Google is having more problems with antitrust. On Friday, the U.K.’s competition watchdog said it thinks the company broke trade rules in the adtech industry. Now, the tech giant has a chance to respond to the preliminary results before the regulator makes a final choice. If you are found to have broken U.K. competition law, you could be given corrective orders and fines of up to 10% of your annual global group sales. People are going to pay close attention to how this case turns out. Since May 2022, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the U.K. has been…
Author: David
If you hang out on X or Threads, where rude jokes come and go, you may have seen posts about “founder mode” like this one in the last few days: You may have even seen this joke about “goblin mode.” The commotion is related to a blog post that Paul Graham, head of Y Combinator and startup guru, wrote not long ago about how founders like Airbnb’s Brian Chesky often don’t follow the rules for running a large business. It’s common sense to hire good people and let them do their job, but Graham says that this often turns into…
Apple will also show off AI and possible AirPods and Apple Watches at its big iPhone 16 range reveal. At times, just a title is enough. We know for sure that Apple will show off the iPhone 16 at its “It’s Glowtime” event on September 9. But Apple doesn’t ask us to fly across the country for a single item, or even book a hotel room for the first game of the 49ers season. Putting football aside, the event’s time is important because it’s the last big chance to show off a lot of new hardware before the holidays. Monday…
Fb was cool when I was young. A lot of middle schoolers were having fun at the mall, and we would go into the Apple Store, find an early MacBook Pro, and use tacky Photo Booth effects to take dozens of pictures that we would then post on Facebook. Teenagers would sometimes forget to log off, so we would post something like “I just pooped” before logging back in. This isn’t true anymore. The Pew Research Centre said that 71% of U.S. teens used Facebook in 2014. By 2022, that number had dropped to 32%, but it slightly rose to…
Fabrizio Longo, a respected Audi executive and passionate mountain climber, sadly died when he fell while climbing a mountain by himself in Italy’s Cima Payer. Longo, 62, died on Saturday, August 31, while climbing up a mountain on a “via ferrata,” which is a protected path. The Italian Winter Sports Federation said this. In a statement, Flavio Roda, President of the Italian Winter Sports Federation, said he was very sorry about Longo’s death and that it was “a terrible loss for the federation, which has worked well with Longo for years.” Roda sent his sympathies to Longo’s family and the…
You can now edit your direct messages on X, the social network that Elon Musk owns. This is one of the most-requested tools for direct messages. The change message feature was added to X over the weekend for iOS users. An engineer at the business wrote about the rollout and said that soon the edit messages feature will be available on more devices. Here’s how to use the new feature now that it’s out there: A help page says that you can change the messages for as long as you want. During our tests, we found that you can also…
What are the odds that Elon will win his fight in the Amazonian jungle? Another judge had banned X the week before for failing to comply with take-down requests. Over the weekend, the Brazilian high court voted to keep that ban. If someone uses a VPN to get around the ban, they could be fined up to $9,000. But the argument and drama aren’t over yet. Mike Masnick at TechDirt talks about how the case shows how hard it is to support free speech while also following so-called “hostage laws.” He also talks about how Musk, as the owner of…
If creative AI gets really good, writer Ted Chiang says it will never make real art. The story “Story of Your Life,” which was made into the movie “Arrival,” made Chiang one of the most admired science fiction writers working today. In addition, he has written great pieces for The New Yorker about the risks and problems of AI. Reading his most recent piece in its completeness is highly recommended. While Chiang agrees that big language models have a lot of promise, he also says that generative AI has been most successful at “lowering our expectations, both of the things…
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg says that the Mac mini will be the next Apple gadget to no longer use USB-A. Customers of Apple products are probably used to seeing thinner USB-C ports instead of the usual, round USB-A ports. There are some good things about USB-C, but users are sometimes confused and have to scramble for ports. On the other hand, the Mac mini hasn’t had a major update since 2010, but Gurman says that will happen this fall. The new models will have five USB-C ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI connection, and a headphone jack. They will also…
A company lawyer said on Monday that customers of WazirX, the Indian bitcoin exchange that was hacked in July and lost $234 million, probably won’t get all of their money back during the restructuring process. George Gwee, a director at the restructuring company Kroll that works with WazirX, said that customers are not likely to get back at least 43% of the money they put into WazirX. Last week, WazirX asked the Singapore High Court to protect it for six months while it restructures its debts. For Gwee, the best outcome would be a return of “anywhere between 55% and…
