Briefly Smartly Users on social media have highlighted an interesting, but controversial use case of Google’s new Gemini AI model: culling watermarks from images, including images published by Getty Images and other renowned stock media portals, as per a Tech Crunch report. The Gemini 2.0 Flash model appears to have precious few guardrails, and in addition to removing watermarks, it can generate images of famous personalities and copyrighted animated characters without any fuss. Case in point: an image of the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk, and a series of images of the famous Pokemon character Pikachu. Notably, only last week, Google had expanded access to Gemini 2.0 Flash’s image generation feature. Removing Watermarks: AI Models in Action This particular feature is ‘experimental’ and ‘not for production use’ as of now, and is only available for use on Google’s developer-facing tools like AI Studio. And even though it appears to be immaculately skilled at removing watermarks and filling in any gaps that are left after a particular watermark is removed, it isn’t perfect at executing this job. It apparently struggles with semi-transparent watermarks and those that cover a wide expanse of images. On the other hand, AI models such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o expressly refuse to remove watermarks from images, with Claude even going as far as to call the act “unethical and potentially illegal.” Earlier in June last year, PicsArt partnered with Getty Images to generate copyright-free AI images. The partnership allows PicsArt’s new AI image generation tool to create images “with commercial rights and an indemnity,”. Here, PicsArts used licensed Getty Images to train its AI models. Legal View On AI And Watermarks Coming to the legal aspect of removing watermarks, the US copyright law outlaws doing away with a watermark sans the original owner’s consent, except for rare instances. Elsewhere, the European Union’s AI Act‘s Article 50 – which lists out the obligations of AI providers and deployers of AI systems – states that outputs of an AI system should be in a “machine-readable format”, and must be detectable as “artificially generated or manipulated”. Advertisements Meanwhile, closer home, China has announced ‘identification measures’ stipulating that AI-generated content should have human and machine-readable notifications. Even AI-generated files available for download must have labels so that users are aware about what they are going to access. An important point to note here is that Chinese regulators likely drew inspiration from the EU’s AI Act, usually considered to be the most comprehensive legal framework aimed at regulating AI thus far. “Chinese policymakers and scholars have said that they’ve drawn on the EU’s Acts as inspiration for things in the past,” said Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. But as AI keeps on becoming sophisticated, it is the need of the hour for countries around the globe to amend existing laws or even bring in newer legislation that safeguards and ensures the rights and security of copyright holders. Also Read:

Google’s new Gemini Flash 2.0 image generation tool is capable of removing watermarks from copyrighted images, users on social media have found. The model is currently in its “experimental” phase, and only available to developers. A slew of apps that are capable of removing objects from photos and filling in the gaps are already available. Newer generative AI models have made them even more capable, and companies like Adobe have been adding updated object-removal tools to their photo editors. Apple Intelligence includes a tool called “Clean up” on iOS and macOS that enables this for supported devices. The post below on X shows how well Gemini Flash 2.0 is at removing objects. New skill unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash model is really awesome at removing watermarks in images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCv — Deedy (@deedydas) March 15, 2025 Major closed models from the likes of Google and OpenAI are typically “nerfed,” meaning they have significant restrictions in place to avoid legal trouble. The latter’s Dall-E image model will not generate images of copyrighted characters, for instance. Microsoft recently sued a group of individuals who managed to trick its image models into generating porn. Do not fear, /r/photoshoprequest, as Google will almost certainly attempt to reign in watermark removals. As some have noted, it is likely impossible to put the cat back in the bag completely on this one, as open models have safety guardrails that can be disabled. But by demonstrating that it is putting in effort to prevent misuse, Google protects itself from legal responsibility. Even open models can come with license agreements, and of course, law enforcement and courts can stop abuses. One funny thing to note in the case of the watermark removal is that Google’s model adds its own watermark to images modified or generated by AI, so as to make it clear to viewers that it is not genuine. It could be described as an allegory of AI itself: Take something owned by someone else, strip any proof of ownership, and then add your own identifying mark.

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 started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an unskippable ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out. Roku’s representative said that Roku’s business “has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products,” adding: Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience. Roku didn't respond to requests for comment on whether it has plans to make autoplaying ads permanent on Roku OS, which devices are affected, why Roku decided to use autoplaying ads, or customer backlash.

Mickey 17 had a lot of pre-release excitement behind it. Despite delays en route to theaters, fans were eagerly anticipating Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning triumph Parasite, especially since it was a sci-fi tale starring various versions of Robert Pattinson. When Mickey 17 arrived on March 7, however, audiences and critics alike were surprised by a film that had some fun elements but ultimately felt weighed down by political metaphor. And it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. After Mickey 17‘s tepid opening weekend, Variety reported that “the goofy sci-fi comedy ignited to $24 million overseas and more than $50 million globally, a decent start for an original film in the current theatrical landscape. It just cost way too much to ever turn a profit in this lifetime.” The trade once again offered praise—”It’s an impressive launch for a fresh, offbeat space odyssey about a disposable employee whose body is able to regenerate for science”—but then pointed out the film’s oversized budget ($118 million, plus $80 million on marketing) means it “needs to earn around $275 million to $300 million globally to get into the black during its big screen run.” That hasn’t happened; according to Box Office Mojo, the most recent total for Mickey 17 is just over $90 million worldwide. Again, not bad for quirky sci-fi, but not enough to recoup all the money that’s already been spent. It’s not surprising then that rumors have begun to circulate that Mickey 17 will arrive on streaming soon, with March 25 being named as a possible date. Warner Bros. hasn’t responded to io9’s query, so that detail remains unofficial and unconfirmed. Movie fans have, however, noticed a trend of under-performing theatrical releases hitting streaming sooner and sooner; to name one notable recent example, Lionsgate’s Borderlands made us go “yikes!” when it arrived on digital just three weeks after opening in theaters. Mickey 17 could certainly prove to be more of an at-home hit than it was on the big screen, and that could end up tipping the budget scales in its favor. But perhaps at this point your choice is even more crystal clear: pick up Edward Ashton’s fantastic source-material novel, Mickey7, which was released in 2022. It even has a sequel, Antimatter Blues. Though the book has fewer replications of the title character, hence the lower number in the title, it doesn’t have any “is this character supposed to be Trump?” intrusions, and is instead a gripping, wryly funny sci-fi mystery. As an added bonus you can also imagine the main character’s voice to… not be what Pattinson went with in Mickey17.

Iguanas on the remote islands of Fiji may appear to live chill lives, but according to new research they had to work for it: by floating across thousands of miles of ocean on vegetation in the last 30 million years or so. That’s right. A new investigation of the Iguanidae family tree—a tree that includes some 2,100 reptilian species, from the marine iguanas of the Galapagos to chameleons of the tropics and chuckwallas of the desert—indicates that Fiji iguanas are most closely related to lizards in the American Southwest. Given the vast geographic distance between the two but their relative genetic proximity, a team of researchers concludes that, in the ancient past, a group of desert reptiles hitched a ride on floating debris and never looked back—somehow making it to Fiji and surviving there for about 34 million years. The team’s research was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The lineage of Fiji iguanas split from their sister lineage relatively recently, much closer to 30 million years ago, either post-dating or at about the same time that there was volcanic activity that could have produced land,” said Simon Scarpetta, a herpetologist and paleontologist at the University of San Francisco and lead author of the paper, in a University of California, Berkeley release. “The probable mechanism of dispersal was rafting on a vegetation mat, so iguanas that voyaged from North America to Fiji could have had food from the raft itself on their journey across the Pacific,” Scarpetta told Gizmodo in an email. “They were also likely resilient to the conditions they faced on the way, such as lack of standing water and high temperatures.” As for timeline, Scarpetta said previous estimates for a trans-Pacific journey were between 4 to 12 months, though more recent simulations suggested a timeline of 2.5 to 4 months. That commute would be the longest-known transoceanic dispersal of a terrestrial vertebrate—an oddly specific record, but one that speaks to the superlative nature of the finding. If the team’s conclusions are correct, the ancestors of Fiji iguanas schlepped a staggering 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers) from western North America to Fiji, riding on vegetative flotsam, fortuitous ocean currents, and a dream. That commute would be the longest-known transoceanic dispersal of a terrestrial vertebrate—an oddly specific record, but one that speaks to the superlative nature of the finding. “Iguanas and desert iguanas, in particular, are resistant to starvation and dehydration, so my thought process is, if there had to be any group of vertebrate or any group of lizard that really could make an 8,000 kilometer journey across the Pacific on a mass of vegetation, a desert iguana-like ancestor would be the one,” Scarpetta said. A genetic analysis of more than 4,000 iguana genes, taken from more than 200 specimens of the lizards, revealed the Fiji iguana’s closest relatives: the North American desert iguana (Dipsosaurus dorsalis). Because Fiji’s islands formed about 34 million years ago, and based on the timing of the Fiji iguanas’ genetic divergence from the North American desert iguanas, the researchers think the lizards arrived on the island in the last 30-odd-million years. “That they reached Fiji directly from North America seems crazy,” said co-author Jimmy McGuire, a herpetologist at UC Berkeley, in the same release, “But alternative models involving colonization from adjacent land areas don’t really work for the time frame, since we know that they arrived in Fiji within the last 34 million years or so.” The notion that iguanas floated from elsewhere to the islands of the South Pacific has previously been, erm, floated. But the new research effectively rules out a South American origin for the Pacific iguanas, as well as the notion that the reptiles evolved from an older lineage that was widespread in the Pacific before going extinct. “One question worth pointing out regarding our study, though it would be difficult to test, is whether iguanas hopped across islands in the Pacific from North America to Fiji, rather than rafting in a single event,” Scarpetta added. “This is an intriguing possibility, though no fossils of Fijian iguanas are known from anywhere in the Pacific besides Fiji and Tonga, and volcanic islands, of which there are many in the Pacific, can be ephemeral.” Despite being isolated on remote islands, the four species of iguana on Fiji and Tonga are endangered due to a combination of habitat loss, predation, and the exotic pet trade. The new research is a reminder of the pains living things have endured to survive, and gives us another reason to conserve the animals that have made it to today.

Not every TV in your home needs to be latest piece of revolutionary tech. We love a good 80+ inch TV with 4K HDR in the living room where you entertain guests, have movie nights, or play games. But your bedroom probably doesn’t need a $3,000 display, and neither does your garage or kitchen. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to watch something in a 32 inch space, we’ll we have good news. This smart TV from Insignia is down 42%, bringing it to just $75. That’s nothing. I went to a diner yesterday for breakfast and paid for myself and two other people. The check was more than this TV for some coffee, pancakes and scrapple. This TV is currently the #1 best-seller in the smart TV category on Amazon: See at Amazon Perfect for Second-Screen Viewing Look. This isn’t a TV meant for viewing Dune: Part 2 and getting the cinematic, theatrical experience right from your couch. This TV has it’s job and that is to be able to pull up movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos so you can view them easily in 720p. This is the TV for second-screen activities. This is the TV for people who scroll through Instagram while watching reruns of Friends. This is the TV for folks who need background sound to fall asleep to. This smart TV comes with Amazon Fire TV integrated into it, allowing you to stream millions of movies and TV show episodes. You can also access a wide variety of apps such as Hulu, Netflix, Max, and Disney+. Although the built-in sound is adequate, the Insignia Fire TV includes HDMI Arc, making it easy to connect a soundbar or AV receiver. I will remain among the few who fervently believe that audio quality surpasses picture quality in importance. Invest in an affordable soundbar, and you will have a perfectly capable home entertainment system. Alexa makes it so simple to find the movie or TV show you’re looking for. What I really love is the Fire TV logs which streaming apps have the movie or show you just searched available, so you don’t have to feverishly search through all your services to find what you want to watch. Just hold down the button and say Twins. Next thing you know, you’re hanging out with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger on your television screen for 107 minutes. Apple AirPlay is supported as well, allowing you to effortlessly share videos, pictures, and more to your TV with just a button press. Personally, I often use it to find a YouTube video on my phone and cast it to the TV while enjoying lunch. Right now, you can grab this Insignia 32″ Fire TV for just $75. That’s a 42% discount from it’s usual price of $130. See at Amazon

is a reviews editor who manages how-tos and various projects. She’s worked as an editor and writer (and occasional sci-fi author) for more years than she cares to admit to. She can be found on Threads as @barbarask. I don’t want to sound alarmist or anything (although I admit I’m naturally pessimistic), but the way things are going, it’s a good idea to have an extra source of power for your home in case of storms and other outages. Luckily, EcoFlow is running a sale through March 26th, letting you save on several of its portable batteries and power stations. For example, the Delta Pro 3 is a scalable power unit that can power everything from a family picnic to an entire home during a blackout. It’s on sale at Amazon for $2,899, which is $700 off its usual $3,699 list price and the best price we’ve seen to date. Our reviewer was very impressed with the Delta Pro 3, especially its versatility. It has the ability to power both 120V and 240V appliances, and can plug directly into your home’s circuit using an inlet box or manual transfer switch. It can be charged using 1000W and 16000 solar inputs or an AC wall charger, among other charging methods. And you can link multiple DP3 units together to increase their output, so that, say, three units connected to an EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 2 (which is also on sale at Amazon for $1,399, or $500 off) can provide enough power to keep a typical home running for a day and a half. Read our review. On the other hand, if you’re just looking for something to use when camping or enjoying additional outdoor activities, EcoFlow’s River 3 Portable Power Station is down to $189 (from $338) at Amazon with a 45W solar panel, which nearly matches its all-time low. It can quickly charge appliances with anywhere from a 300W to 600W AC output, and uses its own solar panel to completely repower it in a little over six hours. That means you can place it in the sun while you’re hiking around and use it to power your games at night. EcoFlow Delta Pro 3 $ 2893 $ 3699 22 % off $ 2893 EcoFlow’s new portable solar generator can scale to power your entire home during a blackout, a van or RV’s electrical system, or a party at the beach. Read More $2893 at Amazon More deals to keep you entertained If you’ve been thinking seriously about treating yourself with Apple’s latest iPad , now is the time: Amazon is already selling the 11-inch, 128GB device in yellow for $328.86, an approximate $20 discount (you can also get the blue, pink, and silver models for slightly more). The new base-model iPad is equipped with an A16 chip and 12-megapixel cameras on the front and back, but does not come with Apple Intelligence, which could be a distinct disadvantage. However, if that feature isn’t important to you, it’s definitely worth looking at. Solo 3 are neither the latest nor the greatest headphones from Beats, but Theare neither the latest nor the greatest headphones from Beats, but Walmart is selling the black model for $99, a $100 discount from their usual $199 price. If you want something more colorful, but still want to save a bit of cash, the rose gold and red models are available for $114.99 at Amazon . Our reviewer found the sound quality of the Solo 3, which are especially geared toward iPhone owners, good but not subtle, however, if your tastes veer toward the loud and unsubtle, you may want to give them a try. Read our review the new OnePlus 13, which got an enthusiastic write-up from our reviewer, who called it “a damn good phone,” with excellent battery life, a 6.82-inch screen, an IP69 rating, and a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. It’s currently on sale at If you’re in the market for a high-end Android phone, before you go for a Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel, you may want to consider, which got an enthusiastic write-up from our reviewer, who called it “a damn good phone,” with excellent battery life, a 6.82-inch screen, an IP69 rating, and a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. It’s currently on sale at Best Buy and OnePlus for $849.99, a $50 discount. Read our review Verge Deals Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Online trading platform Robinhood has positioned itself as the financial app of the people, promising “investing for all.” Apparently the company has decided that what the people need as the stock market continues to undergo a “correction” is the ability to gamble. On Monday, the company announced that it will launch a new prediction hub in its app that will allow people to “trade on the outcomes of some of the world’s biggest events,” which is apparently distinct from gambling in some way. Per Robinhood’s press release the predictions hub will launch with the ability for people to “trade contracts” on what they believe will be the upper bound of the target interest rate the Federal Reserve will announce in May. It’ll also launch with the ability to predict the outcomes of the upcoming March Madness tournament, with both the men’s and women’s brackets available. While the hub will live in the Robinhood app, the “contracts” are being made available by Kalshi, which is technically a federally regulated exchange under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—but has also drawn ire from that very same agency for allowing people to bet on the outcome of elections. Shortly before Trump took office, the CFTC accused Kalshi’s election contracts of being a “Trojan horse to facilitate Kalshi’s transformation into a large-scale election gambling market.” But don’t worry, Kalshi has quelled those fears by…adding Donald Trump, Jr. to its board of advisers. So, less “addressed outstanding concerns about unregulated gambling” and more “buddied up to the kid of the president,” but you know, same outcome! Robinhood has tried to get into the predictions game before. It allowed people to bet on the outcome of the presidential election, which drew criticism from lawmakers for failing to offer sufficient protections for users who were being exposed to speculative “investing.” The company tried to get in on the Super Bowl, too, but pulled back after the CFTC asked it to hold its horses. That, too stemmed from Kalshi, which was the exchange offering the contracts that Robinhood allowed its users to buy—but that seems to have resolved itself, as new CFTC acting Chairman Caroline Pham signaled these contracts will be allowed under the new administration. If you’re wondering what the difference between futures contracts tied to the outcome of things like elections and sporting events and gambling is, join the club. The whole argument here appears to be that you aren’t betting on odds set by a bookmaker but are instead purchasing a “derivatives contract” tied to the outcome of a specific event. That apparently makes it an investment and not a bet. A federal judge has upheld the legality of this kind of “investing” despite objections of the previous administration’s CFTC, so it seems like Robinhood probably has a green light here. For the time being, with the Peter Thiel-backed Polymarket still technically illegal in the US, it also has a pretty strong hold on the market. Surely there is no social commentary to be found in the fact that the service that is supposedly “democratizing finance” (please do not bring up the time it literally stopped retail traders from purchasing or selling certain stocks because it was costing the wrong people money) is rapidly devolving into a platform for purely volatile and speculative “assets” like crypto and events predictions. The people with the least information and the most to lose now have access to the riskiest bets. What could go wrong?

Take a look at the nearly completed worlds at Epic Universe that will transport theme park guests into their favorite adventures within the realms of Nintendo, Universal Monsters, Harry Potter, and How to Train Your Dragon. In about two months the park will open, welcoming people from all over world for Universal Orlando’s momentous occasion, and here’s a new look at the lands past the portals. From a scary adventure at Dark Universe to the gamer haven that is Super Nintendo World, to a magical place in the Ministry of Magic and a realm where real dragons exist at the Isle of Berk, we just wish to be there already! The Dark Universe She’s beauty, she’s spooky grace. It’s the Frankenstein Manor, home of what the internet rumblings from previews have decreed is the best ride of the whole park: Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment. Super Nintendo World Unlike the byte-sized version of Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood, the Epic Universe version of the land is well… epic. As pictured here, it will include the Yoshi’s Adventure ride; if you’ve seen the videos from the Japan version, you know it’s a very cute, family-friendly attraction. And of course this Nintendo World will add on one more big ticket ride alongside Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge—the off-the-rails Donkey Kong Mine-Cart Madness coaster. How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk This one is low-key my favorite. It’s a version of a cinematic environment inspired by DreamWorks’ hit franchise How to Train Your Dragon, which we haven’t seen brought to life like this. It’s just such a great concept to have a land where dragons are real and you can interact with them and see them soar (on stage at least, in the Untrainable Dragon stage show). Universal also posted a preview of how the amazingly awesome dragon meet-and-greets will work. Here’s Astrid and Stormfly, and don’t worry you’ll also be able to meet Toothless and Hiccup. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter: The Ministry of Magic Oh look, a little magic of France. This one looks the plainest of the lot with a circus tent plopped somewhere that may cause a bottle neck, but that’s nothing spell-casting can’t fix, surely. Epic Universe opens May 22.

Qualcomm expanded its Snapdragon G series with three new gaming chips targeting handheld devices. The trio, consisting of the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3, Snapdragon G2 Gen 2, and Snapdragon G1 Gen 2, will power the next generation of offerings from OEMs, including Ayaneo, OneXPlayer, and Retroid Pocket. The Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 leads the pack with an octa-core Kryo CPU consisting of one Prime, five Performance, and two Efficiency cores. It features the Adreno A32 GPU with ray tracing support. Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 offers 30% faster CPU performance and 28% better GPU performance than the previous generation, the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 from 2023. Regarding features, the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 is Qualcomm's first G-series chip to embrace Lumen, Unreal Engine 5's fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system. The chip retains its predecessor's FastConnect 7800 module, offering Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 support. However, the upgraded Adreno A32, which likely features a higher clock speed, has allowed the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 to support displays up to QHD+ 144 Hz, upping the resolution from the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2. Qualcomm Snapdragon G Series Specifications Swipe to scroll horizontally Platform CPU GPU Connectivity Display Support Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 8-core Kryo (1 Prime, 5 Performance, 2 Efficiency cores) Adreno A32 FastConnect 7800 (Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3) Up to QHD+ 144 Hz Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 8-core Kryo Adreno A32 FastConnect 7800 (Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3) Up to FHD+ 144 Hz Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 8-core Kryo (1 Prime, 4 Performance, 3 Efficiency cores) Adreno A22 FastConnect 7800 (Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3) Up to QHD+ 144 Hz Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 8-core Kryo Adreno A21 FastConnect 6700 (Wi-Fi 6/6E, Bluetooth 5) Up to FHD+ 144 Hz Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 8-core Kryo (2 Performance, 6 Efficiency cores) Adreno A12 Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.1 Up to FHD+ 120 Hz Snapdragon G1 Gen 1 8-core Kryo Adreno A11 Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5 Up to 1080p 60 Hz The Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 will replace the previous Snapdragon G2 Gen 1. As usual, the new chip still sports an octa-core Kryo CPU, but the configuration differs. The layout comprises one Prime, four Performance, and three Efficiency cores. Qualcomm says CPU performance is 2.3X higher than the Snapdragon G2 Gen 1. Qualcomm has also upgraded the Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 GPU to the Adreno A22 instead of the Adreno A21. The company asserts that consumers can expect up to a 3.8X increase in graphics performance. This upgrade bumps the display support to QHD+ from the Snapdragon G2 Gen 1's FHD+. Only the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 and Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 support Qualcomm's Snapdragon Game Super Resolution and Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 technologies. The Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 is the last chip in Qualcomm's new Snapdragon G series stack but receives an equally substantial upgrade. The octa-core Kryo CPU features two Performance and six Efficiency cores. The new configuration promises 80% better CPU performance. Meanwhile, the Adreno A12 offers 25% over the last-generation Adreno A11. We can witness this regarding display support, where the Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 is suitable for up to FHD+ 120 Hz as opposed to the Snapdragon G1 Gen 1's 1080p 60 Hz. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Ayaneo) (Image credit: Ayaneo) (Image credit: OneXPlayer) Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 has been confirmed to power three upcoming devices: the Ayaneo Pocket S2, the Ayaneo Gaming Pad, and the OneXPlayer OneXSugar. The Ayaneo Pocket S2 is an Android-powered gaming handheld with a 6.3-inch IPS TrueColor display and a 1440p resolution. While Ayaneo claims a high-capacity battery for prolonged gaming sessions, the manufacturer didn't reveal the exact figure. The Ayaneo Gaming Pad, on the other hand, is more of a tablet. The Android device has an 8.3-inch LCD with a 1440p resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. The tablet flaunts a 50-megapixel rear camera and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide camera while having a 5-megapixel front snapper. It supports different peripherals, such as controllers or keyboards. Meanwhile, the OneXSugar is like a combination of a Nintendo Switch and Nintendo DS. The gaming handheld has a dual-screen design: a 6.01-inch main screen and a 3.92-inch secondary screen. Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 (Image credit: Retroid Pocket) Retroid Pocket's next-generation gaming handheld will leverage the Snapdragon G2 Gen 2. While the company didn't reveal the exact model, it's reasonable to assume that it should be the Retroid Pocket 6, the successor to the brand's overly popular Retroid Pocket 5. The Retroid Pocket 5 came out a few months ago, sporting the Snapdragon 865 chip, which is a little long behind the tooth. The Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 should offer a significant upgrade. Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 (Image credit: Retroid Pocket) The Retroid Pocket Classic will be the first gaming handheld to launch with the Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 chip. The Game Boy-inspired handheld has a 3.92-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1240 x 1080 pixels and a brightness of 500 nits. Specification-wise, the Retroid Pocket Classic has 4GB of LPDDR4x-2133 memory and 64GB of eMMC 5.1 storage. This variant sells for $119, whereas the variant with 6GB LPDDR4x-2133 and 128GB eMMC 5.1 retails for $129. Preorders start today at 9:30 PM ET.

A home security system is not too steep of an investment and works as an excellent deterrent for any unwanted intruders coming onto your property. The Blink Outdoor 4 is a wireless smart security system with a number of different camera options than can give you the peace of mind to leave town for a couple of days or sleep comfortably at night. Right now, it’s part of a limited time deal in which you can snag a bundle one to eight cameras for quite the discount. The solo camera system typically goes for $100, but at its 30% off offer, it now only costs $70—but you can save much more. The two-camera system is 33% off, coming in at $60 per camera. The three-cameras system bundled together for $52 per camera. Your four-camera system is $51 per camera at $204. Then, miraculously, the five-camera system is 50% off at $199, or just $40 per camera. There is no reason to pick up the four-camera bundle during this deal as the total is more than the five. The six-camera system is also now at $40 per camera, and lastly the eight-camera system is just under a dollar shy of $40 per camera. There is no seven-camera bundle for whatever reason. See Blink x5 at Amazon See Blink x3 at Amazon See Blink x1 at Amazon Feel Secure at Home This fourth-generation home security camera is wire-free meaning it can be mounted anywhere along the outside of your house without a concern for nearby power. And if you think that means you’d have to be changing the batteries constantly, it does not. Each camera has a two-year battery life which you can set yourself up with in minutes as they are simply powered by AA lithium batteries — which come included! The cameras have enhanced motion detections so you can be alerted on your smartphone if a person is detected, which it can differentiate from motion by other sources. ON the smartphone app, you can see a live view in 1080p HD and infrared night vision. The system even supports two-way audio communication with the built-in microphones and speakers on each camera. You can save and share clips on the cloud with the Blink subscription plan or locally with the Sync Module 2 which comes included. See Blink x5 at Amazon See Blink x1 at Amazon

A federal broadband official departed the US government with a warning that a Trump administration plan will strand rural Americans with worse Internet access in order to help Elon Musk secure public money for Starlink. "Stranding all or part of rural America with worse Internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington," wrote Evan Feinman, who had been a Commerce Department official and director of the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program since 2022. As Politico reported, Feinman made the statement in "a blistering email to his former colleagues on his way out the door Sunday warning that the Trump administration is poised to unduly enrich Elon Musk's satellite Internet company with money for rural broadband." Feinman left the department on Friday. His departure came less than two weeks after Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced that BEAD was reversing the Biden administration's decision to prioritize fiber Internet networks when distributing grants from the $42.45 billion fund. ProPublica's Craig Silverman reported that "Feinman's term ended and he was not reappointed." Silverman also posted the full email sent by Feinman to colleagues. Warning of “deeply negative outcomes” Feinman wrote that he is "disappointed not to be able to see this project through" and that "the new administration seems to want to make changes that ignore the clear direction laid out by Congress, reduce the number of American homes and businesses that get fiber connections, and increase the number that get satellite connections." The degree of the shift away from fiber "remains unknown, but regardless of size, it will be a disservice to rural and small-town America," he wrote. Feinman said some versions of the proposal are "benign," but he warned of "significant risk that the changes being proposed will be ill-considered and create deeply negative outcomes."

