News and discussions about technology

Amazon.com Inc., which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean.

Archive link: https://archive.is/uZwMA

A US court ruling against Google’s app store policies has shaken the layout of these gardens a bit, but they’ll stay in place—for now.

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Quantum computing could shred the encryption that guards digital information. Great powers are sprinting to master this technology to crack their adversaries’ codes.

Google’s cookie-killing “Privacy Sandbox” project is finally set to begin.

Intel has finally revealed the details on the Core Ultra 9.

Months after its launch in over 100 other countries.

A lot can happen in a year when you're the worlds largest search engine.

In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.

After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.

YouTube removed a snippet of code that publicly disclosed whether a channel receives ad and subscription payouts, obscuring which creators benefit most from the platform.

Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is on track to bring in roughly $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2023 — a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter.

Designed to study Pluto, the spacecraft’s instruments are being repurposed.

Some experts think xAI used OpenAI model outputs to fine-tune Grok.

A U.S. judge on Monday upheld Texas' ban on state employees', including public university employees, using Chinese-owned short video app TikTok on state-owned devices or networks.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed suit in July arguing that Texas’ state government TikTok ban "is preventing or seriously impeding faculty from pursuing research that relates to TikTok."

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman rejected the suit, saying the Texas restriction was motivated by data protection concerns and calling "a reasonable restriction on access to TikTok in light of Texas’s concerns."

"Public university faculty - and all public employees - are free to use TikTok on their personal devices (as long as such devices are not used to access state networks)," he wrote.

A recent study found that websites and applications that use AI tools to undress people are receiving unprecedented traction.

Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.

After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive.

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A new study has been published showcasing a new DNA-based nanobot that could open the door to producing life-saving drugs in the human body. A team of researchers from New York University have developed DNA-based nanobots that could, in theory, replicate themselves exponentially. Developed by Feng Zhou and his team, the tiny DNA bots consist of only four DNA strands and can copy themselves one at a time using their structure as a template. These DNA nanobots could open up exciting opportunities to produce life-saving drugs inside your body.

The nanobots are created with four DNA strands and measure around 100 nanometers. To put that into perspective, you could line up about a thousand of them to fit the width of a human hair, give or take. They are also held in a solution with specific DNA-strand raw materials needed for them to work.

Critics say Fraser Samson hiring is ‘outrageous conflict of interest’ as monitoring technology is rolled out in UK high streets

The material is being exploited for smartphone screens, insulated windows, and more.

The Foundation supports challenges to laws in Texas and Florida that jeopardize Wikipedia's community-led governance model and the right to freedom of expression.

An amicus brief, also known as a “friend-of-the-court” brief, is a document filed by individuals or organizations who are not part of a lawsuit, but who have an interest in the outcome of the case and want to raise awareness about their concerns. The Wikimedia Foundation’s amicus brief calls upon the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed in 2021 by Texas and Florida state legislatures. Texas House Bill 20 and Florida Senate Bill 7072 prohibit website operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question.

“These laws expose residents of Florida and Texas who edit Wikipedia to lawsuits by people who disagree with their work,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “For over twenty years, a community of volunteers from around the world have designed, debated, and deployed a range of content moderation policies to ensure the information on Wikipedia is reliable and neutral. We urge the Supreme Court to rule in favor of NetChoice to protect Wikipedia’s unique model of community-led governance, as well as the free expression rights of the encyclopedia’s dedicated editors.”

“The quality of Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia depends entirely on the ability of volunteers to develop and enforce nuanced rules for well-sourced, encyclopedic content,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Without the discretion to make editorial decisions in line with established policies around verifiability and neutrality, Wikipedia would be overwhelmed with opinions, conspiracies, and irrelevant information that would jeopardize the project’s reason for existing.”

The agency claims the technology is 'simpler than conventional methods for control of hypersonic craft.'

In sub-Saharan Africa, women are at high risk of contracting HIV. Some protective measures carry a stigma but this device enables them to take control without anyone knowing.

Via @tree

The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life is, to date, the most extensive technosignature search of nearby celestial objects. We present a radio technosignature search of the centers of 97 nearby galaxies, observed by Breakthrough Listen at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. We performed a narrowband Doppler drift search using the turboSETI pipeline with a minimum signal-to-noise parameter threshold of 10, across a drift rate range of $\pm$ 4 Hz\ $s^{-1}$, with a spectral resolution of 3 Hz and a time resolution of $\sim$ 18.25 s. We removed radio frequency interference by using an on-source/off-source cadence pattern of six observations and discarding signals with Doppler drift rates of 0. We assess factors affecting the sensitivity of the Breakthrough Listen data reduction and search pipeline using signal injection and recovery techniques and apply new methods for the investigation of the RFI environment. We present results in four frequency bands covering 1 -- 11 GHz, and place constraints on the presence of transmitters with equivalent isotropic radiated power on the order of $10^{26}$ W, corresponding to the theoretical power consumption of Kardashev Type II civilizations.

Google takes heat for a misleading AI demo video that hyped up its GPT-4 competitor.

Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps' push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.

In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.

Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible "dings" or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers.

That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps," Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to "repeal or modify any policies" that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.

In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.

"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."

Google said that it shared Wyden's "commitment to keeping users informed about these requests."

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the push notification surveillance or whether it had prevented Apple or Google from talking about it.

Wyden's letter cited a "tip" as the source of the information about the surveillance. His staff did not elaborate on the tip, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed that both foreign and U.S. government agencies have been asking Apple and Google for metadata related to push notifications to, for example, help tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts.

The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States.

The source said they did not know how long such information had been gathered in that way.