The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on Wednesday said it discovered that no fewer than 100,000 SIM cards were linked to an individual.

NCC’s Director of Public Affairs, Reuben Muoka, revealed this in a statement, where the commission announced September 14, 2024 as the final deadline for linking National Identification Numbers (NINs) to Subscriber Identification Modules (SIMs).

“Through collaboration with the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) and the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the NCC has uncovered alarming cases where individuals possessed an unusually high number of SIM cards—some exceeding 100,000,” Muoka said.

“The Commission also remains committed to working with security agencies and other stakeholders to crack down on the sale of pre-registered SIMs, thereby safeguarding national security and ensuring the integrity of mobile numbers in Nigeria.

“The NCC also reminds the public that the sale and purchase of pre-registered SIMs are criminal offences punishable by imprisonment and fines. We encourage citizens to report any such activities to the Commission via our toll-free line (622) or through our social media platforms.”

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram Messenger app, has shared that he fathered 100 biological children worldwide despite being single.

The 39-year-old revealed this on his popular channel Monday evening.

He explained that 15 years ago, despite his desire to stay single, a friend asked him to donate sperm at a clinic. He agreed, resulting in him assisting over 12 families globally in having children, thanks to what he referred to as his “high-quality donor material.”

Narrating, he said, “I was just told that I have over 100 biological kids. How is this possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone?

“Fifteen years ago, a friend approached me with a weird request. He said that he and his wife couldn’t have kids due to a fertility issue and asked me to donate sperm at a clinic for them to have a baby. I laughed my ass off before realising he was dead serious.

“The boss of the clinic told me that ‘high-quality donor material’  was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples. This sounded crazy enough to get me to sign up for sperm donation.

“Fast forward to 2024, my past donating activity has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids. Moreover, many years after I stopped being a donor, at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids.”

He hinted that he would plan to open-source his DNA so that his biological children could easily find him, stressing, “Of course, there are risks, but I don’t regret having been a donor. The shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, and I’m proud that I did my part to help alleviate it.”

Durov also suggested that healthy men consider donating sperm to families worldwide who are having difficulty conceiving children.

In a significant shift, Google has reversed its initial plan to eliminate third-party cookies, opting instead to introduce new privacy measures that aim to balance user privacy with the needs of advertisers. This decision reflects Google’s responsiveness to industry feedback and its commitment to evolving digital advertising.

The Initial Plan to Eliminate Cookies

Google’s original plan to phase out third-party cookies by 2022 was part of a broader effort to enhance user privacy. Cookies, small pieces of data stored on users’ devices, track browsing habits and are crucial for personalized advertising. However, they have raised privacy concerns, prompting Google to consider alternatives.

Why the Change?

Advertisers and marketers heavily rely on cookies to deliver targeted ads, and the elimination of cookies posed a significant challenge to their business models. The backlash from the advertising industry and concerns about the impact on small businesses led Google to reconsider its approach.

The Role of Cookies in Digital Advertising

Cookies play a pivotal role in digital advertising. They enable advertisers to track user behavior across websites, providing insights into preferences and interests. This data allows for personalized ads, which are more likely to engage users and drive sales. Without cookies, advertisers would struggle to deliver relevant ads, potentially leading to reduced ad revenue and less effective marketing campaigns.

Introducing Privacy Sandbox

To address these concerns, Google has introduced the Privacy Sandbox initiative. This initiative aims to create web standards that enhance user privacy while still enabling personalized advertising. Privacy Sandbox includes several proposals:

1. Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC): This method groups users with similar interests into cohorts, reducing the ability to track individual users while still allowing for targeted advertising.
2. Turtledove and FLEDGE: These proposals focus on enabling interest-based advertising without exposing users’ browsing behavior to third parties.
3. Conversion Measurement: This feature allows advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ads without relying on third-party cookies.

Balancing Privacy and Advertising Needs

Google’s new approach seeks to strike a balance between protecting user privacy and supporting the advertising ecosystem. By developing privacy-focused alternatives to cookies, Google aims to maintain the functionality of personalized ads while addressing privacy concerns.

The Impact on Advertisers and Users

Advertisers will need to adapt to these new measures, potentially rethinking their strategies for targeting and measuring ad performance. However, the Privacy Sandbox provides a pathway to continue delivering relevant ads without compromising user privacy.

For users, these changes promise enhanced privacy and control over their data. They can expect a reduction in invasive tracking practices while still receiving personalized content and ads.