President Donald Trump’s administration defied a federal court order on Saturday to halt deportations of migrants from the U.S. to El Salvador. It’s not the first time the Trump regime has ignored a court order but the scale and brazenness of the defiance really feels like a turning point for the country. And it’s unclear whether anything will stop Trump now that the country has reached such a lawless stage. Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act on Friday, a law from 1798 that gives the president enormous power in a time of war to deport people without judicial review. The problem, of course, is that the U.S. isn’t at war. The president insists we are, but simply saying “we’re at war” because you don’t like immigrants in some abstract way isn’t how it’s done. After Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, the ACLU sued to stop the deportations, which were already in the process of happening on Saturday. Planes were in the air, and based on the publicly available information, at least some of the people being flown to El Salvador had not been handed over to that country yet when the judge issued his ruling. Trump alleges most of the people deported this weekend were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But the fact that these people were deported under the Alien Enemies Act means they didn’t get a court hearing of any kind. There’s no way to even know their immigration status, aside from taking the Trump regime’s word for it. They could’ve been citizens for all we know. One of the ACLU lawyers working on the case, Lee Gelernt, told MSNBC on Monday that he needs to get answers today to a lot of questions raised by the Trump regime’s apparent refusal to abide by the court. Gelernt says it doesn’t matter if the planes were over international waters, one of the arguments the Trump regime is apparently making about why it didn’t need to adhere to the order. “The fact that they might have been in international territory makes no difference, because the U.S. had custody of these individuals, and the judge specifically ordered them to be returned,” Gelernt said. El Salvador’s crypto-loving president Nayib Bukele tweeted about the court order early Sunday, sharing a screenshot of an article from the New York Post with a headline reading “Fed judge orders deportation flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gangbanger to return to US, blocks Trump from invoking Alien Enemies Act.” Bukele tweeted, “Ooopsi… Too late,” along with a crying-laughing emoji. Bukele later shared that 238 alleged members of Tren de Aragua were sent from the U.S. to El Salvador, transferred to what he calls the CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center. Bukele says they’re being held there for a period of one year that can be renewed. An additional 23 alleged members of MS-13 were also transported there, according to the BBC. And the Salvadoran leader says the U.S. is paying for the country to take all these people to its notoriously brutal prison system. “The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” Bukele wrote Sunday. “Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year.” There are other cases where the Trump administration appears to be defying court orders. Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a 34-year-old doctor, was reportedly detained Thursday at Boston Logan International Airport while flying into the U.S. from Lebanon. Alawieh reportedly held an H-1B visa working at Brown University’s medical school, according to CNN. And even though a court ordered she not be deported while the case was heard, the Trump regime apparently sent her back to Lebanon anyway. Lawyers for Alawieh accused Trump’s Department of Justice of “willfully” disobeying the court order, as Slate notes, but the official story is that the DOJ did it unintentionally. There was supposed to be a hearing Monday about Alawieh’s case but it was canceled because lawyers representing her withdrew, though it’s not clear why. Trump has recently targeted law firms, stripping two firms of security clearances last week. Trump has made no secret of his fascist intentions for the United States. The president spoke at the Department of Justice on Friday in a particularly unhinged, though not surprising, speech denouncing perceived enemies, referring to them as “scum.” Trump at the DOJ: “There’s a guy named Norm Eisen. I don’t even know what he looks like. His name is Norm Eisen of CREW. He’s been after me for 9 years. Now CREW is a charitable organization. These are bad people … they’re scum.” [image or embed] — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 14, 2025 at 1:10 PM In a late-night post on Truth Social last night Trump declared that President Joe Biden’s pardons as he was leaving office were “void” because they were supposedly signed by auto-pen, a device often used by presidents of all political stripes to sign paperwork. It’s a ridiculous theory, but it’s the excuse Trump clearly wants to use to persecute people like former congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Republican who led a congressional investigation into his attempted self-coup on January 6, 2021. The Trump regime is openly saying the law and the judges who interpret that law don’t matter anymore. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, appeared on Fox News Monday to say he doesn’t care what the judges think. He’s just going to keep doing what he’s doing. There are no guardrails anymore. If the U.S. government says you were a member of a violent gang, you have no way to contest that. That’s exactly why Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. The courts slow down deportations if you have to actually prove someone is a danger to society. And being a member of a gang isn’t itself a crime in the U.S., even a historically violent one. People in the U.S. are supposed to be punished for committing acts of violence or, at the very least, for providing material support for those acts. “Congress could not have been [more] clear in the statute that it has to be a foreign government or nation invading or in a declared war with the U.S.” Gelernt told MSNBC about the Alien Enemies Act. “Fundamentally, this is about separation of powers and the Trump administration thumbing their nose at Congress and the courts.” A hearing is scheduled for 4 p.m. ET Monday. The ACLU is expected to bring up Bukele’s “oopsie” tweet, as well as a story published by Axios Sunday that quotes anonymous White House officials. “It’s the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,” a senior White House official told Axios. “And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have Venezuelan gang members … These are bad guys, as the president would say.” And that gets to the heart of the problem. Trump is clearly starting with the people he believes will elicit little or no sympathy, even if they’re not actually gang members. Declaring them enemies is typically enough for Americans to believe they must be the bad guys. Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney for one of the people deported, wrote on Bluesky that her client was only singled out because he has tattoos and is not a member of a gang. “Our client worked in the arts in Venezuela. He is LGBTQ. His tattoos are benign. But ICE submitted photos of his tattoos as evidence he is Tren de Aragua,” Toczylowski wrote. “His @ImmDef attorney planned to present evidence he is not. But never got the chance because our client has been disappeared.” The Texas Department of Public Safety guide on how to spot gang tattoos certainly raises more questions than it answers. Unfortunately, it seems like things will only get dumber and more fascist from here.

A feature that's great for having two smartphones has been implemented in the LINE app. Starting with version 15.3.0 for Android, Android smartphones can now be registered as "sub-device." This allows the same LINE account to be used on two main smartphones (iPhone or Android) and the sub Android smartphones. The functions are limited on sub-device, and you cannot "Take over your LINE account", "Age verification", "Back up your talk history", "Purchase paid items such as stamps and emojis", or "Set up a theme." If your sub-device is an iPhone, you will not be able to continue using the same LINE account as your main smartphone. The CNET editorial department is inquiring on LINE Yahoo, "Will we implement similar functions for iPhones in the future?" (Additional note) According to LINE Yahoo, there are currently no plans to support iPhones. Previously, it was possible to have two LINE accounts if the sub-device was an iPad or PC. Additionally, using the LINE Lite app, which was no longer available in 2022, you could have owned two smartphones. View current sales on Amazon "iPhone 16" that allows you to use Apple's AI (check the price on Amazon) Xiaomi's PD compatible mobile battery (check the price on Amazon)

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 of the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices. Ars Technica This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of every command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud. Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said: “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.” One of the most marketed features of Alexa+ is its more advanced ability to recognize who is speaking to it, a feature known as Alexa Voice ID. To accommodate this feature, Amazon is eliminating a privacy-focused capability for all Echo users, even those who aren’t interested in the subscription-based version of Alexa or want to use Alexa+ but not its ability to recognize different voices. However, there are plenty of reasons people wouldn't want Amazon to receive recordings of what they say to their personal device. For one, the idea of a conglomerate being able to listen to personal requests made in your home is, simply, unnerving. Further, Amazon has previously mismanaged Alexa voice recordings. In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s inclination to keep Alexa recordings unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out. If that's not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems. Other reasons people may be hesitant to trust Amazon with personal voice samples include the previous usage of Alexa voice recordings in criminal trials and Amazon paying a settlement in 2023 in relation to allegations that it allowed "thousands of employees and contractors to watch video recordings of customers' private spaces" taken from Ring cameras, per the Federal Trade Commission. Save Recordings or Lose Functionality Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that "if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work." As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don't let Amazon store their voice recordings. Amazon's email says: Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud, which was designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of controls by visiting the Alexa Privacy dashboard online or navigating to More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app. Amazon is forcing Echo users to make a couple of tough decisions: Grant Amazon access to recordings of everything you say to Alexa or stop using an Echo; let Amazon save voice recordings and have employees listen to them or lose a feature set to become more advanced and central to the next generation of Alexa. However, Amazon is betting big that Alexa+ can dig the voice assistant out of a financial pit. Amazon has publicly committed to keeping the free version of Alexa around, but Alexa+ is viewed as Amazon's last hope for keeping Alexa alive and making it profitable. Anything Amazon can do to get people to pay for Alexa takes precedence over other Alexa user demands, including, it seems, privacy. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

According to China's Ministry of Finance, the 2025 central budget will allocate ¥398.12 billion yuan ($55 billion) for science and technology, a 10% increase from 2024. This allocation is the third-largest item in the budget, surpassed only by national defense and debt interest payments. The increase in spending on science and technology by 10%, or $5 billion, emphasizes that China wants to accelerate its national R&D this year, which will speed up its plans for self-reliance in sectors such as semiconductors. $5 billion will not build the country a breakthrough but will rather help with existing projects, particularly in fields such as semiconductors, AI, space exploration, and quantum computing. Also, remember that China's economy is slowing, and the government frequently disguises economic stimulus plans within large-scale initiatives like this, allowing it to avoid directly labeling it as a stimulus. In 2024, China allocated ¥361.9 billion for science and technology expenditures, achieving 97.6% of the budgeted target. The government increased support for fundamental research to strengthen China's capabilities in cutting-edge scientific discovery and technological innovation. Investment was directed into major national initiatives, particularly in strategic sectors such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and space exploration. Last year, China also introduced support for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), including special financing programs to assist innovative SMEs with risk-sharing mechanisms through national financing guarantee funds. In addition, tax reductions and subsidies were offered to tech enterprises to encourage innovation. China plans to channel its science and technology spending on 'Science and Technology Innovation 2030' major projects targeting integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing technology. Governments tend to invest money into projects that may not pay off for years, so expect China to invest in fundamental research in the aforementioned areas. This will strengthen China's global competitiveness in these key industries in the coming years, which is particularly important for China's ongoing rivalry with the U.S.

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 the report's data from apps using its platform. The report covers "more than $10 billion in revenue across more than a billion transactions," and RevenueCat's customer base ranges from indie-sized teams to large publishers. Buffer, ChatGPT, FC Barcelona, Goodnotes, and Reuters are among the San Francisco-based firm's customer base. Additionally, the report examines apps that rely primarily on in-app subscriptions, as well as those that only generate some revenue from subscriptions. All apps examined, though, actively generate subscription revenue and "meet a minimum threshold of installs or revenue (to ensure statistically meaningful findings," according to the report. RevenueCat's report doesn't cover every single mobile app available, but it paints a picture of the challenges related to monetizing mobile apps across different types of categories, as well as how uneven the distribution of app revenue is. A strenuous road to $1,000 RevenueCat's report concluded that most apps fail to make $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years. It says: Across all categories, nearly 20 percent reach $1,000 in revenue, while 5 percent reach the $10,000 mark. Revenue drop-off is steep, with many categories losing ~50 percent of apps at each milestone, emphasizing the challenge of sustained growth beyond early revenue benchmarks. Credit: RevenueCat Some app categories with the smallest percentage of newly launched apps hitting the $1,000 mark are shopping, travel, and utilities. Photo, video, and gaming apps are the most likely to hit $1,000/month within two years. The good news is that apps that do eventually make it to $1,000 in monthly revenue tend to do so rather quickly. The median number of days it takes for an app to reach $1,000/month in revenue is 60 days, RevenueCat found. But as the chart below shows, that stat varies based on the type of app. Education apps, for example, have a median of 79 days. Meanwhile, lofty monthly revenue goals of $10,000/month are especially hard to reach for shopping and travel apps.

Microsoft's Windows updates over the last couple of years have mostly been focused on adding generative AI features to the operating system, including multiple versions of the Copilot assistant. Copilot has made it into Windows 11 (and even, to a more limited extent, the aging Windows 10) as a native app, and then a wrapper around a web app, and soon as a native app again. But this month's Windows updates are removing the Copilot app from some Windows 11 PCs and unpinning it from the taskbar, according to this Microsoft support document. This bug obviously won't affect systems where Copilot had already been uninstalled, but it has already led to confusion among some Windows users. Microsoft says it is "working on a resolution to address the issue" but that users who want to get Copilot back can reinstall the app from the Microsoft Store and repin it to the taskbar, the same process you use to install Copilot on PCs where it has been removed. Though some version of Copilot has been included in fresh Windows 11 installs since mid-2023, and Microsoft even added a Copilot key into the standard Windows keyboard in early 2024, Copilot's appearance and capabilities have shifted multiple times since then.

Bambu Lab is finally announcing its long-awaited new top-of-the-line printer, the H2D . The machine’s March 25th launch date is just keeping the promised announcement date of “Q1 2025”. At that time, the machine will be available for pre-order. However, the price is still unknown. Unfortunately, we can not say more about the H2D 3D printer due to an embargo that Tom’s Hardware is honor bound to uphold. Out of respect to the manufacturer, we are only showing the first teaser photo, which shows a closeup of the H2D’s dual nozzle. Bambu Lab fans and detractors have voraciously tracked down any leaks regarding the new printer, which has been in development for quite some time. The company refuses to acknowledge any of them and is proceeding with their weeklong promotional campaign. There will be five teaser posters released between March 18th and the 24th. On the 25th, the embargo drops, and reviewers will be allowed to discuss the machine and our testing results. We’ve been putting our H2D through its paces for several weeks and will be ready to show you all its new features and report any improvements over the X1C we see. Stay tuned!

Europe risks becoming totally reliant on non-domestic technology within three years if it does not invest in its tech industry, a group including Airbus, Proton and IONOS has warned. In an open letter, around 80 organisations backed recommendations made by the EuroStack initiative to focus less on regulation and more on investment through creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund and requirements for the public sector to “buy European”. They said: “Europe’s current multiple dependencies create security and reliability risks, compromise our sovereignty and hurt our growth. It has been clear for some time that Europe cannot regulate itself out of its laggard position. It needs to take proactive industrial action.” Citing the US’ tariff war and the rising power of China’s tech industry, signatories warned that “without sweeping and urgent change”, Europe’s reliance on foreign technologies “will become almost complete in less than three years.” Addressed to European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and tech sovereignty EVP Henna Virkkunen, the letter called for a sovereign fund to invest in “capital-intensive parts of the value chain” such as quantum computing. The group also said the EU should reassign funds under its Digital Decade Initiative with a focus on “tangible” result-oriented projects. See also: Europe quietly kills off its AI Liability Directive Matthew Hodgson, CEO of E2E messaging platform Element, a signatory of the letter, told The Stack the fund should ensure funding translated into “real-world adoption rather than fragmented pilots.” He said: “This is not just about competitiveness, it’s about security, autonomy and long-term sustainability in a world where digital infrastructure is as critical as energy and defense. “Europe has the talent and assets to lead, but it requires bold action, coordinated investment and a shift from dependency to digital self-determination.” The letter highlights a growing concern in Europe that the early dominance of US and China in the AI sector could leave its own companies in the dust as the technology only grows its power. In 2023 the seven largest US tech companies had a market value 20 times that of their EU counterparts, and not much has happened to indicate this may have changed. The EuroStack initiative, which first published a report on its recommendations in January, said one way to combat the size of US companies was by adopting a “pooling and federating” approach to sharing assets in an open source environment. However, Amanda Brock, CEO of open source development non-profit OpenUK, told The Stack that this approach risked dampening innovation and warned government “must understand that tech and AI development needs to be collaborative.” She said: “I am deeply concerned by all of these consequences of geo-political shifts driving the development of so-called ‘European technology’. “This concept of localising a sovereign software stack risks bifurcating underlying open source and operating in silos is absolutely counter intuitive to what makes open source work."

Enforcement of a first-of-its-kind United Kingdom law that Elon Musk wants Donald Trump to gut kicked in today, with potentially huge penalties possibly imminent for any Big Tech companies deemed non-compliant. UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) forces tech companies to detect and remove dangerous online content, threatening fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. In extreme cases, widely used platforms like Musk's X could be shut down or executives even jailed if UK online safety regulator Ofcom determines there has been a particularly egregious violation. Critics call it a censorship bill, listing over 130 "priority" offenses across 17 categories detailing what content platforms must remove. The list includes illegal content connected to terrorism, child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, illegal drugs, animal welfare, and other crimes. But it also broadly restricts content in legally gray areas, like posts considered "extreme pornography," harassment, or controlling behavior. Matthew Lesh, a public policy fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, told The Telegraph that "the idea that Elon Musk, or any social media executive, could be jailed for failing to remove enough content should send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about free speech." Musk has publicly signaled that he expects Trump to intervene, saying, "Thank goodness Donald Trump will be president just in time," regarding the OSA's enforcement starting in March, The Telegraph reported last month. The X owner has been battling UK regulators since last summer after resisting requests from the UK government to remove misinformation during riots considered the "worst unrest in England for more than a decade," The Financial Times reported. According to Musk, X was refusing to censor UK users. Attacking the OSA, Musk falsely claimed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government was "releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts," FT reported. Such a post, if seen as spreading misinformation potentially inciting violence, could be banned under the OSA, the FT suggested. Trump’s UK deal may disappoint Musk Musk hopes that Trump will strike a deal with the UK government to potentially water down the OSA.

The trade war between the U.S. and Canada is getting nasty and two new suggestions for how to give Canada the edge could make it worse. The first is for Canada to flout U.S. intellectual property law and become a nation that exports jailbreaks. The second is to ban PornHub. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs kick in on April 2. If they go through, they’ll disrupt the economies of both nations. Last week Ontario Premiere Doug Ford announced a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to the states before “suspending” it pending negotiations. It’s hard to know where all this ends up, how nasty it will get, and how much suffering people will endure. Canadian science fiction writer, tech journalist, and friend of Gizmodo Cory Doctorow had a great suggestion last month that would put incredible pressure on the U.S. “What if Canada stopped upholding U.S. tech companies’ intellectual property?” He asked in a paper for the Canada Centre for Policy Alternatives. American tech companies charge a lot of rent. Most app stores run by Amazon, Apple, or Google skim 30% off every transaction. John Deere farming equipment is hard to repair without paying the company for expensive software unlocks. Car companies, and especially Tesla, lock basic features behind electronic paywalls. Doctorow’s suggestion is that Canada not impose tariffs on U.S. goods but go back through its trade negotiations with America and “tear up these laws” that it agreed to regarding big tech’s IP. “You know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of five per cent rather than Apple’s 30 per cent. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too,” Doctorow said. He also suggested that the app store shouldn’t confine itself to Canadian software authors. “Canadian app stores could offer five per cent commissions on sales to U.S. and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allow device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don’t get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.” That’s a much better deal than most of us get when we buy something on our phones. In Doctorow’s calculation, Canada could manufacture devices and software to help jailbreak John Deere tractors, Teslas, and other American cars. Imagine a world where farmers paid a Canadian company for a software update, one time, instead of constantly returning to John Deere for rent-seeking computer updates. Imagine a world where you paid, once, for a device on your new car that unlocked all its software features forever. “What’s standing in the way of a Canadian industrial policy that focuses on raiding the sky-high margins of American monopolists with third-party add-ons, mods and jailbreaks?” Doctorow said. Another, sillier, suggestion has gone viral thanks to an Instagram reel from Canadian comedian Matthew Puzhitsky: ban PornHub. The pornography giant is based in Montreal and sees millions of American visitors every month. On March 6, Puzhitsky published a skit on Instagram where politicians looking for ways to win the trade war against Canada suggested banning the site. The skit struck a nerve and has been covered by The New York Post and The Daily Mail. If Canada could ban Pornhub in the States, we win the trade war. That’s it. There is no trade war,” Puzhitsky told The Post. America doesn’t need the help. PornHub is already banned in 17 states (including Texas, Florida, and more), part of restrictive new laws in conservative parts of the country that force people to show an ID to access adult websites. Rather than comply with a law that is a privacy and technological nightmare, PornHub has blocked access to its services in those states. In these chaotic days of the second Trump presidency, anything is possible and nothing should be off the table.

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. We’ve seen plenty of leaked Pixel 9A renders and images over the past few months, but now we have full-on videos of what looks like Google’s not-yet-announced phone. YouTubers Sahil Karoul and The Mobile Central posted reviews of the Pixel 9A, showing off its refreshed design and performance, as spotted earlier by Android Police. Just like what we’ve seen in previous leaks, the Pixel 9A seems to ditch a prominent camera bump for a flat back. The videos also show the budget-friendly phone with a noticeable bezel bordering the slightly larger 6.3-inch display, along with an upgraded 5,100mAh battery. Both videos include images and videos taken with the phone’s rumored 48-megapixel main camera, 13-megapixel ultrawide sensor, and 13-megapixel selfie camera, and they look pretty sharp. However, The Mobile Central notes that video quality takes a dip at night.

Final Destination hit theaters 25 years ago today, spawning a franchise that’s still going with this spring’s Final Destination: Bloodlines. That original film stood out among the early 2000s teen-horror craze, providing gruesomely creative death scenes that spiral from the idea that the killer isn’t a masked slasher—it’s Death itself, chasing after people who dodged their intended moment of demise. In a new oral history, the series’ creators look back on the film’s origins, including more details about something that’s a well-known part of its history: its ties to The X-Files. Speaking to Variety, writer Jeffrey Reddick recalled reading a magazine article about a woman who avoided a plane crash after a premonition told her not to fly—and how it sparked the idea about Death not taking kindly to being “cheated.” He thought of the perfect vehicle for such a story: The X-Files, which was then in its original run. “I wrote that idea as an X-Files [spec script] … so it was very serendipitous that we ended up having the film go to [The X-Files executive producers] James Wong and Glen Morgan, who were two of my favorite writers of all time,” Reddick said. “The original story was very A Nightmare on Elm Street-influenced, where Death played with their survivor’s guilt or some secrets that they had to drive them to suicide, which was pretty dark,” Reddick added. His original script focused on adult characters, but when it was reworked for the movie, they were changed into high-school students—a studio request in the era of Scream‘s success. Wong, who directed Final Destination and shares a screenplay credit with Reddick and Morgan, revealed a little bit about what Final Destination might have looked like in an X-Files context: “You would be concentrating on Mulder and Scully and how they react to [a series of deaths]—and they had to survive.” However, Wong said, the story really was better-suited to a feature film. “As a movie, the main thing is that you had the time and the budget to make something spectacular that really drew the audience in and give them the surprises you want. In a TV show that’s almost impossible.” Head to Variety to read the full piece, which has some fun reminiscences about Final Destination‘s filming, including crafting those creative death scenes, the (excellent) decision to change the original ending from hopeful to bleak—and how the film’s legacy lingers today.

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: Check Amazon AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: Check Newegg AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: Check Best Buy AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: Check B&H Photo One of the best processors for outright gaming, AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D, with its hefty stacked 3D V-Cache, has been the in-demand CPU for gaming since its initial launch in January and has been very hard to get hold of. AMD even stated that they were trying to get weekly rollouts of stock to retailers to cope with the demand, but that didn't stop the CPU from disappearing almost instantly from website pages when new stock came in. Prices for the 9800X3D skyrocketed, with third-party resellers trying to cash in on the demand for this processor and charging egregious prices. It's been two months, but finally, you can get hold of AMD's current-generation gaming king. Maybe it's the stock levels catching up, or perhaps the launch of the 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs recently has pulled away some of the demand on the 9800X3D, but, whatever the reason, if you're looking to build a top-of-the-line gaming rig, now, you can actually get your hands on this impressive CPU. Available for its $479 MSRP launch price, you can find the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D for sale at Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and B&H Photo. I don't see any discounts coming for this super-popular processor anytime soon, but it's great to see the price come back to normal now that there is availability. Here's hoping the same happens with graphics cards, but I'm not going to hold my breath. AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: now $479 at Amazon AMD's latest gaming king, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, uses AMD's successful 3D V-Cache technology, which provides the 9800X3D its pure gaming prowess. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D comes with eight cores and 16 threads and has a 120W TDP. You can find more details of the performance of the Ryzen 7 processor in our detailed review of the 9800X3D. With an 8% performance gain on the previous generation 7800X3D, and easily outperforming the competition from Intel in gaming benchmarks. The 9800X3D is unlocked for overclocking and doesn't have excessive cooling requirements, making this processor one of the best CPUs for pure gaming.

The Redditor who had thousands of PC-DIY enthusiasts on tenterhooks with posts charting their extraordinarily long BIOS update odyssey had some sad news to share today. GoatWithAGun posted a defeated “Welp, we’re done here,” and shared a picture of their famous-for-15-minutes PC, which was described as “completely unresponsive” after the monitor seemingly lost signal from the machine. In the above post, which serves as both an obituary and epitaph for the deceased PC, GoatWithAGun sensitively told those gathered around this virtual deathbed “As of 2:14 PM Philippine Standard Time, my monitor lost signal from the PC and I returned to it completely unresponsive to any troubleshooting.” The Redditor graciously thanked those who had followed their fight to resuscitate the PC, and those who had donated. Our previous coverage saw the efforts to update the BIOS of this PC’s BioStar A320MH motherboard extend past the 24-hour mark (flashing 66% complete). Actually, follow-up posts saw the Redditor start new threads at 48-hours+, and 100-hours+ before quiet darkness descended today. (Image credit: u/GoatWithAGun / Reddit) It may be unfortunate what has happened to this PC, which the Redditor said they decided to BIOS-flash due to the lure of BioStar stability fixes. However, it shouldn’t be the end of the system, with replacement motherboards readily available. Other components of this system like the AMD Ryzen 3 1200 CPU, 4GB of DDR4-2400 Kingston HyperX memory, an Asus GTX 1660 GPU, a 128GB Transcend SATA SSD, and a 480GB Crucial SATA SSD are all likely unconcerned with the motherboard’s sticky end. Before signing off, GoatWithAGun seemed to hint that they may soon have a new way to reanimate the dead BioStar A320MH motherboard. The Redditor said that a BIOS programmer is on the way (with a spare BIOS chip, we would hope). Thus, there may be a chance that this bricked single-BIOS device could rise again – if the BIOS contents are the only hurdle to it being able to boot. GoatWithAGun will probably announce the result of the BIOS programmer tinkering off of Reddit, due to a segment of the platform the Redditors says have “grown tired of me.” It’s a shame those folks couldn’t just go and read and comment on something else.

