News Links

The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant's new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple "to raise this concern and fix the problem".

Apple declined to comment.

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools.

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀”

Fortunately, I’m an investigative reporter. I already knew that fake product reviews were a dime a dozen, but this seemed to go further. Now that anyone can use artificial intelligence to write convincing marketing and construct sharp-looking websites, the spin has become harder to spot.

Harder, yes, but not impossible. Using my dad’s shopping expedition as a case study, I created this list of how you can avoid falling for fake reviews and iffy products.

Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist who endorsed Mr. Trump during the campaign, said in a podcast interview this week that he had spent about half of his time since Election Day working on the presidential transition. He framed Mr. Trump’s win as a cultural moment for a “techno-optimist” ideology.

“It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy,” Mr. Andreessen said. “People are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of the culture and realizing that it’s actually OK to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.”

Apple designers are developing something akin to a giant iPad that unfolds into the size of two iPad Pros side-by-side. The Cupertino, California-based company has been honing the product for a couple of years now and is aiming to bring something to market around 2028, I’m told.

Apple’s goal for a foldable device is to avoid the crease that current products have when they’re in the open position. And the company has made progress on this front: Prototypes of this new product within Apple’s industrial design group have a nearly invisible crease. But it’s too early to tell if Apple will can get rid of it altogether. Samsung Electronics Co., which launched its first foldable phone five years ago, has tried unsuccessfully to remove the crease.

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.