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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…