How much could a possible folding iPhone cost? The phantom Apple smartphone with flexible display has been in the center of increasingly insistent rumors for a couple of years, with the concrete possibility that something can move from here to the next two years. The most delicate detail is obviously the final price to the user, given that Apple is certainly not known to be an affordable brand and, usually, the Foldable Phone are among the most expensive models. It is therefore not surprising that the estimates are very salty. To venture into a preliminary evaluation is the Tim Long analyst in Barclays, who hypothesized a final price for a possible folding iPhone of 2300 dollars. Taking into consideration the American list of Apple, it is almost double compared to the more expensive melafonino or iPhone 16 Pro Max which starts from 1199 dollars. With a parallel using Italian prices you could reach up to about 3000 euros, given that iPhone 16 Pro Max starts from us from 1489 euros. For a quick comparison, the popular Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 starts from 2099 euros. The price of 2300 dollars for the folding iPhone would also respect another preliminary evaluation, that of the famous Ming-Chi Kuo which had hypothesized a 2000-2500 dollar band, also pushing the base of the technical data sheet with an internal display of 7.8 inches and external to 5.5 ", dual rear camera, Touchid button for the release placed on one side and thickness from just 9-9.5 mm. From closed and 4.5 mm when opened. All these rumors would imply a construction with booklet opening, while it is not yet clear if Apple can instead focus on a shell model. Usually these simplest hardware mountain models - given the lower dimensions available - and therefore are at more accessible prices. What is certain is that one of the prerogatives of a possible folding iPhone will be the absence of the row near the turn of the display. The possible exit window of this mysterious model is scheduled for 2026-2027, but for now there is nothing official.

Two NASA astronauts are finally going home after having spent more than nine months on board the International Space Station (ISS) for what was meant to be a week-long mission. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission will depart from the ISS on Tuesday around 1:05 a.m. ET. The crew includes NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who journeyed to the ISS on board Boeing’s Starliner CST-100 spacecraft on June 5, 2024. The troubled spacecraft was deemed unfit to return the pair to Earth, forcing Williams and Wilmore to travel back to Earth on board a SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft months after their original return date. Live coverage of the Dragon hatch closing will begin on Monday at 10:45 p.m. ET on NASA’s website and NASA+. A live stream of Dragon’s undocking procedure will begin on Tuesday at 12:45 a.m. ET, and splashdown of the crew vehicle is expected around 5:57 p.m. ET. NASA will resume live coverage of Dragon’s return at 4:45 p.m. ET, and a press conference will be held at 7:30 p.m. ET. The Starliner saga has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, with questions over whether or not the crew had been abandoned in space. Williams and Wilmore were assigned as the first crew to fly on board Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Things did not go smoothly for the crewed test flight, five of the spacecraft’s thrusters failed on its way to the ISS, and Starliner returned home empty. NASA had to come up with an elaborate plan to fly the crew back to Earth. On September 28, 2024, NASA launched its Crew-9 mission with two astronauts instead of four (the two being NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov), docking at the ISS on the following day. The two empty seats were reserved for Williams and Wilmore, who were set to return alongside the Crew-9 astronauts in February. The plan did face some trouble, though, as technical issues delayed the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission, postponing the crew handover. That meant that Crew-9, alongside Williams and Wilmore, would not be able to depart the ISS until Crew-10 is on the space station sometime in April. NASA ended up switching the SpaceX crew spacecraft, launching its Crew-10 mission on March 12 to bring the two Starliner astronauts back around two weeks earlier. The decision may have been prompted by President Donald Trump’s ploy to use the plight of the two astronauts in his favor. Shortly after taking office, Trump claimed that he is working on a rescue mission for the two astronauts. Trump announced that he had asked SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk to “go get the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” he wrote on Truth Social. The astronauts, however, were not abandoned in space, nor were they ever in need of a rescue mission. Organizing crew schedules in space can get complicated, and expensive, which is why the Starliner crew had to wait a little longer before they could hop onto a spacecraft headed toward Earth. All that said, we’ll be glad to see the two astronauts back home after an unexpectedly long time in space.

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2011, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Six months after introducing its fifth-generation Spectacles and the second version featuring AR capabilities, Snap has announced new features and functionality. Lenses — what Snap calls the Spectacles’ various AR effects — can now utilize GPS data for simple navigation, multiplayer gaming, and other experiences. There’s also improved hand tracking, along with an AR keyboard that allows for text entry without pulling out a connected smartphone. Lenses can now use location data, including GPS, GNSS, and even compass headings. As part of today’s announcement, Snap shared demos of Lenses using the new capabilities, including Utopia Labs’ NavigatAR, which creates arrows pointing in the direction users should be headed en route to a specific destination. Another lens, Path Pioneer, allows developers to create AR walking courses with waypoints that guide users along a specific path, which could be useful for city walking tours or museums and art galleries. Niantic has also updated its Peridot Beyond game with multiplayer capabilities made possible with access to location data. Users can see and interact with AR versions of their own Dot characters as well as their friends’ Dot characters in the same session. Developers will also now be able to add leaderboards to AR games to help draw players back to set a new high score. The Spectacles now feature a system AR keyboard. Screenshot: Snap The Spectacles’ new AR keyboard features a “full and numeric layout” and takes advantage of refinements that Snap has made to hand tracking to improve targeting intent while reducing false positives while typing. There’s also a new grab gesture that can be used in Lens experiences, and hand tracking now knows when you’re holding your smartphone. Unfortunately, what Snap didn’t announce is a version of its AR Spectacles for general consumers. The fifth-gen Spectacles, featuring a limited 45 minutes of battery life, are still only available to developers who have to apply for access through the company’s Lens Studio desktop tool. Pricing is still $99 per month, and you have to commit to renting them for at least a year.

Since its first day of settlement as President of the United States, Donald Trump has signed dozens of clearly anti-progressive executive orders. And, as it is easy to imagine, the reactions of unions, organizations for civil rights, state departments and citizens have not delayed to arrive. So much so that Just Security, an online forum for political and legal analysis, managed to put a tracker online that "keeps trace of the legal actions against the actions of the Trump administration". On March 15, the date of the last update of the page, 126 procedures are underway - 2 of which closed -, divided into different categories: subsidies, loans and government assistance; Freedom and civil rights; Diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility; Removal of information from government sites, and so on. The most absurd executive orders The executive orders signed by Trump in the first months of his office certainly could not go unnoticed. Among these, in particular, one of the most criticized is undoubtedly the order "Defenseing Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government", in which only the existence of two "biological sexes", the male and the female, determined to the "moment of conception" is recognized. A measure that, according to the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union (Aclu), represents a real regress in the protection of the LGBTQ+community. It is no coincidence that it was precisely the Aclu who intended a federal cause against the American State Department, on behalf of seven complaints, due to a new policy that prohibits the "x" gender indicator on the documents of US identity, thus forcing people to have to indicate the sex assigned to them at birth rather than their gender identity. Likewise, the "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" order has attracted many criticisms about the Trump administration. The new anti-immigration lines of the government, in fact, have allowed the sector authorities to intensify the efforts to retain and remove immigrants residing in the United States without documents. This led to episodes in which the accelerated warding off of some residents without trial was ordered pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act (Ina): an action against which the Association for the rights of immigrants the road New York has lined up, which intended a legal cause against Donald Trump because of the ethicality of the order. Finally, we could not fail to mention the numerous legal actions taken against the Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) and its boss, Elon Musk. The group of activists Public Citizen and several workers unions have sued the Office of Management and Budget (ORD) for having set up the doge under the president's executive office, claiming that allowing a private individual to access citizens' information is a violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act - a law that regulates the behavior of the Federal Consultative Committees. And this is only one of the dozens of causes that organizations, unions and private individuals have filed to contest the doge access to the personal and financial information of the Americans. In short, the Trump administration does not seem to go well at all. And if it is true that the president will go down in history for signing the greatest number of executive orders in the first months of his government, it is equally true that it could also be remembered for the number of legal actions that target it.

Understanding where Elon Musk's private interests end and Donald Trump's political ones are increasingly difficult, since the two appear more and more aligned. How do you explain otherwise the bizarre scene that recently saw the President of the United States, to baste a Tesla teleshopy outside the White House? True, Trump has always been a seller: over the years he has associated his name with practically anything, from casino properties, passing through steaks and, in recent times, also Meme Coin and Nft. At this moment on his online store it is possible to even buy pickleball rackets or branded fragrant candles. Musk's worrying ascendant But Trump is above all a seller of himself. Why should he dilapidate all this political capital for Musk, the richest man in the world? Some protests in the Tesla dealerships and the collapse on the stock exchange of the electric car car of his ally do not seem sufficient reasons. Trump is not an altruist. Musk has paid almost 300 million dollars for the US elections of 2024, most of which in support of Trump's presidential campaign. It transformed X into a sorceress dystopia comparable only to Trump's social networks, Truth. And his work to the so -called Department for Government Efficiency (Doge) has allowed Trump to outsource the boring mechanisms of governance. Seeing Trump literally reading from a Tesla price list in front of the camera is the most plastic representation of a dynamic that will not end well. And that indeed he has already started to take a worrying turn, for the interested parties and for the Americans: in the United States the stock market is in free fall and the consent for Musk in the polls is touching the fund. The representatives of the Republican Party are deleting public meetings in their colleges so as not to have to deal with the wrath of the voters for the work of the doge. And the ministers of the Trump cabinet are apparently fed up with the ascendant who enjoys Musk.

In Germany, if the absence does not exceed three days it is not necessary to present a medical certificate. "If Tesla claims that many employees always take advantage of these three days and never reach the point of having to present a certificate, then this could be the starting point for the reasoning of the employer: I will go there and I will see if this person is really sick", continues the lawyer. “Even if you have to say it: a home visit like this is not very information for the employer. Because you have to open the door, but I'm not forced to get it in. Furthermore, he has no right to know from me because I am actually ill and what is my diagnosis. Not even this is granted to him by the certificate: everything is protected by personal rights. So [the employer] can simply check if there is really someone at home. But even if it does not find anyone, this does not mean that someone is not sick: it could very well be from the doctor or sleep at home ". A personality obsessed with work In recent months, Musk had said about X that he would investigate what happened in Germany. A news that probably did not help to dilute the tension: the personality of the South African entrepreneur is obsessed with work and efficiency. As told by the biographer Walter Isaacson, he often happens to vomit and twist for stress; And, competent as in the engineering - his true passion -, Musk personally supervises the projects with pressing questions that terrorize employees. They narrate the rumors of the corridor that more than one is hiding when he passes. In the sign of the reduction of costs (it is no coincidence that it was pinned of the role of head cutter in the doge of Donald Trump), the idea of ​​the entrepreneur is to take young people promising to pay less than the established colleagues: a mechanism that can only work in the presence of an excellent intuition on who is worth and who is not. However, despite the rumors about the infernal rhythms and the not really relaxing environment, Musk's companies continue to be attractive: having Tesla or Spacex in the curriculum throats to many, because it allows you to sprout higher wages once - and usually it happens after a few years - that the company is left. In recent days, Swedish Hedge Fund (speculative funds, Christer Gardell, said what many think: Tesla's actions could be quite outdated. Clearly, the ups and downs are exactly the one on which Hedge Fund Lucrano, and there is a component of interest in this vision. But, even without reaching the drop of 95% theorized by Gardell, it is undeniable that the enthusiasm for Musk's hyper-patinated narrative (which sees in the Tesla of computers with wheels, and not cars) has bewitched the bag for years well beyond the actual results. And among the political positions of the boss, the autonomous guide who shows no progress and the entry of cheaper competitors such as the Chinese Build Your Dreams (Byd), the matter for the Austin brand begins to complicate.

We may have just found an easy-to-swallow cure for one of the deadliest diseases out there. In research released this month, scientists report that a single dose of an experimental pill dramatically reduced the high fatality rate of Ebola infection, at least in nonhuman primates. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch led the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances. The treatment, an oral antiviral called obeldesivir, prevented up to 100% of deaths in monkeys given a high dose of the deadliest species of Ebola. These findings and others suggest that obeldesivir can become a highly effective measure against Ebola and similar infections that can quickly lead to massive bleeding and death, the researchers say. Ebola is caused by several related strains of viruses (formally called orthoebolaviruses). The most commonly seen and deadliest version of Ebola is caused by the Zaire ebolavirus (named after where it was first discovered), which can have a fatality rate as high as 90% if untreated. Symptoms of Ebola initially include fever, aches, and other flu-like symptoms, but the infection can rapidly progress and cause widespread organ damage and heavy internal bleeding that seeps out of people’s bodies, which is known as hemorrhagic fever. Ebola is a zoonotic disease, meaning outbreaks typically begin when a person is exposed to infected animals (African fruit bats are thought to be a primary reservoir). But it can also spread between people through close contact with bodily fluids, including blood and semen. While the rapid progression of symptoms and high lethality of Ebola often prevent the infection from spreading widely, it has occasionally sparked large-scale outbreaks. During 2014 to 2016, for instance, a Zaire ebolavirus outbreak in West Africa infected almost 30,000 people and killed more than 11,000. No outbreaks since have reached that level of destruction, but Ebola and related hemorrhagic viruses continue to be a grave public health threat in the countries where they’re natively found. Nowadays, there are effective approved vaccines and treatments for some species of Ebola. But the vaccine supply is limited and the current antibody-based treatments have to be stored in cold conditions and taken intravenously, limiting their availability and usefulness. So the UTMB researchers believe that obeldesivir—an oral version of the antiviral remdesivir, originally developed to treat covid-19—can represent a pivotal step forward in Ebola treatment. In their new study, they gave cynomolgus and rhesus macaques a lethal dose of a variant of Zaire ebolavirus, then gave them obeldesivir a day after infection. Incredibly, 100% of rhesus macaques given obeldesivir survived their infection, while 80% of cynomolgus macaques did as well. The treatment delayed the virus’ ability to replicate and even seemed to promote the monkeys’ adaptive, or antibody-based, immune response to it. The team’s earlier work with monkeys has already found that obeldesivir might be effective against Sudan virus, the second most commonly encountered species of Ebola. Earlier this January, the researchers also found that obeldesivir could protect monkeys from Marburg, another deadly cousin of Ebola (a recently ended outbreak of Marburg killed at least 10 people in Tanzania this year). More research will be needed to validate the drug’s potential against Ebola in humans, of course. But the researchers are hopeful that obeldesivir can become a broadly applied and more convenient weapon against these deadly infections. “For outbreak response, oral antivirals might present substantial advantages over now approved intravenous drugs, such as easy supply, storage, distribution, and administration,” they wrote in their paper.

How old is Tex Willer? What about Carson Kit? And ... Mickey? There are many curiosities that emerged during a chat between Alessandro Baricco and the Sergio Bonelli Editore team on the occasion of Milan Comics Week, the first edition of the Comics Festival by Feltrinelli bookstores. The author of the twentieth century, Abel and other masterpieces of Italian literature sat together with Tito Faraci, artistic curator of the Festival and screenwriter of many stories of the Bonelli house, Disney and beyond; Mauro Boselli, editorial curator and Tex screenwriter; And Maurizio Dotti, historical designer of many Bonellian stories. A meeting from which the partnership between the authors and a common passion emerged, palpable: the one for Tex, for the western genre, and for the comic in general. The tone of the conversation is immediately set by Tito Faraci and Alessandro Baricco, who exchange jokes in a code that will be well familiar to Tex's readers. Yes, Baricco and Faraci talk in jargon from Pard, partners, compendatives. Like Tex and Kit Carson, or Tiger Jack. Just to clarify the level of affection they share for the character and his world. But why do you love Tex, why would the most loyal readers all want to have it as a friend? Faraci asks for it, and Baricco replies: “Very difficult to say, because then on the Tex card he has a lot of characteristics that are not typical of my friends. One so right! And then at the same time it is politically correct, on the side of the Indians long before Hollywood. You assembled it complicated, "jokes Baricco. The definition is deliberately provocative, and is immediately collected by the pards gathered around the fire. "Tex is neither right nor left," says Boselli (and if he says, that he meant). “Let's say he has sudden ways to get what he wants. And that being his friend is better than having it against him. " Maurizio Dotti is also of the same notice: “Tex exercises his personal justice, not that of the law. But the reader accepts him because he knows that Tex always takes it with the right person, acting on the side of the good. This is the skill of the screenwriters ".

AMD's fire-breathing Ryzen AI Max+ 395 allegedly crushes Intel's latest efficiency-focused Lunar Lake CPUs in AI benchmarks. An AMD blog post claims the new Zen 5 + RDNA 3.5 chip is up to 12.2x faster than the Core Ultra 7 258V. AMD benchmarked the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and Core Ultra 7 258V (with Arc 140V graphics) in a variety of large language models and LLM configurations, including DeepSeek R1 and Llama. Model sizes were restricted to 16GB to offer a fairer comparison against Lunar Lake-powered laptops with 32GB of memory (the highest memory configuration available for these devices). An Asus ROG Flow Z13 64GB was used for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 test system, and an Asus Zenbook S14 32GB was used for the Core Ultra 7 258V test system. Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: AMD) (Image credit: AMD) (Image credit: AMD) In DeepSeek R1, the Ryzen chip was up to 2.1x faster (measured in tokens per second) than the Intel counterpart using Distill Qwen 1.5b, up to 2.2x faster using Distill Qwen 7b; up to 2.1x faster using Distill Llama 8b; and up to 2.2x faster using Distill Qwen 14b. In Phi 4 Mini Instruct 3.8b, the Ryzen chip was up to 2.1x faster than the Intel Lunar Lake chip; up to 2.2x faster in Phi 4 14b; and up to 2.1x faster in Llama 3.2 3b Instruct. In the same LLM configurations but benchmarking the "time to the first token," the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 was up to 12.2x faster in DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14b. The Zen 5 chip's least-performant dominance was in Phi 4 Mini Instruct 3.8b and Llama 3.2 3b Instruct, where the AMD chip was "only" 4x faster than the Core Ultra 7 258V. AMD showed similar dominance in AI vision models using the same "time to the first token" benchmarking technique. In IBM Granite Vision 3.2 2B, the 395 was up to 7x faster than the 258V, up to 4.6x faster in Google Gemma 3.4b, and up to 6x faster in Google Gemma 3 12b. AMD's benchmarks show complete dominance of its Ryzen AI Max+ 395 against the Core Ultra 7 258V in AI benchmarks. This is all thanks to the Ryzen AI Max CPU's significantly more powerful integrated graphics chip (which rivals discrete graphics with its 40 RDNA 3.5 CUs), eight more CPU cores, and its significantly higher configurable TDP (rated up to 120W). Even though it consumes significantly more power than the Core Ultra 7 258V (which has a max turbo power of 37W), both chips operate in the same market, and are compatible in the same thin-and-light category of laptop PCs. It will be interesting to see how the new AMD mobile APUs shape up against Nvidia's RTX 50-series mobile GPUs, which are reportedly facing supply chain issues, delaying their launch in upcoming RTX 50 series gaming laptops. On a pure performance level (not considering form factor), these new Nvidia-powered systems will be AMD's primary competition. AMD is allegedly well on its way to handling discrete GPU competition, as it already advertised superior AI performance on the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 against Nvidia's RTX 4090 laptop GPU.

Here’s a bit of budgeting magic for you gamers — you could drop $70 on one of the brand-new game releases like Assassin’s Creed Shadows, MLB The Show 25, or Hitman: World of Assassination. But if your monitor is weak, it would make so much more sense to chip in a few extra bucks and head to Amazon to grab the limited-time deal on this 23.8-inch ASUS TUF Gaming Monitor for just $99. Over 8,000 notoriously picky Amazon reviewers have given the ASUS TUF Gaming Monitor an outstanding average rating of 4.6 stars, and most of those probably came from gamers who bought the monitor at its full price of $159. When you see all the amazing features and perks of this 23.8-inch gaming monitor, you’ll see why. See at Amazon No Lag, No Hiccups, Just Speed Everyone knows the first number you check when you’re shopping for a gaming monitor is the all-important refresh rate. Simply put, that’s a measure of how quickly a monitor can refresh the image on the screen. If you’re gaming, that’s everything — a slow refresh rate means a laggy performance when speed is of the essence. The ASUS TUF Gaming Monitor clocks in at a screaming-fast 165Hz, with support for 144Hz. That’s a pro-level performance that will give you amazingly immersive gameplay. ASUS’s Extreme Low Motion Blur allows the monitor to deliver a 1-microsecond response time, and with Adaptive sync to eliminate ghosting and other visual shortfalls. The ASUS TUF also deploys AMD’s FreeSync Premium technology to create the most fluid gameplay possible, especially for super-fast games like sports or intense third-person shooters like Helldivers II. Total Focus at All Times Lesser monitors have so many little annoying pitfalls that you might not even notice until you play on an advanced pro-level monitor like the ASUS TUF. Choppy frame rates, or even something as simple as the dark areas being too dark and the light areas being blown out and overly bright, are hallmarks of an outdated monitor or one that’s nearing the end of its life. The ASUS TUF has among its many advanced features Shadow Boost technology to enhance the image details in dark areas — like the guy sneaking up on you from the shadows to take you out — and brings out the most detail in bright areas without reducing them to just an overlit blur. With support for both Adaptive-Sync with NVDIA GeForce graphics cards (including the GTX 10 and 16 series and RTX 20 series) and FreeSync with AMD Radeon cards, compatibility will not be an issue. That $70 game will still be around in a couple of weeks. This incredible $99 deal on the ASUS TUF 23.8-inch gaming monitor, however, probably won’t be. Choose wisely and head to Amazon now before that fat 38% limited-time discount is gone. See at Amazon

The 2021 Mortal Kombat remake was basically a prequel. It followed the evil head of the Outworld, Shang Tsung, who was trying to kill all of Earth’s fighters so they would be unable to compete in the titular tournament. He, of course, failed—and now in Mortal Kombat 2, out October 24, the tournament is on. Not only that, it’s also the driving narrative of the whole movie. “They keep score throughout the movie,” Ed Boon, co-creator of Mortal Kombat, told Entertainment Weekly. “There’s a visual representation of who is winning… It’s not just a tournament for the sake of a tournament. There are huge consequences, so you really are keeping score. And there are a lot of twists in it that keep you on your toes.” The wild character list is sure to also keep audiences on their toes. All the big characters from the first film are coming back, as well as a few who died. There’s Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), and Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), as well as Kano (Josh Lawson) and Kung Lao (Max Huang), who were both killed. They’re back, but we don’t know how just yet. They’ll then be joined by Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) and Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), who appearances were secret until today, as well as Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), who is apparently the key figure for the audience this time around. “[Johnny Cage’s] integration into the Mortal Kombat story and universe is a big part of what this movie explores,” Boon said. “He’s a washed-up Hollywood guy thrown into this magical, ultra-violent thing. Karl, his depiction of Johnny Cage is different than our games in some ways. He’s adding his own flare to it, but I think it’ll feel fresh. There’s like a novelty factor in there.” We have to imagine several of those are going to be the victims of brutal fatalities though as the field for the tournament keeps getting dwindled down and a champion is crowned. And that’s key too because if Earth loses the tournament, it’ll be the 10th in a row, which means the Outworld can take over the planet. So yes, the literal fate of the world is at stake in Mortal Kombat 2. Which of Earth’s fighters will step up and save us all? We’ll find out in a few months. Head over to EW for more on Mortal Kombat 2 including some new images of Cage, Kitana, Scorpion, and Shao Kahn.

Ever wondered what would happen if you fell into a black hole? According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, you would be crushed by the powerful gravity of its singularity: the center of a black hole where all matter—and time—is compressed into an infinitely dense point where space and time break down. New research suggests that, instead of leading to cosmic oblivion, black hole singularities mark a beginning rather than an end. In a study published March 11 in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, two researchers applied quantum mechanics to a theoretical model of a black hole. Their results suggest a possible transition, or bridge, from a black hole singularity to a white hole—a point that, instead of sucking everything into nothingness, spews time, matter, and energy back into the universe. “It has long been a question as to whether quantum mechanics can change our understanding of black holes and give us insights into their true nature,” Steffen Gielen, study co-author and a researcher from the University of Sheffield’s School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, said in a university release. “In quantum mechanics, time as we understand it cannot end as systems perpetually change and evolve.” Gielen and his colleague Lucía Menéndez-Pidal, a mathematician from Complutense University of Madrid, investigated quantum mechanics within the context of a planar black hole—a simplified, two-dimensional model often used to test theoretical ideas. While physically observed black holes are spherical, the researchers suggest that their results can also apply to real-world black holes. Rather than a black hole singularity, their approach indicates the existence of “strong quantum fluctuations,” which the release describes as “tiny, temporary changes in the energy of space.” Instead of space and time collapsing into nothingness, they are replaced by strong quantum fluctuations that may lead to a “transition” into a white hole. In a white hole, matter and time don’t end. As the theoretical opposite of a black hole, it could be where time starts. “Hypothetically you could have an observer—a hypothetical entity—go through the black hole, through what we think of as a singularity and emerge on the other side of the white hole. It’s a highly abstract notion of an observer but it could happen, in theory,” Gielen explained. The researchers also suggest an intriguing connection between time and dark energy, the theoretical force believed to be behind the universe’s accelerated expansion. “While time is, in general, thought to be relative to the observer, in our research time is derived from the mysterious dark energy which permeates the entire universe,” said Gielen. “We propose that time is measured by the dark energy that is everywhere in the Universe,” he added. “This is the pivotal new idea that allows us to grasp the phenomena occurring within a black hole.” Let’s return to the original question: what would happen if you fell into a black hole? Either you’re crushed into nothingness, or—according to Gielen and Lucía Menéndez-Pidal—you might pull a Matthew McConaughey and pop out on the other side, Interstellar-style.

