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Sweden’s public health agency has recorded the first case of a contagious new variant of mpox in the country.
It is the first case of the contagious new variant Clade I outside the African continent.
On Thursday the World Health Organisation declared mpox a global public health emergency for the second time in two years, following an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that spread to other countries.
Mpox can be caught through close skin-to-skin contact with others who are infected, and symptoms include a high temperature, headache, muscle aches, and a rash.
Health officials have said they’re preparing for any potential cases of the new strain in the UK, but the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said there are currently none.
A child safety organisation in the UK has warned that there is “nothing stopping” child sexual abuse imagery spreading on WhatsApp.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK body that works to find and remove child sexual abuse content from the internet, has made the statement.
Emma Hardy, communications director at the IWF told Tech & Science Daily that the technology to stop these images spreading on encrypted messaging services already exists.
Others have argued that secure messaging platforms are vital to protect vulnerable people, and that there’s currently no viable technology that could create a so-called ‘backdoor’ into encryption without ultimately impacting user privacy and safety.
Emma said that tech organisations like Meta have the experts and knowledge required to develop a tool to stop the content from being shared on encrypted messaging services.
Elon Musk’s new image generation tool released on his social platform X has been accused of unleashing a ‘torrent of misinformation’.
A new version of Grok was launched on Wednesday, only available to paid subscribers on X, however some reports noted that the image tool didn’t appear to have many limits on what it would generate.
As a result, there’s been a wave of strange and offensive images appearing on the platform, often depicting politicians or celebrities – including some showing them taking part in the 9/11 terror attacks.
Daniel Card, fellow of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said “Grok may have some guardrails but it’s unleashing a torrent of misinformation, copyright chaos and explicit deep fakes,”.
In a post on the platform on Wednesday, Elon Musk said “Grok is the most fun AI in the world!”
Also in this episode:
Infected blood scandal victims to receive financial support for life
Google bringing artificial intelligence-powered search results to UK
Study: Scottish and Irish rocks may be rare record of ‘snowball Earth’
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