Tech Digest daily round up: Donald Trump sues social media
Former US president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against tech giants Google, Twitter and Facebook, claiming that he is the victim of censorship. The class-action lawsuit also targets the three companies’ CEOs. Mr Trump was suspended from his social accounts in January over public safety concerns in the wake of the Capitol riots, led by his supporters. On Wednesday, Mr Trump called the lawsuit “a very beautiful development for our freedom of speech”. In a news conference from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Mr Trump railed against social media companies and Democrats, who he accused of espousing misinformation. “We are demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well,” he said. BBC
The UK’s most powerful supercomputer, which its creators hope will make the process of preventing, diagnosing and treating disease better, faster and cheaper, is operational. Christened Cambridge-1, the supercomputer represents a $100m investment by US-based computing company Nvidia. The idea capitalises on artificial intelligence (AI) – which combines big data with computer science to facilitate problem-solving – in healthcare. “If you could imagine ganging up 10 refrigerators in a row and then having several rows of those refrigerators – that is the size and shape of this computer,” said Kimberly Powell, vice-president of healthcare at Nvidia. The UK has already made strides with massive datasets such as the UK Biobank, which encompasses anonymised of medical and lifestyle records from half a million middle-aged Britons. Guardian
The UK has ranked sixth in the world for the share of its electricity it produces from clean wind and solar power, analysis shows. The assessment revealing the top 15 wind and solar power countries by climate and energy think tank Ember shows Denmark is leading the way, generating 61% of its electricity from the two renewable sources, followed by Uruguay on 44%. The UK comes in sixth in the ranking, behind Ireland, Germany and Spain, generating 29% of its power from wind and solar in 2020. The ranking comes after Ember’s recent global electricity review which revealed that wind and solar produced almost a tenth of the world’s electricity in 2020, a doubling since 2015 when they generated 5% of global power. Yahoo!
Windows 10’s one billion users need to be on high alert because Microsoft has issued a serious update warning and everyone needs to take action. The warning is in response to ‘PrintNightmare’, a critical zero day flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service which is actively being exploited by hackers to remotely execute code with system-level privileges (the ultimate goal for attacks). Now Microsoft has issued a series of fixes which, while flawed, are essential updates for all Windows users. “We recommend that you install these updates immediately,” states Microsoft. “The security updates released on and after July 6, 2021 contain protections for CVE-2021-1675 and the additional remote code execution exploit in the Windows Print Spooler service known as ‘PrintNightmare’, documented in CVE-2021-34527.” Forbes
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has suggested that self-isolation for those pinged by the NHS app could be altered as coronavirus cases are expected to spiral. Acknowledging public “frustration”, he said on Thursday that Health Secretary Sajid Javid is looking at an “appropriate, balanced and proportionate” approach for the app. Most of England’s remaining lockdown restrictions will end if the Government proceeds with Step 4 on July 19, but changes to self-isolation rules will not come in for another four weeks. Ministers have been warned that millions of people could be “pinged” by the app or ordered to self-isolate by Test and Trace, with infections expected to hit around 100,000 cases a day in the summer. Evening Standard