In a post on Truth Social overnight, President Donald Trump claims that some pardons by President Joe Biden are “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” saying an autopen was used to forge the former president’s signature. Trump alluded specifically to Biden’s pardons for members of the House January 6th Committee, claiming that the pardon signatures had been “done by Autopen” and that Biden “knew nothing about them.” He added that “the people that did may have committed a crime.” However, the president offered no evidence that Biden was unaware of the pardon or that an autopen — a robotic device that mechanically copies a signature — had been used. Trump’s post echoes claims made last week by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which alleged that Biden’s signature on several pardons was identical, implying the use of an autopen. The New York Post further claimed that a Biden aide “made unilateral determinations” to sign documents using an autopen. The idea that Biden was unaware of these pardons, however, is contradicted by his public statements about them. In a January 20th statement on pardoning January 6th Committee staff and others, Biden said that although he felt that the recipients would “ultimately be exonerated,” investigations of them could “irreparably damage” their reputations and finances. In the years since losing the 2020 election to Biden, Trump has vowed political revenge multiple times. Before the Supreme Court issued its decision on presidential immunity, he told Time that depending on that decision, “Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.” As an NPR story last year describes, Trump has said similar things about Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as Liz Cheney, who served as the vice chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. His new Truth Social post, similarly, claims “those on the Unselect Committee” are “subject to investigation at the highest level.” Presidents and other politicians have long used autopens to sign documents, with President Gerald Ford having been among the first to admit to its use. President Barack Obama signed a bill remotely with an autopen in 2011, pointing to a Bush White House legal team memo that said the president could sign something “by directing another to affix one’s name or seal to the document in one’s presence.” As Bloomberg notes, the Justice Department also held in 1929 that “neither the Constitution nor statute prescribed the method by which executive clemency shall be exercised or evidenced. It is wholly for the president to decide.”

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Warner Bros. Discovery has removed the entire lineup of classic Looney Tunes shorts (1930-1969) from its streaming service, Max. The company confirmed the move to Deadline, saying the streamer will prioritize adult and family programming, rather than content for kids. This comes after Warner Bros. Discovery yanked hundreds of Looney Tunes episodes at the end of 2022, and later erroneously included the series in its list of titles leaving the platform. At the time, the company said Looney Tunes “will continue streaming on Max.” Newer Looney Tunes content, like Looney Tunes Cartoons released in 2020 and 2015’s New Looney Tunes, remains on Max. Max didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

The head of the Commerce Department’s ambitious plan to expand fiber internet access across rural America warned on Sunday that opening the door to SpaceX’s Starlink would leave rural Americans worse off. Evan Feinman, who directed the program for the last three years, wrote in a departing email to staff that Starlink’s satellite internet is “inferior” to alternatives, “delivering slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.” Elon Musk, along with Republications, has vociferously attacked the rural broadband program launched under President Biden, called the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD). Three years after launch, no internet expansion projects have begun with the program’s $42.5 billion in funding, though three states were awaiting final approvals just as President Trump took office. Musk has regularly used X to lambast the program, of course, while pushing his own Starlink service. Howard Lutnick, the new Commerce Secretary, has said the agency would review BEAD and remove burdensome requirements that have slowed down deployment as well as, crucially, eliminate any preference for fiber. “Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection,” Feinman wrote in his email, adding these states should be allowed to move forward with their plans while program changes remain in flux. Internet access, being just about as important as other basic necessities, is considered by many a utility today, but internet providers have not had much incentive to expand into rural areas that would be less profitable. BEAD was meant to address this with subsidies and incentives. Starlink is fast to deploy to households, as it only requires customers order a satellite dish from SpaceX, with installation completed in minutes. Broadband fiber, conversely, is labor-intensive and costly to deploy as it requires physically laying cable on power lines and into every home. Starlink can offer some impressive speeds in the range of hundreds of megabits, but typically not the 1 Gbps (1,000 megabits) or more offered by fiber optic, and latency is an issue given the limitations of sending signals to and from space. SpaceX may not need to lay cable, but must continuously launch new satellites into space as the old ones reach end-of-life, and the company is limited by regulators in how many it can place in orbit. Competition from Amazon and others is on the horizon, but has been slow-going. Starlink is generally more expensive than broadband fiber. The satellite dish itself costs $349 (sans promotions), with service typically going for $120 per month. Feinman argues that while fiber might be more expensive to deploy upfront, households will be left with faster and more affordable internet service for years to come. Elon Musk himself said from the early days that Starlink would never replace fiber broadband for those who already have it, as the service inherently has limitations that ground-based infrastructure does not. The service is a good option for remote areas without access to fiber, and SpaceX has partnered with cruise and airline operators to offer internet in moving vehicles. Starlink is good if it is the only option. If the government supports the development of broadband in rural areas, however, it would make Starlink a harder sell. By potentially eliminating the program’s preference for fiber, states might be pushed to adopt Starlink for its lower roll-out cost. “Reach out to your congressional delegation and reach out to the Trump Administration and tell them to strip out the needless requirements, but not to strip away from states the flexibility to get the best connections for their people,” Feinman wrote. Musk has claimed that he has not used his newfound influence in Washington for financial gain or self-dealing. Tesla sales might be falling precipitously due to his divisive brand, but President Trump recently ran a promotion for Tesla on the White House lawn. And at SpaceX, deals to replace other internet providers in government agencies seem to be moving apace. The FAA is reportedly looking to cancel a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon in favor of Starlink. Unfortunately for those in rural America, it looks like they may soon be forced to pay more for less because Musk has been able to use X as his megaphone to push his agenda and intimidate any Republicans who do not go his way.

Google Assistant is not long for this world. Google confirmed what many suspected last week, that it will transition everyone to Gemini in 2025. Assistant holdouts may find it hard to stay on Google's old system until the end, though. Google has confirmed some popular Assistant features are being removed in the coming weeks. You may not miss all of them, but others could force a change to your daily routine. As Google has increasingly become totally consumed by Gemini, it was a foregone conclusion that Assistant would get the ax eventually. In 2024, Google removed features like media alarms and voice messages, but that was just the start. The full list of removals is still available on its support page (spotted by 9to5Google), but there's now a new batch of features at the top. Here's a rundown of what's on the chopping block. Favorite, share, and ask where and when your photos were taken with your voice Change photo frame settings or ambient screen settings with your voice Translate your live conversation with someone who doesn’t speak your language with interpreter mode Get birthday reminder notifications as part of Routines Ask to schedule or hear previously scheduled Family Bell announcements Get daily updates from your Assistant, like “send me the weather everyday” Use Google Assistant on car accessories that have a Bluetooth connection or AUX plug Some of these are no great loss—you'll probably live without the ability to get automatic birthday reminders or change smart display screensavers by voice. However, others are popular features that Google has promoted aggressively. For example, interpreter mode made a splash in 2019 and has been offering real-time translations ever since; Assistant can only translate a single phrase now. Many folks also use the scheduled updates in Assistant as part of their morning routine. Family Bell is much beloved, too, allowing Assistant to make custom announcements and interactive checklists, which can be handy for getting kids going in the morning. Attempting to trigger some of these features will offer a warning that they will go away soon.

On March 17, six companies, Shuto Expressway, Shuto Expressway Technology, JDRONE, Aerosense, KDDI Smart Drone, and NTT Communications, announced that they had conducted a demonstration experiment of inspections using drones at night on the Shuto Expressway. Inspection using drones at night Inspection using drones at night The demonstration experiment was conducted on February 14th at Rainbow Bridge, a long bridge on the Metropolitan Expressway. We have verified automatic flights of approximately 2.8km round trip using drones. This was carried out as a "Demonstration of video visibility confirmation during night flights" and "Demonstration of long-distance flights that use multiple drone ports that can automatically take off and land and charge drones, and redirect between ports." We confirmed the usefulness of inspection methods in the event of a disaster, using footage shot with a drone. In addition to delivering stable footage in real time while flying autonomously over the highway at night, it also examined items such as broadcasting footage while flying under the elevated trains during the day and night, automatic takeoff, autonomous flight and automatic landing that travel from drone ports to and from different drone ports, flight information and video acquisition of simultaneously flying aircraft in real time, and centralized management. In the demonstration of reciprocating between drone ports, communication was interrupted in some footage, but communication with the Global Positioning System (GPS) was relatively good and there were no interruptions. The video can be checked in real time, and the results were found to be sufficient to understand the road conditions even at night.

On March 17, six companies, Shuto Expressway, Shuto Expressway Technology, JDRONE, Aerosense, KDDI Smart Drone, and NTT Communications, announced that they had conducted a demonstration experiment of inspections using drones at night on the Shuto Expressway. Inspection using drones at night Inspection using drones at night The demonstration experiment was conducted on February 14th at Rainbow Bridge, a long bridge on the Metropolitan Expressway. We have verified automatic flights of approximately 2.8km round trip using drones. This was carried out as a "Demonstration of video visibility confirmation during night flights" and "Demonstration of long-distance flights that use multiple drone ports that can automatically take off and land and charge drones, and redirect between ports." We confirmed the usefulness of inspection methods in the event of a disaster, using footage shot with a drone. In addition to delivering stable footage in real time while flying autonomously over the highway at night, it also examined items such as broadcasting footage while flying under the elevated trains during the day and night, automatic takeoff, autonomous flight and automatic landing that travel from drone ports to and from different drone ports, flight information and video acquisition of simultaneously flying aircraft in real time, and centralized management. In the demonstration of reciprocating between drone ports, communication was interrupted in some footage, but communication with the Global Positioning System (GPS) was relatively good and there were no interruptions. The video can be checked in real time, and the results were found to be sufficient to understand the road conditions even at night.

is a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge. Google is shipping the latest “experimental” features of its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model to more developers across all regions, and people are finding some concerning abilities that include editing out watermarks from photos. The company’s lightweight localized on-device AI model is now equipped with native image generation that can not only produce pictures from a text prompt but also let you conversationally edit images. Over the weekend, users found that it can also remove watermarks with precision, TechCrunch reports. Tools like Watermark Remover.io can already scrub marks from companies like Shutterstock, and a research team at Google built a watermark removal algorithm in 2017 to highlight the need for more secure protections. Conversely, some AI tools — like OpenAI’s GPT-4o — will refuse requests to remove them. Gemini 2.0 Flash, however, seems to be better than other options at removing complex watermarks like Getty Images stamps and filling in the image. After it removes the watermark, it will add a SynthID mark, effectively replacing a copyright mark with an “edited with AI” one. But it’s possible to remove AI marks using AI, too, as we’ve seen before with Samsung’s object erase tool. Users also noted that Gemini 2.0 Flash could apparently add recognizable images of real people like Elon Musk into photos, something that the full Gemini model doesn’t allow. Flash’s latest image features are only available for developers through AI Studio for now — so its apparent lack of guardrails isn’t quite open for everyone to use (or abuse). We’ve asked Google if there are protections in place to stop things like watermark removal but haven’t yet heard back.

is a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge. Google is shipping the latest “experimental” features of its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model to more developers across all regions, and people are finding some concerning abilities that include editing out watermarks from photos. The company’s lightweight localized on-device AI model is now equipped with native image generation that can not only produce pictures from a text prompt but also let you conversationally edit images. Over the weekend, users found that it can also remove watermarks with precision, TechCrunch reports. Tools like Watermark Remover.io can already scrub marks from companies like Shutterstock, and a research team at Google built a watermark removal algorithm in 2017 to highlight the need for more secure protections. Conversely, some AI tools — like OpenAI’s GPT-4o — will refuse requests to remove them. Gemini 2.0 Flash, however, seems to be better than other options at removing complex watermarks like Getty Images stamps and filling in the image. After it removes the watermark, it will add a SynthID mark, effectively replacing a copyright mark with an “edited with AI” one. But it’s possible to remove AI marks using AI, too, as we’ve seen before with Samsung’s object erase tool. Users also noted that Gemini 2.0 Flash could apparently add recognizable images of real people like Elon Musk into photos, something that the full Gemini model doesn’t allow. Flash’s latest image features are only available for developers through AI Studio for now — so its apparent lack of guardrails isn’t quite open for everyone to use (or abuse). We’ve asked Google if there are protections in place to stop things like watermark removal but haven’t yet heard back.

Formula 1's four-wheeled circus got underway this past weekend in Melbourne, Australia. Held on the roads around a lake in Albert Park, the track is one of F1's trickier challenges, made more so on Sunday thanks to rain that eased off before the start of the race, only to return with a vengeance a dozen or so laps before the end. It proved to be a tough day for four of the sport's six new drivers, as well as some more well-known names, and it gave us a clearer idea of the pecking order between the teams, at least for now. True F1 junkies were probably following the preseason test earlier this month in Bahrain, as the sport now helpfully shows those three days of running on its streaming platform. But those devoted enough to watch the cars circulate for hours with nothing on the line also know you shouldn't read too much into a preseason test, especially one held at a circuit that is unrepresentative of most of the others that F1 visits—and in unseasonably cold weather, to boot. Little has changed in the way of the technical regulations between the end of last year and the start of this one, other than an increasing scrutiny on the front and rear wings' ability to flex when they're not supposed to. Flexing or deflecting under load at opportune times reduces the drag and allows a car to go a little faster in a straight line for the same amount of power, giving that car an unfair advantage. It looked as if McLaren would be starting the season off with the fastest car and that both Williams and Alpine tested well, but with no way to know how heavy or light any of the cars were running, it was less clear how to sort the field properly.

In principle, "signing your identity verification" (PIN bypass) when making a credit card payment in-store will be abolished at the end of March. From April onwards, a PIN will be required for payments above a certain amount, so credit card companies are all warnings at once. This change is based on the Credit Card Security Guidelines published by the Japan Credit Association (JCCA). With the aim of enhancing security, the previously possible identity verification using handwritten signatures will be abolished at the end of March, and a PIN will be required from April onwards. In addition, "PIN-less" transactions, such as "Trades less than 10,000 yen require no PIN code" will continue in the future. In other words, you will need a PIN when using a credit card from now on. For users who have forgotten their PIN code, each company will provide instructions on how to request a PIN code. According to the companies that provide payment terminals, users of overseas credit cards, such as visitors to Japan, who cannot verify their identity using a PIN, can continue to use signatures to verify their identity. View current sales on Amazon

Many variables can affect the quality of a steaming cup of espresso, including so-called "channeling" during the brewing process, in which the water doesn't seep uniformly through the grounds but branches off in various preferential paths instead. This significantly reduces the extraction yield and thus the quality of the final brew. Scientists from the University of Warsaw have gleaned insights into the underlying physics of channeling that will help coffee lovers achieve more consistent results when brewing espresso. They presented their preliminary findings at the American Physical Society's Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, this morning. As previously reported, there's an official industry standard for brewing espresso, courtesy of the Specialty Coffee Association, which sets out strict guidelines for its final volume (25–35 mL, or roughly 1 ounce) and preparation. The water must be heated to 92° to 95°C (197° to 203°F) and forced (at a specific pressure) through a bed of 7 to 9 grams (about a quarter of an ounce) of finely ground coffee for 20 to 30 seconds. But most coffee shops don't follow this closely, as the brewing machines allow baristas to configure water pressure, temperature, and other key variables to their liking. The result of all those variations in technique is a great deal of variability in quality and taste. Naturally, scientists find this fascinating. For instance, in 2020, Christopher Hendon's lab at the University of Oregon helped devise a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup of espresso over and over while minimizing waste. Hendon is a computational materials chemist, and his lab holds regular coffee hours for the Eugene campus community. The researchers focused on an easily measurable property known as the extraction yield (EY): the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final beverage. That, in turn, depends on controlling water flow and pressure as the liquid percolates through the coffee grounds. Hendon et al. based their model on how lithium ions propagate through a battery's electrodes, akin to how caffeine molecules dissolve from coffee grounds. They concluded that the most reproducible thing you can do is use fewer coffee beans and opt for a coarser grind with a bit less water; brew time was largely irrelevant.

The eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have "sighted" a stupefacent disco galaxy, dating back to the primordial universe. It is an unexpected discovery, the result of the work of a research group coordinated by Weichen Wang and Sebastiano Cantalupo, respectively a signing of research and full professor at the Physics Department of the University of Milan-Bicocca. Until now, in fact, looking at the primordial universe, the JWST had detected much smaller galactic records than what we are used to observing in the local universe. The just identified galaxy, on the other hand, would be about three times larger than the previously discovered galaxies with star masses and similar cosmic times. The study has just been published in Nature Astronomy. A look at the past "When and how galactic records are formed, it is still an enigma in modern astronomy - says Cantalupo - The first years of observations of the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a plethora of galactic records in the primordial universe, which corresponds to a cosmic era of eleven billion years ago, or two billion years after the Big Bang. Before our observation, however only much smaller galactic records were discovered by JWST by JWST than we see in the local universe. For this reason, it was thought so far that the formation of the biggest records had requested most of the age of the universe ". To investigate this theme, the authors and authors of the study analyzed a set of data collected by the JWST, relating to a region of the sky that is located 11-12 billion years light away from us and which is incorporated into a structure that will probably evolve into a storage of galaxies. It is a very particular region of the universe, characterized by a high concentration of galaxies, gas and black holes. The "Cosmic Web" research group, which coordinated the study on the giant galaxy. Credits: University of Milan-Bicocca The newly discovered disc galaxy "Using the data of two tools - explains Wang - the Near -Infrared Camera and the Near -Infrared Spectrograph aboard the JWST, we identified the galaxies within this hyperdensive region". After that the researchers analyzed morphology and characteristics, up to identifying a surprisingly large galaxy, which have decided to call "Big Wheel" (panoramic wheel), precisely for its enormous size. "Big Wheel is about three times larger than the previously discovered galaxies with star masses and similar cosmic times, and is also at least three times larger than the current cosmological simulations - continues Wang - It is instead comparable to the size of most of the massive records seen in the current universe". Further spectroscopic analyzes then confirmed that Big Wheel is a disc that revolves like a spiral galaxy, that is, like the Milky Way, the galaxy that hosts us. The rapid and early growth of this disco galaxy could have to deal with the particularly dense environment in which it is located, hypothesize the authors, even if further data will be used to confirm this possibility. "Exceptionally dense environments like the one that hosts the Big Wheel remain a relatively unexplored territory - concludes Cantalupo - further targeted observations are needed to build a statistical champion of giant records in the primordial universe and thus open a new window on the initial stages of galaxies' formation".

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2011, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Frida Baby is upgrading a popular tool designed to help relieve an infant’s congestion with more power. The company says it sells over 4.7 million of its manual SnotSuckers every year, but for parents who are too grossed out at the thought of manually sucking snot out of a sick infant’s nose, the new $79.97 Electric NoseFrida Pro nasal aspirator does it automatically and more powerfully than the company’s other electric option. The Verge’s Allison Johnson has already thoroughly explained why sucking snot out of a baby or toddler’s nose is as important a task as it is an unpleasant one. A stuffed-up nose is not just uncomfortable for a child; it can also make it hard for them to eat, drink, and sleep. The NoseFrida SnotSucker comes highly recommended in parenting communities, but it’s a finicky device that requires a lot of manual suction and — more often than not — two adults to get the job done. The company already offers an easier-to-use electric version for $39.99, and other companies sell similar products. But Frida Baby says its new ENF Pro introduces two additional levels of suction power comparable to “hospital-grade neonatal aspirators.” A carrying case is included, and while the ENF Pro charges over USB-C, you’ll need to provide your own AC adapter. Image: Frida Baby Frida Baby hasn’t shared details on how much suction that actually equates to, but Dr. Noze Best, a company that also sells a hospital-grade solution, says the suction strength of its NozeBot is 585 mmHg, while devices like breast pumps are closer to 270 mmHg. What sets the ENF Pro apart from the NozeBot is that it’s an FDA-approved medical device that “meets stricter standards for safety and effectiveness than typical consumer-grade aspirators,” according to the company. The Electric NoseFrida Pro includes two swappable tips designed for infants and older children. Image: Frida Baby The process of clearing a congested infant’s nose can be stressful, especially for new parents when a child is already crying. To ease some of the discomfort of the process, the ENF Pro includes a soft tip that’s gentler for smaller noses, and a more rigid alternative that offers improved suction for older kids. An added finger loop facilitates one-handed operation, and all the parts that actually come into contact with nasal passages and snot can be washed in the dishwasher, so cleanup is mostly hands-off. Friday Baby says the ENF Pro can run for up to two hours on its rechargeable battery but doesn’t specify if that’s at full power or using one of the lower options of its five variable suction settings. It charges using the included USB-C cable, but you’ll need to provide an AC adapter or some other source of USB power.

Will they therefore be able to criticize and public to correct the route of a film that seems to be born under a bad star? Everything started from the announcement, in the summer of 2021, of the casting of Rachel Zegler as the protagonist, the Princess Biancaneve: many observers immediately criticized the choice by Disney to write an actress of Colombian origins for a "white" character by his own definition. The criticisms intensified after Zegler herself made several statements to the press in which she criticized the sexist system of the original fairy tale of the Grimm brothers and the animated film of 1937: "There is a great focus on her love story with a guy that clearly stalking them", said she, suggesting that the new Snow White would have had a role of greater action and self -determination, song like Someday My Prince Will how (my love a day will come). The remake therefore was criticized for the attempt to make a classic fairy tale "Woke". Also for topics related to the politically correct, the new live-action has also been criticized for the famous figures of the seven dwarfs. The actor Peter Dinklage, he himself a dwarf person, criticized this story in January 2022 he called "retrograde", especially for the childhood of Snow White's seven companions. In response to this, Disney had assured that he would do everything "to avoid reinforcing the stereotypes of the original animated, with a new approach and consulting members of the community". At one point some images had also circulated on the web, theoretically taken from the set, in which seven very different figures were seen that "reinterpreted" the seven dwarfs. In the end, it was confirmed that the seven dwarfs would have been recreated in computer graphics, similar to those of the original film, a move in turn highly criticized because it was considered a missed opportunity to write real dwarf interpreters instead. Geopolitics and in particular the war between Israel and Palestine also entered the race during the promotional campaign of the film. Gal Gadot, the actress chosen to interpret the bad queen Grimilde, is Israeli and in recent months it has been a very active voice in inviting governments to do more for the liberation of the hostages captured by Hamas on October 7th. For his part, however, Zegler called himself "pro-Palestina", reiterating his closeness to the Palestinian people in several posts. After Trump's victory he wrote, always on social media: "Trump and his supporters never know peace". Despite the apparently conflicting political ideas, Gadot and Zegler were seen together during the awards of the Oscars, even if on several occasions they promoted the film separate (however not unusual when you want to cover more places of promotion by dividing the cast). In short, Snow White has been talked about so far so far, in the hope that the images on the screen now speak.

Unless something drastically changes in the calendar year, confidently declaring that Earth is a planet in our solar system that orbits the sun wouldn’t land you in prison. Thanks to generations of egghead astronomers putting their collective noggins together, we all share the collective knowledge about our solar system. While the particulars of how scientists arrived at that truth sound boring on paper, this Netflix show’s fictional take on the matter is worthy of being an early lock for anime of the year. Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, animated by Madhouse, is a historical seinen drama set in Europe where the predominant thinking of society and Christianity at large believes in geocentrism. The Earth is at the center of the solar system because we are the main characters of the universe, and other celestial beings, including the sun, orbit around us. Anyone who dares say otherwise is deemed a heretic by the Inquisition, put on probation after extra-judicial torture, and burned at the stake should their zealotry remain unchanged. At the start of Orb, we follow a young man named Rafal, who prides himself on his reasoning and capacity for not rocking the boat. He’s book-smart enough to ace his college entrance exams and street-smart enough to spout socially acceptable answers his teachers want to hear about geocentrism. That is until a chance encounter with a scholar-turned-heretic pulls him into believing in heliocentrism—that planetary thing we all casually believe now—jumpstarting the anime’s fatal generation-spanning game of cat and mouse between the church and astronomers about how the universe works. Orb is an anime that feels like a mix of The Da Vinci Code‘s thrilling mystery, Attack on Titan‘s enthralling political tug of war, and Vinland Saga‘s rich character writing while bringing something all its own to the table. The show expands beyond Rafal’s contribution to heliocentrism—such as explaining how the Earth can move without us feeling it—through a succession of protagonists who revise, substantiate, destroy, adapt, and distribute the planetary model. These characters include the unlikely duo of a monk and a street fighter, an underappreciated fifteenth-century woman in STEM, a charismatic revolutionary, and a young Romani girl whose collective genius and incurable thirst for knowledge draw them into the orbit of heliocentrism. Despite their motivations for inheriting the theory varying—with some seeking capitalistic gain from selling it for profit—they all sacrifice life and limb to develop the theory under church persecution and pass it on to the next generation. Orb could have easily rested on the laurels of saddling its drama as a clear-cut black-and-white affair with an evil church and an altruistic group of astronomers butting heads for twenty-five episodes. Instead, the anime wisely explores why both sides would go to the extremes of putting their lives and the lives of others at risk for their beliefs. The overarching drama in Orb is not a case of Schrödinger’s depth, where planetary and monotheistic musings equate to a teenage atheist and an out-of-touch bible thumper clashing on social media. Although Orb‘s narrative framework is somewhat high-concept and heady to parse due to its dense, dialogue-heavy episodes, the anime excels by grounding itself as a compelling character study that celebrates the beauty of collective knowledge persevering through generations of persecution. Except for one protagonist who explicitly states they are an atheist, both sides of the argument strive to demonstrate the perfection of the universe. The Inquisition’s drive to stomp out heretics is driven by the notion that heliocentrism spits in the face of the Biblicism of Earth being the centerpiece of God’s perfect universe. To them, the rise of heliocentrism models is tantamount to saying there is something more ideal than the universe being centered on heaven and Earth. Meanwhile, Rafal and most of his fellow protagonists are driven by the desire to prove how perfect God’s universe is through the complex science and patterns of heliocentrism. The church’s archaic geocentrism is akin to forcing a puzzle piece into a frame that doesn’t fit. The major outlier to the show’s central conflict is also its most unique element: its central villain, Nowak. Not unlike Christoph Waltz’s haunting portrayal of Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds, Kenjiro Tsuda’s performance as Orb‘s resident boogeyman steals the show with every scene. Unlike the rest of the cast, Nowak doesn’t have an ideological dog in the race. He is merely an instrument of the Inquisition. In a single scene, Nowak transitions from a lackadaisical, carefree man to a ruthless mercenary willing to inflict extreme torture on men and children alike, to an extent that would make even the most radical inquisitor question their role in the cultural war. Orb is one of those anime where the action is both sparse and a violent exclamation point to the show’s intense verbal chess matches, double-crosses, and political subterfuge. The show’s capacity to conceive well-rounded characters throughout its numerous time skips, place them in the same room, and debate their ideals to perceived allies and enemies alike is more compelling than most fights in this year’s crop of anime. From start to finish, Orb is an anime that has the potential to stir one’s soul as effortlessly as the sun pulls the planets into its orbit. More people owe it to themselves to fall into its orbit and give it a watch. All 25 episodes of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth are streaming on Netflix.

