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DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly Antitrust officials also to seek data licensing, AI measures Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developersThe judge has set a two-week hearing in April on what changes Google must make to remedy the illegal behavior and plans to issue a final ruling by August 2025.

The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine and give websites more options to prevent their content from being used by Google’s artificial intelligence products, said the people.

But Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found. The proposal was, in fact, a calculated business maneuver designed to bring in billions of dollars in new revenue, box competitors out of lucrative government contracts and tighten the company’s grip on federal business.

The White House Offer, as it was known inside Microsoft, would dispatch Microsoft consultants across the federal government to install the company’s cybersecurity products — which, as a part of the offer, were provided free of charge for a limited time.

But once the consultants installed the upgrades, federal customers would be effectively locked in, because shifting to a competitor after the free trial would be cumbersome and costly, according to former Microsoft employees involved in the effort, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions. At that point, the customer would have little choice but to pay for the higher subscription fees.

UK-based mobile operator Virgin Media O2 has created an AI-generated "scambaiter" tool to stall scammers. The AI tool, called Daisy, mimics the voice of an elderly woman and performs one simple task: talk to fraudsters and "waste as much of their time as possible."

Here's how Daisy works: O2 added phone numbers linked to its AI tool to the lists used by scammers to target vulnerable people. When a scammer dials a number linked to Daisy, the AI tool can have random conversations about its made-up family and hobbies or provide fake bank details to beat scammers at their own game.

Both Musk and Jones are known allies of President-elect Donald Trump. Musk has allowed Infowars to broadcast on X while Infowars’ fate is in limbo.

Jones has used Infowars as a platform to promote conspiracy theories, far-right ideologies and misinformation. He often focuses on events and social issues to sell related products like supplements and survival gear.

Previous M-series MacBook Pro models used a red KSF phosphor film to enable the miniLED backlighting to produce a wider color gamut than would normally be possible.

This film is also very efficient, but there’s an even better film available, known as quantum dot. Display analyst Ross Young reports that Apple quietly introduced this to the M4 MacBook Pro.

Big Apple display news, they have adopted quantum dots for the first time. The latest MacBook Pro’s (M4) use a quantum dot (QD) film rather than a red KSF phosphor film.

Young says this provides the latest models with two advantages over earlier models.

Better color gamut and better motion performance.

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.