Dropbox has bought the AI-powered schedule app Reclaim.ai. Calendly and Index Ventures have backed the app. The news was posted on Reclaim.ai’s website in a blog post on Tuesday. The terms of the deal have not been made public by Dropbox. Henry Shapiro and Patrick Lightbody started Reclaim.ai in 2019. The company said it hopes to keep working on its product with the new owner. The company also said it would keep helping all of its users. The blog post says that the tool is used by over 43,000 businesses and over 320,000 people around the world. As of now,…
Early this year, voters in New Hampshire heard fake audio of Vice President Biden that was made by AI. Right away, the FCC fought back. They found the scammer to be the Texas-based Life Corporation, which has been behind similar schemes for years. They fined the company and a person connected to them $6 million. In addition, the con artists hired a game-changing company that has been linked to shady activities in the past. Now Lingo Telecom, which has also been called Ameritel, Excel, Impact, Startec, Trinsic, and other names, will pay a $1 million fine and promise to follow…
It’s been on Meta’s test for months now to let people post from Instagram and Facebook to Threads, its social networking site that competes with X (formerly known as Twitter). Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the function is now available in all countries where Threads is available. Because Meta wants to get the most out of the information people share on its family of apps, it has added the ability to cross-post. Meta has been letting people who use both Instagram and Facebook share posts from Facebook to Instagram and Instagram posts to Facebook for years now. Also, in 2023,…
Waymo said on Tuesday that it now gives more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides each week in its three main business markets: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The co-CEO of Waymo, Tekedra Mawakana, shared those numbers in a post on X. The new number of 100,000 is twice what the company said before. Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company’s earnings call this summer that Waymo was providing more than 50,000 paid rides per week. Waymo also wrote in a June blog post that the number was higher. Waymo has reached that goal with a fleet…
Tech giant Cisco said it would be laying off workers for the second time this year. Employees told Parhlo World that they won’t know if they are affected for about a month. Reuters said earlier this month that Cisco was going to fire another 4,000 workers this year. This comes after the company fired these workers in February. In a filing with the SEC last week, Cisco revealed that it is letting go of 7% of its staff. Even though employees have been told that more jobs will be cut, the company has refused to tell those affected until September…
There are cheaper thermostats that work just as well, but once you put the Nest, you won’t want to use anything else. One of the first things I bought when I moved into my first house last month was a used third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat. Since I’ve lived in an apartment in New York City for a long time, I mostly watched the device from a distance and wondered how a thermostat, of all things, became so important to Google’s hardware play. Of course, I could have picked a better time, since the fourth-generation device just came out. Another person…
The rise in AI is increasing the need for data centers, which in turn increases the amount of water used. (In data centers, water is used to cool down the computers.) FT says that between 2019 and 2023, water use will have increased by almost two-thirds in Virginia, which has the most data centers in the world, going from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons. Many people say the trend, which is happening all over the world, can’t last. The big data center company Microsoft says that 42% of the water it used in 2023 came from “areas with…
PostEx is a Pakistani company that helps online stores with shipping and money matters. Parhlo World has learned that the company is about to expand into new markets, starting with Saudi Arabia this year. On the phone, Muhammad Omer Khan, founder and CEO of PostEx, said, “We want to go into other markets to really disrupt them because we see the gap.” There is about 1.5% of Pakistan’s total retail market that is made up of online shopping. This number has grown by 50% in the last year. Most likely, PostEx is a part of that growth. Since 95% of…
What’s the point of chatting with a human-like bot if it’s an unreliable narrator — and has a colorless personality? That’s the question I’ve been turning over in my head since I began testing Gemini Live, Google’s take on OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, last week. Gemini Live is an attempt at a more engaging chatbot experience — one with realistic voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any point. Gemini Live is “custom-tuned to be intuitive and have a back-and-forth, actual conversation,” Sissie Hsiao, GM for Gemini experiences at Google, told TechCrunch in May. “[It] can provide information…
The man who got the most attention at the first White House Creator Economy Conference wasn’t a TikTok or YouTube star. President Joe Biden was the one who emphasised how social media users can change people’s minds. President Biden said of content makers, “Until about three or four months ago, I didn’t pay very much attention, following you guys.” He said that his niece told him to read more about how social media gives more people the chance to reach a huge audience. “She called me and said, ‘Pop, you need to start listening to these guys.'” That’s you guys.…
The biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Binance, has started doing business again for users in India after being shut down for seven months for “illegally” doing business in the country. The exchange said on Thursday that it has registered with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), a government body whose job it is to look into financial transactions. At the FIU’s suggestion, India shut down about a dozen foreign cryptocurrency trading services at the end of last year. These included Binance, Kraken, Kucoin, and Mexc. The FIU said that offshore exchanges had to register in the country to follow the…
Elon Musk’s Grok added a new AI tool for making pictures on Tuesday night. It’s not very safe, just like the AI chatbot. In other words, you could make fake pictures of Donald Trump smoking pot on the Joe Rogan show and share them right to the X platform. But it’s not really Elon Musk’s AI company that’s making things crazy. Instead, the feature in question was created by a new company called Black Forest Labs. xAI stated that it is working with Black Forest Labs to power Grok’s image generator with its FLUX.1 model, which made the partnership public.…
In order to boost the economy of Puerto Rico, tax breaks were put in place in 2012. These breaks allowed people from the center of the United States to live and do business on the island without having to pay any capital gains taxes. Recent data shows that the large number of tech (mostly crypto) entrepreneurs who came to hide their wealth didn’t do much to improve its fortunes. Some people have instead left a mess of unfinished business behind them, according to a new report from the New York Times. The report focuses on Brock Pierce, a 43-year-old former…
The joint X Spaces event between Elon Musk and Donald Trump seems to have failed on Monday afternoon. The owner of X was supposed to talk to the former President at 5 p.m. PT, but when people tried to join at that time, they got an error message. When X tried to join the Space, it showed a message that said, “This Space is not.” This much-anticipated talk, which Trump and Musk have been promoting, was meant to mark the former president’s return to X. Musk called the Spaces event a “conversation,” and it began at 5:42 p.m. PT. The…
On Monday, the FBI said it had taken the computers of Radar (also known as Dispossessor), a ransomware and extortion gang. At the time this was written, Radar’s website had a message from the police that said, “This website has been seized.” It’s a rare win for the FBI, which has been working hard with law enforcement around the world to stop the spread of ransomware. The FBI said in a statement that they took the gang’s domains and computers in the UK and Germany. The statement came from the FBI’s Cleveland, Ohio location. The government says that Radar/Dispossessor has…
Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been picked to lead Bangladesh’s temporary government. This comes after the country’s former prime minister, Sheik Hasina, quit and left the country after weeks of violence. The day Ms. Hasina left was called Bangladesh’s “second liberation day” by Mr. Yunus, who was a loud critic of her. What do we know about the Nobel Prize winner who is 84 years old? Banker For Poor People The Muslim traders who raised Mr. Yunus had nine children. He was born in the city of Chittagong on the coast of Bangladesh. He went to…
Soon, Reddit users will see descriptions made by AI at the top of search results. On Reddit’s earnings call on Tuesday, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told investors that the company is going to test search result pages that use AI to “summarize and recommend content.” He said that this would help people “dive deeper” into material and find new Reddit groups. Huffman said that Reddit will use both its own technology and technology from other companies to power the feature. Later this year, the company will start the test. Most people who have been keeping up with the company’s…
What will happen to Google Assistant has been unknown for over a year. Google used to think of its software as its crown jewel. It was an important part of both the company’s mobile and smart home plans. Google gave away Home Mini speakers five years ago as a way to expand its community. But on Tuesday, before next week’s Made by Google 2024 event, the company said that Assistant will be back, at least on the Home/Nest side of things. Because everyone had to stay home more because of the plague, Assistant and Alexa got a nice boost. For…
Monday, a U.S. District Court judge said that Google broke the law by keeping a monopoly on online search. Google will now appeal that decision. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s decision is a big loss for Google. If the decision stands, it could change how the company does business and even how the internet is built. Google paid companies like Apple to make its search engine the default on their products and web browsers, according to Mehta. This was an abuse of its monopoly power in the search business. It was…
Anthropic has hired John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, to work for them instead. The company also revealed that OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is taking a long leave that will last until the end of the year to “relax and recharge.” Brockman has worked for the company for nine years. I’m taking a break until the end of the year. This is my first break since helping to start OpenAI nine years ago. We still need to build a safe AGI before the task is over. A product manager named Peter Deng left OpenAI not long…
