Apple fixed two security bugs on Tuesday that were being used in active cyberattacks against Mac users. The company said the fixes are “recommended for all users.” A website security alert from Apple said the company knew of two holes that “may have been actively exploited on Intel-based Mac systems.” The bugs are called “zero day” flaws because Apple didn’t know about them until they were used. For macOS, Apple launched a software update that fixed the bugs. iPhones and iPads, even those with the older iOS 17 software, also got fixes. As of now, no one knows who is…
Author: David
Graphics processing units (GPUs), which are the chips that most AI models are run on, need a lot of power. Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will cause a 160% rise in power demand by 2030. This is because GPUs are being used in data centers more and more quickly. Vishal Sarin, an analog and memory circuit creator, says the trend can’t last. After more than ten years working in the chip business, Sarin started Sagence AI (it used to be called Analog Inference) to make GPU alternatives that use less power. “The uses that could really make AI computing common…
One of India’s biggest news outlets, Asian News International, has sued OpenAI. This case could set a standard for how AI companies use protected news material in India, which has the most people in the world. Asian News International sued the AI company in 287 pages in the Delhi High Court on Monday, saying that the company illegally used its content to train its AI models and made up false information that it said came from the news agency. It’s the first time that an Indian news group has gone to court against OpenAI over copyright claims. At the meeting…
The company said on Tuesday that Instagram is trying a feature that will let users reset their suggestions. You would start over with your suggestions and teach the app’s algorithm again what material you like on your Explore page, home feed, and Reels tab if you reset them. This feature is made for people who feel like the content suggestions they get no longer match their styles. You might not be interested in cooking videos anymore, even though you liked them in the past. However, that’s what you might only see on your Reels and Explore pages. TikTok added a…
Quantization is one of the most common ways to make AI models work better, but it has boundaries, and the industry may be getting close to them quickly. In AI, quantization means reducing the number of bits that are needed to store information. Bits are the smallest units that a computer can handle. Think about this comparison: You would likely say “noon” instead of “oh twelve hundred, one second, and four milliseconds” when someone asks you what time it is. That’s quantizing. Both answers are right, but one is a little more accurate. It depends on the situation how precise…
There are only two companies in the United States that send cargo to and from the International Space Station right now. This is what the Exploration Company, which has offices in Germany, France, and Italy, wants to change: To help it reach its goal of making Europe’s first reusable space ship, it just closed a big funding round. With the $160 million Series B round, the Nyx spacecraft will continue to be built. It will be able to take 3,000 kilograms of cargo to and from Earth. Three years ago, aerospace engineers Hélène Huby, Sebastien Reichstat, and Pierre Vine started…
Bluesky is having a moment, and it’s been going on for almost three months now. After X (formerly Twitter) was temporarily banned in Brazil over the summer, a lot of new people signed up for the social media app. Bluesky’s growth seems to have sped up a lot in the US, where people are unhappy with changes at X and with owner Elon Musk’s close ties to President-Elect Donald Trump. SimilarWeb says that the day after the election was the busiest day for both X’s traffic and account deletions. Bluesky, on the other hand, says it’s been adding a million…
Security experts say that Apple’s new iPhone software has a unique security feature that restarts the phone after 72 hours of not being unlocked. 404 Media reported last week that police and forensic experts were worried that some iPhones were restarting themselves for unknown reasons, making it harder for them to get into the devices and get data from them. Later, 404 Media said that security experts had found that iOS 18 had a new feature called “inactivity reboot” that made the devices restart. We know the exact time it takes for this tool to work now. A researcher at…
Elon Musk sued OpenAI, saying the company had given up on its non-profit purpose. The lawsuit was dropped in July, but it was brought back in August. As of now, the lawsuit has added new defendants, such as Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Dee Templeton, former board member of OpenAI and vice president of Microsoft. New plaintiffs are added in the amended file. They are Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink and a former member of the OpenAI board, and Musk’s AI company, xAI. Musk was one of the original founders of OpenAI, a non-profit organization whose goal…
Over a million people signed up for Bluesky’s website in the last 24 hours, the company said Thursday evening. It was one of their busiest days ever. This also means that the social network now had more than 16 million users. It was just hours ago that Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that more than 15 million people signed up for Threads in November. He also said that for the past three months, one million people have signed up every day for the Meta-owned website. On Thursday, Bluesky also had some teething problems. Some users couldn’t connect because one of…
