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      Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.

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      If deals are struck, Meta may incorporate the actors’ voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, people with knowledge of the effort said.Meta is in discussions with Awkwafina, Judi Dench and other actors and influencers for the right to incorporate their voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, as the company pushes to build more products that feature artificial intelligence.Apart from Ms. Dench and Awkwafina, Meta is in talks with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key and other celebrities, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. They added that all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations with the tech giant.The talks remain fluid, and it is unclear which actors and influencers, if any, may sign on to the project, the people said. If the parties come to an agreement, Meta could pay millions of dollars in fees to the actors.A Meta spokesman declined to comment. The discussions were reported earlier by Bloomberg.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, which the biggest tech companies are racing to develop and lead. Meta has plowed billions into weaving the technology into its social networking apps and advertising business, including by creating artificially intelligent characters that could chat through text across its messaging apps.On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, increased how much his company would spend on A.I. and other expenses this year to at least $37 billion, up from $30 billion at the beginning of 2024. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would rather build too fast “rather than too late” to prevent his competitors from gaining an edge in the A.I. race.One area of A.I. that is rapidly emerging are chatbots with voice abilities, which act as virtual assistants. In May, OpenAI, a leading A.I. company, unveiled a version of its ChatGPT chatbot that could receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos. It was part of a wider effort to combine conversational chatbots with voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Other Tech Billionaires Brawl Over Politics

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      Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and other tech billionaires, many of whom are part of the “PayPal Mafia,” are openly brawling with one another over politics as tensions rise.Less than an hour after a gunman in Butler, Pa., tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump this month, David Sacks, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco, directed his anger about the incident toward a former colleague.“The Left normalized this,” Mr. Sacks wrote on X, linking to a post about Reid Hoffman, a technology investor and major Democratic donor. Mr. Sacks implied that Mr. Hoffman, a critic of Mr. Trump who had funded a lawsuit accusing the former president of rape and defamation, had helped cause the shooting.Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla and previously worked with Mr. Sacks and Mr. Hoffman, then weighed in on X, name-checking Mr. Hoffman and saying people like him “got their dearest wish.”In Silicon Valley, the spectacle of tech billionaire attacking tech billionaire has suddenly exploded, as pro-Trump executives and their Democratic counterparts have openly turned on each other. The brawling has spilled into public view online, at conferences and on podcasts, as debates about the country’s future have turned into personal broadsides.The animus has pit those who once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings against one another, fraying friendships and alliances that could shift Silicon Valley’s power centers. The fighting has been particularly acute among the “PayPal Mafia,” a wealthy group of tech executives — including Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and the investor Peter Thiel — who worked together at the online payments company in the 1990s and later founded their own companies or turned into high-profile investors.Other tech leaders have also been pulled into the political spats, including Vinod Khosla, a prominent investor, and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Congress Calls for Tech Outage Hearing to Grill Executive

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      The House Homeland Security Committee called on the chief executive of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to testify on the disruption.A Congressional committee called on the chief executive of CrowdStrike to testify at a hearing about its role in a tech outage that roiled the global economy, in one of the first attempts to hold the cybersecurity company responsible.CrowdStrike sent a faulty security update to its customers Thursday night, resulting in millions of Microsoft Windows devices shutting down and disruptions to airlines, hospitals, logistics companies and others.Americans “deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking,” wrote Representative Mark Green of Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Representative Andrew Garbarino, Republican of New York.The letter was sent to George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive. Mr. Green and Mr. Garbarino asked the company for a response to scheduling the hearing this week, but did not specify when it would take place.“CrowdStrike is actively in contact with relevant congressional committees,” said a company spokeswoman. “Briefings and other engagement timelines may be disclosed at members’ discretion.”The request came as the world continued to deal with the fallout from the widespread outages. Delta Air Lines canceled more than 800 flights on Monday, leaving more passengers stranded. And other industries were still recovering after being knocked offline for hours.The outage underscores how the world has become reliant on a small group of companies to maintain its digital infrastructure. CrowdStrike, while little-known to most consumers, is the second largest American cybersecurity company. More than half of Fortune 500 companies use its products.“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem — global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors, and customers,” said a Microsoft executive, David Weston, in a blog post on Saturday. “It’s also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist.”CrowdStrike’s products are used primarily by large businesses, not consumers. Its flawed update sent computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system into a spiral where they continually rebooted. Although CrowdStrike sent a fix, many computers didn’t get it because of the loop. In many cases, businesses had to delete the damaging file from each machine manually.Mr. Kurtz on Friday told NBC’s “Today” show that the incident was not a cyberattack and was the result of the faulty update. But the congressional committee said in its letter to Mr. Kurtz on Monday said that the incident still presented vexing security questions.“Malicious cyber actors backed by nation-states, such as China and Russia, are watching our response to this incident closely,” the lawmakers said. “Protecting our critical infrastructure requires us to learn from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again.”Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, on Friday also asked the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the outages. More