A major update to GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) has arrived today. GIMP 3.0 has been finalized and released to relieve GIMP 2.10 from its duty as the premier free and open source image editing software for multiple platforms. We only recently crowned GIMP the standard for free image editors in a comprehensive comparison article. Now with version 3.0 hitting mainstream, it might become unassailable. (Image credit: GIMP.org) The GIMP Team's original focus with the introduction of the long-awaited version 3.0 of the photo editing application was to overhaul the user interface (UI). However, over the years since the last stable release, they have naturally piled up features, enhancements, and other tweaks. Starting with the interface improvements, the GIMP Team say that the move to the GTK3 GUI library means that there is now "much better UI scaling on Hi-DPI screens," which could be an issue with 2.10. Users will also benefit from mouse wheel flipping between dockable dialogs, better dark theme support, and a way to tone down motion and animation UI effects. Moreover, tablets are now better supported. The new application runs natively on Wayland (and X11), and there are a host of other fixes in this domain. Major new features The release notes for GIMP 3.0 are extensive, but we think the highlights of the new release, beyond the UI, include the addition of features like the non-destructive layer effects, improved color management, bolstered file format support, and refined text support. GIMP's mascot, Wilber, has also had a new lick of paint. The goodies don't stop there, as users will also see a multitude of usability improvements. Popular features such as Layers, Channels, and Paths have had developer attention, as have workflow concerns and shortcuts. It is also worth mentioning the introduction of off-canvas editing, where painting tools can auto-expand the canvas as you create. Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: GIMP.org) (Image credit: GIMP.org) Reenergized GIMP roadmap GIMP 1.X reigned over the free photo editor category for eight years, while GIMP 2.X lasted 20, but the team behind the application want "minor releases to be much more frequent," starting with version 3.X. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors The GIMP Team says that users should expect GIMP 3.2 within a year. There may be fewer features between point releases, but they should get to users sooner. Last but not least, GIMP users are encouraged to join the community UX Design group to shape the future look and feel of the software.

The moment of garden furniture is finally returning: here we are celebrating the stretch of the days, the awakening of nature and everything that can lead us to stay outdoors thanks also to the milder temperatures. Gardens, but also terraces and balconies, they fill again with life and adequately equip them is the best way to make it really exploited in all their potential. Depending on the space and the intended use, of course, different choices can be made, but there are a couple of general rules that can make us as a guidelines. Here then below all our tips to go without fail. The materials in the foreground Garden furniture are exposed to the sun, rain, wind and temperature changes between the heat of the day and the cold of the night. In short, not a small stress test, which does not admit the choice of materials not suitable for the purpose, cheap or arranged. For this reason, it is good to rely on brands specialized in the production of garden and outdoor furnishings that guarantee full resistance to weather, reliability and durability. Eye to the style Everyone has their own tastes of furniture, you know, but focusing on a sober style and as natural as possible is a good choice that rewards in the long term. Not for nothing, the Rattan and the synthetic materials that imitate him are among the most loved and used ever since they fit without forcing in the external environments and give a beautiful feeling of serenity and comfort that goes well with the relaxation that we seek in our outdoor moments. Types In the world of garden furniture, each piece is designed to merge with the natural environment and respond to practical and aesthetic needs. Among the most common types, we find first of all the sessions: from the elegant rattan armchairs intertwined with sofas in resistant and waterproof fabrics, ideal for setting up relaxing corners. Chaise Longue and deck chairs, with their ergonomic design, are perfect for sunbathing in total comfort. The dining tables cannot be missing, ranging from rattan to synthetic materials and aluminum, designed to live convivial evenings under the stars. For those looking for the shadow, the gazebos and the pergolas are transformed into real shelters, creating protected and welcoming spaces, while benches and garden beds add a touch of class and functionality. The best garden furniture according to Wired And here we are at the best garden furnishings. We made a diversified selection by type of product to give a taste of everything that can serve to furnish gardens, terraces and swimming pools with different materials and finishes, in classic or contemporary style, with compact or wider solutions, but always taking into account the reliability of the brand in proposing durable and safe materials.

Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model can reportedly remove watermarks from user-provided images and depict copyrighted characters/celebrities in generated images, claim users on Reddit (via ComputerBase). This includes licensed stock imagery found online, stamped with watermarks to indicate their copyrighted nature. This risks potential litigation from media licensing corporations. Limited testing on our end revealed that watermark removal was unsuccessful on several provided images, while the generation of celebrity images was possible. Back in December, Google introduced native image output with Gemini 2.0 Flash for testing. Just last week, this update was made accessible across all regions, free of charge, and includes a slew of new features such as: telling a story with pictures, conversational image editing, world understanding, text rendering, and more. AI image generators have consistently faced scrutiny regarding ethical and moral considerations. Companies like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI typically integrate a set of guardrails or a list of dos and don'ts in their models to combat the misuse of their technologies. The restrictions stretch wide, but the general prohibitions typically include depictions of celebrities and notably the removal of watermarks from copyrighted material. Recently, several Redditors found that Gemini's native image output feature extends to watermark removal from stock images, such as those from Getty Images, and celebrity image generation as well. In the first case, this probably violates multiple DMCA provisions as removing a watermark alters the CMI, which is information that identifies copyrighted work. The legality of generating celebrity images using AI is slightly more complex, primarily concerned over the protection of celebrities' rights of publicity and concerns surrounding deepfakes and potential defamation. Even so, the removal of the watermark doesn't change the fact the image is likely protected by copyright law. So you can't expect to use these images commercially, as you'd probably be hit with a barrage of DMCA claims. In most cases, individuals may desire to remove the watermark, if said image is intended for personal use-cases. Contrary to the Reddit thread, we were not able to remove watermarks from the same images, with Gemini responding, "Unfortunately, I cannot directly edit images." Conversational image editing works as intended in Google AI Studio, where Gemini managed to reproduce the image of a celebrity, so there's still some ironing out left to be done. It's important to note that Google has tagged the image generation feature of Gemini 2.0 Flash as experimental. This may be why it's only available in Google AI Studio and not on Gemini's main site and could also explain these lapses in judgment.

Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model can reportedly remove watermarks from user-provided images and depict copyrighted characters/celebrities in generated images, claim users on Reddit (via ComputerBase). This includes licensed stock imagery found online, stamped with watermarks to indicate their copyrighted nature. This risks potential litigation from media licensing corporations. Limited testing on our end revealed that watermark removal was unsuccessful on several provided images, while the generation of celebrity images was possible. Back in December, Google introduced native image output with Gemini 2.0 Flash for testing. Just last week, this update was made accessible across all regions, free of charge, and includes a slew of new features such as: telling a story with pictures, conversational image editing, world understanding, text rendering, and more. AI image generators have consistently faced scrutiny regarding ethical and moral considerations. Companies like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI typically integrate a set of guardrails or a list of dos and don'ts in their models to combat the misuse of their technologies. The restrictions stretch wide, but the general prohibitions typically include depictions of celebrities and notably the removal of watermarks from copyrighted material. Recently, several Redditors found that Gemini's native image output feature extends to watermark removal from stock images, such as those from Getty Images, and celebrity image generation as well. In the first case, this probably violates multiple DMCA provisions as removing a watermark alters the CMI, which is information that identifies copyrighted work. The legality of generating celebrity images using AI is slightly more complex, primarily concerned over the protection of celebrities' rights of publicity and concerns surrounding deepfakes and potential defamation. Even so, the removal of the watermark doesn't change the fact the image is likely protected by copyright law. So you can't expect to use these images commercially, as you'd probably be hit with a barrage of DMCA claims. In most cases, individuals may desire to remove the watermark, if said image is intended for personal use-cases. Contrary to the Reddit thread, we were not able to remove watermarks from the same images, with Gemini responding, "Unfortunately, I cannot directly edit images." Conversational image editing works as intended in Google AI Studio, where Gemini managed to reproduce the image of a celebrity, so there's still some ironing out left to be done. It's important to note that Google has tagged the image generation feature of Gemini 2.0 Flash as experimental. This may be why it's only available in Google AI Studio and not on Gemini's main site and could also explain these lapses in judgment.

Who needs friends when you can make your own using AI? That seems to be what maker and developer Pollux Labs has pulled off with their latest Raspberry Pi project. Using our favorite SBC and a little help from ChatGPT, Pollux Labs upgraded a rotary phone to interact with those who call using speech recognition and text to speech for responses. According to Pollux Labs, the project merges both vintage technology and the thrill of modern AI. To use the system, all you have to do is dial a specific number which then enables the speech to text function. You can talk with the ChatGPT AI in a full conversation that will be remembered so you can call again later and pick up where you left off. The phone doesn't work as a regular phone but rather is monitored entirely by a Raspberry Pi. When the receiver is triggered, a dial tone sound is played like you would normally expect. However, it's up to you to call the AI program and engage with a futuristic experience that can only be accomplished with modern LLMs and a spark of ingenuity. So while you do retain much of the original experience using the handheld speaker and rotary dial, there's a huge element of modernity oozing out of the system. Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: Pollux Labs) (Image credit: Pollux Labs) The project is driven by a Raspberry Pi 4B but you could get better performance using the latest Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi is housed inside of the old rotary phone along with a few components that bring the project together including a microphone that listens for audio which can then be parsed through the AI channel. The software was put together by Pollux Labs just for this project and is primarily driven by a Python script that interacts with other services like the Whisper API from OpenAI to handle the ChatGPT interactions. It also maintains the conversation history and converts responses from ChatGPT into speech for the rotary phone to output. If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project in action, you can check it out in greater detail over at the project page shared to Hackster .

On March 17, Hitachi Solutions announced a solution that supports the implementation of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) by visualizing the systems operated by companies and their actual operation. It will begin offering from the 18th. Prices are individually estimated. SRE is a method that optimizes system operational costs and speed-up based on visualized numbers while maintaining system reliability. The new solution will support SRE practices in businesses through the introduction of observability. An overview of site reliability engineering support solutions (provided by Hitachi Solutions) An overview of site reliability engineering support solutions (provided by Hitachi Solutions) Specifically, by utilizing observability platforms such as "New Relic," we can visualize the actual operational situation in addition to information related to the system, such as operations from browsers and smartphones, networks, infrastructure, and applications, by visualizing the actual operation, not only analyzing system failures, but also effectively analyze and improve operations. Hitachi Solutions will select the most suitable tool that suits the company's challenges and budgets, and will step up the automation of system operations in stages. In addition to system performance, it also provides dashboards that allow you to monitor the actual operational situation and its improvement effect, as well as regular reports from the company's engineers. The company is said to be able to assist engineers in implementing the SRE process over a long period of time, helping them to penetrate the company. According to the company, SRE is widely adopted by US IT companies as a method to maintain system reliability and meet the speed of change required in modern IT. On the other hand, SREs have not yet been fully popular among Japanese companies, and the reasons for this include a shortage of internal engineers, difficulty in in-house production, and resistance to sudden changes in operation.

On March 17, Hitachi Solutions announced a solution that supports the implementation of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) by visualizing the systems operated by companies and their actual operation. It will begin offering from the 18th. Prices are individually estimated. SRE is a method that optimizes system operational costs and speed-up based on visualized numbers while maintaining system reliability. The new solution will support SRE practices in businesses through the introduction of observability. An overview of site reliability engineering support solutions (provided by Hitachi Solutions) An overview of site reliability engineering support solutions (provided by Hitachi Solutions) Specifically, by utilizing observability platforms such as "New Relic," we can visualize the actual operational situation in addition to information related to the system, such as operations from browsers and smartphones, networks, infrastructure, and applications, by visualizing the actual operation, not only analyzing system failures, but also effectively analyze and improve operations. Hitachi Solutions will select the most suitable tool that suits the company's challenges and budgets, and will step up the automation of system operations in stages. In addition to system performance, it also provides dashboards that allow you to monitor the actual operational situation and its improvement effect, as well as regular reports from the company's engineers. The company is said to be able to assist engineers in implementing the SRE process over a long period of time, helping them to penetrate the company. According to the company, SRE is widely adopted by US IT companies as a method to maintain system reliability and meet the speed of change required in modern IT. On the other hand, SREs have not yet been fully popular among Japanese companies, and the reasons for this include a shortage of internal engineers, difficulty in in-house production, and resistance to sudden changes in operation.

Sumitomo Riko (Nagoya City), a major manufacturer of vibration-resistant rubber for automobiles, has introduced the security evaluation platform "Assured." Ashuard announced it on March 17th. Sumitomo Riko is promoting manufacturing innovation using DX, and the use of cloud services is increasing. We have been conducting security assessments up until now, but not only the research labor required for the time of implementation, but also the inventory and regular evaluation of services used would take a huge amount of labor. Therefore, it has been decided to introduce Assured to achieve efficient and highly accurate security assessments. Assured is a platform that visualizes the safety of cloud services such as SaaS/ASP. A specialized security assessment team investigates the security measures status of cloud services based on key guidelines and frameworks, and aggregates the evaluation results into a database, achieving efficient and highly accurate security assessments. Sumitomo Riko is expanding its business globally and is strengthening its cybersecurity measures, but the business area of ​​the information systems department is expanding, and it has been necessary to address a variety of areas within the limited number of personnel. By using Assured for security assessments and inventory when cloud services are introduced, the company hopes to review its operations to make it more efficient and allow for appropriate evaluations.

Sumitomo Riko (Nagoya City), a major manufacturer of vibration-resistant rubber for automobiles, has introduced the security evaluation platform "Assured." Ashuard announced it on March 17th. Sumitomo Riko is promoting manufacturing innovation using DX, and the use of cloud services is increasing. We have been conducting security assessments up until now, but not only the research labor required for the time of implementation, but also the inventory and regular evaluation of services used would take a huge amount of labor. Therefore, it has been decided to introduce Assured to achieve efficient and highly accurate security assessments. Assured is a platform that visualizes the safety of cloud services such as SaaS/ASP. A specialized security assessment team investigates the security measures status of cloud services based on key guidelines and frameworks, and aggregates the evaluation results into a database, achieving efficient and highly accurate security assessments. Sumitomo Riko is expanding its business globally and is strengthening its cybersecurity measures, but the business area of ​​the information systems department is expanding, and it has been necessary to address a variety of areas within the limited number of personnel. By using Assured for security assessments and inventory when cloud services are introduced, the company hopes to review its operations to make it more efficient and allow for appropriate evaluations.

Google’s Gemini AI model is reportedly being used to strip away watermarks from images even as the tech giant attempts to simplify the labelling of AI-generated content. Several users on X and Reddit have pointed out that Gemini 2.0 Flash is capable of removing watermarks from images published by Getty Images and other well-known stock media websites. The free-to-use, experimental image generation feature of Gemini 2.0 Flash is more skilled at watermark deletion than other AI tools, according to a report by TechCrunch.

On March 17, Sony Marketing and Hitachi Global Life Solutions (Hitachi GLS) announced that they will expand their joint logistics area in the domestic home appliance market. The Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba) and the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Shiga, Nara, Hyogo, Wakayama) areas will be added to the Hokkaido area, which has already been launched. In addition to mutually utilizing on-site repair services in some regions in the after-sales service field, the two companies have continued to collaborate in the sales and customer service field, including selling Sony's TV "Bravia" at the local electronics store "Hitachi Chain Stole." In April 2024, logistics warehouses were integrated in the Hokkaido area and joint delivery began. Approximately 80% of the amount of items delivered to mass retailers are jointly delivered. In the metropolitan area, a portion of Hitachi GLS's overseas production products that have arrived at Tokyo Port will be transported in containers to Sony Marketing's target delivery bases, and jointly delivered to mass retailer logistics centers. In the Kansai region, products that have been individually delivered from each base are delivered efficiently, such as collecting transport vehicles. In the future, we are also considering implementing similar initiatives nationwide, and we aim to improve transportation efficiency, improve domestic logistics issues such as driver shortages, and reduce the environmental impact.

On March 17, Sony Marketing and Hitachi Global Life Solutions (Hitachi GLS) announced that they will expand their joint logistics area in the domestic home appliance market. The Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba) and the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Shiga, Nara, Hyogo, Wakayama) areas will be added to the Hokkaido area, which has already been launched. In addition to mutually utilizing on-site repair services in some regions in the after-sales service field, the two companies have continued to collaborate in the sales and customer service field, including selling Sony's TV "Bravia" at the local electronics store "Hitachi Chain Stole." In April 2024, logistics warehouses were integrated in the Hokkaido area and joint delivery began. Approximately 80% of the amount of items delivered to mass retailers are jointly delivered. In the metropolitan area, a portion of Hitachi GLS's overseas production products that have arrived at Tokyo Port will be transported in containers to Sony Marketing's target delivery bases, and jointly delivered to mass retailer logistics centers. In the Kansai region, products that have been individually delivered from each base are delivered efficiently, such as collecting transport vehicles. In the future, we are also considering implementing similar initiatives nationwide, and we aim to improve transportation efficiency, improve domestic logistics issues such as driver shortages, and reduce the environmental impact.

Did you just buy a record player and realize you’re surprisingly low on music to play on it? You’re not alone: Everyone has to start their vinyl collection somewhere. That means getting some of your favorite music in analog format. While we always recommend you hit up a local independent record store when shopping for your next album, sometimes you want something very specific or hard to find, or you’re looking for vinyl records to send to friends or family. Here are the best ways to find those records online. Don't forget to check out the rest of our buying guides, including the Best Turntables and Best Bookshelf Speakers, and information on How to Set Up a Turntable. Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that's too important to ignore for just $2.50 $1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe Today. Screenshot courtesy of Parker Hall The center of vinyl collections the internet over, Discogs allows folks to buy, sell, and trade rare and desirable discs from their collections. This is the best place to find the coolest (and most expensive) albums and singles ever pressed to plastic. The store here sells all formats of music, from vinyl to cassettes and CDs, so you'll need to select the vinyl category before searching for whatever you are after. With over 11.5 million records in the United States alone, you're unlikely to run out of things you want before you run out of cash. Make an account, register your collection, and start searching for new gems to fill it out. Screenshot courtesy of Parker Hall I love searching Bandcamp for new musical gems to order for friends and family. If you're looking for truly independent music from all over the globe, select the Vinyl tab at the top of the homepage and get to listening. You may have to do a bit of digital crate digging to find something that you like, but that's the best part of visiting record stores in person anyway. Shop till your eyes drop.

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Xbox 360 modders have discovered a new way to get homebrew apps and games running on the console. A new software-only exploit known as BadUpdate allows you to use a USB key to hack past Microsoft’s Hypervisor protections and run unsigned code and games. Modern Vintage Gamer has tested BadUpdate and found that you don’t even have to open up your Xbox 360 console to get it running. Unlike the RGH or JTAG exploits for the Xbox 360, this BadUpdate method just requires a USB key. If you have the time and patience to get this running successfully, you’ll be able to run the Xbox 360 homebrew store which includes games, apps, emulators, utilities, and even custom dashboards. The Xbox 360 software-only exploit. Image: grimdoomer (GitHub) There are some limitations, though. If you want to take advantage of BadUpdate then you’ll also need to manually patch every executable you want to run on your Xbox 360. Modern Vintage Gamer says the exploit isn’t always reliable either, or takes some time to pull off. As this exploits Microsoft’s custom Hypervisor on the Xb0x 360, you’ll also need to run this exploit every single time you boot up the console. You’ll just need a USB key, the exploit code, and a trial version of Rock Band Blitz that helps enable the bypass. Modern Vintage Gamer walks through all the steps in his detailed YouTube video, and there’s a brief guide on the GitHub repository that houses this software-only exploit.

It works exclusively with the Linux variant of Akira. The tool cracks the encryption by brute force. The security researcher Yohane's Nugroho has developed a decryption tool with which files can be deciphered that were encrypted with the ransomware Akira. However, the tool that is available free of charge on GitHub is currently only working with the Linux version of the blackmail software. As Bleeping Computer reports, the researcher dealt with a decryptor tool for Akira after a friend asked him for help. The development of such a tool seemed possible that the AKIRA creates the encryption key using a timeline. Akria uses the timeline as a seed to create a strong, unpredictable encryption key. The encryption key, in turn, is individually created for each file from four different time stamps with the accuracy of a nanosecond. This already results in one billion options per second. In addition, according to NUGroHO, Akira encrypted several files at the same time by multithreading, which designs the determination of the correct time stamp even more complex. Nevertheless, the decryption tool relies on Brute Force to generate the necessary keys. The researchers' time stamps may be used by evaluating log files from the system of his friend by evaluating log files. The metadata allowed him to appreciate the times when the encryption was carried out. When it comes to estimate, his tool even takes into account different hardware profiles and encryption benchmarks. He finally tested how his tool works with the Cloud GPU service from Rundpod & Vast.ai. Specifically, sixteen Nvidia GPUs of the RTX 4090 Nvidia GPUs were used to uncover a decryption key within ten hours. Depending on the number of encrypted files, the entire process may need several days. According to Bleeping Computer, Nugroho hopes that GPU experts are able to optimize its code and thus improve performance.

That’s all, folks–as parent company Warner Bros.’ valuation of animation continues to be in rapid descent, the company has decided that the same weekend the Looney Tunes light up the big screen in The Day the Earth Blew Up would be the perfect time to remove every original Looney Tunes short from its streamer, Max. Deadline reports that the removal–which impacts almost 40 years’ worth of animated shorts from the 1930s all the way up to the late ’60s–is part of an ongoing reprioritization on Max to focus on adult and family content. While plenty of Looney Tunes series remain on the streamer for now such as The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, parts of New Looney Tunes, and Tiny Toons Looniversity, the franchise’s classic legacy of short form animation has been scrubbed entirely, coming even after Warner Bros. previously clarified plans not to remove the original shorts from Max in late 2023. It’s not the first time in recent memory that Warner Bros. has come under fire for how it’s treating the studio’s animated legacy. At the end of September 2024, Warner Bros. confirmed that it would shutter its classic-animation-focused streaming platform Boomerang entirely, and came under fire when it completely scrubbed the beloved Cartoon Network website of years of history to replace it with a landing page directing people to subscribe to Max–cutting off generations of flash games as well as free online access to a host of episodes from contemporary and recent series. But the move is also just the latest in an oddball relationship Warner Bros. has had with the Looney Tunes franchise in particular. The timing of Looney Tunes‘ animated origins being dropped from Max comes right as the franchise makes its long-overdue fully animated theatrical debut in The Day the Earth Blew Up–a release itself that Warner Bros. distanced itself from, first ordering the film for Max as a streaming original, and then selling the film to Ketchup Entertainment outside the American theater market for release after priorities shifted again. It also, of course, comes after the debacle that was Warner’s handling of live-action hybrid Coyote vs. Acme, shelved for a $70 million tax write-off amid reports that the studio allegedly obfuscated attempts to get the movie sold to other distributors. Time will tell just how things between Warner and one of its most legendary animated franchises continue to develop, especially while Day the Earth Blew Up remains in theaters. After that brief bright spot, who knows what’s next after this?

