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U.S. technology giant Apple has notified RFE/RL that it has removed another of its apps following a request from Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor.

The newly removed RFE/RL app is that of the Russian Service, which in turn hosts the websites of its regional projects Siberia.Realities and North.Realities.

Apple had previously removed the apps for RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service and Current Time, the Russian-language TV and digital network run by RFE/RL.

Roskomnadzor notified Apple that the Russian Service app contains materials from an organization whose activities in Russia have been declared "undesirable."

With deep sadness, we say goodbye to computer pioneer Thomas Kurtz.

Thomas Eugene Kurtz (Feb. 22 1928–Nov. 12, 2024) was an American mathematician, computer scientist and co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language and Dartmouth Timesharing System.

In the early days of academic computing in the 1960s, there were no simple non-professional programming languages available for undergraduates. BASIC was aimed at this audience. To realize their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny concurrently developed the Dartmouth Timesharing System, allowing BASIC to be accessed by students around campus using Teletype terminals.

Fitbit’s Ace LTE, the smartwatch designed for ages 7+, is introducing new features to help families stay connected and get active together.

On Wednesday, Fitbit announced a slew of new features, including group chats, family quests, a new mini-game, and two new watch faces. There’s also a new direct message feature for siblings to text and call each other using their devices.

Ace LTE, launched in May, is designed to provide parents with a sense of security. It allows them to text and call their kids, track their location, and monitor their activity level. The device restricts kids’ ability to add contacts. Instead, guardians can approve and add up to 20 trusted adults to the account, ensuring that communication stays in a controlled network.

U.K. consumer rights group ‘Which?’ is filing a legal claim against Apple under competition law on behalf of some 40 million users of iCloud, its cloud storage service.

The collective proceeding lawsuit, which is seeking £3 billion in compensation damages (around $3.8 billion at current exchange rates), alleges that Apple has broken competition rules by giving its own cloud storage service preferential treatment and effectively locking people into paying for iCloud at “rip-off” prices.

“iOS has a monopoly and is in control of Apple’s operating systems and it is incumbent on Apple not to use that dominance to gain an unfair advantage in related markets, like the cloud storage market. But that is exactly what has happened,” Which wrote in a press release announcing filing the claim with the U.K.’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).

In the AI chatbot world, ubiquity is everything. Companies have raced to build desktop and mobile apps for their bots, in order to both give them new capabilities but also to make sure they’re right in front of your face as often as possible.

There’s no better example of that than Google’s new Gemini app for iPhone, which quietly hit the App Store around the world this week. The free app is simple and straightforward: it’s just a chat window and a list of your previous chats. You can query the bot with text, voice, or your camera, and it’ll give you answers. It’s effectively identical to the Gemini section of the Google app, or what you’d get by opening a browser and going to the Gemini website.

After demoing at I/O 2024 in May, Google is rolling out real-time Scam Detection for phone calls on Pixel devices.

Scam Detection listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams.” Once recognized, an audio and haptic alert will prompt you to look at your phone for a “Likely scam” visual warning. “Suspicious activity detected for this call” is accompanied by an “End call” button, or the ability to mark “Not a scam.”

OpenAI is preparing to launch a new artificial intelligence agent codenamed “Operator” that can use a computer to take actions on a person’s behalf, such as writing code or booking travel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

In a staff meeting on Wednesday, OpenAI’s leadership announced plans to release the tool in January as a research preview and through the company’s application programming interface for developers, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Today, Apple revealed the latest updates to Final Cut Pro for the Mac and iPad, with both offering a variety of new features and simplified workflows.

Final Cut Pro 11 for the Mac has added magnetic masks, extending the “magnetic” metaphor used for clips placed on your timeline. Apple says the new feature will allow you to quickly mask people and objects in a shot to color grade them or add effects separately from the rest of a scene.

Apple also released an update to Logic Pro for the Mac and iPad, adding a new Quantec Room Simulator plug-in that recreates ‘80s-era hardware invented by Wolfgang “Wolf” Buchleitner. The plug-in simulates room acoustics in a natural-sounding way that has been used in a wide variety of recordings.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken steps to place Google under formal federal supervision, an extraordinary move that could subject the technology giant to the regular inspections and other rigorous monitoring that the government imposes on major banks.

Google has fiercely resisted the idea over months of highly secretive talks, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them — setting up what may ultimately be a major legal clash with vast implications for the CFPB’s powers in the digital age.

The exact scope of the CFPB’s concerns is not clear, and its order does not appear to be final. The political fate of the bureau’s work under Director Rohit Chopra is also in doubt, as the watchdog agency braces for potentially significant changes to its leadership and agenda with the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House.

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Meta has been fined nearly €800mn by Brussels after regulators accused Facebook’s parent company of stifling competition by “tying” its free Marketplace services with the social network.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s outgoing competition chief, said on Thursday that by linking Facebook with its classified ads service Meta had “imposed unfair trading conditions” on other providers.

