Booking.com warns of AI travel scams explosion, Motorola confirms new gen Razr phones

Booking.com is warning artificial intelligence (AI) is driving an explosion in travel scams. The firm’s internet safety boss, Marnie Wilking, said there had been “anywhere from a 500 to a 900% increase” in the past 18 months. She said there had been a particularly marked increase in phishing – where people are tricked into handing over their financial details – since generative AI tools like ChatGPT burst onto the market. “Of course, we’ve had phishing since the dawn of email, but the uptick started shortly after ChatGPT got launched,” she said. BBC 

Police have used the “very legitimate grievance” the public has with large tech companies like Meta about data collection and surveillance as a pretext to undermine user privacy, the president of encrypted messaging app Signal has said. Meredith Whittaker told Guardian Australia that it had become “an easy win with few political consequences” for politicians to beat up on Facebook in the past decade. Guardian

Apple this year announced a series of changes when it comes to the App Store in the EU, as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) antitrust legislation came into force in March. However, the European Commission doesn’t seem satisfied with the changes Apple has made. For the EU, Apple has some “very serious” issues with not being fully compliant with the new legislation. In an interview with CNBC, the European Commission’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that Apple’s proposed changes were “not what was expected of such a company.” 9to5Mac

Psst! Some flip-worthy news is coming… pic.twitter.com/NioPU69hLQ

— motorolaus (@MotorolaUS) June 17, 2024

Motorola has confirmed it’s launching a new generation of Razr smartphones on June 25 in the United States, with a recently posted teaser trailer on the brand’s X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) account.  It doesn’t show much as most of the video is covered in shadows, although we do see glimpses of what the devices will look like. Close-up shots reveal the phones will be made out of vegan leather as you can see the texture of the material. Tech Radar 

With just a few dollars, a little time, and a smart brute-force guessing algorithm, most passwords can be cracked in much less time than you might imagine. According to a new analysis from the experts at Kaspersky, 59% of 193 million actual passwords were cracked in less than 60 minutes, and 45% were cracked in less than 60 seconds….“Smart algorithms make short work of most passwords that contain dictionary sequences,” Kaspersky’s Antonov said, “and they even catch character substitutions.” Forbes 

Chinese carmakers have urged Beijing to hit back against European Union tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) with the “most severe measures” in the latest sign of global trade tensions.  At a private meeting organised by China’s ministry of commerce, car manufacturers reportedly called on their government to retaliate by imposing tariffs on imported European vehicles with high-powered engines. German carmakers and Britain’s Jaguar Land Rover which makes Land Rover Discovery and Land Rover Defender models in Slovakia could be hit. Telegraph 

Name any major tech brand – from Google to Amazon to Tesla to ChatGPT – and the chances are Nvidia is involved in some way. The company – which makes computer chips – may not be a household name in the UK, but it has just leapfrogged Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable public company in the world. It is now worth more than $3.3tn (£2.6tn) – with its share price up by almost 600,000% from when it first traded on the US stock market back in 1999. Sky News