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Epic Games Is Suing Samsung Now

Epic Games Is Suing Samsung Now

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, had always worried that his company’s victory last year in a multimillion-dollar legal battle against Google’s app store monopoly wouldn’t be enough to open up competition. Even if Google could no longer keep alternative marketplaces out of Android, phone manufacturers could make them harder to access. In a US lawsuit filed today, that’s exactly what Epic alleges Google has conspired with Samsung to do.Some newer Samsung phones have required settings changes to install apps from the web such as Epic’s app marketplace, according to Epic, which also develops Fortnite and Rocket Racing. The…
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Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech’s Anti-Terrorism Group

Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech’s Anti-Terrorism Group

The four tech giants have presided over the consortium since they announced it in 2016, when Western governments were berating them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded. Now with a staff of eight, GIFCT—which the board organized as a US nonprofit in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre—is one of the groups through which tech competitors are meant to work together to address discrete online harms, including child abuse and the illicit trade of intimate images.The efforts have helped bring down some unwelcome content, and pointing to the work can help companies stave…
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Google Maps will flag businesses with potentially fake reviews

Google Maps will flag businesses with potentially fake reviews

I have slowly turned into that frustrating person who won't go somewhere before checking its reviews on Google Maps. However, I also get suspicious when the reviews are too good — there's no pleasing me, apparently — so I'm relieved to hear that Google is making it easier to spot fake ones. Google is now issuing a warning for applicable businesses, stating, "Suspected fake reviews were recently removed from this place."Google has previously come under fire with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which opened an investigation into their handling of fake reviews in 2021. A user on X…
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Engadget review recap: iPhones, AirPods, Pixel Buds and an early look at the PlayStation 5 Pro

Engadget review recap: iPhones, AirPods, Pixel Buds and an early look at the PlayStation 5 Pro

I don't know how many more times I can say what an intense two weeks it's been since the last time I posted an Engadget review recap without sounding repetitive. Ever since we launched the first of these roundups last month, companies have relentlessly launched new hardware each week, contributing to a growing pile of products for our team to review. With all these announcements overlapping, it can be easy to miss a review that, say, was published at the start of the iPhone 16 event or another that went up at the same time as Meta's Connect keynote this…
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NotebookLM can now summarize YouTube videos

NotebookLM can now summarize YouTube videos

You can now upload YouTube videos and audio files to NotebookLM, an AI-powered summarizing tool for education and research. The update means Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro-powered virtual assistant can now handle Google Docs, PDFs, text files, Google Slides, YouTube video URLs, audio files and web pages. This expands NotebookLM's potential sources to include lecture recordings, informative YouTube content and group discussions. Google claims that it securely stores all information uploaded to NoteBookLM and does not use it to train AI.Google launched the virtual research assistant in the summer of 2023 and upgraded it to run on Gemini 1.5 Pro this…
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Google launches Gemini’s contextual smart replies in Gmail

Google launches Gemini’s contextual smart replies in Gmail

When Google rolled out Gemini side panels for Gmail and its other Workspace apps, it revealed that its generative AI chatbot will also be able to offer contextual smart replies for its email service in the future. Now, the company has officially released that feature. Smart replies have existed in Gmail since 2017, giving you a quick, albeit impersonal, way to respond to messages, even if you're in a hurry or on the go. These machine-generated responses are pretty limited, though, and they're often just one liners to tell the recipient that you understand what they're saying or that you…
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The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself

The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself

If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He’ll lead you into…
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Google files EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft

Google files EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft

Google filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission on Wednesday. In it, Google accused Microsoft of making it prohibitively expensive for cloud customers to move their work from Azure to other providers, like Google Cloud.Google claims Microsoft’s cloud licensing terms restrict European customers from switching to competing cloud platforms despite “no technical barriers to doing so.” In a blog post explaining its complaint, Google wrote that Microsoft’s practices have “significantly harmed European companies and governments,” costing European businesses €1 billion ($1.1 billion) annually, wasting taxpayer money and stifling competition.Amazon’s AWS leads Europe’s cloud market. Microsoft’s Azure is second,…
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Google is bringing Watch OS 5 to the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2

Google is bringing Watch OS 5 to the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2

Google announced today that the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 will be getting the new Watch OS 5. The latest operating system will roll out to Pixel Watches currently running Watch OS 3.5 and Watch OS 4 beginning today. Users will see a notification on their device as the update becomes available to them over the next week.The Watch OS 5 update will bring improved camera controls to the older versions of the smartwatch hardware, in addition to adding support for Pixel Recorder and the grid-view app launcher. While early reports said that Watch OS 5 would also ,…
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The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback

The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback

For five years, reactor one at Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania has lain dormant. Now, thanks to a deal with Microsoft, the reactor will start running again in 2028—this time to exclusively supply the tech firm with oodles of low-carbon electricity.It’s all part of an ongoing flirtation between Big Tech and nuclear power. In March, Amazon Web Services agreed to buy a data center powered by Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania. At an event at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned small modular nuclear reactors as one potential source of energy…
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