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      Scams Tied to the CrowdStrike Crash Have Bloomed. Here’s How to Stay Safe

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      People posing as airline customer service representatives may be making fraudulent attempts to access your money or private data, experts warn.In the hours after the American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike deployed a flawed software update that crippled critical businesses and services around the world, scammers pounced.Government agencies and businesses have warned that the panic caused by the CrowdStrike crash on Friday has given criminals an opening to take advantage of customers who are looking to reschedule flights, access banking information or fix their technology.Here are some ways to guard against the fraudulent schemes.Scammers see an opportunity.CrowdStrike provides cybersecurity for some 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies, so the crash led to widespread failures that grounded planes, crippled businesses, disrupted 911 emergency systems and delayed banking transactions.Thieves online are using the confusion to carry out a variety of scams, including phishing attempts, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said. The National Cyber Security Center in the United Kingdom issued a similar statement noting that an “increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed.”Scammers may look to get your money immediately by offering a product like a bogus plane ticket. But they could also be after personal identifying data that would allow them to access your finances in the future.What industries are being targeted?Because grounded planes caused frustrated customers to look to reschedule their flights, travel has been particularly subject to schemers, said Anton Dahbura, the executive director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Some of the Loudest Cheers for Trump Are Coming From Silicon Valley

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      Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology have endorsed former President Donald Trump. How did the Democrats lose Silicon Valley? Or did they?If you read the headlines this week about Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology moving to support former President Trump’s re-election, it appeared a sea change had taken place in Silicon Valley, long considered a Democrat hotbed.The loudest donors in Silicon Valley are promoting Trump at a time when the tech world as a whole is ascending in Washington, with billionaires using their ballooning wealth and media foothold to exert influence. Their voices are made all the more prominent amid the conspicuous neutrality of Big Tech leaders like the Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai and the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, who are possibly afraid of invoking Trump’s ire and employee backlash.It wasn’t always this way. But big technology’s relationship with government, once symbiotic, attracted new scrutiny from Silicon Valley’s libertarian masses after social media companies tamped down on misinformation, drawing accusations that they were ceding to an overstepping government.For some, the infractions were more personal. Musk was brushed off by President Biden over his anti-union stance and excluded from an electric vehicle event at the White House in 2021. Now Musk, who has voted for Democrats in the past and has said he created Tesla to help one of Biden’s biggest ambitions, preventing climate change, has become among the party’s biggest detractors.Then there are issues in California, like rising taxes and a crime wave in San Francisco; the anti-woke movement; and regulatory battles over antitrust, crypto, and artificial intelligence that have high stakes in Silicon Valley.The question now is whether Silicon Valley’s Trump boosters are heralding a larger shift in the tech world, or if they’re merely demonstrating that their voices are more powerful in politics than ever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Counting the Costs of the Microsoft-CrowdStrike Outage

