Rising number of children seeing ‘deepfakes’ of themselves, why tech investors are interested in football

Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce. The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or “faked” in some way, including with AI and nudification tools. In the first six months of this year it received 420 reports from children of images of themselves that they believed had been faked or manipulated to appear explicit. Guardian

Fifa has been forced to U-turn on plans to sell off a slice of the World Cup after fierce opposition, with threats of future boycotts and calls for the governing body’s president, Gianni Infantino, to quit. But why were a group of tech investors interested in the World Cup in the first place, and are similar proposals in the future inevitable? In a world in which AI could upend human recreation and pastimes, executives at Thrive Eternal, a spin-off of venture capital firm Thrive Capital, saw an opportunity to lead a group of investors to place cash in the biggest sporting competition on the planet. BBC

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 combines the utility of a book-style foldable with the pocketability of a flip phone to create what may be the ultimate foldable form factor. It’s thin, light, and incredibly fun to use on either display. Performance is great too, although expect some heat when playing games, and be ready to fiddle around with aspect ratios and app sizes. Still, it’s clear Samsung is really onto something, and hopefully this form factor finally becomes more mainstream. Android Central 

ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach the size of Anthropic’s most cutting-edge Mythos system, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top US labs. The Chinese tech giant is at an early stage of training a model with as many as 10tn parameters — three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. FT.com

Ben Wodecki is used to travelling the globe and is used to seeing airline crew at work. But flying into Las Vegas in June, the technology journalist saw something he’d never seen before, as worried looking flight crew dashed to the rear of the plane. “There was a glint of fear. They were dour. This was something more than someone being ill. It was something that affected them.” As smoke, then distressed passengers emerged from the rear of the plane, it because clear what had happened. A passenger had been using a battery pack during the flight, and it had overheated before bursting into flames with a seat catching fire. BBC

Motorola has officially launched the Moto Pad 70, following its earlier announcement of the tablet’s main specifications and launch date. The company has now confirmed the available configurations, pricing, and sales details. The Moto Pad 70 features a 12.1-inch LCD display with a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution and a 90 Hz refresh rate. The panel can reach up to 800 nits in High Brightness Mode and covers 96% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. The tablet comes with 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and either 128 GB or 256 GB of UFS 2.2 storage. Users can expand the storage by up to 2 TB with a microSD card. Notebook Check