Google settlement with Epic caps Play Store fees, boosts other Android app stores

Google has spent the last few years waging a losing battle against Epic Games, which accused the Android maker of illegally stifling competition in mobile apps. Losses in court left Google to make sweeping changes to the Play Store, but Google appeared poised to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. That is unlikely now that Epic and Google have reached a settlement in the case. It…

November 5, 2025
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New HDR10+ Advanced standard will try to fix the soap opera effect

Motion smoothing has a bad reputation among most cinephiles, as well as many home theater enthusiasts and content creators. Also known as motion or video interpolation, motion smoothing is available in virtually every modern TV today. It’s supposed to remove judder from films and TV shows that are shot with 24p (24 frames per second) or 25p film and displayed on 60Hz or 120Hz TVs. But motion smoothing often results…

November 4, 2025
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Meet Project Suncatcher, Google’s plan to put AI data centers in space

The tech industry is on a tear, building data centers for AI as quickly as they can buy up the land. The sky-high energy costs and logistical headaches of managing all those data centers have prompted interest in space-based infrastructure. Moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have mused about putting GPUs in space, and now Google confirms it’s working on its own version of the technology. The company’s latest…

November 4, 2025
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After confusing driver release, AMD says old GPUs are still actively supported

Last week, AMD released version 25.10.2 of its Adrenalin driver package for Radeon GPUs. It seemed like a relatively routine driver release with a typical list of bug fixes and game performance improvements, except for one accompanying announcement: AMD said at the time that it would be moving support for Radeon RX 5000-series and 6000-series GPUs (and their RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 architectures) to “maintenance mode.” That meant that…

November 3, 2025
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OpenAI signs massive AI compute deal with Amazon

On Monday, OpenAI announced it has signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon Web Services to power products like ChatGPT and Sora. It’s the company’s first big computing deal after a fundamental restructuring last week that gave OpenAI more operational and financial freedom from Microsoft. The agreement gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its AI models….

November 3, 2025
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Two Windows vulnerabilities, one a 0-day, are under active exploitation

Two Windows vulnerabilities—one a zero-day that has been known to attackers since 2017 and the other a critical flaw that Microsoft initially tried and failed to patch recently—are under active exploitation in widespread attacks targeting a swath of the Internet, researchers say. The zero-day went undiscovered until March, when security firm Trend Micro said it had been under active exploitation since 2017, by as many as 11 separate advanced persistent threats…

October 31, 2025
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Closing Windows 11’s Task Manager accidentally opens up more copies of Task Manager

One reason to use the Task Manager in Windows is to see if any of the apps running on your computer are misbehaving or using a disproportionate amount of resources. But what do you do when the misbehaving app is the Task Manager itself? After a recent Windows update, some users (including Windows Latest) noticed that closing the Task Manager window was actually failing to close the app, leaving the…

October 31, 2025
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“Unexpectedly, a deer briefly entered the family room”: Living with Gemini Home

You just can’t ignore the effects of the generative AI boom. Even if you don’t go looking for AI bots, they’re being integrated into virtually every product and service. And for what? There’s a lot of hand-wavey chatter about agentic this and AGI that, but what can “gen AI” do for you right now? Gemini for Home is Google’s latest attempt to make this technology useful, integrating Gemini with the…

October 31, 2025
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With new acquisition, OpenAI signals plans to integrate deeper into the OS

OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Incorporated (SAI), perhaps best known for the core team that produced what became Shortcuts on Apple platforms. More recently, the team has been working on Sky, a context-aware AI interface layer on top of macOS. The financial terms of the acquisition have not been publicly disclosed. “AI progress isn’t only about advancing intelligence—it’s about unlocking it through interfaces that understand context, adapt to your intent,…

October 23, 2025
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Microsoft makes Copilot “human-centered” with a ‘90s-style animated assistant

Microsoft said earlier this month that it wanted to add better voice controls to Copilot, Windows 11’s built-in chatbot-slash-virtual assistant. As described, this new version of Copilot sounds an awful lot like another stab at Cortana, the voice assistant that Microsoft tried (and failed) to get people to use in Windows 10 in the mid-to-late 2010s. Turns out that the company isn’t done trying to reformulate and revive ideas it…

October 23, 2025
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