Tech Digest daily roundup: New law will make sharing pornographic deepfakes a crime
A planned new law would make sharing pornographic deepfakes without consent a crime in England and Wales. Tackling the rise in manipulated images, where a person’s face is put on someone else’s body, is part of a crackdown on the abuse of intimate pictures in the Online Safety Bill. This law would also make it easier to charge people with sharing intimate photos without consent. Prosecutors would no longer need to prove they intended to cause distress. In some cases under the existing law, men have admitted sharing women’s intimate images without consent, but have not been prosecuted because they said they did not intend to cause any harm. BBC
Twitter will roll out gold and grey verification check marks when it relaunches the delayed blue tick service next week, owner Elon Musk has announced. The move was “painful, but necessary”, the billionaire chief executive said in a post on the social media platform. All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before the tick is activated, said Mr Musk. He wrote: “Gold check for companies, grey check for governments, blue for individuals (celebrities or not). Painful, but necessary.” In a further tweet, Mr Musk said: “Individuals can have a secondary tiny logo to show they belong to an organisation if verified as such by that organisation.” Sky News
Planning permission has been granted to build Europe’s largest lithium hydroxide refinery on Teesside. It is hoped the £248 million zero-waste refinery, critical to the automative industry, will begin production in 2025, generating more than 1,000 jobs in the area. Permission has been given for the lithium hydroxide refinery, which will produce the building block critical for battery manufacturing, to be built at Teesside’s freeport. Tees Valley Lithium Ltd, which is owned by Alkemy Capital Investments, could supply 30% of the UK’s projected automotive demand by 2030 and would be positioned to serve proposed gigafactories in the region. ITV.com
An Apple engineer has addressed the lack of lossless audio support in the second-generation AirPods Pro in a new interview. Current Bluetooth technology in the AirPods lineup means that Apple’s audio products do not support Apple Music Lossless audio. Apple has previously hinted that it may develop its own codec and connectivity standard that builds on AirPlay and supports higher quality audio streaming, but so far has not made any such move… In an interview with What Hi-Fi?, Apple engineer Esge Andersen, who works on the company’s acoustic team, said that Apple does not believe that current Bluetooth technology is a limiting factor in audio quality for the AirPods. Mac Rumors
Alongside stable One UI 5 updates for a host of its devices, Samsung is rolling out a fresh update for its latest Wear OS smartwatches. As per reports on Reddit, the Galaxy Watch 5 update started rolling out in several regions yesterday. If you haven’t received it yet, you can check for it on your phone by heading to the Watch settings section of the Galaxy Wearable app and tapping on the Watch software update option at the bottom of the list. The latest software update for the Galaxy Watch 5 and Galaxy Watch 5 Pro (firmware version R920XXU1AVK7) brings a new ‘Ball’ watch face, the Android security patches for November 2022, and some stability and reliability improvements. XDA Developers