Today’s episode of Decoder is a little different, and I think it’s one of the more illuminating conversations I’ve had in a while. I’m talking to Evan Smith, the cofounder and CEO of Altana, a company that makes software to track and manage the global supply chain. Smith started Altana in 2019 because he predicted that the first wave of globalized manufacturing and free trade would come to an end, and companies would need powerful tools to adapt their supply chains as borders, tariffs, and tensions got more complicated. Here in 2025, that looks like it was a pretty good bet, even if the way it’s playing out is a little more stressful and chaotic than anyone really wants. The easiest way to think about Altana’s product is that it’s a map of the global supply chain — you’ll hear us call it that several times in this conversation. What that means is that Smith has a front-row seat to how things like Trump’s tariffs and isolationist trade policy are playing out in real time. So while we talked about Altana as a company a little bit, we really spent our time talking about where things like the iPhone are made and where they might be made in the future. Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here! You’ll also hear us talk a lot about China and how the Trump administration is focused on reducing our dependency on Chinese manufacturing — a goal that may or may not be possible on the kinds of timelines that matter to politicians, especially ones like Trump. Smith has a lot of insight here, and he’s very even-keeled about what Altana’s map of the world is showing us about trade policy and conflict between major powers like the United States and China. There are some big, unsettling ideas here, but talking about them directly and with clarity at least made me feel like I had a framework to understand the endless on-again, off-again tariff news cycle. Oh, two notes before we start. You’ll hear us mention John Mearsheimer, who really was my international relations professor at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s. Mearsheimer is a famous proponent of what’s called realism, a philosophy that says great-power competition dominates world affairs. The other note is that you’ll hear us talking about China being granted membership in the World Trade Organization in 2001. That probably seems like a bit of trivia now, but it was a major political decision at the time — a decision that you’ll hear Smith characterize as the end of the first wave of globalization and the end of the post-WWII world order. You can certainly argue with that characterization, but it’s worth calling out because it was indeed a major, controversial decision at the time. There’s a lot in this one; I’m very eager to hear what you all think about it. Okay: Altana CEO Evan Smith. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Evan Smith, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Altana. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you for having me. I am excited to talk to you. Altana builds software that helps people think about supply chains and logistics. There’s a lot to talk about there. I was reading the company’s manifesto, which you wrote in 2022. You founded the company in 2019 on the thesis that globalization as we knew it would break down and change, and Altana could build some software to help people in a new era of globalization. That bet seems very prescient right now — but also maybe a little bit destabilized, given how globalization might change. Explain what you mean by that manifesto, that founding statement that globalization is breaking down. The premise was that the side effects and the unintended consequences of globalization since World War II were creating its demise. That breaks down into a few dimensions, principally around geopolitics. So it’s the US and China playing out a great power competition principally in the supply chain and economic theater. We can go back to that—the other one’s around climate. So you had this race to the bottom, where everything was outsourced to the lowest cost, just-in-time manufacturing locations, and the world’s physical production became dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. And you have these increasing climate dislocations and the policies, and the corporate actions, and the capital market actions that are following as a result. The third one was around the destabilization of the middle class of the West. So if you have a rapid sort of outsourcing and a collapse of manufacturing, then the point of view was you’re going to have a populist response. And I think we’ve seen that play out. The fourth thing we said was that these just-in-time supply chains are only economically efficient under conditions of stability. Because of reasons one through three, our point of view was that the world was getting a whole lot less stable. Therefore, the supply chain itself — the fabric of the world’s physical economy — was going to break down. And I think that’s borne out since COVID. We didn’t literally predict COVID-19, but we did predict the fragility in the system. I am the editor-in-chief of The Verge; I often think about things in terms of the iPhone. I’m a kid of the ‘80s and ‘90s. I remember Ross Perot saying that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, would lead to a giant sucking sound of labor being moved to Mexico. I think a lot of people believe that it played out exactly that way. But at the same time, you also get the ability to make a product like the iPhone, which is just inherently global. It’s manufactured in several countries around the world, principally in China, but lots of parts flow back into China so Apple can make that product. They make it at an enormous scale. But then you can look at the Tim Cook era, and you can say from one perspective, “He increased Apple’s stock price.” But from another perspective, you can look at it and say, “Oh, the iPhone has actually prevented the great power conflict,” right? Everyone wants an iPhone. If the Chinese government somehow makes it impossible for people to buy iPhones in China, that would be bad. If the US government makes it impossible for US customers to buy the iPhone, that would be bad, and both economies would crash. And that’s going to keep us from being in a war. And again, I’m a kid of the ‘80s and ‘90s. When I was in college, John Mearsheimer wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which is a big book that predicted the United States and China would go to war, and the next day was September 11th, and then that whole thing got sent to the side. Now maybe we’re back to it, but I just look at all of that, and your thesis, which feels correct, like it’s being borne out, and I’m like, “Oh, this thing is actually being held together by some consumer products.” Making those consumer products and making our economies interdependent is the thing that keeps us from going to World War III. Are you all the way there? Are you building software to be like, “Okay, I’m going to try to hold this together a little bit longer?” I’m building software and AI to help the public and private sectors navigate that dislocation and hopefully build resilience and some amount of decoupling without it resulting in a hot war. But look, the version that you described of the economic ties that bind, I too kind of had that economic worldview. I got an economics degree from Yale in 2007, so at the absolute apex of the neoliberal and kind of neoconservative worldview, where… I literally went to school with Thomas Friedman’s daughter, and I read all of his books. His famous thing was the Golden Arches theory, right? Countries that have McDonald’s don’t go to war with each other, which was true then. So, the premise was that free trade and economic interdependence result in peace between nations. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve kind of watched the world progress, studied more of history, and read some Mearsheimer, and I’ve actually kind of come to the exact opposite view — meaning peace gives rise to free trade and not the other way around. When there is an equilibrium in the whole global geopolitical great power competition, then what you see through history is that trade progresses between nations; and then in the moments of disequilibrium and big shifts in power, those become more violent. Then trade collapses. And so, my fear right now is that we’re in a disequilibrium. You have a rising great power. You have multipolarity with Russia and the EU asserting themselves in different ways, and the US, at least on a relative basis as a declining power, is no longer the single global hegemony. Over the last 15 years, if you look at the world, it’s in a state of disequilibrium, and I see the tariff issue. I see all this trade policy and volatility. I see all the economic security policies and industrial policies following as a result. So it’s all sort of nested within that big geopolitical circumstance. When you think about the thesis of Altana, in which you identified that globalization is running one version of its course, and there’s going to be a next version... I’m reading your manifesto. Your idea here is: We’re going to need a lot more data so we can build supply chains across our partners that we trust, across actual suppliers that we trust, so we can see the social costs in other countries of outsourcing or the social cost of outsourcing labor to other countries. I look at that, and what I see is, “Oh, we should make globalization better.” It’s changing. There are some great power dynamics, but we are still going to have this. I look at the Trump administration and the imposition of tariffs, and the idea that we’re going to annex Canada, and we should stop it, right? The response from basically every member of the Trump administration to the question “Are tariffs going to cross prices to go up?” Is, “Well, then you should manufacture it here.” That seems wholly unworkable to me. Again, I just go back to the iPhone. I’ve listened to every explanation from every Apple executive, from Steve Jobs on down, about why the iPhone can’t be built in the United States of America. And they seem correct. I take them at their word that if they could solve the problem, they would. And yet the Trump administration seems to think that just by turning the knob on costs they will be able to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Do you think that’s possible? I think it’s certainly possible to bring some manufacturing back to the United States. I also think it’s possible to bring a lot more manufacturing into North America. So, in other words, we’ll do some things more and better, and you have both the labor cost environment and the national security, or sorry, the natural resources, starting in southern Mexico and going north. You have that stratification of low-cost, relatively low-skilled labor going to higher-skilled, higher-cost labor, and you can manufacture most of everything that the United States consumes in our backyard, so to speak. So that’s just sort of a fact of the market around us. Will that happen entirely? No. And will that happen immediately? No. So then, what’s the policy objective of the Trump administration? I’m not in the Trump administration, so I won’t speak to it with total authority, but I have spoken with people who are in the Trump administration, and I think there are two key themes. One is yes, absolutely, there’s a motivation to bring manufacturing back to the United States and back within the USMCA, which is the US, Mexico, Canada Free Trade Agreement that replaced NAFTA under the first Trump administration. Which might be again replaced by the annexation of Canada. Even that doesn’t seem like a stable foundation, but okay, continue. We’ll take it, but some people in the Trump administration published that data. Objective number one. Right. So, theatrics aside, policy objective number one is that we want to bring industry back generally, and we want to rebuild a middle class. It’s an industrialization initiative, and they want to do that by creating trade barriers. The Biden administration had a similar objective, but they did that through very large-scale subsidies and industrial policy initiatives to direct capital toward those industries they wanted to see in America. So that’s thing one. The second thing is there’s a very clear objective, which he’s given to his policy team, to be strategically decoupled from China in critical industries by the end of his term. Critical industries — a kind of policy-speak for things that matter a lot, like food, telecom, aerospace, defense, and advanced electronics. The things that we couldn’t do without. Everyone’s less concerned about toys and apparel and more concerned about the things that are critical to our economic and national security. He’s told his team that within four years, we need to bend the supply chain such that the United States no longer has these fundamental dependencies on China. So that’s going to impact everything from critical minerals to chips to everything downstream of those, like pharmaceuticals. It’s a huge, huge economic policy objective with sweeping consequences for the private sector. I want to hold on discussing China for one second because I want to come back to it and talk about it in depth. Altana builds software that helps people see these supply chains. Describe how you build the software and what it does for your customers because I think understanding your viewpoint and your visibility into these supply chains will help me understand how you can see the shift from China in real time. The whole world’s a supply chain. At the base level, what we do is model the whole physical world of companies making things and buying and selling them from other companies. So it’s like a bottom-up, Google Maps-style view of all the companies — where they operate, what they make and sell, and the connections between them. In the same way that Facebook built a social graph that connects everybody within six degrees of Kevin Bacon, and LinkedIn is our professional relationship graph which shows how you’re connected to all your colleagues and counterparts… We’re doing the same thing but at the scale of the whole global supply chain network. So that’s the foundation. And the way that our customers primarily use that is to understand and manage what are called value chains. This matters in the context of the globalization discussion we were just having. So, what’s a value chain? A value chain for any product is the whole network of production all the way back to the soil. Let’s take the iPhone: The silicon comes out of the ground, it turns into chips, and it turns into all the logic in your phone. The graphite comes out of the ground, the aluminum comes out of the ground. The whole system of raw materials through the intermediate goods, through the final assembly, and the sale and end use of the product is called the product value chain. We make it possible to know and manage that whole network for all the products in the world, and it sits on top of that map of the world that we’ve built. So why is that novel? Because of globalization and outsourcing. There was a deliberate move to outsource that whole value chain. The whole theory was that we should only do our comparative advantage. We should only do the most specialized version of that within our borders, and everything else got outsourced and outsourced and outsourced and outsourced. So it became impossible to really know your supplier’s supplier or your supplier’s, supplier’s supplier, and even in the other direction. Western electronics companies keep seeing their stuff get into Russian weapons systems. Well, they’re mostly not selling to Russia, so it’s that customer’s, customer’s, customer that’s receiving the electronics, right? That’s the value chain. We make it possible to know that and to map it, manage it, and actually collaborate with those value chain partners. The story I like to tell is in the 1950s, Ford Motor Company used to own the entire value chain of its cars. They owned rubber plantations in Brazil to make tires, and now they just do the final assembly. So that’s the point. Boeing doesn’t own its value chains anymore. They can’t even make an airplane. Ford is in the final assembly business. Apple doesn’t even manufacture anything; they just create the software and the designs, and everybody else manufactures it. So what we’re doing at our core is we’re kind of making it possible to do what the industry used to do, which is to see and connect and have some control over that whole network. In our case, you don’t have to own the whole network. You can illuminate it to see the compliance, security, and resilience dimensions of it. And we can actually give our customers the ability to map, manage, and collaborate across that whole network. So you collect a bunch of data from across these value chains from different suppliers. Why do these companies give you that data? They don’t share it in the broadest sense. What they’re doing is they’re connecting to a network that we provide. And the thing we built the company around, the core invention of Altana, was that everybody could kind of keep their data sovereign, siloed, private, and connected to the network, and we’d sort of solve for both at the same time. What that means practically is that it’s like a hub-and-spoke federated data model. So we provide the shared map of the world and all the software and AI systems in the hub, and our customers keep their data in a spoke, and we bring the platform down to their data and not the other way around. There’s a Maersk spoke, there’s an LL Bean spoke, there’s a General Atomic spoke. None of those customers are sharing all their raw data with each other. They’re not allowing us to pool it all centrally, but what they are doing is subjecting their data to the network; they’re connecting their data to our platform, and they’re seeing how they fit within the broader network. We learned from that. We build out the network connections, and we train AI systems, and that all adds up to a model where every customer that joins adds to the visibility, connectivity, and intelligence for all the other parties. Put that into practice for me. Let’s just use LL Bean. LL Bean wants to manufacture some more hats for the stores for ski season. What does Altana help them do? LL Bean tends to know not just the garment manufacturer it buys from and has a direct relationship with, it will also sometimes know the textile manufacturers that feed into those garment facilities. What it doesn’t know is everything upstream of that. It’s like, where does the cotton come from? Where does the polyester come from? Where does the zipper come from? At the base layer, we just help them answer the question: What’s the whole network of the value chain for every one of my goods, all the way back to the soil? They’re motivated by a few things. One is ensuring that their goods are compliant and free of forced labor. So speaking of trade barriers, that was a big one that happened in 2022. The US banned all imports of goods into the United States that have any of that upstream value chain content coming from Shenzhen, China. So it’s a rebuttable presumption that the Uyghur forced labor issue was sort of infecting all those goods. So that’s a big one. You literally can’t import to the United States, and they’ve had detentions; everybody in the industries had detentions. And so, navigating through that, making sure the value chains are healthy and compliant, and that you don’t have these big multi-million dollar, tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of border interruptions and delays. So that’s one. And now they’re expanding that to look at all things sustainability in their value chain. So how do you use Altana to understand your carbon footprint? How do you understand the workers’ rights and ecological impacts of production, all the way through the chain, and on and on and on? We become that sort of foundational network that they use to not just see the whole global value chain network but then engage it and make it better over time. I’m still just thinking about the incentives to expose any data to your network. I get it at the top level, right? A car company or a shipping company at the top level wants to see all this data, but then you need information from the lowest levels of that from the soil. Why does the big industrial producer in China want anyone to know where its products are coming from? I’m not sure they do in all cases, but what’s interesting is they now have to in more and more cases. The big arc of policy here, whether it’s tariffs, forced labor bans, or a carbon border adjustment in Europe… I can paint a big picture, but in the last two years alone, there have been 1,200 net new trade barriers added. And basically, what it says is that if you want the downstream goods, the car, the iPhone, or the clothes to make their way into the UK, the US, Europe, Australia, or Canada, then the large upstream manufacturer has to disclose all this information about your goods and your production practices. That’s always been a little bit true in the context of moving goods across borders. There are certificates of origin and customs classifications that depend on the nature of the goods, and that’s how you pay your tariffs and duties. And you give the Food and Drug Administration the certificates and permits. That all is kind of business as usual. What’s so different over the last few years is they’ve created so many new and more stringent requirements on that whole upstream value chain, saying, “You have to share this information with us, you have to make these declarations, and it’s a matter of market access.” So your customers and your customers’ customers can’t get their goods into the biggest markets in the world without it. When you look at what Altana provides in that, that’s a problem to be solved. You can say, “Okay, well, add some software to make it easier to share data better.” You’re also talking about adding AI to it. What kind of insights are you generating from collecting all this data? It seems like you have an enterprise data provisioning problem, but then you also, generally with AI, want to see all the data and collect an insight [from it]. It seems like there’s a tension between wanting to see the information across the whole network and actually generating insights. Where do you get the data, and what kind of insights do you generate? We get the data across both the publicly available and commercially purchasable universe of data. I mean, we spend a lot of money bringing all the data to us that we can get our hands on. And then, as I mentioned earlier, every customer that joins the platform is connecting their data to that model of the world, and then it’s subjecting their data to that whole framework of visibility and shared learning. So we’re now at the place where roughly half of all that supply chain connectivity, all the supply chain visibility, is coming from our customer network itself. That’s another way of saying that we’ve doubled what you can theoretically do by going out and scraping the internet, getting publicly available data, and licensing data from commercial vendors. So we’ve exhausted what you can do in the public domain, and we’ve now about doubled that, and the lead keeps compounding. We use AI to connect all that data together. So it’s billions and billions of data points. It’s really messy stuff. It’s in Chinese, Cyrillic, and Spanish, so it’s in many different languages. You don’t have the benefit of unique IDs, like you do in personal data, where an email address or a telephone number can help you join all the records together, like Nilay or Evan. In the world of businesses and transactions, purchase orders, and shipments, you just have this messy, semi-structured text. You need AI to process all that data and connect it into one clean, unified representation of the world. We’ve been building our own homegrown AI systems since day one to do that. Then, you need AI to map out those value chains. So that’s where we’ve invested really heavily over the last few years. We can almost instantaneously illuminate the inputs and outputs of anybody’s products across the whole global network with very, very high fidelity. So that’s always a jaw-dropping wow moment with customers, where it’s like, how could you possibly know this, and how could you possibly draw these connections? And then, on top of that foundation, we have AI systems that are doing everything from detecting single points of failure and business interruption risks. We can look at the whole network and say, “Here are upstream suppliers that are at risk of failing financially, just by sensing what’s happening in the supply chain.” That’s been one of our crazy success stories over the last year, just seeing the model perform on that. We have AI systems that automate all of the cross-border tariff and customs compliance work and all the logic associated with that. So that’s a $150 billion per year industry — just humans reading text about the nature of the goods and then assigning them the codes when they come across a border that say, “Here’s the tariffs and duties, and certificates, and permits.” So we have an agentic AI system that’s doing all of that. You can put the customer’s broker in the loop and give them ultimate control, but that’s become wildly performant. That’s not the whole list, but the point is that it’s AI constructing the map. It’s AI to show the customers how they fit inside of the map, what are the networks that are relevant to them, and then also AI that generates insight and automates entire workflows. Let me ask the two Decoder questions, and then I want to put all this into practice with what’s happening in trade right now. How big is Altana right now, and how have you structured the company? We’re about 240 people and our two primary lines of business are enterprise and government. We then have financial services partners and logistics partners through whom we service the enterprise. So, they connect to our platform to better serve their customers and connect them to the network. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework? This has evolved pretty meaningfully in the last few months. So, where I have little depth or relatively little depth, depending on the team around me, I try to speak last and ask questions, and then decide when I need to break ties or move the group forward. And then, the net new thing over the last couple of months is permitting myself to be very decisive when I’m deep in the details and driving the company forward that way. So I’ve actually leaned in pretty aggressively on product management and some big audacious product bets we’re making right now, and a lot of the network architecture we’re building to connect the public and private sectors into this whole global value chain network. And so, on those two dimensions, I’m highly opinionated, and I’m driving very, very fast decision-making by doing it myself and bringing groups along with me. Do you think that’s reflective of the fact that the foundation of the entire global economy seems to be changing very quickly? It’s a big part of it. We started the conversation where you’re like, “Hey, all these things seem to be coming true,” and that’s true. Our lived experience is that these things we kind of expected would be relevant products that could exist on top of our platform... Over time, we’ll do this, and then we’ll do this, and we’ll do this. There’s demand for most of it right now. And so, the big scramble in Altana is like, how do we launch new software? How do we meet the demand? How do we get out there, and how do we do this from a unified base? I’m finding myself in wartime mode and calling a lot of shots to get through that stuff with velocity. How real-time is the insight you get? You mentioned being able to detect when an upstream provider might be failing, right? Is that in real time? Is that… You wake up, and there’s a map, and there’s a blinking red light, or is it on a trailing basis? It’s actually a spectrum. So some of the data we process is — I think of it as negative latency. You see the intent of a transaction before it occurs in real life through what are called booking requests and shipping instructions. That could be a thing that will happen five weeks from now. And then, we get the shipment itself, and then we get the customs entry associated with the shipment. So you see this life cycle of the supply chain activity. We also have real-time event feeds through a partnership with Dataminr, and we can overlay that on the whole map of the world and contextualize that for our customers. You see some things that kind of develop over time — in that, you need more pieces of data, pieces of signal to kind of build up a broader picture you feel good about. So it’s really a spectrum. There are some things that you can see far ahead of the curve. It’s totally predictive. Some of it is more… there’s something sort of taking shape in the network, and then some of it is sort of post-factum. All right, let me put all of this into a blender. I think I’ve got a sense of the company and what you can see. Trump announces tariffs; 24 hours later, he walks back the tariffs, and then he announces them again. Maybe they’re on. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, shows up on CNBC and says they’re going to go away. Do you see that reflected in the data? Do you see that across the network? What does that look like? Do you see the aftershocks of it? Do you see the supply chain reconfiguring? Yes and yes. And this goes back years because the first Trump administration was the first to go hard with tariffs, and Biden continued it. So yeah, you do see a couple of things. The obvious one is for the goods that have tariffs applied. You see a redistribution of imports associated with the tariffed goods from the tariffed countries, and then this is kind of obvious, but it’s either going to be manufactured locally, or it’s going to come from other places where the tariffs don’t apply. The more interesting thing that you see is that the ownership structures associated with these big global supply chain networks change, and so does the nature of the value chains. So what happened in Trump’s first term, when there was a bunch of Chinese economic policy and trade barriers that were put up, was you saw a big shift in Chinese supply chains going to Mexico and Canada, where two things happened. In one case, they would just do final assembly, so they’d ship all the refrigerator parts to Mexico, turn it into a refrigerator, and then import it into the United States under USMCA and not pay tariffs. The other version of it was through what’s called the e-commerce de minimis threshold, where the premise was like, if the goods are under $800, we don’t need to do a whole customs entry, pay tariffs, and put a trade compliance process in place. Let’s just rip it into the country and get consumers what they want. So then, unsurprisingly, you had these mega warehouses built up on the Mexican and Canadian borders, where they were drop-shipping items under $800, or even components that were sort of disassembled so that each of them was under $800 and then imported into the United States through that loophole. Both of those things are coming to an end, and it’s obviously a little chaotic, but I see the whole USMCA tariff thing through those lenses. And the other thing I should say is that it’s really interesting when you see the ownership networks because we map those too. You’re seeing all these Chinese companies open Mexican and Canadian subsidiaries to import goods from themselves and then bring them into the United States, subject to those exemptions I just spoke to. Is that what’s driving all of the posturing towards Canada and Mexico? Is it an underlying sense that China’s actually taking advantage of those agreements? Yeah. I have to get a little wonky to argue the case. So yes is the answer, and if you look at where the tariff thing landed, and again, by the time this airs, who knows where we are, but where it landed three or four days ago was they said, “Okay, we’re going to do the 25 percent Mexico and Canada tariffs for any goods coming into the United States that are not registered under the USMCA.” That was fine print in the announcement. That is pretty consequential. What that means is that companies that bother to prove that the material origin of their goods is within the value chain definitions of the USMCA — again, this is the free trade agreement that replaced NAFTA — those companies and products are not subject to the tariffs. That’s roughly 40 percent of Mexican and Canadian trade with the US. So the 60 percent that hasn’t done the work, to say the raw materials and the intermediate goods are all eligible as per the USMCA — and they’re part of our free trade world — those 60 percent of goods are still subject to the 25 percent tariffs. At the same time, they hit China with extra tariffs. So they’ve now done two, a 10 percent and another 10 percent on all Chinese imports. The dotted line through all those things is that the Trump administration is trying to bring Mexico and Canada into tighter alignment with the United States and its trade policy vis-à-vis China. And all of that is to say, we want more manufacturing here in the North American continent and to get away from China. You’ve got a big map of the world. You see the value chains, you see where things are manufactured. If you just look at where all the puzzle pieces are today, can you actually accomplish that in four years? Can you decouple the United States from China at the end of Trump’s term? You said that was the goal, and I don’t know how to take those Jenga blocks and make that tower. I know how to knock the tower down; that seems very obvious to me. But I don’t know how to make the tower or make a new tower. What I believe is that they’re going to try, and then in some cases, you’re talking about billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars of capital expenditure (CapEx) in the ground in China. Some of the biggest chemical companies in the world have manufacturing locations in China that feed into all of our pharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing processes. Is that kind of CapEx possible to replicate elsewhere within a four-year timeframe? That’s going to be pretty tough. Do we even have the capital to do it? There’s a lot of capital sloshing around the world. Yeah. Yeah. So, should the US government invest in that, and will it? Certainly not in this administration. It will not do that, right? I suppose the operative part of my question there was the “we.” There is a lot of capital, but do we in the United States have the ability, the will, or the coordination to do it? That seems up in the air. I do think, philosophically, what this administration is saying is rather than the Biden approach of using mostly incentives and capital to build the things that we want here… So the IRA, the CHIPS Act... those deployed a lot of capital and loan guarantees and other ways to kind of subsidize and motivate the manufacturing of those things here. What this administration is doing is saying, “We’re going to use trade barriers to restrict the market access of competitive products,” and a lot of it’s aimed at China obviously, “and we’re going to let the market figure out the rest.” So we’re going to create the barriers. We’re going to distort supply and demand and then let capitalism figure it out from there. On what timeframe do you think capitalism figures that out? Again, I’m just looking at Altana’s product, right? You have a view of this system and how it reacts to different kinds of shocks. What timeframe do you think that we can figure this out? It is just a spectrum. I mean, a lot of these things are already in motion, so you’re just accelerating the near-shoring of advanced electronics. You’re accelerating the near-shoring of automotive supply chains. The pharmaceutical CEOs I’ve talked to in the last six months have already been talking about creating new manufacturing locations outside of China for all their key stuff. Some of these things are going to move a lot more quickly, and some of these things are going to be pretty tough. I think for those examples where you just have massive CapEx in China, it’s really hard. And I think the most intractable one, honestly, is what are called critical minerals. It is rare earths, which we all have heard of, and then the other metals that go into all of our most important electronics. So, think nickel. Nickel’s not rare, but it’s critical. And China has a virtual lock on all of the world’s critical mineral processing. They don’t have a lock on the raw material itself. The raw materials are pretty pervasive. They’re abundant. China, over the last 25 years, was very deliberate about building a stranglehold on the refining of the raw ores. And this is nasty stuff, right? These are typically big open pit mines where they’re doing cyanide leaching to separate these ores from other metals and refine them. So it’s stuff we don’t actually want in our backyard, which is all well and good if there’s a free trade environment. But in a world of geopolitical and economic competition, China now has between 60 percent and 98 percent of the world’s critical minerals on lockdown, and they use that market position now to kill any emergent refining in a country or a company that they don’t control. So a new one pops up, and we’re refining lithium, and we’re doing Lithium oxides. Well, you’re going to see, and this has happened repeatedly, China floods the market, depresses the price, and puts that company out of business. They either go away, or the Chinese company buys them. And so, the reason this really matters is that you can’t make missiles, airplanes, guns, telephones, or GPS [without these minerals]. Our everyday modern economy depends on all these critical minerals, and they all run through China. So, can that be fixed in four years? No, not without a radical sort of World War II-style change in our regulatory stance, our willingness to invest, and a massive cross-border partnership with our allies. I don’t see that happening. When you describe that, I think about directed industrial policy, right? China made a decision. They made a huge trade-off against their environmental policy, the air quality that their people breathe and the labor abuses their workers might suffer, but they said, “It’s worth it, because over some timeframe we will have this stranglehold on the market and that will create peace, create prosperity,” some set of goals that industrial policy will deliver. We can look at Taiwan, for example. On this show, we’ve talked a lot about TSMC and Taiwan’s massive investment in the chip industry because it saw the future and said, “We’re going to do that here. We’re going to make an industrial policy from the top down that says all the chips are going to be made in Taiwan. TSMC is our national champion; here we go.” Those things came true. Again, the trade-offs are very real, and very clear. We don’t have a directed industrial policy in the United States. To the extent that the Biden administration was trying, they were doing it in the most Freakonomics neoliberal way you could do it, right? They created a bunch of incentives, and they hoped people would not game them. You can see how that played out for them. The Trump administration is doing the exact opposite, right? They’re creating a bunch of impediments and saying, “Our market is so valuable that if you want the n+1 American consumer to buy your car, you have to do a bunch of stuff to get to our market.” That seems just as naive. It’s still not directed industrial policy. It’s negative incentives instead of positive incentives, and you still might game the system in some way. But it doesn’t seem like that plan of, we have to actually say out loud, “We’re going to do nickel refining to decouple from China.” They haven’t said that out loud. They’ve said, “Here’s a bunch of structural impediments that might result in some capital directed at nickel refining in the United States.” And that to me seems again, for all the criticisms of the Biden programs, like you run into the same problems. You’re not actually saying what you want. You’re hoping that the negative incentives will create momentum for the market to deliver the result. I would add one thing to the picture you painted, though, just to be fair about it. The other thing that the Trump administration is trying to do is massively deregulate. So, why isn’t there nickel refining in the United States? Because it’s impossible to get it permitted. It’ll never happen, right? But again, that’s a trade-off, right? There’s a reason we don’t want nickel refining. I’m not making a normative judgment. I’m just describing the landscape I see. I think the Trump thesis here is, “Let’s remove the barriers to building, let’s create the barriers to what they view as unfair trade and economic abuses by adversaries. Let’s let the market figure out the rest.” And you’re asking, is there a third way? In general, my perspective is that the United States can’t possibly out-centralize China. It can’t possibly out-execute top-down economic control better than China does. Our comparative advantage, our right to win, is through innovation. So create a rule of law and a risk capital environment, and a labor environment where the best ideas can win, people can take risks, and that can flush through the system — that has been our comparative advantage. I’m more sympathetic to an economic security framework that plays to our right to win than one that doesn’t. I think the Biden kind of Freakonomics thing you described was very much like, “Okay, let’s sort of take other examples of central planning and industrial policy, and make these big billion, a hundred billion dollar, trillion dollar injections into sectors of the economy and specific recipients of aid, and then hope it works out.” That’s what China does. I’m not so optimistic about that working for us. So I do think there’s a big question of, “Is there a third way, and what should the economic security policy framework of the United States be?” That’s a conversation I’m getting into more and more in the academic and think tank worlds. I don’t think we have a coherent answer to that as policymakers, and I don’t even think we have the language for it in a lot of cases. A lot of what you’re talking about with the comparative advantage of the United States historically being risk-taking innovation, I agree with that. The foundation of that has been the relative stability of the United States after World War II. I’m not saying it’s been totally stable — it hasn’t. No one listening to the show looks back across the last 20 years and thinks, “That’s been stable.” But fundamentally, politically, we’re stable. Economically, there is a sense of stability. Data-wise, we have not, until recently, had the United States government deciding that it will redefine how GDP is calculated. There’s sort of an essential policy and economic stability to how the United States works. Your company relies on some amount of stability in the system, right? Even to just look at a system and say, “We can see how things are moving,” implies that all the actors in the system are rational or predictable in some set of ways, or at least participating. That is what feels destabilized right now. The tariffs are on, the tariffs are off. We’re going to export bourbon to Canada. We’re not going to do that anymore. Trump is going to say, “We’re going to cut our own lumber in the United States,” but all the trees are in Canada. That seems destabilizing. We’re going to decouple from China in four years. Inherently destabilizing. Apple is going to announce $500 billion worth of investment that they already planned for, and somehow, that’s going to make it okay. All of that seems new and destabilizing in a way that, even in Trump’s first term, didn’t exist. Do you see that? Is that reflected? Do you worry about that? I mean, back to the beginning of the conversation, we bet our careers on it. I just see it as an inevitability. I am a macro guy. I like these big systems problems, and I’ve seen, for a long time now, the gears of history cranking. It’s pretty obvious to me that the system I grew up in, and I think the orthodoxies of our time, have come to an end. And so, yeah, it’s destabilizing. The moment in time is one of instability and destabilization. I see these trends playing out almost irrespective of who’s in office here or there. Like, look at Brexit, look at what’s happening in the EU. Look at all the climate dislocation and the waves of immigration across borders that then result in nationalism and populism. And you kind of add all these mega-trends up. The rise of China, the relative decline of the United States, the global debt burden and how that’s playing out in economic policy, and wealth inequality are these asset bubbles inflated and reflated. All these things, to me, signal a breakdown of the system. When you look at your map and you see China in the center of it, and almost all these value chains end up flowing through or around China, can that be reallocated? Can you shift things around to a world where you have the United States and its allies’ value chain and China and its allies’ value chain? I mostly see it going there, at least for the more sensitive critical value chains. I don’t see it playing out any other way. And this isn’t just a sort of the US doing its thing. China publishes its economic intentions every five years, and then they reify them and the national addresses. This is their explicit strategy: to create economic resilience and dominance in the technologies that they believe will be the commanding heights of the 21st century. And to ensure that the value chains associated with them as either critical imports or as exports where they know they need to deploy their production capacity (because they’re an export-driven economy) — they are explicitly trying to secure both. And they write it down, and they do what they say. To some extent, how did we get here? We had a rules-based free trade order that the United States architected, and everything made a lot of sense economically, middle class impacts aside. The admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, I think, was the end. That was the beginning of the end. And you had a very large and growing economy that was exploiting the free trade system systematically, stealing trillions of dollars of intellectual property to feed their industrial engine and subsidizing their exports at the expense of everybody else’s markets. And so, 25 years later, we are where we are. And so, it was sort of bigger than its neighbor at an unprecedented scale, and I think the system is responding to that fact, right? That was the catalyst. It wasn’t that somebody here or there was elected and did some policy actions. So I view things in sort of this multi-decade lens, and the policy environment, the political environment right now is a consequence of that as opposed to the primary driver of it, if that makes sense. I wrote my law review article in law school on China’s use of open-source software to get itself into the WTO. And their approach to intellectual property was, “Oh, well, we’ll do copyright law,” because that is a foundation for open-source. And now we have Linux. That was a fascinating rhetorical move. I don’t know if my law review article was any good, and I don’t know if anybody understood what I was talking about at the time, but I was like, “Pay attention to Red Flag Linux.” The other end of that, the positive end of that, is one where we start, the iPhone. The iPhone exists at scale, at a massive scale. The idea that we manufacture as many iPhones as we do with three nanometer TSMC chips in them is mind-boggling. There are many criticisms of Tim Cook one could issue, but… Did you maintain the rules-based world trade order for as long as you did because the iPhone is such a successful product, and you managed all of those supply chains? You managed both Trump’s first term and the Biden administration through COVID-19. That’s a remarkable fact of American industrial policy, right? Apple exists, and it held the world together for a minute. Do you think that there are still those kinds of products or those kinds of companies that will keep this thing going even as everything else gets destabilized? Because that is the success. There has not been a great power conflict or a hot war between the United States and China in all this time. Even as things frayed, even as both sides felt taken advantage of or felt hostile towards each other, or sent fighter jets flying at each other for no reason, just to have a good time. Honestly, I hope that I can look back at the whole arc of Altana and say that we are one of those companies that bent the arc of history in that way. How’s that? I think we’re making it possible to be resilient and to navigate this change for both the public and private sectors. I mean, we work with governments of the West and allies to enforce this stuff, to navigate it, to find some of the dependencies and vulnerabilities in these networks, and to mitigate them. We also help them simulate policies and see how they might play out. What are the direct impacts for the second, third, and fourth order impacts so that better decisions get made? And then we work with the private sector to navigate all that stuff. And so, if we succeed at the scale that we’re trying to, our mission is to fix globalization. Then, I think you can envision a world where business in the West and business in the East continue to be transnational, and you have these miracles of productivity, and you have the economic ties that bind. At the same time, you de-risk the most critical infrastructure and the most critical supply chains. Through that de-risking, you prevent accidents from happening, and you prevent the worst from happening. So, paint a picture like, let’s say China moves on Taiwan by the end of the decade. And I’ve been in a war game with US military leadership, where one of their assumptions is that GPS goes off, and all of the critical water and electricity facilities in America are shut down. Our cars can no longer navigate because of all the logic in our cars. And those are all through supply chain exploits that have been built into the systems by China over the last two decades and known vulnerabilities, known state-sponsored cyber attacks that create those exploits... In that scenario, is America more or less likely to go to war? I actually think it’s more likely to go to war. I think there’s a higher probability that escalation occurs and tensions fray. There’s more popular support for conflict. And so, in a world where we’re more and more de-risked, where you don’t need to go to war over an island, where you don’t need to defend a specific supply chain or you don’t need to react to a vulnerability that your adversary exploited and shut down all the critical infrastructure in the country, that’s a world that, to me, is less likely to go to war. I feel like some people will take issue with your characterization of Taiwan as an island, but I get it. Is there enough world? This is the biggest question that I have for you. Your software builds you a picture of the value chains across the world. I don’t know if there’s enough capacity. I mean, it’s a big world. I am not saying all of it has been industrialized. We’re producing everything everywhere. But it does seem like with the past 25 years of globalization and maybe the next wave of globalization that you’re helping bring about, it has reached an equilibrium. And destabilizing that equilibrium just implies there will be more capacity, that we’re going to move the chips out of Taiwan and make them in India or something. I’m not sure that there’s enough capacity to reorient everything and maintain an equilibrium or to change it without something even more destabilizing happening. I’m wondering if that’s where you’re at or if you think you can actually make the shift. Because if you’re like, “We need to move to the next phase of globalization,” my view is that Trump may kind of want it to stop, right? And it still feels like tension. I think there’s enormous production capacity at basically every stage of the value chain. So I don’t think there’s any kind of fundamental limit that we’re bumping up against, either in terms of labor price, labor skill, raw material availability, or manufacturing sophistication. And I’m also reasonably optimistic. I’m not maximally optimistic about automation and software-defined manufacturing and where a lot of this is going. So I think there’s an enormous amount of capital out there chasing good returns, and there’s an enormous wave of productivity gains that are already underway, and it’s going to keep scaling with AI and robotics. All those things add up to the means to refactor. You’ve got the big view; you’ve got the software. If you’re someone listening to this, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a builder — we have a lot of those listening to the show — where would you go build? Based on your map, what seems the most stable right now? Geographically or in terms of industries? Both. So, tariffs notwithstanding, if I were starting from scratch and not doing Altana, the thing I’d be most excited about is building a software-enabled and AI-driven manufacturing value chain for advanced electronics in North America. I’d be focused on producing in Mexico, sourcing most of my components from North America, serving US and Canadian markets, and taking advantage of the free trade agreement that exists. And again, the way that the tariffs just played out only applied to anything that wasn’t certified under the USMCA. As you know, North American origin got hit with tariffs, but everything that’s certified is still sort of free trade. I would go long on the Mexican demographics. I would go long on the Mexican economy, generally. I would go long on North American demand for advanced electronics components in everything from automobiles to aerospace, to defense, to the whole picture. And I would try to build a Shenzhen of North America. One big, integrated, and co-located value chain where you could really do mass-scale drone manufacturing, optics, the whole thing. The Chinese government also made a huge investment in labor, right? When Obama asked Steve Jobs, “Why can’t you make the iPhone here?” His answer was, “There’s just not enough manufacturing engineers. It’s not going to happen.” Do you see that labor pool existing in the United States, Canada, or Mexico? Do you have to create it? Is the Mexican government going to be better at that than we are? Mexico’s a lot better at it. We’re terrible. And I think some interesting experiments were begun with junior colleges and community colleges and some of those initiatives. But we’re nowhere close to having the skilled labor necessary to execute the industrialization objectives of either the Biden administration or the Trump administration. So, there is a massive gap in both of those worldviews and approaches. Do you think that can be reconciled? Partially, through automation. Not fully. Evan, this has been an incredible conversation. I obviously could talk to you for another hour. You’re going to have to come back. I want to know more about your law school thesis. I think China’s doing the same thing with open source and AI that they did with open source back then. But anyway, maybe that’s for another one. Thank you for being the only person, including the editor of the Wisconsin International Law Journal, who has ever said, “I want to know more about this thesis.” I appreciate you for that. It was a good suck up to end the show. We’ll have you back. Well, here’s what we’ll do. When tariffs go on, we won’t have you. When tariffs go off, we’ll have you. So, every few weeks, we’ll have you back on the show. All right, I’m going to be a regular. Yeah, that’ll be great. Evan, thank you so much. We’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email! Decoder with Nilay Patel A podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems. SUBSCRIBE NOW!

