A few years ago, Australia passed a law that requires platform giants like Meta, which owns Facebook, and Google, which owns YouTube, to work with news publishers to pay for resharing media. Big Tech had to make deals with local news sites because of the News Media Bargaining Code. But Meta has stopped advertising news around the world on its platforms, and in March, it shocked Australian publishers by telling them that deals worth about $70 million would not be renewed. After Meta’s shocking move a few months ago, the Australian government is getting ready to respond. According to the…
Author: David
Skype, the phone and messaging app owned by Microsoft, has quietly stopped letting users add cash to their accounts and buy Skype phone numbers. This is bad news for anyone who still uses it. Instead, Skype is switching into SaaS mode, which means that users are being forced to sign up for monthly plans for both local and international Skype-to-phone calls. This will likely affect millions of people. Microsoft said last year that Skype had 36 million daily active users, which is the most current information they gave out. Microsoft did not make the change official: It wasn’t known about…
Google revealed Willow, its newest and best quantum computer chip, on Monday. The tech world was interested in Google’s claims about the chip’s speed and dependability, but it was an even stranger claim tucked away in a blog post about the chip that really got people’s attention. Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, said in a blog post that this chip was so fast that it must have drawn computer power from other worlds. So, the chip’s work shows that there are multiple universes and that “we live in a multiverse.” This Is The Passage: It’s amazing how…
Generative AI has been used in a lot of bad ways, like making up academic papers and copying artists. Now it seems to be showing up in state efforts to influence people. A recent report from the Massachusetts-based threat intelligence company Recorded Future says that commercial AI voice generation products, such as tech made public by the hot startup ElevenLabs, “very likely” helped with a recent campaign. The report talks about a Russian-backed effort to weaken Europe’s support for Ukraine. It was called “Operation Undercut,” and it used AI to make voiceovers for fake or false “news” videos. The videos…
A California district court judge said on Tuesday that Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg must allow WP Engine to access WordPress.org again. Mullenweg owns this site and it is a library for themes and plugins. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said that WP Engine should be able to access WordPress.org, themes, plugins, and sites the same way they did on September 20, when Mullenweg called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” at an event and started a public war against it. Soon after, he stopped WP Engine from going to WordPress.org. A third-party WordPress hosting company called WP Engine sued Automattic…
Data-mining software company Palantir Technologies recently passed Pentagon contractor and aerospace supplier RTX in market cap. This shows that the outlook for the military industry is changing. Palantir provides AI-powered tools to government, civilian, and business clients. This year, the company’s shares have gone up 345%, valuing the business at $174 billion at the end of the trading day on Friday. That is more than RTX, which has a market cap of $157 billion and has grown 40% this year. RTX is the parent company of Raytheon, Collins Aerospace, and Pratt & Whitney. It’s also more than Boeing’s $115 billion,…
(Parhlo World) -The Information reported on Sunday that President-elect Trump’s transition team has asked Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and three other big tech companies to a meeting in the middle of December to talk about how to stop people from selling drugs online. The report also said that on Thursday, staff from the three tech giants, as well as Snap and TikTok, were emailed by someone working for Trump’s transition team and Jim Carroll, who was Trump’s drug czar during his first term. The emails were meant to invite the staff to a call. The person told the Information that…
Mom of Elon Musk, Maye Musk, was on FOX Business not long ago. She talked about how people see billionaires, her son’s friendship with Trump, and even how she sat in on Elon’s meetings. Maye had some interesting things to say about Elon Musk and how the media talk about him when she talked to host Stuart Varney. Maye said right away that she likes “to sit in on meetings” with Vivek Ramaswamy and her son, among other well-known people. She gave a sneak peek into these meetings by saying that they had just talked about getting government workers back…
OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, now has a new, very expensive membership plan. Confirming rumors that came out this morning, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro, a new $200-a-month plan that gives users full access to all of OpenAI’s models, including the o1 “reasoning” model. “Power users of ChatGPT will be interested in ChatGPT Pro,” said Jason Wei, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, during a livestreamed press conference on Thursday. “These are the people who are already pushing the models to the limits of their abilities in tasks like math, programming, and writing.” o1 and other thinking models try to check…
This year, Bluesky has grown very quickly thanks to a lively community of posters, the ability for users to make their own changes, and a decentralized system that doesn’t force users to follow the decisions of a billionaire CEO. But one thing that isn’t clear about Bluesky is how the platform will make money in the long run and whether it will use ads, which are a popular way for websites to make money. So far, $15 million has been raised for the business, and CEO Jay Graber tells Parhlo World that other investors are already interested. Bluesky has hinted…
