News Links

Last week, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the law, clearing the way for it to take effect on January 19. Days later, TikTok asked the court to issue a temporary pause on the ban while the company asks the Supreme Court to review its challenge to the law. The appeals court unanimously rejected that bid in a brief, unsigned order that called such a block “unwarranted.”

The TikTok ban has been one of the most closely watched pieces of federal legislation in recent years, and it’s been widely expected that the law would eventually land before the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

On Thursday morning, YouTube TV sent a stunning message to subscribers, informing them that they were raising the monthly price of their base plan. But this wasn’t just an incremental price hike, mind you. This was a whopping $10 monthly price increase.

The monthly price of $72.99 for the YouTube TV base plan is now all the way up to $82.99. And it starts next month on January 13, 2025.

Apple’s silicon design team in Israel is leading development of the AI chip, according to two of the people. That team was instrumental in designing the processors Apple introduced in 2020 to replace Intel chips in Macs.

Apple this past summer canceled the development of a high-performance chip for Macs—consisting of four smaller chips stitched together—to free up some of its engineers in Israel to work on the AI chip, one of the people said, highlighting the company’s shifting priorities.

To make the chip, Apple is planning to use one of TSMC’s most advanced manufacturing processes, known as N3P, said three people with direct knowledge. That would be an improvement over the manufacturing process used for Apple’s latest computer processor, the M4.

The FCC has unanimously adopted new rules to expand very-low-power device operations across all 1,200 megahertz of the 6-GHz band alongside other unlicensed and Wi-Fi-enabled devices.

Despite opposition from the NAB and other parties who have argued that opening up the spectrum would create problems for fixed microwave links, satellite uplinks and broadcast auxiliary services that use this spectrum, the FCC has in recent years been opening up parts of the 6-GHz band.

Prior to the Dec. 11 vote to open up all 1,200 megahertz for very-low-power devices, the FCC expanded unlicensed use between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz, helping to usher in Wi-Fi 6E, set the stage for Wi-Fi 7 and support the growth of the Internet of Things.

A judge late Tuesday night said he would not approve the sale of Infowars, the website founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to the Chicago-based satirical publication The Onion, prolonging a messy tug of war between two high-profile suitors.

The ruling, by Judge Christopher M. Lopez in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, poses a roadblock for The Onion’s plan to take possession of the Infowars site and its associated assets after it won an auction last month. The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones.

A judge late Tuesday night said he would not approve the sale of Infowars, the website founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to the Chicago-based satirical publication The Onion, prolonging a messy tug of war between two high-profile suitors.

The ruling, by Judge Christopher M. Lopez in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, poses a roadblock for The Onion’s plan to take possession of the Infowars site and its associated assets after it won an auction last month. The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones.

Google debuted a new version of its flagship artificial intelligence model that it said is twice as fast as its previous version and will power virtual agents that assist users.

The new model, Gemini 2.0, can generate images and audio across languages, and can assist during Google searches and coding projects, the company said Wednesday. The new capabilities of Gemini “make it possible to build agents that can think, remember, plan, and even take action on your behalf,” said Tulsee Doshi, a director of product management at the company, in a briefing with reporters.

GM is shutting down the business, citing the high costs to develop the technology and build out a fleet of cars in multiple cities, retreating from a once-promising market that proved full of reputational pitfalls for the automaker.

Instead, Barra will merge Cruise into GM’s operations with more humble goals such as developing advanced safety systems for the vehicles it sells and, one day, offering autonomous driving as a feature on future models.

WP Engine just won a preliminary injunction against WordPress.com parent company Automattic. On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins.

The preliminary injunction comes after WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, filed a lawsuit that accused Automattic and its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, of “multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm.” It later asked the court to stop Mullenweg from restricting WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org.

YouTube announced on Tuesday that its auto-dubbing feature, which allows creators to generate translated audio tracks for their videos, is now rolling out to hundreds of thousands more channels.

YouTube first introduced its AI-powered auto-dubbing tool at Vidcon last year, which was only being tested with a limited group of creators. This tool could help make content on the platform more accessible and easier to understand for people all over the world.

The auto-dubbing feature is now available to channels that are focused on informational content, such as videos that teach viewers how to cook or sew. It’ll expand availability to other types of content soon.

To use the feature, simply upload a video as you normally would. YouTube will automatically detect the language and create dubbed versions in other languages. The tool supports English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Customers can hop on to Amazon Autos and search for the Hyundai make and model they want, then find vehicles at nearby dealerships with the combination of features they want. Shoppers can select trim, color, and interior features, then get a valuation on their current vehicle to estimate a trade-in price. (Amazon says it is working with an “independent third party” to determine trade-in values.)

The checkout process gives options to pay in full or to find help securing financing—though interest rates may vary. Finally, shoppers can e-sign most of the paperwork on Amazon, then schedule a time to pick up their new ride at the Hyundai dealer. There are also the familiar features that have come to feel like the stalwarts of buying stuff on Amazon: user reviews, star ratings, and an add-to-cart button. (Throw some soap in there too while you’re buying that $66,000 Ioniq 5.)

ere’s the problem with this, which many people don’t seem to understand: to figure out what a “reasonable and prudent” person would do is an after-the-fact judicial analysis. That means that any time something bad happens online that works up enforcers into a frenzy, they will go after any website they dislike where said “bad thing” was discussed, and insist that the platform should have “prevented and mitigated” the bad thing.

Then the platform would need to go to court and spend roughly $5 million across three to four years to argue that the “bad thing” which was discussed (but didn’t actually happen on the platform) wasn’t “reasonably foreseeable.”

Most platforms aren’t going to want to do that. Instead, they’ll just remove all sorts of content that might otherwise lead to such a lengthy, draining, and resource-intensive legal fight (including all the negative headlines that will go along with it).

That’s why this is a censorship bill, first and foremost.

On Monday, Nature released a paper from Google's quantum computing team that provides a key demonstration of the potential of quantum error correction. Thanks to an improved processor, Google's team found that increasing the number of hardware qubits dedicated to an error-corrected logical qubit led to an exponential increase in performance. By the time the entire 105-qubit processor was dedicated to hosting a single error-corrected qubit, the system was stable for an average of an hour.

In fact, Google told Ars that errors on this single logical qubit were rare enough that it was difficult to study them. The work provides a significant validation that quantum error correction is likely to be capable of supporting the execution of complex algorithms that might require hours to execute.

With its own modem in the pipeline, Apple is investigating the idea of bringing cellular connectivity to the Mac for the first time. That means users wouldn’t need Wi-Fi to get online. To date, that capability has been reserved for the iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad. But cellular connections are unlikely to come to the Mac before 2026, when Apple is planning a second-generation modem that includes support for faster speeds.

The company is also discussing bringing cellular support to headsets, including future models of the Vision Pro. Someday, the technology may also be used in lightweight augmented reality glasses, though such a device is years away.