Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).

Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."

"[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.

It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Founded in 1947, the Minor Planet Center is the official worldwide authority "for observing and reporting new asteroids, comets and other small bodies in the solar system," reports USA Today.

Unfortunately, "What an amateur astronomer recently took to be a newly discovered asteroid turned out to be a Tesla Roadster,"... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps' further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon... [and] challenge Meta's social media empire... "Help us put control back into the hands of the people!" [Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps] said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter's Thursday launch. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans "bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces."

And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023.

Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one furnace. Nevertheless, the trend for heat pumps is up. Russell Unger, the head of decarbonizing buildings at RMI, said, "There's just been this long term, consistent trend." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

ZDNET's senior editor sees an "overwhelmingly negative" response to Microsoft's surprise price hike for the 84 million paying subscribers to its Microsoft 365 software suite. Attempting the first price hike in more than 12 years, "they made it a 30% price increase" — going from $10 a month to $13 a month — "and blamed it all on artificial intelligence."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup"

2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas"

"Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes:
3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model.

Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"For years, renewable energy proponents have hoped to build a U.S. electric grid powered by wind, solar, geothermal and — to a lesser extent — nuclear power..." writes the Washington Post. In America's power markets "the economics of clean energy are strong," with renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel plants in many jurisdictions. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last month, researchers revealed a finding that's likely to shock some people and confirm the low expectations of others: Renewable energy facilities throughout Central Europe use unencrypted radio signals to receive commands to feed or ditch power into or from the grid that serves some 450 million people throughout the continent. Fabian Braunlein and Luca Melette stumbled on their discovery largely by accident while working on what they thought would be a much different sort of hacking project. After observing a radio receiver on the streetlight poles throughout Berlin, they got to wondering: Would it be possible for someone with a central transmitter to control them en masse, and if so, could they create a city-wide light installation along the lines of Project Blinkenlights?... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has released the largest ever photomosaic featuring over 200 million stars -- all of which are bright than our own Sun. It consists of over 600 overlapping Hubble images and 2.5 billion pixels. "That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy," reports TechSpot. "Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

