News Links

For over a decade, you couldn’t easily fly a DJI drone over restricted areas in the United States. DJI’s software would automatically stop you from flying over runways, power plants, public emergencies like wildfires, and the White House.

But confusingly, amidst the greatest US outpouring of drone distrust in years, and an incident of a DJI drone operator hindering LA wildfire fighting efforts, DJI is getting rid of its strong geofence. DJI will no longer enforce “No-Fly Zones,” instead only offering a dismissible warning — meaning only common sense, empathy, and the fear of getting caught by authorities will prevent people from flying where they shouldn’t.

Previously, Google charged an additional $20+ per user/month for Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and other Workspace apps. The full Gemini experience is now coming to Google Workspace business users as part of a price increase.

In the past, Workspace users only got access to the Gemini app as part of their productivity subscription. To access the Gemini side panel in Gmail and Drive, companies had to pay $20 or $30 per user/month for Gemini Business or Gemini Enterprise, respectively.

That separate Gemini Add-on is now going away. Google is adding the integrated Gemini experience to Workspace Business and Enterprise plans.

OpenAI will underwrite the expansion of Axios to four cities of its choice as part of a broader content-sharing and technology deal, the firms said Wednesday.

Why it matters: It's the first time OpenAI is funding newsrooms as a part of a publisher deal, although the idea isn't novel.

Platformer can now confirm that misinformation-related demotions have been eliminated at the company.

The company plans to replace its professional fact-checking program with volunteers from the user base appending information to posts in a system modeled after X’s community notes. But Meta has offered few details on how the program will work, and has not said when it will become available.

As a result, Meta has chosen to open a window for viral hoaxes to spread unchecked on its properties while it works to build a new system to mitigate their impact.

Elon Musk cheated Twitter shareholders out of more than $150 million by waiting too long to disclose his growing stake in the company as he prepared a takeover bid, the US Securities and Exchange Commission claimed in a lawsuit filed days before the Trump administration takes over.

The agency’s complaint, which was immediately disputed by a lawyer for Musk, accuses the billionaire of failing to promptly report that he had amassed more than 5% of the social-media platform’s stock in early 2022 — a revelation that would have sent the stock’s price up.

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned. The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual, and he could ensure that because he was the person in control, the only ultimate decision-maker.

The State of Texas sued Allstate on Monday, accusing the insurer of illegally tracking drivers by way of their phones through a subsidiary called Arity that claimed to have the “world’s largest driving behavior database.”

“Allstate and Arity paid mobile apps millions of dollars to install Allstate’s tracking software,” Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement. “The personal data of millions of Americans was sold to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent in violation of the law. Texans deserve better and we will hold all these companies accountable.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new measure on Friday that could protect your Robux from scammers and hackers.

The proposed rule would interpret terms in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, or EFTA, which has traditionally been used to protect consumers from unauthorized debit transactions, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and cryptocurrency companies.

Meta employees are furious with the company’s newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness,” according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content moderation on Meta platforms.

“I am LGBT and Mentally Ill,” one post by an employee on an internal Meta platform called Workplace reads. “Just to let you know that I’ll be taking time out to look after my mental health.”

The U.S. government has secured final approval in the Northern District Court of California to liquidate crypto's largest-ever federal seizure, signaling the closure of a complex four-year legal battle over billions in Bitcoin tied to the infamous Silk Road marketplace.

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied a motion to block the forfeiture of 69,370 Bitcoin, clearing the Department of Justice to sell the $6.5 billion assets, according to a court document filed December 30.

Google is kicking off a new experiment in Search Labs today called “Daily Listen.” It’s a bit like NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews, while there are also podcast parallels.

Through Discover and Search, Google is aware of what you are interested in. Daily Listen takes all that into account to create a 5 minute or so episode that provides an overview of stories and topics that you follow.

Phi-4 excels in benchmarks that test advanced reasoning and domain-specific capabilities. Highlights include:

• Scoring over 80% in challenging benchmarks like MATH and MGSM, outperforming larger models like Google’s Gemini Pro and GPT-4o-mini.

• Superior performance in mathematical reasoning tasks, a critical capability for fields such as finance, engineering and scientific research.

• Impressive results in HumanEval for functional code generation, making it a strong choice for AI-assisted programming.