A commercial robotaxi service has been started in Abu Dhabi by the ride-hailing giant Uber and the Chinese company WeRide, which makes technology for self-driving cars. This is Uber’s first foreign service for self-driving cars. Uber has been quickly forming agreements with self-driving car companies in a wide range of industries, such as delivery, ride-hailing, and trucking. Wayve, Serve Robotics, Aurora Innovation, Waabi, and other companies are also partners. Still, investors are worried that companies like Waymo and maybe even Tesla, which are making new technologies, will be too good for companies like Uber to compete with. Waymo announced plans…
Display expert Ross Young says that Apple’s long-rumored folding iPhone will come out in late 2026. It will give the “stagnating” market for foldables a new spark. For years, we’ve been hoping for an iPhone that folds in half, and more and more people think it will happen in 2026. There’s more rumours about a folding iPhone. A new report from a well-known industry expert says Apple will enter the foldables market in 2026 and give the whole industry a boost. It comes from Ross Young of Display Supply Chain, a company that helps tech companies plan for the future…
Because of an unprecedented cyberattack on phone companies like AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have told people to use encrypted texting apps to keep their messages safe from hackers in other countries. It was called “Salt Typhoon” by Microsoft, and it was one of the biggest leaks of U.S. information in history. It hasn’t been fully fixed yet. During a news call on Tuesday, officials refused to say when the country’s phone lines would be free of outsiders. Government sources told NBC News that China broke into AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies to spy on users. A representative for the…
Trump’s choice to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration is pulling out just two days after being named. He is claiming the “gravity” of the job as the reason. On Sunday, Trump chose Chad Chronister, who is the sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, to lead the DEA. He said it was the “honour of a lifetime” and that he was “deeply humbled by this opportunity to serve our nation” at the time. But on Tuesday, Chronister wrote on X that he had changed his mind. “Over the past several days, as the gravity of this very important responsibility set in, I’ve…
People thought it was one of the worst tech deals ever when Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. After two years, an election, and a boom in creative AI, it seems like a better deal now. Wedbush Securities tech analyst Dan Ives said soon after the deal finished in October 2022 that it would “go down as one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A deals on the Street.” Musk borrowed $13 billion to buy Twitter, which is now called X. This deal has turned out to be the worst merger financing deal for banks…
Another safety expert has told OpenAI that they are leaving the company. Rosie Campbell, a policy worker at OpenAI, wrote on Substack on Saturday that her last week at the company was over. She said she was leaving because Miles Brundage, the senior policy assistant who led the AGI Readiness team, quit in October. The AGI Readiness team was broken up when he left, and its members were sent to work in different parts of the company. The AGI Readiness team told the company how safe it is for the world to handle AGI, which is a hypothetical form of…
This is how Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has slowly become a big player in the call/contact center space. In 2017, Amazon launched Amazon Connect, a cloud-based (and AI-focused) call center service. These days, businesses like U.S. Bank, Air Canada, and Dish Network use the site for customer service. The company announced a number of updates to Connect at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. These updates, which are driven by the Amazon Q platform and focus on AI, are not a surprise. The company that made AWS first started out as a voice-only service that worked on bringing AI…
These days, it seems like every tech company and startup is working on an AI agent or program that can complete complex tasks with little to no human intervention. When they become accessible, these agents will have a lot of complicated tasks to accomplish, like making hotel and trip reservations and payments. The founders of the new business /dev/agents, who were instrumental in creating Android in the early days of smartphones, feel that a new OS is necessary to unleash the full potential of AI agents. Android co-founder and CEO David Singleton (shown above) stated, “As a developer, it was…
In an effort to grow its user base, Reddit is focussing on foreign countries like the Philippines, Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom. Reddit COO Jen Wong told CNBC that over half of the site’s users are located outside the United States. Wong singled out India, a country whose English-speaking people are actively discussing Bollywood and cricket. “India’s economy is booming. She informed the publication that there is a significant possibility in India. In October, CEO Steve Huffman announced plans to increase the company’s translation efforts in order to reach more than 30 nations by 2025 with its machine-learning-based translation…
Researchers in the field of security have discovered that three seemingly unrelated individuals—a venture financier, a recruiter from a large corporation, and a recently employed remote IT worker—were actually operatives for the North Korean dictatorship. At Cyberwarcon, an annual conference in Washington DC centred around cyberthreats, security experts presented their latest assessment of the North Korean threat on Friday. The researchers expressed concern about a persistent effort by North Korean hackers to impersonate job applicants at multinational firms. Their goals were to gain trade secrets that would assist the weapons program of the North Korean leadership and make money for…
