequence, he’s said, of sumo wrestling about nine years ago). “Exact date is still in flux,” Tesla’s “techno king and chief executive officer” tweeted of the mixed martial arts matchup. “I’m ready today,” Zuck responded on one of his own social media platforms, Threads, but “not holding my breath.”
Delay may be the better part of valor — given the better physical condition, the Facebook founder is in. But it also ups the anticipation levels of everyone who’d like to see a billionaire-on-billionaire smackdown. Usually, these take place via the value of the stock they have in their own companies (Musk is the plutocrat to beat in this category). As my colleague Adrian Wooldridge recently wrote, physical combat between these tech titans could establish who’s the alpha-est of all the alpha males in Silicon Valley.
I get the appeal of going mano a mano. Kaiju vs. kaiju? I’m there. (I got up early in the morning for the worldwide debut of Godzilla vs. Kong). Novak Djokovic against any top five men’s singles tennis player? I’m in. Alexis vs. Krystle in Dynasty? Ok, I’m showing my age.
Not too long ago — well, back in 2005 — I was caught up in the revival of MMA. It was inspired by a reality TV show that concluded in a titanic cage fight, which I wrote about for Time magazine. Here’s my description of the single battle that revived a fugitive sport that’s now captured Musk and Zuckerberg:
Neither man would give in, so the crowd roared for the fighters to smash each other again: more kicks, punches, stomps, knees, and elbows. They obliged. When they got too tired to fight, they would grab each other and crash to the mat of the octagonal ring, grappling, twisting like strange action figures, pressing against the cage’s netting. Then they would be back on their feet, catching a breath, calculating advantage, their faces streaked with sweat and gore. Both were bleeders. Weeks before, in a qualifying bout, Forrest Griffin, 26, had suffered a gash above an eye that required so many stitches that few expected him to advance in the contest. He healed in time for this evening’s punishment, and as Stephan Bonnar, 28, punched him in the head, Griffin cheekily offered a come-hither smile, turned the other cheek, and slammed back.
The fight turned Forrest Griffin (who won) and Stephan Bonnar into the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier of MMA — and the sport into a commercial and athletic phenomenon. Eight years earlier, it had been banned from TV and major arenas in the US after critics lambasted its bizarre brutality, which pitted martial art against martial art (sumo against boxing against Brazilian jiujitsu against Muay Thai and on and on). The late US Senator John McCain called it “human cockfighting.” But the first season of The Ultimate Fighter on SpikeTV (now the Paramount Network) not only revived interest, it set up the gladiators in a house where they shared their lives as they fought and eliminated each other in brutal matches, leading up to the Griffin-Bonnar finale. You rooted for them as fighters but also as affecting characters in a drama. That kind of scripting did the trick: It humanized a notorious blood sport.
Griffin and Bonnar were perfectly cast as the pioneer standard bearers of the revivified MMA. Bonnar was handsome and brooding. Griffin was a smart aleck with a gap-toothed charisma. And the astonishing thing is that they were friends and remained friends, even after Bonnar lost a rematch months later (he named his son Griffin). MMA provided a way out of obscurity — and near penury. Griffin told Time that, while fighting in fly-by-night cage circuits, he’d be sometimes paid $100 a night —and then see the check bounce.
The tremendous charm of the original ultimate fighters was that they were strong men with soft hearts. They transcended gladiatorial and mercenary instincts, as well as financial adversity, to find brotherhood despite or perhaps because of the physical pain they had to inflict on each other. That attraction has certainly diminished as the sport has become big business and the public personalities of the fighters more cartoonish. I don’t watch it anymore for that reason and others. I’m tired of seeing people I’ve come to care for get hurt.
The ever-entertaining Griffin has gone on to a corporate job with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the Las Vegas-based company that started it all. Bonnar’s career went the other way: He meandered from MMA to wrestling to a run-in with the police. He died suddenly in December 2022 from what was first described as a heart attack. This past March, the coroner’s office in Clark County, Nevada, said it was the result of an “accidental” fentanyl overdose. Bonnar had said he’d been on a prescription of 30 mg of oxycodone a day — a moderate amount — for the pain resulting from his fighting career. Griffin tweeted: “Stephan was a lot of things: He was always the most interesting person in the room, he had the biggest heart and most importantly, he was my friend. I always loved it that people got excited when they found out we were really friends. I’ll always miss you, brother.”
It is heartbreakingly poignant. That kind of emotion does not seem to undergird all the trash-talking between the two billionaires. But, if it ends up with genuine friendship, let them fight.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 alongside the Galaxy Tab S9 series and Galaxy Watch 6 series at its first Galaxy Unpacked event in South Korea. We discuss the company’s new devices and more on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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