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      A “historic” tech failure alarmed investors, after a security update caused problems for Microsoft devices and services, and took down businesses worldwide.A major IT outage involving Microsoft and CrowdStrike has caused major delays at airports around the world.Clemens Bilan/EPA, via ShutterstockThe glitch felt around the world Grounded flights, emergency services unreachable, payment systems not functioning — the world is assessing the damage caused by a cascade of IT outages that is spooking investors and grinding many businesses and government services to a halt.“This outage is historic in scale,” Mikko Hypponen, a research specialist at the software company WithSecure and a cybercrime adviser to Europol, told DealBook.The problem is being attributed to a tech upgrade gone wrong. All eyes are on CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company. It issued a software update that is causing Microsoft systems, including its Azure cloud service, to crash or not function properly. George Kurtz, the C.E.O. of CrowdStrike, said on X that a fix is being deployed, adding it’s “not a security incident or cyberattack.”Here’s the latest: American, United and Delta had grounded flights, according to the F.A.A. Airlines in Europe and Asia, including Air France-KLM and Japan Airlines, also had reported delays or cancellations. Some had reported a partial return to service.Long queues of airline passengers could be seen at airports around the world, with some resorting to manual check-in. In France, the television networks TF1 and Canal+ told the public on X that they could not go on the air on Friday morning. Comcast’s Sky News in the U.K. also went dark for a spell.The incident points to how reliant the global economy is on a handful of major tech companies to run vital infrastructure. CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity vendor, is taking the brunt of the hit. Its stock was down nearly 12 percent in premarket trading. Microsoft was down about 1.4 percent, and also said a resolution was forthcoming.Security has become a big focus in the cloud wars. Google is trying to bolster its cloud operations with an eye on cybersecurity. The company is in talks to buy Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity firm, in what would be its biggest acquisition ever, and an effort to take market share from Microsoft.Expect tough questions about the business world’s computing systems. Financial regulators in the U.K. have already begun speaking with financial services companies to learn the extent of the damage on banks and payment companies, The Financial Times reports.In other IT news: A U.S. judge dismissed most claims against SolarWinds, an IT security company, and its chief information security officer; the S.E.C. had sued the company after it was hacked by Russian agents in 2020.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carlos Espina is a One-Man Telemundo on TikTok

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      On a recent scorcher of a Houston afternoon, Carlos Eduardo Espina was driving to a restaurant that specializes in Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican food when he received a news alert on his iPhone: The former president of Honduras had been sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.“Oh, I need to make a video, actually, in the car,” Mr. Espina, 25, said apologetically as he pulled his Honda crossover S.U.V. into the restaurant’s parking lot. He skimmed a Honduran newspaper’s Instagram post about the news and then opened TikTok, where he has 9.4 million followers. He turned the camera on himself while his girlfriend, who was sitting behind him, crouched out of the frame, clearly used to this sort of drill.His hazel eyes widened, and he boomed, “Importante noticia de última hora” — Spanish for “important breaking news” — then shared a one-minute recap. The video racked up more than 100,000 views during lunch, which Mr. Espina received for free because the restaurant owner was thrilled to recognize him from TikTok.Mr. Espina created TikTok content on his phone while dining at a Nicaraguan restaurant in Houston.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York TimesMr. Espina watching Mexico play Venezuela in the Copa América at a Venezuelan food truck in College Station, Texas. Mr. Espina, whose videos are mainly in Spanish, has flown under the radar in the national press.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York TimesMr. Espina, a recent law school graduate who lives in College Station, Texas, has become something of a one-man Telemundo for millions of Latinos in the United States and one of the White House’s favored social media personalities. He posts almost constantly, sharing earnest and personal news about immigration and the Latino community, along with videos about food, sports and politics — and often championing the Biden administration’s agenda.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Google Close to Its Biggest Acquisition Ever, Despite Antitrust Scrutiny

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      The search giant’s negotiations to buy Wiz, a cybersecurity start-up, for $23 billion, come as the Biden administration has taken a hard line against consolidation in tech and other industries.Google, which became one of the world’s the most valuable companies through its search engine and other consumer internet services, is nearing its largest-ever acquisition to improve what it can offer to business customers.Google is in talks to buy Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity start-up, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to discuss them. Wiz was last valued at $12 billion.The companies have valued the deal at roughly $23 billion, said one of the people, easily making it Google’s most expensive acquisition and nearly double what the company paid for Motorola Mobility in 2012.While a deal looks likely, talks could still fall apart, the people said.Google and Wiz did not respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the companies were discussing a deal.Google has moved forward with negotiations despite the possibility that regulators might try to block the deal. But the company may be willing to fight to beef up its cloud-computing division, which lags behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.Google was sued by the Justice Department in two separate antitrust cases, one targeting its ubiquitous search engine and another seeking to break up its digital advertising-technology business. A verdict in the search case is expected this summer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More