Financial Times

The UK government has launched a new mobile app that will eventually allow Britons to access thousands of public services on their smartphones, as well as paving the way for new digital identity cards. Technology secretary Peter Kyle said the new gov.uk app would streamline access to public services from claiming benefits to renewing a passport. However, it will be launched as a “beta” service that initially only connects to existing government websites.

Meta’s use of millions of books to train its artificial intelligence models has been judged “fair” by a federal court, in a win for tech companies that use copyrighted materials to develop AI. The case, brought by about a dozen authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, challenged how the $1.4tn social media giant used a library of millions of online books, academic articles and comics to train its Llama AI models. Meta’s use of these titles is protected under copyright law’s fair use provision, San Francisco District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. A phrase that is catchy, sometimes true, and perhaps, in Donald Trump’s America, an investment strategy. A possible example of this comes from Charlie Ergen. EchoStar, the satellite operator Ergen founded in 1980, is in the middle of trying to build out a mobile telephone network, using a particular band of wireless spectrum it purchased from the US government. But the chair of the Federal Communications Commission sent the company a letter saying the regulator planned to review whether it was complying with its obligations to provide a 5G service.

Sal Khan tightly controls his children’s screen time and their access to social media, but the founder and chief executive of the Khan Academy, an online education organisation, is a big believer in the power of the digital world and artificial intelligence to help students get ahead. Like many executives in Silicon Valley, he is well aware of the dangers of technology and how far apps have been designed to drive usage and harvest personal information.

South Africa has proposed new legislation to meet Elon Musk’s conditions for offering his Starlink satellite internet service in his birth country after the billionaire refused to comply with Black empowerment laws he called “openly racist”.

After years of effort and some frustrating delays, Amazon’s dream of delivering high-speed internet to some of the remotest places on Earth quite literally got off the ground in April. A United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket dropped Kuiper’s 27 satellites 450km above the Earth, from where they will climb to their final orbit at 630km. The successful deployment marked more than the birth of a new internet service provider.