She added: “It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that [others] could not match. This is illegal.”

As Google continues to navigate its relationship with publishers, regulators, and news readers, the company is starting a pretty drastic test: it will remove news articles from European Union-based publishers from Search.

While the “test” is supposed to determine how it will impact traffic and the overall search experience, it won’t show up for everyone. Google will only remove EU news articles from search results, Google News, and Discover for one percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.

AI seems to have done less to shape how people voted and far more to erode their faith in reality. The new tool of partisan propaganda amplified satire, false political narratives and hate speech to entrench partisan beliefs rather than change minds, according to interviews and data from misinformation analysts and AI experts.

In a report shared with The Washington Post ahead of its publication Saturday, researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that the rapid increase in AI-generated content has created “a fundamentally polluted information ecosystem” in which voters increasingly struggle to distinguish what’s artificial from what’s real.

A portrait of the British mathematician Alan Turing sold at auction for nearly $1.1 million on Thursday, a surprisingly large sum for a painting whose creator wasn’t an artist in the traditional sense, but rather a humanoid robot powered by artificial intelligence.

The experiment was the brainchild of Aidan Meller, a former gallerist living outside Oxford, England, who has worked with a team of nearly 30 people to build the robot. In most recent appearances, the robot is dressed like a woman with a bob haircut and is referred to as Ai-Da in honor of Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician who has been recognized as the world’s first computer programmer.

“I am trying to adapt to this slightly surreal moment,” Meller said in an interview, recalling the final moments of the sale.

The painting, which depicted Turing as the god of artificial intelligence, was offered as part of Sotheby’s digital art sale and initially was estimated to sell for $120,000 to $180,000. It received more than 27 bids and was sold to an anonymous buyer from the United States.

Meller said the proceeds from the sale of the painting, called “A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing,” would help finance new improvements to Ai-Da’s design.

Speaking plainly, Intel's recently-launched Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs, code-named "Arrow Lake", weren't quite what we expected out of this new generation of chips from Intel. While productivity and content creation performance was potent in some cases, gaming performance saw a significant regression. As it happens, Intel was as disappointed by some of these results just as the community was, and is apparently hot on the trail of root cause identification with a host of fixes are inbound as well.

Speaking to us on our recent livestream, Intel's Robert Hallock was candid in saying that the Arrow Lake launch was indeed disastrous, but that it was in large part due to launch day performance being below Intel's own expectations and the result of test systems not being properly optimized. Hallock was quick to take the blame for the launch day missteps on Intel's behalf, saying that "our wounds with Arrow Lake not hitting the performance we projected were self-inflicted.

The iPod line has vanished into history, but the influence of this once-ubiquitous device is still shaping Apple, music, and the world, 23 years on from its announcement on October 23, 2001. You had one. Everybody had an iPod, some people had several, and at the time it seemed as if Apple had somehow thrown a light switch. One moment, almost nobody had any portable music players, and the next they were all wearing those white earbuds.

That isn't true, of course, because the iPod did take a long time to climb up as high as it got. Yet its ultimate dominance was so total that it used to be hard to imagine a time when there wasn't an iPod.

It was hard, too, to remember that there were alternatives, but there were many. Apple's iPod was far from the first music player, and Microsoft's failed, brown Zune may not even have been its absolute worst rival.

Memecoins surged Wednesday as former President Donald Trump clinched a second term in office.

Dogecoin surged more than 15% and Shiba Inu gained 6%, according to Coin Metrics. The moves came as bitcoin rose to a fresh record above $76,000.

But if you sit closer, Sony’s new game console can make select games look amazing. Blades of grass, pillars of rough hewn stone, the weave of a backpack — they pop at higher fidelity. It’s enough of an improvement that I found myself wanting to sit closer, or stand, or even plug the PS5 Pro into a 4K computer monitor to use it like a gaming PC.

With some games, playing the original PS5 could feel like looking through a dirty window. The PS5 Pro has the power to wipe that window clean.

What’s clear to me with this 9800X3D is that AMD has now established an even more impressive gap over Intel in gaming performance, while shrinking the performance differences in productivity and creator workloads. I think this smaller gap on the non-gaming side will now tempt more creators who also play games over to AMD.

Intel sacrificed gaming performance in favor of efficiency with its Core Ultra 9 285K, but many PC gamers simply don’t care about power efficiency unless it results in significantly cooler temperatures and, therefore, better performance and less throttling. Intel’s sacrifices make the 9800X3D an obvious purchase if you want the best PC gaming performance, and the Core Ultra 9 285K is an obvious choice if you want the best in productivity and creator performance and play games very little or not at all.

OpenAI bought Chat.com, adding to its collection of high-profile domain names.

As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the acquisition via email.

Chat.com is one of the older domains on the web, having been registered in September 1996. Last year, it was reported that HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah acquired Chat.com for $15.5 million, making it one of the top two all-time publicly reported domain sales.