Instant speech meetings, like Slack’s Huddles, are coming to Google Chat. These let you quickly switch to a voice or video call from within a chat. No changes will be made to the name of the feature, though. Google will keep calling it “Huddles.” If you are in Google Chat and want to start a huddle quickly, click on the drop-down menu next to the chat icon and choose “Start the huddle.” It will start out as a talk call, but like with Google Meet, users can swap screens or turn on video. Also Read: There Are New Tools Added…
On Wednesday, U.S. phone company T-Mobile said that hackers had “no access” to its users’ calls, text messages, and voicemails during a cyberattack that is affecting internet and phone companies across the board. Jeff Simon, T-Mobile’s chief security officer, said in a statement that the company had seen “attempts to infiltrate our systems” in the past few weeks. Simon said that the attacks came from another telecoms company that was tied to T-Mobile’s network. No name was given to that company. Simon said, “We quickly cut off access to the provider’s network because we think it was hacked and may…
Spotify said in a blog post for developers on Wednesday that it would no longer let developers who are making third-party apps with its Web API access some features of the music streaming service, like song and artist suggestions. It looks like the company is making it hard for outside developers to use info from Spotify users to make AI apps. Spotify told Parhlo World in an email, “We’re making changes to our public APIs as part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies face today.” It thinks that some developers have been abusing its…
Researchers in security have found two zero-day flaws that were not known before. These are being used by RomCom, a hacking group with ties to Russia, to attack people in Europe and North America who use Firefox or Windows devices. There is a hacking group called RomCom that is known to attack computers and get into computers without permission for the Russian government. The group was recently linked to a hacking attack on the Japanese tech giant Casio. It is also known for being hostile to groups that support Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014. Researchers from the security company…
The FCC has given SpaceX the green light to go ahead with its plans to offer a direct-to-phone version of its Starlink satellite internet service. T-Mobile will be the service provider, and there are a few conditions that must be met. The plan goes back to the summer of 2022, when SpaceX and T-Mobile first said they were looking into ways for T-Mobile customers to get Starlink access on their phones. They said at the time that the service would start in 2023, but it’s now the end of 2024 and it’s just now getting approved by the government. The…
A satirical newspaper called The Onion won an auction earlier this month to buy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ website InfoWars and other linked assets. But the sale is now in limbo because a federal judge put a temporary hold on the deal. Elon Musk threw another wrench in the works on Monday when he said he didn’t agree with giving InfoWars’ X accounts to the new owners. An objection made on Monday in bankruptcy court by X Corporation says that it owns all X accounts on its platform, even the ones run by Alex Jones and InfoWars. Elon Musk’s platform…
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced today that it has given $7.865 billion to chip giant Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. This is a federal law that President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 to encourage more semiconductors to be made in the U.S. The number is much lower than the highest amount that could be given. In March, the White House said that it had made a deal with the Department of Commerce to give Intel a grant of “up to” $8.5 billion. All of this is happening at the same time that Intel is…
Google launched the Google Developer Program in June. It is a free program that gives developers access to tools that will help them make apps that use Google services. Google says that “millions” of developers have signed up, so the company is adding a second, paid level to make the program more business-like. The premium registration for the Google Developer Program started on Monday. It costs $299 a year and is an upgrade from the regular Google Developer Program. There are a lot of perks that come with it, like being able to talk to Google Cloud experts one-on-one and…
The car company seems to be putting together a teleoperations team as it gets ready to start a robotaxi service in the next few years. A recent job posting says that Tesla is looking for a software engineer to help build a teleoperations system that will let people access and handle the company’s upcoming robotaxis and humanoid robots from afar. It was the job of the software engineer in Palo Alto to “drive requirements, make design decisions, and implement software integration for this custom teleoperation system.” The job posting doesn’t say if Tesla wants to add to a current teleops…
There was a bill in Australia that would have fined online platforms up to 5 percent of their global income if they didn’t stop the spread of false information. However, the government has taken the bill back. The Labour government backed the bill, which would have let the Australian Communications and Media Authority make rules about fake news on the internet that could be enforced. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement that the bill would have “brought about a level of transparency that has never been seen before, holding big tech accountable for their systems and processes to…