The NJ98-CP V2 HE looks, feels, and sounds great for its price and has a hot-swappable PCB that accepts both magnetic and mechanical switches. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. The mechanical keyboard market has been flooded with pre-built keyboards featuring magnetic switches over the past year — it seems like a new 75-percent magnetic switch keyboard boasting Rapid Trigger and Snap Tap comes out every week. But because magnetic switches are largely aimed at gamers, we haven't seen a lot of magnetic switch gaming keyboards that are larger than 75-percent. We've seen some — like Glorious' wildly-expensive custom-built GMMK 3 series. And now, the Keydous NJ98-CP V2 HE, which is a much more budget-friendly option. This almost-full-size keyboard (96-percent layout, or 98 keys), may not have a full aluminum case, but it's got a numberpad that turns into a calculator, a programmable rotary knob, and a programmable, detachable screen. (Just because.) It's wireless and features a hot-swappable PCB that accepts both magnetic switches and mechanical switches, which is handy considering the lack of standardization in the magnetic switch market at the moment — you can always fall back on your favorite mechanical switches. Designed to compete with the best mechanical keyboards , the NJ98-CP V2 HE is available now for $150 — not exactly budget-priced, but less than half the price of other full-size options. Design and Construction of the NJ98-CP V2 HE The NJ98-CP V2 HE is a wireless magnetic switch keyboard with a 96-percent layout — it's designed to give you almost all of the functionality of a full-size keyboard in a more compact form. The keyboard has a full function row and a full numberpad, as well as three of the navigation keys (Delete, PgUp, and PgDn), as well as a dedicated calculator key. The numberpad is also squeezed closer to the arrow keys, and has a 1u 0 key to fit. The keyboard also features a volume knob (programmable) in the upper right corner, which is next to a detachable magnetic docking screen. (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) By default, this screen displays a number of stats (Num lock, Caps lock, battery life, connection, and time), as well as a gif of a cat (which is cute, I guess). You can customize this screen with your own images or gifs using the keyboard's companion software, similar to the screen seen on the Asus ROG Azoth and ROG Azoth Extreme . This screen also acts as a screen for the keyboard's built-in calculator function, which you can access by hitting Fn + Numpad Enter. I'll admit this is pretty handy if you... well, frequently need a calculator, though I wish the shortcut was easier to hit one-handed (I can hit it one-handed, but it's not convenient). Also, the dedicated calculator key, which opens up your PC's onscreen calculator, seems like overkill in addition to this feature (how many calculators do you need?!). Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) The screen is easily removable — it just pulls off, though the magnet is strong enough that you shouldn't have to worry about accidentally knocking it loose. I'm not sure why the screen is removable, as it doesn't work on its own, but Keydous does sell replacement screens in different colors (light pink, light green, and khaki) on its website for $20, so I suppose it's just another way to customize your build. Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) The keyboard is housed in a plastic chassis with a slightly textured matte finish, which is not the fanciest-looking (or feeling) chassis material. The keyboard comes in six colorways: white (white case, white keycaps, light blue and orange accent keys), black samurai (black case, black keycaps, yellow accent keys), pale green (white case, cream keycaps, green accent keys), star dream (white case, gray-to-black ombre keycaps, translucent teal accent keys), and shadow (gray-to-black ombre keycaps with shine-through side legends) with either a white or a black case. Our review unit was in star dream, which has dye-sub PBT keycaps in a Cherry keycap profile. Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) The keyboard measures 15.87 inches (403mm) wide by 5.43 inches (138mm) deep, and is approximately 1.57 inches (40mm) thick at its thickest point (including keycaps). It's slightly larger than the Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless (14.84 x 5.16 x 1.57 inches / 377 x 131 x 40mm), because it adds the navigation keys in a column next to the numberpad (instead of along the top, like the Strix Scope II 96 Wireless does). The roomier layout is nice for those who frequently use the numberpad, though the overall compact layout will still take some getting used to if you're moving from a full-size keyboard. You can get this keyboard with either an aluminum or a brass positioning plate (brass costs $15 more); our review unit with its aluminum plate weighed in at 2.52 pounds (1,144g) — solid, but not particularly heavy. Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) On the back of the keyboard, you'll find four small anti-slip rubber pads, as well as a set of flip-out feet to change the keyboard's typing angle. This is a nice feature, as a lot of the magnetic switch keyboards we've been looking at recently have had aluminum cases and no angle adjustment. The power switch is also located on the back of the keyboard, which is a little inconvenient if you frequently turn your keyboard on and off — but at least the keyboard is fairly lightweight and so the switch is not too much of a hassle to get to. Finally, there's a little slot for the keyboard's 2.4GHz wireless USB-A dongle, which is small and unassuming (a little too unassuming — there's no label on the USB dongle at all, and I immediately forgot what it belonged to). (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) In the box, the keyboard comes with a keycap puller, a switch puller, and a 5-foot (1.5m) rubber USB-C to USB-A cable. It also comes with extra keycaps (Mac keys and accent key replacements), a 2.4GHz wireless USB-A dongle, and a USB extender. Specs Swipe to scroll horizontally Size 96-percent Number of keys 98 Switches Kailh Ice Cream Magnetic Switch V2 (linear) Backlighting Yes Onboard Storage Yes Dedicated Media Keys Yes Game Mode Yes Additional Ports 0 Connectivity 2.4GHz, Bluetooth, wired (USB-C) Cable USB-A to USB-C Keycaps Dye-sub PBT Construction Plastic chassis Anodized aluminum top plate Software Keydous Driver Dimensions (LxWxH) 15.87 x 5.43 x 1.57 inches / 403 x 138 x 40 mm Weight 2.52lbs / 1,144g MSRP / Price at Time of Review $149.99 Typing and Gaming Experience on the NJ98-CP V2 The NJ98-CP V2 HE comes with magnetic switches, but the hot-swappable PCB supports both magnetic and mechanical switches (3- and 5-pin) — like Glorious' magnetic GMMK 3 — and you can mix magnetic and mechanical switches. It comes with Kailh Ice Cream Magnetic Switch V2 switches, which are linear magnetic switches with an initial force of 30gf and a total travel of 4mm. They have all the features that magnetic switches have: adjustable actuation (between 0.1 and 4.0mm), Rapid Trigger, Dynamic Keystrokes, and SnapTap, which you can set up and configure in the Keydous Driver companion app. (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Typing on the NJ98-CP V2 HE feels and sounds quite good — the switches are smooth, consistent, and stable, and the stabilizers are well-lubed. The case comes with three layers of foam inside, which do a very good job of dampening sound and absorbing any case ping. While it's not the absolute best-sounding keyboard we've tested, the aluminum positioning plate combined with the sound-dampening foam makes for a nice, crisp, consistent overall sound — except for the space bar. The space bar has a deeper, somewhat out-of-place "thock" to it, which is noticeable but not so much so that it's overly distracting. The keycaps that came with the star dream colorway are made of dye-sublimated PBT and have a Cherry keycap profile. The Cherry keycap profile is relatively low-profile with sculpted rows, for a comfortable, easy-travel typing experience. These keycaps have slightly curved tops and a lightly-textured finish that's just slippery enough for speedy typing — I was able to consistently hit around 130 wpm with 99% accuracy on this keyboard right out of the box. The keycaps vary slightly depending on which colorway you get — the star dream, pale green, black, and white colorways have Cherry profile keycaps, while the two shadow colorways have OEM profile keycaps. For productivity, this keyboard's built-in calculator does seem to be pretty handy. However, when you go into calculator mode by pressing Fn + Numpad Enter, you can't enter any input on the keyboard until you leave calculator mode — so you can't enter the numbers into your PC without exiting calculator mode, and exiting calculator mode clears the calculator. I suppose maybe that's why there's also a dedicated calculator button on this keyboard — in case you need to enter in your numbers on your computer. But, of course, this is a keyboard — how often are you not going to be using your computer when you're using this calculator? While I did think this feature was pretty neat at first, I now think you probably don't really need it alongside a dedicated calculator button. But maybe there's some use case I'm not considering. For gaming, the NJ98-CP HE V2 is as solid as any other magnetic switch keyboard. It has a solid, 1,000 Hz polling rate over both its 2.4GHz wireless connection and its wired connection, and game mode (Fn + Windows Key) is built in. It also offers adjustable actuation, which lets you adjust the point at which the key actuates (individually for each key, if you like), as well as Rapid Trigger, which matches the key's actuation point to its de-actuation point, so you can press it down as soon as you let go of it, without having to wait for it to pass a specific de-actuation point. The keyboard's low, Cherry profile keycaps and linear magnetic switches make it easy to quickly glide across the keyboard, but the keyboard itself is perhaps a little too big for most gamers. However, if you're a gamer like me and you need all the buttons, the NJ98-CP V2 HE is probably one of your only options on the market. Features and Software of the NJ98-CP V2 HE You can configure the NJ98-CP V2 using the Keydous Driver, which is available both as a download and a web app. It is pretty clearly translated from Chinese, and all the documentation is also translated from Chinese, which makes it a little confusing and convoluted at times. You can turn on and adjust the keyboard's magnetic switch settings — actuation point, Rapid Trigger, Dynamic Keystrokes, Toggle Keys, Snap Tap, etc. and also calibrate the switches when you've swapped in new magnetic or mechanical switches. The software also lets you remap and configure keys (on multiple layers) and the rotary knob, and includes a built-in macro recorder. Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) You can also customize the screen with your own pictures or animations. The software is actually pretty impressive here, if perhaps a little unnecessarily detailed — you can upload your own images or gifs, or you can draw things on the "draw board" and save them to the hardware — and your drawings can have colors and multiple frames. I didn't spend too much time exploring this, but it is kind of neat if you love customization. You can also upload and share your presets — whether they're keymaps, drawings, or lighting effects — with others in the Keydous Driver community. Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) The keyboard has bright RGB lighting with per-key configuration using the app. It comes with several presets (and you can also do some limited customization directly from the keyboard using shortcuts), but you can also change each individual key's lighting (if you like) and you can save lighting effects to different layers (so, for example, you know what profile you're currently using). Wireless Performance and Battery Life of the NJ98-CP V2 HE The NJ98-CP V2 offers three forms of connectivity: low-latency 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth, and wired via USB-C. It offers a solid 1,000 Hz polling rate over both 2.4GHz wireless and wired connections, which is the standard for gaming keyboards — though we've recently seen a few magnetic switch keyboards with ultra-high polling rates (such as the Luminkey Magger 68 HE and the Lemokey L5 HE 8K ). Keydous rates the NJ98-CP V2 HE's battery life at around 800 hours in power saving mode — that is, with the screen and the lighting turned off. With the screen and the lighting set to "always on," the keyboard gets just 29 hours (which is pretty respectable considering "always on" means never sleeping). The screen displays the battery life by default, but if you change the screen or turn it off, you'll still get a low battery warning at less than 10% thanks to a red light under the F12 key. The Bottom Line There really aren't very many full-size magnetic switch gaming keyboards on the market — and this technically isn't even full-size, either. So if you're the kind of person who needs a numberpad or just a lot of extra keys, your options are pretty limited.

The trains of the trains of 18 and 19 March 24 hours was revoked, but to remain standing is 8 hours. Here are who strikes and who does not. The possible inconveniences From 9.01 to 16.59 on Wednesday 19 March 2025, trains will be able to undergo cancellations or variations, for a national strike of the staff of the FS group, Trenitalia, Trenitalia Tper and Trenord. Initially, the mobilization should have lasted 24 hours, from 9pm on Tuesday 18 to 21 on Wednesday 19 March. However, USB private work has revoked the protest, announcing that he intends to promise it in the coming months. Instead, the eight-hour stop proclaimed by Ugl Ferrovieri, Fast-Confsal and Orsa Ferrovie, from 9 to 17 on Wednesday 19 March, with possible repercussions on rail connections from all over Italy, remains confirmed. Guaranteed trains Regional trains will be guaranteed in the guarantee bands from 6 to 9 and from 18 to 21. As regards long journeys, it is possible to consult the guaranteed trains directly from the official website. How to request a refund For all passengers who intend to give up the trip, it is possible to ask for a refund starting from the declaration of strike until the time of the start of the booked train, only for Intercity and Arrows and until 24.00 on the day before the strike for regional trains.

"2024 was the hotter more recorded year and the oceans of the Earth are following on the wheel, reaching the highest levels in three decades," says Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of the physical oceanography programs and the Etegrated Earth System Observatory of NASA. Thermal expansion is also favored by the absorption of heat by the deep ocean, a growing phenomenon, reports NASA. Marine water stratifies based on its temperature and density, with hot and light bands that normally position themselves above the colder and dense ones. The heat absorbed by the surface layers is therefore slowly transferred in depth. Strong winds and currents such as those present in the southern ocean can however mix these levels, bringing heat from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. To all this are added events such as El Niño, which redistributes large masses of hot water in the central and eastern Pacific, contributing to the vertical transfer of heat to the ocean. The risks of increasingly high seas The satellite data of NASA certify that the annual rate of raising the sea level has grown by more than double since 1993, adding 10 cm in total. Several agencies have highlighted the risks of this acceleration, especially for the Pacific islands. The Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization Celeste Saul has warned that "due to the flowing of sea level, the ocean is going from being a friend of all time to a growing threat". The Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres has defined the trend "a crisis entirely caused by man", underlining that "the world must act and respond before it is too late. It is essential to reduce global emissions of 43% by 2030 compared to 2019 and 60% levels by 2035". A NASA study published in September provides that the sea level in the Pacific islands will increase by at least 15 cm in the next three decades. Raising is defined as irreversible and "will occur independently of the fact that greenhouse gas emissions change in the coming years". Research indicates that the well -being and safety of insular nations are also threatened. According to the report to New Climate for Peace ("A new climate for peace"), commissioned by the G7, the raising of sea level represents "a threat to the economic and physical vitality of the low altitude areas, as the earth and coastal resources gradually be lost. This can lead to social disorders, displaces and migrations, as well as disagreement on maritime boundaries and ocean resources". This article originally appeared on Wired En Español.