Amazon has come out with an answer to Temu and Shein’s sale and discount stores. The Amazon Haul store, which can only be accessed on the mobile app or mobile web browser right now, has similar cheap mass-produced things, most of which come from China. Even Amazon can’t cut down on the time it takes to get these goods from overseas, which goes against their long-standing image as a leader in fast delivery. Even the way the Amazon Haul home page is designed makes me think of Shein and Temu: Instead of Amazon’s usual list, items are shown in grids,…
A consumer rights group in the UK called “Which?” is suing Apple under competition law on behalf of the 40 million or so people who use its cloud storage service, iCloud. As of right now, the collective proceeding lawsuit is asking for £3 billion in damages, which is about $3.8 billion. It says that Apple has broken competition rules by giving its own cloud storage service special treatment and making people pay “rip-off” prices for iCloud. ‘iOS has a stronghold and controls all of Apple’s operating systems. Apple should not abuse this power to get an unfair edge in related…
In this world, there is now an MP3 file of Mark Zuckerberg humming the line “to the window, to the wall, ’til the sweat drop down my balls.” The founder of Meta met his wife, Priscilla Chan, at a college party where Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz’s song “Get Low” with the Ying Yang Twins was played. Because Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram, it looks like he and his wife listen to “Get Low” every year on their anniversary of dating. This year, though, the cocky Zuck went the extra mile by writing an acoustic version of the 2002…
Videos by some creators that Parhlo World watched show that TikTok is soon to have an integration with LTK, an app that lets users shop based on suggestions from creators and influencers. The partnership could make it easier for customers to find the clothes and accessories that fashion bloggers talk about and make it easier for bloggers to earn affiliate fees through LTK. If you watch fashion videos on TikTok, you already know about LTK, which used to be called LiketoKnow.it and RewardStyle. People who use the app can post pictures of what they’re wearing and include links to the…
On the outside, planes of the future may look a lot like planes of today, but what’s inside (or next to the tailfins) will probably be very different. That’s the kind of future NASA wants to build with five $11.5 million study grants. As of now, the Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability 2050 (AACES) program is just getting started. Its goal is to find “transformative solutions” that could help the carbon-emitting air travel business become more environmentally friendly. These awards aren’t even close to enough to make an airplane that can fly, and these ideas are still just that—ideas.…
Tuesday, President-elect Trump said that Elon Musk will co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE is Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, and the name for the department stands for it. Vivek Ramaswamy, biotech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, will lead the department with the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, and owner of X. Their goal is to make it easier for Trump’s administration to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” DOGE will “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government,” which means it won’t be a real government body that needs funding and approval…
Future and its partners may get paid more if you buy something after clicking on a link in one of our stories. During Apple’s M4 Mac week, the M4 Mac mini’s new, smaller design was meant to be the star of its launch. But a design flaw has been drawing all the attention. Because the power button on the Mac mini is on the bottom, some users have come up with clever ways to get around this, such as 3D printing power button extenders. Even though it’s a small thing, Mac fans have been talking about where the power button…
Sam Altman has some inspiring words for people who want to start their own tech businesses: Now is the best time to start a business ever because AI is becoming more popular. In a talk with Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, the head of OpenAI compared the AI boom to other major turning points in technology, such as the rise of mobile, the start of the internet, and the semiconductor revolution. “With each successive major technological revolution, you’ve been able to do more than you could before,” he said. Having been able to solve OpenAI’s funding problem…
For video calls, the privacy-focused messaging app Signal is adding new features like responses, links, and a calls tab. This is done to try to compete with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. A new “Calls” tab is the best part of the update. It lets you make new calls, handle call links, and look at your call history. You can make links for calls on this tab, so instead of making a group, you can just send people the link, which is how Meet, Zoom, and Teams work. If you want to use the links more than once, you…
People in the US: A government “shield” bill called the PRESS Act has only a few weeks left to be passed by the Senate. It was passed by the House with unanimous, bipartisan support in January, but has been waiting there for a final vote ever since. Should the PRESS Act become law, it would protect journalists all over the United States from being forced to reveal or hand over their private sources, unless it’s an emergency like stopping a terrorist attack. The bill also protects people in other ways. For example, it limits what information the government can steal…