Google’s decision to reverse its cookie ban and introduce the Privacy Sandbox reflects its commitment to evolving with the digital landscape. This approach aims to create a sustainable model for online advertising that respects user privacy and supports advertisers’ needs.

In summary, Google’s pivot from eliminating cookies to introducing the Privacy Sandbox is a significant development in digital advertising. By balancing user privacy with the needs of advertisers, Google is paving the way for a more secure and effective advertising ecosystem. This move highlights the importance of adaptability and responsiveness in the ever-changing tech industry.

When Google announced this week that its climate emissions had risen by 48 percent since 2019, it pointed the finger at artificial intelligence.

US tech firms are building vast networks of data centres across the globe and say AI is fuelling the growth, throwing the spotlight on the amount of energy the technology is sucking up and its impact on the environment.

How does AI use electricity?
Every time a user punches a request into a chatbot or generative AI tool, the request is fired off to a data centre.

Even before that stage, developing AI programs known as large language models (LLMs) needs a huge amount of computer power.

All the while, the computers are burning through electricity and the servers get hotter, meaning more electricity to cool them.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report earlier this year that data centres in general used roughly 40 percent of electricity on computing and 40 percent on cooling.

Why are experts worried?
Big tech firms have been rushing to pack all their products with AI ever since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT bot in late 2022.

Plenty of experts are concerned these new products will cause electricity usage to spike.

This is firstly because AI services require more power than their non-AI analogues.

For example, various studies have shown that each request made to ChatGPT uses roughly 10 times the power of a single Google search.

So if Google switches all search queries to AI — about nine billion a year — it could hugely inflate the company’s electricity usage.

And most of these new services and products rely on LLMs.

Programming these algorithms is extremely intensive and usually requires high-powered computer chips.

They in turn require more cooling, which uses more electricity.

How much energy does AI use?
Before the era of AI, estimates generally suggested data centres accounted for around one percent of global electricity demand.

The IEA report said data centres, cryptocurrencies and AI combined used 460 TWh of electricity worldwide in 2022, almost two percent of total global electricity demand.

The IEA estimated that the figure could double by 2026 — the equivalent of Japan’s usage figures.

Alex De Vries, a researcher who runs the Digiconomist website, modelled the electricity used by AI alone by focusing on sales projections from the US firm NVIDIA, which has cornered the market in AI-specialised servers.

He concluded in a paper late last year that that if NVIDIA’s projected sales for 2023 were correct and all those servers ran at full power, they alone could be responsible for between 85.4–134.0 TWh of annual electricity consumption — an amount similar to Argentina or Sweden.

“The numbers I put in that article were already conservative to begin with because I couldn’t include things like cooling requirements,” he told AFP.

And he added that adoption of NVIDIA’s servers had outstripped last year’s projections, so the figures would certainly be higher.

How are data centres coping?
Fabrice Coquio of Digital Realty, a data centre company that leases its services to others, told AFP during a visit to one of its enormous facilities north of Paris in April that AI was going to transform his industry.

“It’s going to be exactly the same (as the cloud), maybe a bit more massive in terms of the deployment,” he said.

Part of Digital Realty’s latest data centre hub in Courneuve — a gigantic edifice that looks like a football stadium — will be dedicated to AI.

Coquio explained that normal computing requests could be handled by server racks in rooms with powerful air-conditioning.

But AI racks use much more powerful components, get much hotter and require water to be physically pumped into the equipment, he said.

“For sure, this requires different servers, storage equipment, communication equipment,” Coquio said.

Is it sustainable?
The biggest players in AI and data centres — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — have been trying to reduce their carbon footprints by buying up vast amounts of renewable energy.

Amazon official Prasad Kalyanaraman told AFP that the firm’s data centre division, AWS, was “the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world today”.

AWS is committed to being a net-zero carbon company by 2040. Google and Microsoft have pledged to reach that goal by 2030.

But building new data centres and ramping up usage in existing ones is not going to help with green energy targets.

Google and Microsoft have said in recent reports that their greenhouse gas emissions have been rising in the last few years.

Google flagged a 48 per cent rise from 2019 and Microsoft a 30 percent increase from 2020.

Both have squarely blamed AI.

Microsoft President Brad Smith told Bloomberg in May the pledge was a “moonshot” made before the AI “explosion”, adding that “the Moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020”.

Books and movies of the future could all start to feel the same if creative industries embrace artificial intelligence to help write stories, a study published on Friday warned.

The research, which drew on hundreds of volunteers and was published in Science Advances, comes amid rising fears over the impact of widely available AI tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art and writing.

“Our goal was to study to what extent and how generative AI might help humans with creativity,” co-author Anil Doshi of the University College London told AFP.

For their experiment, Doshi and  co-author Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter recruited around 300 volunteers as “writers.”

These were people who didn’t write for a living, and their inherent creative ability was assessed by a standard psychology test that asked them to provide 10 drastically different words.

The scientists then split them randomly into three groups to write an eight-sentence story about one of three topics: an adventure on the open seas, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet.

Participants were also randomly placed into three groups that received varying levels of AI assistance.

The first group got no help, the second was provided a three-sentence story idea from ChatGPT, and the third could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to help them get going.

– Individual benefit, collective loss –

After completing their stories, participants were asked to assess their own work’s creativity through measures including how novel it was, how enjoyable, and how much potential the idea had to be turned into a published book.

An additional 600 external human reviewers also judged the story on the same measures.

The authors found that, on average, AI boosted the quality of an individual writer’s creativity by up to 10 percent, and the story’s enjoyability by 22 percent, helping particularly with elements like structure and plot twists.

These effects were most significant for writers who were judged during the initial task to be the least creative, “so it has this kind of leveling the playing field effect,” said Doshi.

But on the collective level, they found AI-assisted stories looked much more similar to each other than those produced without any AI help, as writers “anchored” themselves too heavily to the suggested ideas.

Hauser said this created a “social dilemma.” On the one hand, “you make it easier for people to get in; lowering barriers is good.” But if the collective novelty of art decreases, “it could be harmful down the line.”

Doshi said the research also showed that, just like introducing pocket calculators to children too early could prevent them from learning how to do basic arithmetic, there was a danger that people could rely too much on AI tools before developing underlying skills in writing, music or more.

People need to start thinking about “where in my workflow can I insert this tool to get the most benefit, while still inserting my own voice into the project or outcome.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform is deceiving users with its blue checkmarks for certified accounts, and is also violating EU content rules, Brussels said Friday, in a finding that could lead to hefty fines.

EU regulators are unhappy with changes Musk made to the blue badge system since anyone can now obtain it via a premium subscription, whereas previously it was reserved for verified accounts including leaders, companies and journalists, and subject to approval.

Musk overhauled the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, including changing its name, after purchasing it in October 2022.

But his plans for X have put him at odds with Brussels since the EU wants big tech to do more to protect users online and increase competition in the digital sphere.

Now, the European Commission has informed X of its preliminary view that it is “in breach” of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), arguing that the social network “deceives” users with its new blue badge rules.

“Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a ‘verified’ status, it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” the commission said in a statement.

“There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the ‘verified account’ to deceive users,” it added.

X’s chief executive Linda Yaccarino pushed back at the charge in a post on the platform, arguing that “a democratized system, allowing everyone across Europe to access verification, is better than just the privileged few being verified.”

EU regulators’ wide-ranging probe into X also continues to look into the spread of illegal content and the effectiveness of the platform’s efforts to combat disinformation, the commission said.

Musk lashed out at Brussels in a post on X, accusing Brussels of offering it a deal to censor speech.

“The DSA IS misinformation!” he wrote in reply to a senior EU official.

“The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not,” he claimed.

Contacted by AFP, the commission declined to comment on the allegation.

• Tech in its sights –
  The formal warning against X is the first under the DSA, a sweeping law that forces digital companies to do more to police content online. It follows a probe launched in December 2023.

X becomes the third company in as many weeks to face the European Union’s wrath for violating landmark new rules, after Brussels warned Apple and Meta to change their ways or risk massive fines — for breaches of a second law known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The commission also accused X of failing to comply with rules on advertising transparency — since it does “not provide a searchable and reliable” ad database — and failing to give researchers access to public data.

“X has now the right of defence — but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines and require significant changes,” the EU’s top digital official, Thierry Breton, said.

Fines under the DSA can go as high as six percent of a company’s total worldwide annual turnover and force it to make changes to address violations.

X will be able to examine the EU’s file and defend itself against Friday’s finding.

There is no time limit on the investigation.

Under the DSA, X is subject to stricter regulations as one of 25 “very large” online platforms, including Facebook and TikTok, with more than 45 million monthly active users in the 27-country EU. X is also in the EU’s crosshairs for cutting its content moderation resources. In May, the EU told X to hand over “detailed information and internal documents” and demanded more information about steps taken to mitigate risks from generative AI in elections.

There are currently other investigations under the DSA into Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as TikTok and AliExpress.

The DSA and the DMA are both part of the EU’s bolstered legal armoury targeting big tech, and EU regulators have stepped up enforcement.