A South Korean appeals court heard on Monday that Samsung Electronics Chief Jay Y. Lee should spend five years in jail and pay a 500 million KRW fine, which is about $375,000. Ten months ago, Lee and 13 other former Samsung executives were found not guilty of changing stock prices or committing financial fraud in connection with the 2015 merger of Samsung subsidiaries, which gave Lee more power over the tech giant. A news source in the area says that the appeals case will have a decision sometime between January and February 2025. Two things make the hearing important. First,…
Thanks for coming back to Week in Review. This week, we’ll talk about how the DOJ told Google to sell off Chrome to break up its monopoly, how OpenAI deleted possible evidence in The New York Times’ copyright case against it by accident, and how AI companies are using TikTok brainrot as study tools. Let’s do this. The U.S. Department of Justice said Google should sell its Chrome browser to help break up its illegal search market monopoly. In August, District Court judge Amit Mehta said that Google was an illegal monopoly because it abused its power in the search…
Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart, has quit PhonePe’s board of directors. This is three quarters of a year after doing the same thing at Flipkart. PhonePe, based in Bengaluru, said it had hired Manish Sabharwal, a manager at the staffing and HR company Teamlease, as an independent member and chair of the audit committee. In 2016, Bansal was a key part of Flipkart’s deal to buy PhonePe. He has since been on the board of the fintech company. The Walmart-backed startup runs India’s best mobile payments app. It split off from Flipkart in 2022 and was valued at $12 billion…
As SpaceX’s Starship test program continues to move forward, the company signed its second business deal to send a package to the moon using a version of the huge vehicle called a lunar lander. Lunar Outpost, a company based in Colorado, said that Starship will bring Eagle, their tough robot, to the moon’s surface by 2029. CEO of Lunar Outpost Justin Cyrus wouldn’t say anything else about the trip, like how much it would cost or whether this would be a dedicated flight or part of a ride-share. Also, it’s not clear how Starship will get the rover, which looks…
With permission from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, nuclear company Kairos Power can begin building two test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Kairos signed a deal with Google in October to provide 500 megawatts of energy for Google’s data centres. This permit is a big step forward for the company. These high-temperature reactors that are cooled by fluoride salt are smaller versions of what Kairos hopes to build in the end so that Google can get power starting in 2030. Even though the new reactors are just test beds, Ashley Lewis, a spokeswoman for Kairos, told Paehlo World that the…
JERUSALEM (AP) — The chief prosecutor of the world’s top war crimes court sought arrest warrants Monday for leaders of Israel and Hamas, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over actions taken during their seven-month war. While Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, do not face imminent arrest, the announcement by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor was a symbolic blow that deepened Israel’s isolation over the war in Gaza. The court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, accused Netanyahu, Gallant, and three Hamas leaders — Yehya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — of war crimes and crimes against humanity in…
Over the past few years, WhatsApp Business has gained more than 200 million new users every month. And that means that a lot of companies are sending messages to people. Some of these messages might be spam. For clients, the only choices were to either let them send texts and deals or block the business account completely. That will finally change with WhatsApp. Right now, the company is trying out new ways for people to tell businesses what kinds of messages they should get and shouldn’t get. For certain types of texts, this includes buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume.”…
In a statement with the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia on Wednesday, the US Department of Justice said that Google should give up its Chrome browser as a way to end the company’s illegal monopoly in online search. Google would not be able to get back into the search market for five years if the DOJ’s solution is accepted. Judge Amit Mehta of the District Court will decide what Google’s final sentence will be. This could have a huge impact on one of the biggest companies in the world and on how the internet works as we…
After making Google Lens to make it easier for people to shop online, the company is now improving it to help people shop in stores by giving them information about products, comparing prices, and seeing what’s in stock nearby. Along with this news, the company is also adding more shopping features to Maps and more ways to pay with Google Pay before the holiday shopping season. The changes to Google Lens add to what Google is already doing through its Google Shopping business. It’s thought that people should also be able to make similar well-informed shopping choices in real life.…
Would you rather send all of your Windows work to the cloud? Microsoft might have the small computer that you can use at your desk. At Microsoft Ignite 2024 on Tuesday, the tech giant showed off Windows 365 Link, a thin, fanless PC that links to Windows 365. Windows 365 is a virtual Windows machine that runs on a remote server and is stored in the cloud. It works like a regular Windows installation. Windows 365 Link will be available in “select markets” in April of next year for a recommended retail price of $349. Microsoft says it boots up…