The president’s office said in a statement that Bangladesh’s parliament was disbanded on Tuesday. This came one day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quit and left the country because of violent protests that called for her removal. It was made public hours after leaders of striking students set a deadline to dissolve parliament and said a “strict program” would begin if their deadline wasn’t met. Monday, Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said that Hasina had quit after weeks of deadly protests and that the military would set up a temporary government. Hasina, who is 76 years old, had been in charge…
A filing with the SEC shows that Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, cut its position in Apple by about half, to $84.2 billion. Even though the company still has a lot of Apple stock, Buffett cut his holdings in it by 13% earlier this year, indicating that he wasn’t against selling “a little Apple” for tax reasons. The Financial Times calculated that Berkshire Hathaway made a lot of money on the sale. Before starting to buy Apple stock in 2016, Buffett had mostly avoided tech investments. This could mean that Buffett no longer believes in Apple, or he could just…
Elon Musk has been talking about Dojo for years. It is the AI machine that will be the core of Tesla’s AI plans. It’s so important to Musk that he just recently said that the AI team at the company will “double down” on Dojo as Tesla gets ready to show off its robotaxi in October. But what does Dojo really mean? Why is it so important to Tesla’s long-term plan? In short, Dojo is Tesla’s own machine that it uses to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks. Tesla wants to make Dojo even better so that it can fully…
Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quit and left the country on Monday, according to news sources. More than 300 people were killed in some of the worst violence the country has seen since it was founded more than 50 years ago. A source told AFP, “She and her sister have left Ganabhaban, which is the official home of the Prime Minister, for a safer place.” It was her wish to record a speech. “But she couldn’t find a chance to do that,” the person said. Waker-Uz-Zaman, the army chief of Bangladesh, told the people of the country that a political…
The Turkish government didn’t say why the ban was in place or how long it would last. However, reports say the ban was a reaction to the Meta-owned platform taking down posts about the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority of Turkey said Friday morning that Instagram was blocked for 85 million people in the country. A post on the authority’s website said, “Instagram.com has been blocked by a decision on the date of 02/08/2024.” This was reported by local media. Turkish news outlets say that more than 50 million people in the country…
On Meta’s Q2 2024 earnings call the day before, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how his newest social media experiment, Threads, had reached “almost” 200 million people. The platform has now reached that number. In a post on Threads, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri revealed that the app’s 200 million active users mark. Meta got to that weight in just 13 months. Mosseri wrote, “I’m happy to say that we passed the 200M mark on @threads.” “I hope that Threads can give people ideas that bring them together and help this wonderful community grow.” Threads has grown a lot. The text-based…
Microsoft has a complicated past with OpenAI. As part of a long-term partnership, Microsoft is said to have invested $13 billion in the company that makes ChatGPT. As part of the deal, Microsoft is the only cloud provider for OpenAI and uses its models in both business and consumer goods. When the tech giant filed with the SEC on Tuesday, it was the first time it called the company a “competitor.” Along with Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta, OpenAI joined a long list of AI rivals in Microsoft’s annual 10K. Thanks to OpenAI’s new SearchGPT feature, which was announced last week,…
In a memo sent to workers on Thursday, Intel said it would be letting go of more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 people. After a bad earnings report and forecasts for the second quarter, the huge hiring is part of a big plan to cut spending by $10 billion by 2025. “Our sales have not grown as we had hoped, and we have not yet fully benefited from strong trends like AI,” CEO Pat Gelsinger wrote in a memo to workers. “Our margins are too low and our costs are too high.” We need to take bigger steps…
We’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and get off the highway to get gas or food. After a while, Google Maps barks at you to get back on the road. Even though the company has a lot of cash and AI chips, the app still won’t let you stop when you need to. Somewhere in my brain, I thought that Wednesday, when Google said it was adding two new features to Maps, this would finally be the day that this problem would be solved. Google did not announce either of the features that would allow you to…
Apple is finally putting out some of the Apple Intelligence tools that it talked about at its June Worldwide Developers Conference. However, the spread is only happening with developer beta versions of iOS 18.1 right now. If you don’t want to deal with buggy software in its early stages, you might want to wait for the stable version later this year or the public beta release of Apple Intelligence features. You can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language and area are set to U.S. English and you are on the developer beta. This doesn’t change where you can…