Fraudsters are using the promise of fake roles to trick job-seekers out of money, personal information or both, and with the help of AI they are more convincing than ever. But there are ways to spot them
There were clues from the start that it was too good to be true. A headhunter emailed me with a job prospect – a journalist role with “a leading US technology and markets editorial team”. The opportunity, she said, was part of a confidential expansion and hadn’t been publicly posted.
My spidey-sense was tingling, but the timing was auspicious. I was on the lookout for new work as my maternity leave was coming to an end. Initially, the email seemed legitimate. When I Googled the sender, I found a headhunter with the same name and profile picture on LinkedIn, and the message was clearly tailored to me: It referenced several roles I’d previously held and identified my specific areas of expertise. “Your focus on the real-world impacts of AI, digital culture and the gig economy aligns perfectly with an internal, high-priority mandate I’m managing,” the headhunter wrote.
Continue reading...As he stars alongside Sheridan Smith as a casino boss on the take, the actor talks about leaving school with no qualifications, playing vile dads – and why he’s eager to circulate the This Is England reunion rumour
Michael Socha is about to jump on a train to Wales. The impressively bushy beard he’s got is for his role in The Witch House, a dramatic adaptation of an episode of the Danny Robins podcast Uncanny, about a supposed haunting in the Brecon Beacons. He plays Bill Rich, who moves his family to a spooky old farmhouse where it all goes “horribly wrong”, Socha says. “In the photos he has a beard, and I thought, ‘I’ll match that.’” The actor strokes his chin and turns his head from side to side. It looks pretty substantial to me. “You say that, but see this bit? I’m struggling. It’s a bit patchy there. I’m happy with this bit, but then this needs work.”
Socha has just left a screening of his new BBC thriller The Cage, and he has the gentle bounce of a man who struggles to stay still. As with his beard, he finds it hard not to find flaws in what he’s done. Normally, he admits, he tries to avoid watching himself on screen. “I’ll sort of nitpick away,” he shrugs, but he had such a nice time making The Cage that he was looking forward to seeing it. “But the more you watch something, the more you find bits that you’re not too happy with.”
Continue reading...‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank
Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.
Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.
Continue reading...Forty years after the 1937 masterpiece returned to Madrid from its Franco-era exile in New York, it is again embroiled in politics
Every September, Spain celebrates one of the most symbolic moments of its transition to democracy. This year will mark 45 years since an Iberia commercial flight from New York landed in Madrid with its pilot announcing to the surprised passengers that they had just travelled with one of the country’s most famous exiles: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. After more than four decades on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the painting could finally return home after the end of the Franco dictatorship, in accordance with the wishes of the Spanish painter.
Picasso’s most famous painting, which depicted the horrors inflicted on civilians during the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish civil war, was intended to be a cry for peace. “If world peace prevails, the war I painted will be a thing of the past,” Picasso told Josep Lluís Sert, his friend and the architect of the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris international exhibition.
María Ramírez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain
Continue reading...Earlier this month the AI company Anthropic said it had created a model so powerful that, out of a sense of responsibility, it was not going to release it to the public. Anthropic says the model, Mythos Preview, excels at spotting and exploiting vulnerabilities in software, and could pose a severe risk to economies, public safety and national security. But is this the whole story? Some experts have expressed scepticism about the extent of the model’s capabilities. Ian Sample hears from Aisha Down, a reporter covering artificial intelligence for the Guardian, to find what the decision to limit access to Mythos reveals about Anthropic’s strategy, and whether the model might finally spur more regulation of the industry.
‘Too powerful for the public’: inside Anthropic’s bid to win the AI publicity war
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Continue reading...One way to pay for wildlife conservation is to allow the rich to bag a few animals for high prices. But critics see this approach as an exercise in neocolonialism
You can kill almost anything if you’re willing to pay. Big or small. Land, water or air. Ten a penny or one of the last of its kind. There’s nearly always a way, though it might not make you popular. The Niassa special reserve, a vast reservation larger than Switzerland, stretches for 190 miles along the northern rim of Mozambique, taking in 4.2m hectares of woodland and rivers. The reserve, one of the world’s largest protected areas, is home to elephants, leopards, hyenas, zebras and about 1,000 wild lions.
That word, however: protected. It applies to some, but not all, of its animal inhabitants. Each year, a specific number are set aside for sacrifice, for the greater good. Not long ago, I joined an expedition in Niassa, with one of Africa’s top game-hunting companies.
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