CERN's particle accelerator is being used in a pioneering cancer treatment called Flash radiotherapy. This method delivers ultra-high radiation doses in less than a second, minimizes side effects while targeting tumors more effectively than conventional radiotherapy. The BBC reports: In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumors (PDF), eliminate cancers that have metastasized to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. auto safety agency said on Friday it is reconsidering a landmark rule from the administration of former President Joe Biden requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would delay the effective date to March 20 to give the new Trump administration time to further review the regulation.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's CUDA 12.8 release notes signal the transition of Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs to the legacy driver branch. As a result, there will be no more new feature updates for these architectures; however, CUDA and gaming driver support will remain for now. From the report: It's crucial to highlight that this has nothing to do with GeForce gaming driver support. In fact, Maxwell and Pascal continue to be on the support list for the GeForce RTX series driver, unlike Kepler. Nvidia didn't detail whether or when it'll drop support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs for the gaming driver.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The British Museum was partly closed after a dismissed IT contractor trespassed, shutting down systems including its ticketing platform. The move disrupted operations and forced the closure of temporary exhibitions. The Guardian reports: While the museum will remain open this weekend, only a handful of ticket holders will be able to access its paid-for exhibitions, such as its Silk Roads show, because the IT system that manages bookings has been rendered unusable. The incident caused chaos in the middle of a busy Friday afternoon and is the latest security issue to blight the institution. A statement on the museum's website on Friday said that "due to an IT infrastructure issue some galleries have had to be closed. Please note that this means capacity will be limited, and priority will be given to members and pre-booked ticket holders. Currently our exhibitions remain closed."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Scientists have observed for the first time how microplastics move through and block blood vessels in mouse brains, according to research published in Science Advances this week. Using fluorescence imaging, researchers at Peking University tracked plastic particles as they were consumed by immune cells and accumulated in brain blood vessels, causing obstructions that persisted for up to four weeks and reduced blood flow. The study found that these blockages, which behaved similarly to blood clots, decreased the mice's mobility for several days.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Nearly 190 million Americans were affected by February's cyberattack on UnitedHealth's Change Healthcare unit, almost double initial estimates, the company disclosed Friday. The breach, the largest in U.S. medical history, exposed sensitive data including Social Security numbers, medical records, and financial information. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as "collectibles." From a report: "It's like a baseball card or a stamp," Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump's explosively popular memecoin. "People buy it because they want to commemorate something." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She'll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn't been announced publicly. The move helps bolster a team that's racing to make Apple a leader in AI -- an area where it's fallen behind technology peers. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Longtime Slashdot reader shanen writes: What matters to you when buying a new smartphone? How can we make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share -- quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago. Or perhaps I could start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient Ask Slashdot discussion about batteries?... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Netflix plans to expand its cloud gaming offerings to include couch co-op and party games, according to co-CEO Greg Peters. The company will also continue developing narrative games based on its IP, despite recent leadership changes and the closure of its AAA game studio. The Verge reports: In the blog post, Netflix notes that it's a "limited" beta test, so it seems like this won't be available to too many people to start. (Netflix used that same "limited" language with the initial launch in Canada and the UK.) Like with the original test, the only two games available to stream are Oxenfree from Netflix's own Night School Studio and another game titled Molehew's Mining Adventure.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies. Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The FBI warned this week that North Korean IT workers are abusing their access to steal source code and extort U.S. companies that have been tricked into hiring them. From a report: The security service alerted public and private sector organizations in the United States and worldwide that North Korea's IT army will facilitate cyber-criminal activities and demand ransoms not to leak online exfiltrated sensitive data stolen from their employers' networks. "North Korean IT workers have copied company code repositories, such as GitHub, to their own user profiles and personal cloud accounts. While not uncommon among software developers, this activity represents a large-scale risk of theft of company code," the FBI said. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Walgreens Boots Alliance has ended a $200 million digital display venture with startup Cooler Screens after widespread technical failures and poor revenue, removing thousands of smart screens from its store freezer doors [non-paywalled link]. The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Battery cars on Britain's roads are lasting as long as petrol and diesel cars, according to a study that has found a rapid improvement in electric vehicle reliability. From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy. The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Leaders at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will introduce financial incentives for academic publishers to adopt open science policies as part of the organization's collective agreement with 11 particle-physics journals. From a report: The current scheme sees those journals publish work from the field openly and at no cost to authors, in exchange for bulk payments. Under the newly launched initiative, CERN will pay more to publishers that adopt polices such as use of public or open peer review and linking research to data sets, and less to those that do not. Some open-science specialists say the policy could be a game-changer in encouraging transparent science. Others caution that it could set a precedent for publishers to boost their fees in exchange for becoming more open. "Particle physics is large, international, highly complex, highly dynamic. Openness is the only really effective way of practising science in the discipline," says Kamran Naim, head of open science at CERN. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1331225/private-equity-firm-hongshan-acquires-rock-icon-marshall-for-115-billion?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Longtime Slashdot readers smooth wombat and AmiMoJo shares a fusion energy breakthrough from China. Charming Science reports: China's "artificial sun," officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in fusion energy research. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), EAST recently sustained high-confinement plasma operation for an unprecedented 1,066 seconds, shattering the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023. [...] The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors. This breakthrough, accomplished by the Institute of Plasma Physics under the CAS, signifies a major leap towards realizing the potential of fusion energy. [...] The success of EAST's recent experiment can be attributed to several key advancements. Researchers have made significant strides in improving the stability of the heating system, enhancing the accuracy of the control system, and refining the precision of the diagnostic systems. Warning: the source originates from China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. It's rated "questionable" by Media Bias/Fact Check because of its association with the CCP.