Irish

A 14.3 billion euro escrow fund holding a massive disputed tax bill for Apple and the Irish government has shrunk by over a billion dollars in value due to global financial headwinds. Back in 2018, the European Commission decided that Apple and the Irish government's tax arrangement was less than satisfactory, and ordered the Cupertino company to cough up an eye-watering €14.3 billion in taxes plus interest the bloc judged Apple owed the country. Bizarrely, neither Apple nor Ireland wants to see this money handed over,…

Adrian Weckler / Independent.ie: The Irish DPC says Instagram's Threads, which faces stricter data privacy rules in the EU than in the US or the UK, cannot launch in the EU “at this point” — Meta's new Twitter rival wants to suck Instagram users' data, including health, location, search history and sensitive information, into the new Threads service. Adrian Weckler / Independent.ie: The Irish DPC says Instagram's Threads, which faces stricter data privacy rules in the EU than in the US…

The next article you read might be written by a robot, and people who published it might not even know. The Irish Times issued an apology Sunday after running a hoax editorial written by an AI chatbot, which called the incident a “deliberate and coordinated deception.” The article, titled “Irish women’s obsession with fake tan is problematic,” was attributed to a made up immigrant woman, complete with an AI-generated photo of the imaginary author.Chat GPT-4 Worth the Upgrade? | Future Tech“We don’t take this lightly. It…

Pictish Stone in the Museum of Scotland. Credit: Johnbod/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA The Picts of Scotland who have long intrigued and have been ascribed exotic origins in fact descended from indigenous Iron Age society and were genetically most similar to people living today in Scotland, Wales, North Ireland and Northumbria. Adeline Morez of Liverpool John Moores University and Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of…

An Irish startup has teamed with CERN to develop a new form of insulation for superconducting cables, which are designed to accelerate the green energy transition. Named SuperNode, the company has invented energy transmission cables that can transfer immense power across long distances. As the system requires less space and voltage than conventional copper-based cables, the environmental impact is reduced. These benefits derive from superconductivity. This phenomenon occurs when certain…

The state body responsible for advising the Irish government on cyber security recommended on Friday that staff at government departments and state agencies not use Chinese-owned video app TikTok on official devices.A number of Western countries including Britain, the US and other European Union member states have barred TikTok over security concerns. The EU's two biggest policymaking institutions also banned the app last month.TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, is under scrutiny from governments and…

The state body responsible for advising the Irish government on cyber security recommended on Friday that staff at government departments and state agencies not use the Chinese-owned video app TikTok on official devices.A number of Western countries including Britain, the US and other European Union member states have barred TikTok over security concerns. The EU's two biggest policymaking institutions also banned the app last month.TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, is under scrutiny from governments and…

At a time when technology companies are bullish on using generative AI, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, a group of governing bodies globally have called for regulations. The Irish data regulator has echoed the sentiment but it said that authorities must figure out how to do so properly."It needs to be regulated and it's about figuring out how to regulate it properly," Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) Helen Dixon was quoted as saying."For the Irish data protection commission, where we are at is…

Irish film-maker and journalist Sinéad O’Shea has a gripping and inspirational story to tell about her home town of Navan in Co Meath, and she tells it terrifically well, talking to the people involved, engaging with the history, delivering the drama and teasing out the poignancies and complexities.O’Shea is speaking to the people who stood up to church abuse in the 60s and 70s, at a time when challenging the Catholic authorities seemed unthinkable. There can hardly be anyone left now who doesn’t know something about…

Ireland’s president has led tributes to Mark Sheehan, guitarist with Irish rock band The Script, after his death at the age of 46. The band said Sheehan died in a hospital on Friday after a brief illness. In a statement, The Script called him a “much loved husband, father, brother, band mate and friend.” Formed in Dublin in 2001 by Sheehan, singer Danny O’Donoghue and drummer Glen Power, The Script topped U.K. and Irish charts with its self-titled debut album in 2008. It included the hits “We…