So far, social network X has only let its paid users use Grok, an AI robot made by Elon Musk’s other company, xAI. But it looks like the platform is getting ready to let free people use the chatbot. This past weekend, a number of app experts and users wrote that people in certain areas could get a free version of Grok. Parhlo World has confirmed that X is trying some way for free users in New Zealand to get to Grok. A expert who goes by the name Swak on X says that for now there are limits on…
Twenty years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0, the first version of its browser. You could download it or buy a Mozilla CD-ROM with a guidebook at the time. You might also have been able to get it on one of the free CDs that came with a lot of mags at the time. From the ashes of Netscape, Firefox rose to become the market leader, with more than 30% of the market. But after that, things didn’t change. Then, when faster and lighter Google Chrome came out, Firefox slowly but surely lost market share. At the time, Mozilla seemed…
Now it’s up to the social magazine app Flipboard to try to bring more news sources to the open social web, which is also called the fediverse. The companies that run Press.coop, a service that made mirror accounts of major news outlets like Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even this blog, revealed Thursday that they have moved their collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard. A fediverse company called Hello.coop, which is run by Dick Hardt, started Press.coop a year ago. Like many others, he wanted more news to be available in the fediverse, especially on Mastodon, the…
WP Engine Tracker is a new website that shows how many sites have left hosting company WP Engine since September, when the company got into a fight with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress. Mullenweg runs a competing web hosting service called Automattic, which admitted that it made this site. It’s funny that the full URL of the site is WordPressenginetracker.com because Mullenweg and Automattic have said during the fight that WP Engine used the WordPress trademark improperly and led people to believe that WP Engine is connected with WordPress.com. At the time this was written, the page showed that more…
Activision, a big name in video games, said in October that it had fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that was banning “a small number of legitimate player accounts.” The hacker who found and was using the bug said that they were able to ban “thousands upon thousands” of Call of Duty players by making them look like they were cheating. Someone hacking under the name Vizor talked to Parhlo World about the flaw and gave their side of the story. Vizor said, “I could have done this for years and no one would have known as long as…
A company called Anthropic announced on Thursday that it is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the data analytics company Palantir to give U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to its Claude family of AI models. The news comes at a time when more and more AI companies are trying to make deals with U.S. defense users for both strategic and financial reasons. Meta recently said that its Llama models will be offered to defense partners. OpenAI, on the other hand, wants to get closer to the U.S. Defense Department. Anthropic’s head of sales, Kate Earle Jensen, said that…
Seagrass is stronger than it looks. Although the marine plant only takes up 0.1% of the ocean floor, it helps keep fish and plants alive in the ocean by cleaning the water and storing a lot of carbon. Seagrass is also dying because of climate change and other things, and each year, fields around the world lose 7% of their area. It’s something that Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering wants to fix up. The self-driving robot Ulysses can be designed to go to certain spots on the ocean floor and plant seagrass. Akhil Voorakkara, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Ulysses, told…
All eyes are on how the new Trump administration in the U.S. will deal with China Tech in the coming years. In the meantime, one of the biggest apps to come out of the country has been hacked by its northern neighbor. Due to concerns for national security, Canada has directed that ByteDance’s operations in Canada be shut down. This includes the offices of TikTok Technology Canada, Inc. The risks don’t apply to the app itself—people can still download, use, and make content for TikTok, and businesses can still put ads on it. The country’s Minister of Innovation, Science, and…
Pebble is a rival to X. Gabor Cselle used to be the CEO and co-founder of Pebble. He has now joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. According to LinkedIn, Cselle has worked at OpenAI since October, but he only told everyone about it in a post on X yesterday. He wrote, “Will share more about what I’m working on when the time is right.” “I am already learning a lot.” This is Cselle’s second time starting a business. He gave his first one to Google, which was a mobile email startup backed by Y Combinator. Namo Media, his…
The controversial update to X’s block function is now live. It lets people see your public posts even if you have blocked them. Some people are against this change because they think it’s unsafe for blocked users to see their posts. People who have been blocked still can’t follow, interact with, or send direct texts to the person who blocked them. In an old version of X’s help page, it says that users who are blocked can’t see a user’s list of followers and people they follow. The company has since changed the page to remove that mention. Users can…