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on AI Thursday that will revoke past government policies his order says "act as barriers to American AI innovation." From a report: To maintain global leadership in AI technology, "we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas," Trump's order says. The new order doesn't name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review "all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken" as a result of former President Joe Biden's sweeping AI executive order of 2023, which Trump rescinded Monday. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from MotorTrend: A coming ground-fault circuit-interrupter revision could make slow-charging your car nearly impossible. The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) publishes a new National Electric Code every three years, and we almost never notice or care. But the next one, NFPA 70 2026, has the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric-vehicle charging subcommittee, OEMs, and companies in the EV Supply Equipment (EVSE, or charger) biz mightily concerned. That's because it proposes to require the same exact ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection that makes you push that little button on your bathroom outlet every time the curling iron won't heat up. Only now, that reset button will often be down in an electric panel, maybe locked in a room where you can't reset it. If EV drivers can't reliably plug in and expect their cars to charge overnight at home or while at work, those cars will become far less practical. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors. A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a "strategic collaboration" that'll initially look into the potential for new nuclear power plants in Texas and the Rocky Mountain region that would power SDC's data centers. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 (PDF) highlights misinformation as the top global risk due to generative AI tools and state-sponsored campaigns undermining democratic systems, while cyberespionage ranks as a persistent threat with inadequate cyber resilience, especially among small organizations. From a report: The manipulation of information through gen AI and state-sponsored campaigns is disrupting democratic systems and undermining public trust in critical institutions. Efforts to combat this risk have a "formidable opponent" in gen AI-created false or misleading content that can be produced and distributed at scale, the report warned. Misinformation campaigns in the form of deepfakes, synthetic voice recordings or fabricated news stories are now a leading mechanism for foreign entities to influence "voter intentions, sow doubt among the general public about what is happening in conflict zones, or tarnish the image of products or services from another country." This is especially acute in India, Germany, Brazil and the United States.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Epic Games is expanding its mobile app store to include nearly 20 third-party games on Android and EU iOS, launching a free games program, and temporarily covering Apple's Core Technology Fee for participating developers to counter platform restrictions. "Our aim here isn't just to launch a bunch of different stores in different places, but to build a single, cross-platform store in which, within the era of multi-platform games, if you buy a game or digital items in one place, you have the ability to own them everywhere," Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told reporters during a press briefing. The Verge reports: Under the program, Epic will offer new free games in the store each month before eventually switching to a weekly schedule. However, the games aren't actually in the store yet -- Epic said on Thursday that it "ran into a few bugs that we're working through now" and "we'll provide an update once the games are live and ready to play!"... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The Linux 6.14 kernel now maps out support for Microsoft's "Copilot" key "so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: A change made to the atkbd keyboard driver on Linux now maps the F23 key to support the default copilot shortcut action. The patch authored by Lenovo engineer Mark Pearson explains [...]. Now it's up to the Linux desktop environments for determining what to do if the new Copilot key is pressed. The patch was part of the input updates now merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: The same morning that JetBlue Airways announced that it was the first airline partnering with Venmo to begin accepting payments for booking flights, an account on the popular payment platform was already raking in money. A Venmo user named Owen Miller paid the JetBlue Checkpoint Store for a drink on Wednesday morning, which is a typical transaction between a traveler and airline, except for the fact that JetBlue doesn't operate that account. "At this time, JetBlue does not accept Venmo payment for inflight purchases such as food and beverages," a representative for the airline told SFGATE in an email. "Unfortunately, we have seen accounts falsely representing themselves as JetBlue to deceive and defraud customers." To stay safe from scammers when booking JetBlue flights with Venmo, the airline recommends customers only use verified JetBlue channels, such as their official website or app, and follow their secure payment process using the provided QR code. JetBlue said it plans to fold Venmo payments into its mobile app later this year.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Intel is advocating for modular PC designs to improve repairability, reduce e-waste, and align with the right-to-repair movement. A trio of executives makes their case for such designs in a recent blog post. The Register reports: Intel's approach to the problem is to draft three proposals targeting different market segments, saying that a one-size-fits-all approach would not be able to address the nuanced demands of these varied segments. Those three segments comprise "Premium Modular PC" (actually a laptop design); "Entry/Mainstream Modular PC" (another laptop); and "Desktop Modular PC."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that "sets a federal agenda meant to move U.S. digital assets businesses into friendly oversight," reports CoinDesk. The order creates a cryptocurrency working group tasked with proposing a new regulatory framework for digital assets. It will be "made up of the Treasury secretary, attorney general and chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, along with other agency heads," notes Reuters.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source "tar pit" to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed "offensively" as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies' resources.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ian Tregillis and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin have published a physics paper deriving a mathematical model for the Wild Cards virus, a fictional pathogen that kills 90% of those infected while granting survivors either mutations ("Jokers") or superpowers ("Aces"). ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

US President Donald Trump blasted European Union regulators for targeting Apple, Alphabet's Google and Meta, describing theircases against American companies as "a form of taxation."
From a report: The EU has established a reputation globally for its aggressive regulation of major technology companies, often sparring with major social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, over content moderation, and the likes of Apple and Google over antitrust concerns. "These are American companies whether you like it or not," Trump said in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The rumors are true: OpenAI today launched Operator, an AI agent capable of performing web-based tasks through its own browser, as a research preview for U.S. subscribers of its $200 monthly ChatGPT Pro tier. The agent uses GPT-4's vision capabilities and reinforcement learning to interact with websites through mouse and keyboard actions without requiring API integration, OpenAI said in a blog post. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Google will remove URL breadcrumbs from mobile search results globally, displaying only domain names instead of the full hierarchical path marked by ">" symbols, the company said.

The change affects all smartphone and tablet searches while desktop results remain unchanged. The company said it made the change because of limited screen space, noting breadcrumbs often get cut off on smaller displays.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies