The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office's special investigation squad arrested Kazutaka Yonekura, 48, the founder and former president of Japanese artificial intelligence developer Alt, and three others on Thursday on suspicion of padding the firm's sales in violation of the financial instruments and exchange law. The other three include Yusuke Hioki, 34, also a former president of the Tokyo-based company. The special squad did not reveal whether the suspects have admitted the allegations against them. They allegedly submitted to the Kanto Local Finance Bureau in September 2024 financial statements, in which the company's sales in the period from January 2022 to June 2024 were inflated by about ¥8.4 billion. In March this year, after Alt's listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Growth section for startup in October 2024, the suspects submitted a statement that overstated sales for the business year to December 2024 by about ¥4.9 billion, according to the special squad.

Three former executives at the video game company Ubisoft have been given suspended prison sentences for enabling a culture of sexual and psychological harassment in the workplace at the end of the first big trial to stem from the #MeToo movement in the gaming industry. The court in Bobigny, north of Paris, had heard how the former executives used their position to bully or sexually harass staff, leaving women terrified and feeling like pieces of meat. Former staff had said that between 2012 and 2020, the company's offices in Montreuil, east of Paris, were run with a toxic culture of bullying and sexism that one worker likened to a "boys' club above the law". Ubisoft is a French family business that rose to become one of the biggest video game creators in the world. The company has been behind several blockbusters including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and the children's favourite Just Dance.

A former executive at TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has alleged that the Chinese Communist party accessed user data from the social video app belonging to Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists. Yintao Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance's US operation, claimed in a legal filing that a committee of Communist party members accessed TikTok data that included the users' network information, Sim card identifications and IP addresses in a bid to identify the individuals and their locations. The claims, in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit brought by Yu in a California court and reported by the Wall Street Journal, also allege the party accessed TikTok users' communications, monitored Hong Kong users who uploaded protest-related content and that Beijing-based ByteDance maintained a "backdoor channel" for the party to access US user data. Yu alleges in the filing that members of a Communist party committee inside ByteDance had access to a "superuser" credential which was also called a "God credential" and allowed them to view all data collected by ByteDance. The filing adds that when Yu was at ByteDance, between August 2017 and November 2018, TikTok stored all users' direct messages, search histories and content viewed by users.

On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage to a packed auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the public was quick to comment: Siri, a virtual assistant. Scott Forstall, then Apple's chief software officer, pressed a button on the iPhone to call Siri and asked questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris ("20:16," Siri replied), defined the word "mitosis" ("Cell division in which the nucleus is divided into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes," he said) and has published a list of 14 Greek restaurants highly regarded, five of them in Palo Alto, California. "I've been in the field of artificial intelligence for a long time and it continues to amaze me," Forstall says.