A United States District Court for the Northern District of California judge has signed off on a settlement agreement between HP and its customers who sued the company for issuing firmware updates that prevented their printers from working with non-HP ink and toner. In December 2020, Mobile Emergency Housing Corp. and a company called Performance Automotive & Tire Center filed a class-action complaint against HP [PDF], alleging that the company…

The European Commission is not backing down from efforts to rein in Big Tech. In a series of press releases today, the European Union’s executive arm has announced actions against both Apple and Google. Regulators have announced that Apple will be required to open up support for non-Apple accessories on the iPhone, but it may be too late for Google to make changes. The commission says the search giant has…

During Tuesday’s Nvidia GTX keynote, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled two “personal AI supercomputers” called DGX Spark and DGX Station, both powered by the Grace Blackwell platform. In a way, they are a new type of AI PC architecture specifically built for running neural networks, and five major PC manufacturers will build the supercomputers. These desktop systems, first previewed as “Project DIGITS” in January, aim to bring AI capabilities to developers,…

On Tuesday at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 conference in San Jose, California, CEO Jensen Huang revealed several new AI-accelerating GPUs the company plans to release over the coming months and years. He also revealed more specifications about previously announced chips. The centerpiece announcement was Vera Rubin, first teased at Computex 2024 and now scheduled for release in the second half of 2026. This GPU, named after a famous astronomer, will feature…

Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS are already subject to video advertisements on the home screen. Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen. Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen…

If you’re frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from “over 75,000” mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month. The data is detailed in RevenueCat’s 2025 State of Subscription Apps report. RevenueCat makes a mobile app subscription tool kit and gathered…

Open source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet. The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files, is part of tj-actions, a collection of files that’s used by more than 23,000 organizations. Tj-actions is one of many GitHub Actions, a form of platform…

There’s not much new in Apple’s latest refresh of the iPad Air, so there’s not much to say about it, but it’s worth taking a brief look regardless. In almost every way, this is identical to the previous generation. There are only two differences to go over: the bump from the M2 chip to the slightly faster M3, and a redesign of the Magic Keyboard peripheral. If you want more…

Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view at the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices. In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users…

In a new paper published Thursday titled “Auditing language models for hidden objectives,” Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or “personas.” The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden motives, although the methods are still under research. While the…