A French frigate has shot down two drones over the Red Sea that were believed to be approaching from the coast of Yemen, according to the French military. "The interception and destruction of these two identified threats" were carried out late on Saturday by the frigate Languedoc, which operates in the Red Sea, the general staff said in a press release on Sunday. The interceptions happened at 20:30 GMT and 22:30 GMT and were 110km (68 miles) from the Yemeni coast, it added. Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Saturday threatened to attack any vessels heading to Israeli ports unless food and medicine were allowed into the besieged Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by more than two months of Israeli bombing. The Houthis said that all "ships linked to Israel or that will transport goods to Israeli ports" are not welcome in the Red Sea, a vital channel for global trade linked to the Suez Canal.

Grok, the latest AI chatbot, is officially live on X. And by that we mean it's exclusively available to Premium members who pay $16 per month for a subscription. According to the announcement Grok "loves sarcasm," and is "designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak." Grok will "answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems," is built with "people of all backgrounds and political views" in mind, making it safe to say, Grok is Musk's answer to his version of free speech. How has Musk's vision of Grok turned out?

OctoML says it has ended its business relationship with Civitai days after an investigation by 404 Media revealed the text-to-image platform was being used to generate images that "could be categorized as child pornography." While OctoML initially indicated it would continue working with Civitai and introduced new measures to curb the creation of harmful images, 404 Media reported on Saturday that it has now decided to cut ties with the platform altogether. According to 404 Media's December 5 report, internal communications showed that OctoML was aware some Civitai users were creating sexually explicit material that included nonconsensual images of real people and pornographic depictions of children. In a followup report this weekend, the publication noted that OctoML rolled out a filter to block the generation of all NSFW content on Civitai before announcing its decision to pull out. Civitai also added new moderation methods in response to the investigation earlier this week, including a mandatory embedding called Civitai Safe Helper (Minor) that bars the model from generating images of children if "a mature theme or keyword is detected," according to 404.

KIME, the robotic bartender, is a marvel of modern engineering. There is a revolutionary change underway when it comes to making our food and drinks. The advent of robotics, once limited to the fields of industrial manufacturing and the beloved Roomba, is now making a monumental leap into our kitchens and dining experiences. This shift is not just a fleeting trend; it's an evolution reshaping the very fabric of the food and beverage industry. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK VIDEO TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER KIME is a humanoid bartending kiosk that stands as a testament to the possibilities of robotic technology in food service.

If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big platforms were deep into what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" – the process in which platforms go from being initially good to their users, to abusing them to make things better for their business customers and finally to abusing those customers in order to claw back all the value for themselves. Elon Musk was ramping up his efforts to alienate advertisers on Twitter/X and accelerate the death spiral of his expensive toy. TikTok was monopolising every waking hour of teenagers.

TL;DR: As of December 9, get the Mymanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds for only $89.97 -- a 42% discount. Communication is such an important part of life. Whether in your work or personal life, clear lines of communication often make for less stress. And since we are all in the holiday state of mind, here's an offer on a fun product that can help someone on your list experience optimal communication when traveling or engaging with those who speak a different language. A 2019 CES Innovation Awards Honoree, the Mymanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds work with their exclusive app, MyJuno, to enable speech-to-text and text-to-speech translations in 37 languages.

A demo video of Gemini, Google's new AI model, isn't as "mindblowing" as it appears. On Wednesday, Google released Gemini, a natively-built multimodal model that surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 in major intelligence benchmarks. A six-minute demo video showing off Gemini's amazing abilities to track a ball in a cup trick, locate countries on a map, and identify a simple duck drawing wowed techies on social media -- and seemed to convince the internet that AGI (artificial general intelligence) is on the horizon. But it didn't take long for experts to discover the Gemini video was a teensy bit exaggerated. As Parmy Olson for Bloomberg first reported, the video was edited in numerous ways.

An overreliance on technology by Israel's intelligence agencies and military has continued to shape the current conflict in Gaza, analysts say, while also being partially responsible for the failure to detect the Hamas attack on October 7. Hamas's surprise attack on army outposts and surrounding villages in southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 Israeli and foreign nationals, mostly civilians, took the Israeli intelligence agencies by surprise. Hamas fighters also took about 240 people captive. Israel, in its brutal military response, has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza since then. Within both Israel and the wider Arab region, many have asked how Shin Bet, one of the world's most respected and feared intelligence agencies, which is responsible for Israel's domestic security, could have been outmatched by Hamas using bulldozers and paragliders. The world's disbelief has sparked a bounty of conspiracy theories in some quarters.

More than 60 days into the Israel-Gaza war, two Israeli news outlets – 972 magazine and Local Call – published a report on The Gospel, a new artificial intelligence system deployed in Gaza. The AI helps generate new targets at an unprecedented rate, allowing the Israeli military to loosen its already permissive constraints on the killing of civilians. The exchange of hostages between Israel and Hamas late last month created some challenges for the Netanyahu government – and its messaging. Producer Meenakshi Ravi looks at how Israeli media has been reporting on the story. As the world is focused on the events unfolding in Gaza, Israel has also escalated its attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas has no authority or military presence.

Pasty skin, empty eyes and slightly misshapen features against delirious music tracks – it's the recent TikTok trend with a dose of disconcerting strangeness. Generally called the uncanny valley makeup trend, it involves creators using makeup to appear as hyper-realistic bots. Some of the videos under this trend have received up to 13 million likes on the platform. I love the uncanny valley makeup trend because it taps into the primal fear of being stalked by a not-quite-human thing that's ambiguously threatening. Modern thrillers often confuse surprise with fear: Lingering creepiness is much scarier than one-time jump scares and CGIs.