The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus. There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services…

On Thursday, Google and the Computer History Museum (CHM) jointly released the source code for AlexNet, the convolutional neural network (CNN) that many credit with transforming the AI field in 2012 by proving that “deep learning” could achieve things conventional AI techniques could not. Deep learning, which uses multi-layered neural networks that can learn from data without explicit programming, represented a significant departure from traditional AI approaches that relied on…

It is an immutable law of nature that when you receive a corporate email with a subject line like “Changes coming to your Pixel 4a,” the changes won’t be the sort you like. Indeed, a more honest subject line would usually be: “You’re about to get hosed.” So I wasn’t surprised, as I read further into this January missive from Google, that an “upcoming software update for your Pixel 4a”…

Author, journalist, and long-time Internet freedom advocate Doc Searls wants us to stop asking for privacy from websites, services, and AI and start telling these things what we will and will not accept. Draft standard IEEE P7012, which Searls has nicknamed “MyTerms” (akin to “Wi-Fi”), is a Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Searls writes on his blog that MyTerms has been in the works since 2017, and…

On Sunday, the genetic testing and heritage company 23andMe announced that it had entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was asking a court to arrange its sale. The company has been losing money for years, and a conflict between its board and CEO about future directions led to the entire board resigning back in September. Said CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has now resigned and will be pursuing an attempt to purchase the…

On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots. The tool will attempt to thwart AI companies that crawl websites without permission to collect training data for large language models that power AI assistants like ChatGPT. Cloudflare, founded in 2009, is probably best known as a company that provides infrastructure and…

Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers. This is just the latest phase of a campaign that has also targeted Italian ISPs and other international firms like Cloudflare. The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams, but the effort has already caused collateral damage. Regardless, Italy’s communication regulator praises the…

On Thursday, Anthropic introduced web search capabilities for its AI assistant Claude, enabling the assistant to access current information online. Previously, the latest AI model that powers Claude could only rely on data absorbed during its neural network training process, having a “knowledge cutoff” of October 2024. Claude’s web search is currently available in feature preview for paid users in the United States, with plans to expand to free users…

In May 2024, the website of ad-tech firm Kubient touted that the company was “a perfect blend” of ad veterans and developers, “committed to solving the growing problem of fraud” in digital ads. Like many corporate sites, it also linked old blog posts from its home page, including a May 2022 post on “How to create a world free of fraud: Kubient’s secret sauce.” These days, Kubient’s website cannot be…

The Apple TV+ streaming service “is losing more than $1 billion annually,” according to The Information today. The report also claimed that Apple TV+’s subscriber count reached “around 45 million” in 2024, citing the two anonymous sources. Ars reached out to Apple for comment on the accuracy of The Information’s report and will update you if we hear back. Read full article Comments Powered by WPeMatico