Meta announced on Sunday that Threads, its social network, now has 275 million monthly active users (MAUs). “Every month, more than 275 million people use @Threads. Thanks to everyone who has helped us so far. Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads and Instagram for Meta, said, “There’s a lot more to do and a lot of things to fix, but there’s something exciting about this place.” When it started in July 2023, Threads was meant to take advantage of the millions of users who were leaving X after Elon Musk bought it. It quickly gained users and is now one of…
Finally, OpenAI’s answer to Google is here. The company released ChatGPT Search on Thursday. It is an improvement over the SearchGPT version it showed off this summer. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Search, which is part of the ChatGPT platform, will draw from a number of online sources to give “timely answers” to questions. ChatGPT Search uses a tweaked version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to pull information and pictures from the web, such as sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more, along with links to relevant sources. You can then ask follow-up questions to make your search more specific. You can…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Reddit AMA that one big reason the company can’t ship goods as often as it’d like is that it doesn’t have enough computing power. “These models have all become very complicated,” he wrote in answer to a question about why OpenAI was taking so long to make its next crop of AI models. “We also have a lot of restrictions and have to make tough choices about how to use our computers to work on many great ideas.” There are a lot of stories that say OpenAI has had trouble getting enough computer…
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, hinted on Thursday at a better, “agenttic” version of the company’s Alexa helper, which would be able to do things for users. During Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings call, he said, “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not only answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but also taking actions.” “And I think we’d be pretty good at that with Alexa.” As Jassy said, Amazon is still “re-architecting the brain” of Alexa with “a new set of foundation models” that the company wants…
Reports say that OpenAI is working with TSMC and Broadcom to make its own AI chip. It is also starting to train its AI with AMD chips along with Nvidia chips. According to Reuters, OpenAI has given up on its plans to build a network of chip plants, at least for now. The company will instead focus on making chips in-house. Reuters claims that OpenAI and Broadcom have been working together for months to make an AI chip for running models. This chip could be ready as early as 2026. Also Read: Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang, Ceo of Nvidia,…
Today, Elon Musk’s social network X changed the prices and limits of its APIs. It also announced yearly plans with a discount. The company raised the price of the basic API tier from $100 to $200 and said that this plan would get more destinations and higher limits. We are adding new pricing choices and limits to our Self Serve X API. Here are the most important parts. Â Launching annual subscriptions, which can be bought at a price! Basic: the monthly fee will go up from $100 to $200, and there will be more endpoints and higher boundaries. Free:…
Google’s Project Astra is a big attempt to make AI apps and “agents” that can understand in real time and across multiple modes. Tech from Project Astra won’t be released until at least next year. The timeline was given by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, during the company’s Q3 results call on Tuesday. He said, “Google is building places where AI can see and think about the world around you.” “Project Astra shows us what the future will be like.” Things like this will be available as early as 2025, thanks to our work. Google showed off Project Astra at…
The hardest part of Kat and Mike Stickler’s divorce was figuring out how to split their TikTok account, which had millions of fans and made them a lot of money, according to the WSJ. More and more couples and divorce lawyers are having trouble figuring out how to value social media accounts and what to keep when a pair breaks up. Kat Stickler took over the couple’s TikTok account, and her growing fan base helped her buy a new house. Her husband, on the other hand, had his YouTube account shut down. Reports say he changed careers and is now…
The web interface for Google Calendar is being updated to match Google’s Material Design 3 standards, and dark mode support is being added. The company said that the change makes controls like buttons, dialogues, and sidebars more “modern and clear.” You can see that the edges of buttons and dialogue boxes have been rounded off in screenshots on the Google Workspace blog. The colour schemes have also been tweaked. Google is also changing the Calendar UI’s buttons and fonts to make them easier to read. For me, the best thing about this change is that it now works in dark…
India now has YouTube’s affiliate program, which lets video uploaders tag products in their videos and make referral fees. This comes just in time for the Indian holiday season. The business is working with Flipkart, an online store owned by Walmart, and Myntra, a fashion store, to let people add products to their catalogues. Creators must have at least 10,000 subscribers and have their channels mentioned in the partner program in order to be able to join the affiliate program. Some YouTube creators in India can already list their own products on their channels. Now, creators can also tag goods…