Tech Digest daily roundup: Twitter in the US must pay a $150m fine

Twitter in the US must pay a $150m (£119m) fine after law enforcement officials accused it of illegally using users’ data to help sell targeted ads. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice say Twitter violated an agreement it had with regulators, court documents showed. Twitter had vowed to not give personal information like phone numbers and email addresses to advertisers. Federal investigators say the social media company broke those rules. Twitter was fined £400,000 in December 2020 for breaking Europe’s GDPR data privacy rules. BBC

Hackers have flooded the dark web with credit card details stolen from Russia’s largest bank as cybercriminals target the country in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. The card details of 113,476 Sberbank customers have leaked onto the dark web since the conflict began, according to research by data intelligence firm Cyberint, where they are being advertised for sale to fraudsters. This is almost 10 times the number circulating on illicit websites before the conflict began. Sberbank has been hit by international sanctions since Vladimir Putin launched his war. Cyber experts said this has made it more vulnerable to hackers because it is easier to con distracted staff into sharing sensitive details. Telegraph 

A portrait of the Queen painted by a humanoid robot artist has been unveiled ahead of the Platinum Jubilee. Titled Algorithm Queen, it was painted by Ai-Da Robot – an artificial intelligence machine built in 2019. It was designed to create drawings, painting, and sculptures by using cameras in its eyes and its computer memory, before deploying a variety of unique algorithms to paint, draw and abstract images. A robotic arm lets it turn its digital formations into physical drawings and paintings. Ai-Da Robot – named after 18th century mathematician and scientist Ada Lovelace – is also able to converse using a specially designed language model. Sky News 

A Cape Cod science center and one of the world’s largest shipping businesses are collaborating on a project to use robotic buoys to protect a vanishing whale from lethal collisions with ships. A lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution developed the technology, which uses buoys and underwater gliders to record whale sounds in near real time. The robotic recorders give scientists, mariners and the public an idea of the location of rare North Atlantic right whales, said Mark Baumgartner, a marine ecologist with Woods Hole whose lab also operates the buoys. The whales number less than 340 in the world and ship strikes are one of the biggest threats to their existence, as they travel through some of the busiest stretches of ocean on the planet. Independent

China’s mobile phone shipments reached 18.08 million units in April, down 34.2 percent from a year ago, data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed. In the January-April period, total shipments came in at 87.42 million units, the academy, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said on Friday. Shipments of 5G mobile phones amounted to 14.59 million units last month, accounting for 80.7 percent of shipments, data showed. CGTN

Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) investor-led proposal to review its use of plastic won 49% support even as shareholders voted down all the 15 resolutions at the e-commerce giant’s annual general meeting, a regulatory filing showed on Friday. It was the only proposal that came close to reaching the 51% mark for approval. Investors opposed resolutions that challenged the company’s policies on various issues, including the treatment of workers and use of non-disclosure agreements. read more