Google discontinues Nest Protect smoke alarm and Nest x Yale lock

Google acquired Nest in 2014 for a whopping $3.4 billion but seems increasingly uninterested in making smart home hardware. The company has just announced two of its home gadgets will be discontinued, one of which is quite popular. The Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector is a common fixture in homes, but Google says it has stopped manufacturing it. The less popular Nest x Yale smart lock is also…

March 28, 2025
Read More >>

Google announces Maps screenshot analysis, AI itineraries to help you plan trips

After a long and gloomy winter, many people are looking forward to some summer travel. Google has some new tools to help you plan, but like most of what Google does now, the new features lean heavily on AI. And unusually, the most interesting of these additions is launching first on iOS. Google says that lots of people tend to take screenshots when they’re planning a trip. Instead of letting…

March 27, 2025
Read More >>

Discord is planning an IPO this year, and big changes could be on the horizon

As previously rumored, Discord, a popular communications platform, is working with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase to plan an IPO as soon as this year, according to a recent report by Bloomberg. The report cites people familiar with the matter and notes that more advisors may come on board as the talks progress. This isn’t the first we’ve heard about plans for an IPO; an article in The New…

March 27, 2025
Read More >>

OpenAI’s new AI image generator is potent and bound to provoke

The arrival of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated the act of visual creation. But like many early AI systems, DALL-E 2 struggled with consistent text rendering, often producing garbled words and phrases within images….

March 27, 2025
Read More >>

Newer Kindles get a work-around for touchscreen page-turning in new software update

Amazon discontinued 2016’s Kindle Oasis in early 2024, and since then, the company hasn’t offered a new e-reader with physical page turn buttons or any other alternative to touchscreen input. There still isn’t a Kindle with buttons and the feature seems unlikely to return, but buyers of the latest Kindle Paperwhite or the Kindle Colorsoft are getting a possible consolation prize in the new 5.18.1 software update: a “double tap…

March 26, 2025
Read More >>

Google makes Android development private, will continue open source releases

Google is planning a major change to the way it develops new versions of the Android operating system. Since the beginning, large swaths of the software have been developed in public-facing channels, but that will no longer be the case. This does not mean Android is shedding its open source roots, but the process won’t be as transparent. Google has confirmed to Android Authority that all Android development work going…

March 26, 2025
Read More >>

Broadcom’s VMware says Siemens pirated “thousands” of copies of its software

VMware is suing the US arm of industrial giant AG Siemens. The Broadcom company claims that Siemens outed itself by revealing to VMware that it downloaded and distributed multiple copies of VMware products without buying a license. VMware filed the lawsuit (PDF) on March 21 in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, as spotted by The Register. In the complaint, VMware says that it has had a…

March 26, 2025
Read More >>

Open Source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries

Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted…

March 25, 2025
Read More >>

Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after $207M acquisition

Infinite Reality, a media, ecommerce, and marketing company focused on 3D and AI-powered experiences, has entered an agreement to acquired Napster. That means that the brand originally launched in 1999 as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing service is set to be reborn again. This time, new owners are reshaping the brand into one focused on marketing musicians in the metaverse. Infinite announced today a definitive agreement to buy Napster for…

March 25, 2025
Read More >>

Apple barred from Google antitrust trial, putting $20 billion search deal on the line

Apple has suffered a blow in its efforts to salvage its lucrative search placement deal with Google. A new ruling from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirms that Apple cannot participate in Google’s upcoming antitrust hearing, which could leave a multibillion-dollar hole in Apple’s balance sheet. The judges in the case say Apple simply waited too long to get involved. Just a few years ago, a high-stakes court case…

March 25, 2025
Read More >>