President Donald Trump, the same man who once said that people promoting electric vehicles should “ROT IN HELL,” bought his own EV this week. He showed off his new Tesla Model S — red, like the Make America Great Again hats — outside the White House on Tuesday, piling compliments on his senior advisor Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and declaring the company’s vehicles “beautiful.” It resembled a sales pitch for Musk’s company, the country’s biggest seller of EVs. Tesla has lost more than half of its value since December as sales have plummeted worldwide. With Musk dismantling parts of the federal government as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the vehicles have become a toxic symbol for Democrats, a large portion of Tesla owners. Over the past week, protesters have vandalized Tesla dealerships, set Cybertrucks aflame, and boycotted the brand. Liberal Tesla drivers have slapped stickers on their cars that read “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” The strong feelings surrounding Musk have already started to scramble the politics around EVs. Trump’s exhibition at the White House on Tuesday was a defense of Musk, who he said had been unfairly penalized for “finding all sorts of terrible things that have taken place against our country.” Yet the bizarre scene of Trump showcasing a vehicle that runs on electricity instead of gas felt almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, and not just because the Trump administration has been trying to reverse Biden-era rules that would have sped up the adoption of low-emissions vehicles. Here were the two biggest characters in MAGA politics promoting a technology that’s been largely rejected by their right-wing base. Other prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly moved to defend Tesla against vandalism that Trump is labeling “domestic terrorism.” Tesla’s sudden shift from Democratic status symbol to Republican icon has some thinking the controversy around Musk could lead to a bipartisan embrace of EVs. “He’s uniquely positioned to and has the power to really shape this debate and help bridge the divide here,” said Joe Sacks, executive director of the American EV Jobs Alliance, a nonprofit trying to prevent “silly partisan politics” from stopping a manufacturing boom for electric vehicles. “I’m unsure if that’s what he’s going to use his new perch and his role in the administration to do, but it seems like he has the ability to do that.” According to polling the alliance conducted after the November election, Republicans have warmed up to Musk, with 82 percent of those polled saying that Musk is a good ambassador for EVs. A solid majority of Trump voters — 64 percent — said they viewed Tesla favorably, compared with 41 percent of those who voted for Kamala Harris. “Republicans are probably inching towards the idea that there shouldn’t be much of a cultural divide on this product category, if the market leader CEO is sitting next to President Trump in the Oval Office during press conferences,” Sacks said. The data aligns with a recent analysis from the financial services firm Stifel, which found that Tesla has become more favorable among Republicans as its popularity plunges with Democrats. Compared to August, 13 percent more Republicans are willing to consider purchasing a Tesla. Yet there are reasons to suspect that EVs will continue to be a hard sell for Republicans. They are typically tradition-minded people who like big cars, not small cars with new technology they’ve never used before, said Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the book Prius Or Pickup? “Conservatives don’t have the sensibility that fits with electric vehicles at all,” he said. “So I don’t think that you’re going to see a spike in Tesla sales among conservatives.” Alexander Edwards, president of the research consultancy Strategic Vision, said that Republicans view gas-powered cars as a more practical purchase for transporting their families from place to place. That’s based on his firm’s surveys, which examine the psychology behind the car choices of about a quarter-million Americans a year. “I think Elon made a bet that I think he’s secretly regretting, that Republicans would come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Yes, we’re going to support you,’” Edwards said. If they came around to any electric vehicle, however, it might be a Tesla. One of the primary things Republicans care about when it comes to buying a car is that it looks fast and goes fast, and Tesla has seen more Republican buyers for that reason, Edwards said. Democrats have consistently been buying electric vehicles at a rate of 4 to 1 compared to Republicans, but 2 to 1 when it comes to Teslas, according to Edwards’ data. Last year, more Republicans than Democrats bought Teslas for the first time — not because more Republican flocked to the brand, but because Democrats pulled away from it. For Democrats, who had long been criticized as having a smug attitude for driving a Prius, Teslas offered a cool and desirable alternative with less baggage when they took off in the early 2010s. “Tesla was able to finally give Democratic buyers what they were looking for — a Prius-like image of being thoughtful, combined with the fun and excitement of a real luxury sports car,” Edwards said. That started to change as Musk became a magnet for political controversy, starting with his takeover of Twitter in 2022. A Tesla EV became a symbol of Tesla’s CEO. “Doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat — when you jump into the Batmobile, you become Batman,” Edwards said. “And the same thing is true with the vehicles we purchase. We often want them to show who we are, what we’ve accomplished, what we stand for.” Of course, there are ways to depolarize electric vehicles that don’t rely on cues from Trump or Musk. Sacks recommends talking about the attributes of electric vehicles: their ability to accelerate faster and brake more crisply, as well as help people save money for every mile they drive, since there’s no need to buy gas. When people have friends or family who own an EV, that also helps break down the cultural divide, he said. In a way, you could see Trump becoming a salesman for electric vehicles as an example of that very phenomenon, with his self-described “first buddy” convincing him to come around. Just two years ago, Trump complained that EVs needed a charge every 15 minutes and would kill American jobs. But, after Musk endorsed his presidential campaign last summer and donated $288 million, Trump softened his tone, saying that he was in favor of “a very small slice” of cars being electric. “I have to be, you know,” Trump said, “because Elon endorsed me very strongly.” On Tuesday, as Trump climbed into his new electric car for the first time, he seemed surprised by what he saw there. “That’s beautiful,” he said, admiring the dashboard. “This is a different panel than I’ve had. Everything’s computer!” This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/elon-musk-tesla-trump-republicans-electric-vehicles/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Alphabet is spinning out laser-based Internet company Taara from its “moonshot” incubator, hoping to turbocharge the start-up that provides high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites. Taara is the latest project to spring from X—Alphabet’s experimental hub that produced AI lab Google Brain and Waymo’s self-driving cars—and has its origins in a concept called Loon. That envisaged shooting beams of light between thousands of balloons floating on the edge of space to provide phone and Internet services across remote areas. Loon was wound up in 2021 due to the political and regulatory hurdles to flying the balloons and the difficulty of servicing the 20-mile-high equipment. However, its lasers found a second life on Taara’s towers under engineer Mahesh Krishnaswamy. The technology works by firing a beam of light the width of a pencil from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, using a system of sensors, optics, and mirrors to fix it on a 1.5 inch receiver. Alphabet says the system can transmit data at 20 gigabits per second over 20 km, extending traditional fibre-optics networks with minimal construction and lower costs. Based in Sunnyvale near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Taara has two dozen staff and is hiring aggressively. The start-up has secured backing from Series X Capital, and Alphabet will retain a minority stake, but the company refused to disclose any details about its seed funding or financial targets. “We’ve realized over time that for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, X’s captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors, and generally be able to scale faster this way.” Taara already operates in 12 countries including India and parts of Africa. It has created a 5 km laser link over the Congo River between Brazzaville and Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where Internet costs are much higher. It also supplements overloaded mobile phone networks at events such as the Coachella music festival in California.

Rapidly Deteriorating EU-U.S. Relations Means Europe's Industrial Base is exhibited to growing risks links to u.s. Technology in its supply chains, The Letter Warns, CITING U.S. Vice President JD Vance's Speech at the Munich Security Conference as Proof. The EU is currently in a stand-off with Washington about Tariffs on Aluminum and Steel specifically, and Tensions about Tech Regulation Have Grown in Recent Months. Beyond Airbus and Dassault, The Letter was also signed by the French Public Investment Bank BPifrance, European Cloud Companies Including Scaleway, OVHCloud, and NextCloud, Several Tech Industry Allianances Including France and Contrect, and The European Digital Smaller, and Contrial Smaller, and Contrual Smaller, and Contrual Smallaller, and Contrual Smallaller, and Contrect -Smaller, and Contrect -Smallerie, And Contrect -Smaller, And Contrect Compomerie, and Contrect Compomer, and Contrect Compomer, and Contrect, and Contrect, and Contrect Competual, and Concect Ecosia. Europe is Highly Reliant on U.S. Technology. European Data is Primarily Stored on U.S. Cloud Services, With Companies Like Amazon, Microsoft and Google Taking Up about Two-Thirds of the European Market. Europe Accounts for Just 10 percent of the Global Microchips Market. Most Recently, U.S. Companies Like OpenAI Have Taken The Lead on Artificial Intelligence Apps Like Chatbots. The Commission Needs to "Mobilize Industry" for a "Continent-Wide Strategy" to Make Sure Europe Has Its Own Alternatives in Thesis, The Letter Read. Frank Karlitschek, CEO of German File Storage Provider NextCloud, which signed the letter, Said “I Don’t Think the Goal is to be Completely Independent From The U.S. Or the rest of the world ... but at least have some assets so that we can at ate negotiate. ” The Pleea Follows An Earlier Industry Initiative Called Eurostack, which Entails the Idea of ​​Building Out a Core European Tech Infrastructure Across Three Layers (Hard Infrastructure, Intermediaary Services Such As Cloud Services and Reducings) and Reducing EUROPE) and Reducing EUROPE) and Reducing EUROPE) and Reducing EUROPEMES) Big Tech.

One of the things that Nvidia does not exactly encourage its partners among add-in-board (AIB) manufacturers to do is to 'factory overclock' memory on graphics cards featuring its GPUs. However, it looks like MSI's Alexei 'Unwinder' has managed to unlock this possibility for GDDR7 memory on GeForce RTX 50-series products, as noticed by VideoCardz. Good news, it works for all GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards. But, as always, there is a catch. A new unofficial update for MSI Afterburner enables RTX 50-series GPU owners to push their memory overclocking limits by an additional 3 GT/s, achieving data transfer rates of up to 36 GT/s. While some may say that a mere 10% overclock — especially in the case of the GeForce RTX 5090 that has a wide memory interface and barely needs that extra bandwidth — is not a big deal, this is not as simple as it sounds. GDDR7 memory ICs available today from Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix are rated for an up to 28 GT/s — 32 GT/s (Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung have GDDR7, but the latter does not disclose its specs). Nvidia recommends reducing data transfer rates to 28 GT/s (except for RTX 5080, which is set to 30 GT/s), though the chips can handle higher speeds, which is where Unwinder's achievement represents a breakthrough as it 'unlocks' available capabilities of the memory chips. This is particularly significant for GeForce RTX 5080-series boards that come with 32 GT/s chips that are 'down-clocked' to 30 GT/s by default. However, keep in mind that on the GPU side there are memory controller peculiarities and this represents risks in terms of overclocking. The new update involves replacing a specific database file and is compatible only with MSI Afterburner version 4.6.6 Beta 5 Build 16555. Although this update might eventually be integrated into a future beta version, it remains to be seen when exactly this happens. Some users have instead turned to GPU Tweak III, Asus's software, which supports both AMD and Nvidia GPUs and avoids known bugs present in MSI Afterburner. Ultimately, both MSI Afterburner and GPU Tweak III can now support GDDR7 memory overclocking on GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards. This is especially beneficial for the GeForce RTX 5080-series users who aim to maximize performance beyond the default 30 GT/s limit. With the modified database, pushing speeds beyond 32 GT/s should now be achievable without issues.

A hot potato: Google recently expanded availability of its Gemini 2.0 Flash model to more developers, and it didn't take long for folks to unearth its new capabilities. One of its abilities to remove watermarks from stock images is so impressive that Google might have to nerf it in order to avoid future legal action. Social media is abuzz with Gemini 2.0 Flash's ability to remove watermarks from licensed work, a practice that is deemed illegal by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Such images litter stock photography services although in many cases, an identifying logo, text, or pattern is used to discourage unauthorized use. If you want the rights to an unaltered image without any watermarks, you will need to pay for a license. Watermarks have been around in the digital imaging space for decades, and people have been erasing them for years. Originally, this was something that was done manually using an image editing program and could take a lot of time. Eventually, programs and online services emerged that automated the process although results could vary wildly. New skill unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash model is really awesome at removing watermarks in images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCv – Deedy (@deedydas) March 15, 2025 Early examples of Gemini 2.0 Flash's capabilities shared online, however, are among the most impressive we have seen to date from an automated service. Not every instance is flawless, but many are very passable. Some are now wondering if they are too good, and if Google will end up removing the feature over fear that it might attract a lawsuit from a major player like Getty Images, which recently purchased rival stock media provider Shutterstock for $3.7 billion. As TechCrunch highlights, others in the AI space have previously reached this fork in the road and acted on it. For example, OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet will flat out refuse to remove certain watermarks from images when asked. The good news for Google is that it's still early days, and this version of Gemini 2.0 Flash is considered experimental. One would think that designation would give Google time to make any necessary changes without facing too much trouble in court.

Amber Midthunder isn’t sure if she’ll return to the Predator franchise any time soon. Sarah Michelle Gellar discusses how quickly the Buffy revival is coming together. Plus, get another new look at The Toxic Avenger, and try not to be too surprised: Jonathan Frakes teases that there’s going to be a starship in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Spoilers away! Untitled M. Night Shyamalan/Nicholas Sparks Project Deadline reports Phoebe Dynevor is in talks to star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in M. Night Shyamalan’s mysterious “supernatural romance” made in collaboration with Nicholas Sparks. Avengers: Doomsday During a recent interview with Omelete (via Screen Rant), Joe Russo described Doomsday and Infinity War as “a new beginning” for the MCU. The greatest thing that ever happened is we got to, you know, get immersed in you know a 20 movie arc and and see an ending to that arc. What’s compelling about these two new Avengers movies is they’re a beginning. It’s a new beginning. We told an ending story, now we’re going to tell a beginning story. And then who knows where we’ll go from there. Maybe it’ll be another 5 years but I think we just needed that time and perspective to figure out where it needed to go next, and the only thing that brought us back was the right story. In another recent interview with The Times, Anthony Russo confirmed Iron Man’s death in Endgame somehow tees up Robert Downey, Jr.’s return as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. We can’t explain that as it’s part of the story. But there’s nobody else in the world who could play this character the way he’s about to. Untitled Predator Project/Predator: Badlands Meanwhile, Amber Midthunder told Collider she “doesn’t know” if Naru will ever return to the Predator franchise following Prey. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. [Laughs] I genuinely don’t. I also want to do another one. I would be happy to do another one. I love Dan Trachtenberg with my whole heart. I love that world, I love that character, and I think that there’s some fun ideas out there that I’ve heard that are very cool. I’m really excited. He obviously has Badlands coming out this year, so I’m really excited to see that. Whatever Dan does, I will always be his fan. The Toxic Avenger Fangoria has a new poster for the upcoming Toxic Avenger remake, finally seeing release this August. The Variable Man Deadline also reports a TV series based on Philip K. Dick’s The Variable Man is now in development from Humans creators, Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent. The “grounded sci-fi project” is said to concern “a cold war during which sides calculate their chances of winning with advanced tech.” Star Trek: Starfleet Academy During a recent appearance at this year’s Indiana Comic Convention (via Screen Rant), Jonathan Frakes stated Starfleet Academy is aimed at “hardcore Star Trek fans” and boasts “the most massive set of any Star Trek” series, “ever.” [Robert] Picardo’s in it, Tig Notaro’s in it. Right? I love Tig. But it has the most massive set of any Star Trek ever. There’s also a spaceship on the show, which I think, I hope that’s not a fucking secret. I have been known—I’ve had a bad experience with oversharing, and I hope that wasn’t an overshare, but it’s fabulous. The sets are great. The scripts are—they’re funny, which is always helpful on Star Trek… It’s [aimed at] much more hardcore Star Trek fans. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Meanwhile, Sarah Michelle Gellar told People the new Buffy series is “progressing probably faster” than she’d originally anticipated. We’ve set up our offices, which means things are progressing probably faster than I’d anticipated. But it’s going to be a process, I think. To do it the way it needs to be done, everyone has to be patient with all of us, because this isn’t something that [will just happen]. I pinch myself every day when I get into these rooms, and I’m looking at Gail Berman, the Zuckermans and Chloé Zhao. It’s an incredible group. There was no world where I thought Chloé Zhao was going to call me and partner with me, and ask my advice on things and my opinion — especially because she hasn’t done television. She’ll call me, and she’ll say, ‘Well, I have to defer to you,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’ Those aren’t words I ever thought I would hear. Yellowjackets Finally, the team debate what to do about the unexpected eyewitnesses to their latest cannibalistic ceremony in the trailer for “Croak,” this week’s episode of Yellowjackets.

is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget. The picture above does not contain two different gaming handhelds. Instead, this halo device for Qualcomm’s just-announced Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 gaming chips — which I’ll tell you about in a sec — is a single transforming device with swing out gamepads and screens. It’s called the OneXSugar Sugar 1, and it’s one of the most delightfully gadgety gaming gadgets I’ve seen. Hold it horizontally like a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, flip out its secondary screen, then rotate its twin hinged gamepads for a more squared-off Nintendo DS-like experience: GIF by The Verge / OneXPlayer GIF by The Verge / OneXPlayer If you listen closely, you can almost hear the emulation community jumping for joy at the idea of two different aspect ratio screens joined at the hip. Me, I’m busy imagining the satisfying and/or horrifying sounds it might make as its triple joints swing into action! Image: OneXPlayer Image: OneXPlayer Image: OneXPlayer We know little more than what you can glean from the pictures and animations, but here are the key bits: It’s from OneXPlayer, the same boutique Chinese gadget maker behind the three-in-one X1 and X1 Mini that I told you about last spring. OneXPlayer plans to put it on preorder this May. It’s got a 6.01-inch main screen and a 3.92-inch secondary display. The joysticks are “magnetic,” though it’s not clear if that’s referring to the sticks themselves having Hall effect or TMR sensors, or whether OneX means the gamepads snap into place. It’s an Android device with Qualcomm’s just-announced Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 processor inside, rather than an AMD-toting Windows gaming handheld. Image: Qualcomm Before you get your hopes up, the OneXPlayer OneXSugar is unlikely to become a machine aimed at Windows games too. For one thing, we’re looking at nice but modest gains of 30 percent more CPU performance and 28 percent more GPU performance than the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 announced in 2023. It doesn’t contain the Oryon CPU core that powers both Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for phones or its Snapdragon X Elite for laptops, nor the Adreno X1 or Adreno 830 GPUs that respectively feature in those chips. And while Qualcomm Snapdragon gaming lead Micah Knapp told journalists that the company might launch support for other operating systems “over time,” it’s “really focused on the Android side” as of today. That’s because China is such a huge market for Android gaming, the company hints. “The perspective that Android gaming isn’t popular is a very region-centric perspective,” Qualcomm spokesperson Sascha Segan says when I ask. That China interest is certainly helping produce some incredible looking devices. When Qualcomm first announced its last handheld gaming chips, the best it could show off was a dull batarang-shaped reference design. Today, in addition to the OneXSugar, it’s got the sleek metal-bodied Ayaneo Pocket S2, an Ayaneo Gaming Pad, and additionally two new Retroid Pocket devices on its new lower-tier chips, the Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 and G1 Gen 2. Here’s that Pocket S2: Previous Next 1 / 3 Knapp tells me that his company doesn’t need to subsidize the development of Qualcomm handhelds, either. “To be blunt, most of them are coming to us to build platforms on their own,” he says. “People have accepted this is where things are going to happen, and now they’re just aggressively moving into the space,” he says. Of the two lower-tier chips, the G2 Gen 2 claims significant gains of 2.3x the CPU performance and 3.8x the GPU performance of a Snapdragon G2 Gen 1, though I’m not aware of any particular handhelds shipping with that earlier chip, and neither Qualcomm nor Retroid have released images of its next horizontal handheld. The G1 Gen 2 boasts 80 percent greater CPU performance than G1 Gen 1, and a 25 percent faster GPU. The Ayaneo Pocket S2 should be coming this month, the Retroid Pocket PR Classic should be up for preorder this month, and the Ayaneo Gaming Pad should be coming this May. Previous Next 1 / 2 Update, March 17th: Added a few more images and details about the OneXSugar Sugar 1, including that it will be called the Sugar 1 specifically.

AMD recently held an event titled 'Spring New Product Launch' in Akihabara, Tokyo, which drew influencers and partner representatives to showcase and comment on the company's latest Radeon RX 9000 and Ryzen 9000X3D offerings. Facing questions about RDNA 4 supply, AMD Japan's Marketing Manager Yoshiaki Sato claimed (machine translation) that Radeon has boosted its market share in the country to 45% with RDNA 4, the highest it's ever been. AMD had high ambitions for this generation, and Nvidia's woes made it the perfect opportunity to strike and increase its dwindling market share. Admittedly, supply constraints have spoiled the value of these RX 9070 series GPUs, of which the flagship is within reach of the RTX 5070 Ti at a more affordable MSRP. Of course, this generation, retailers are interpreting the 'suggested' part in MSRP quite literally. While AMD has attributed these stockouts to unprecedented demand, the RX 9070 XT ($599 MSRP) typically starts at $800 depending on the retailer. The session was joined by popular influencers who praised AMD's Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs for low temperatures but also expressed a desire for more I/O on the motherboards. Afterward, Ms. Saki Suzuki and Mr. Sato from AMD gathered at a roundtable, side-by-side with board representatives from ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor and Sapphire. The board partners, despite wanting to sell more Radeon GPUs, reported they lacked the production capacity to meet demand. Mr. Sato, responding to the point raised, stated, "AMD isn't used to selling [so many] graphics cards." This was later followed up by an important statistic, with Mr. Sato reporting a 45% retail market share for Radeon GPUs. "We're the opposition party, so let's aim for 70%," said Mr. Sato, though such high ambitions require a reliable and steady supply chain. These comments are recorded in this video, starting from four hours, seven and a half minutes. It's important to understand this figure is quite vague. We presume it refers to the share of Radeon GPUs sold in Japan since earlier this month, when RDNA 4 hit shelves. The best global statistic we have is from the Steam Hardware Survey, where Radeon's market share (including iGPUs) plummeted to 11.5% in February. If AMD manages to offer RDNA 4 at MSRP, whether it be by ramping up production or offering rebates, we could probably see this number tick up. At least that's what AMD hoped to achieve this generation.

"Most prefectures have a system in place for public high school entrance exams in a single application system, meaning that one student can only apply to one public high school, but there is a major problem from the perspective of fairness." The person who raised this issue was former Digital Minister Kono Taro. "Under a single-person system, students who are worried about their family's financial strength will have no choice if they fail to try a difficult school, but have no choice but to attend a private school, which creates unfair and inefficient situations, such as students who are forced to take a safe place or who do not attend cram schools fail to get enough information about their exams and fail to accurately grasp what level they will pass," says Kono. ●What is the "acceptance pending algorithm" that Mr. Kono recommends introducing, what is the "acceptance pending algorithm"? On the other hand, he also pointed out that "if students simply implementing a combined application system, high schools that have not been selected will be forced to pass the vacancies from the reserved positions, and there will also be vacancy and the vacancies continue to spurt, resulting in inefficient issues," he said the following. "A system called the acceptance hold algorithm (DA) method, which is currently proposed by Kojima Takehito, Noda Toshiya, and Keio University's Nakamuro Makiko, should be introduced in public high school entrance exams." With this algorithm, students submit a list of schools they want to attend, starting from their first choice. Next, in the unified examination for each prefecture, students will be assigned from the top to their first choice school in order of score. If the high school capacity is full, students who use that school as their first choice will be assigned to the next school they would like to choose. This process is repeated. If you achieve the minimum passing score for your desired school, you will be able to enroll as per the rankings on the list, so students will no longer need to lower their desired school as a safety measure. And, regardless of their financial background, it will create an environment where all students can take the exam based on their own wishes. The algorithm has a proven track record in public high school entrance exams in New York, and is said to be a theoretically excellent method. Kono also said, "There is almost no cost other than system development, and it can be easily implemented thanks to advances in digitalization." ● "Development led by the Digital Agency" Furthermore, when he was serving as digital minister, Kono explained that he developed a system that allows high school entrance exam documents to be sent digitally, and that the operation will begin with next year's entrance exams. "So, the next step is to develop (a system for the DA system) with the initiative of the Digital Agency and provide it for use in each prefecture," he concluded. Toyama Prefecture Governor Nitta Hachiro also posted a post from Mr. Kono. "I also wanted to introduce a multiple application system for prefectural high schools, but I found the algorithms implemented in the United States to be extremely complicated and thought it would be difficult in one prefecture. I would be grateful if the Digital Agency could work on it," he sent a positive message. View current sales on Amazon

EU tech leaders want to move away from relying on foreign-owned infrastructure Establishing a Euro-stack would increase competition and innovation EU companies want common standards and less red tape Several major European tech companies are pushing for greater action from the European Union to reduce the bloc’s reliance on foreign-owned infrastructure by buying and building locally. In an open letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU’s digital chief, Henna Virkkunen, around 100 organizations called for greater adoption of EU-grown apps, platforms, AI models, chips, computing, storage, and connectivity. The move comes as the Trump administration seemingly positions itself to burn an 80 year relationship that the United States has held with Europe. Developing the ‘Euro-stack’ The European digital sovereignty movement has been gradually gaining momentum over the past few years, but has seen a massive increase in support and traction following the re-election of President Trump. Companies such as Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton have all put their mark on moving towards EU digital sovereignty. A paper [PDF] published in January 2025 by a number of prominent business heads and tech experts has given some foresight to how a “Euro stack” would work: “The objective is to reduce Europe’s current total dependency on non-European actors for service to European citizens, businesses, and institutions, to enhance security, create redundancy and resilience, improve opportunities for innovation and digital competitiveness while establishing European governance rules.” Essentially, the European Union has become overly reliant on foreign-owned infrastructure - especially US Big Tech - and if nothing is done soon, EU countries will become subservient to foreign tech companies. The solution therefore is to foster growth at home, with the letter stating, “Industry will invest if there are adequate demand prospects. Prioritizing areas where Europe can already deliver will be key to shifting resources fast to European suppliers, creating value and market in a virtuous circle.” Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors Among suggestions made on how to achieve a Euro stack are plans for the development of common standards to help EU companies compete and defend against US hyperscalers, establishing a ‘Sovereign Infrastructure Fund’ to publicly fund new digital infrastructure in the EU, and promoting innovation by cutting through the burdensome red tape of EU lawmakers. Via TechCrunch

On March 17th, Merpay announced that it will offer the "Mercad Gold" gold card under the JCB brand from the same day on its credit card "Mercad Gold." The annual membership fee is 5,000 yen, and the usage limit is up to 3 million yen, and the service will be provided with bonus points and no annual fee depending on the amount you spend, as well as additional services. Essentially up to 2% return, with over 500,000 yen free annual fee Mercacat Gold will always receive 1-4% points when you purchase Mercari or Mercari Shops, and 1% points when you pay other than Mercari. In addition, up to 20,000 points will be awarded as bonus points, depending on the amount of annual usage, including purchases and sales on Mercari. For example, if you use 2 million yen per year by paying for a local store alone, you will receive 20,000 points per year, including a constant point redemption (1%) and a cumulative bonus points of 20,000 points, and a total of 20,000 points, which is essentially equivalent to up to 2%. In addition, if the annual usage amount, including Mercari's purchase and sales, exceeds 500,000 yen, the annual fee for the following year will be free. The annual usage limit will be increased from Mercado's maximum of 900,000 yen to 3 million yen. We utilize not only traditional attribute information, but also the operational performance of services using "trust" based on Mercari's usage history and AI technology. Taking into account information from CIC, a designated credit information agency that collects, manages and provides credit card credit information, the company will provide appropriate credit that suits the user's usage situation. Additional services include "Shopping Insurance," which covers up to 3 million yen in cases where a product purchased through Mercari or Mercari is damaged, malfunctioned or stolen, and "Smartphone Insurance," which covers repair costs such as screen cracking when you pay your smartphone's communication fees with Mercari Gold. Airport Lunge Services covers lounges within major domestic airports and at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. The amount sold will also be used annually. The biggest feature of Mercaca Gold is that not only is that the amount sold on Mercara is also subject to annual usage amounts. Kayano Oshu, head of Merpay Products, said, "We have been offering Mercado since November 2022, and the number of cards issued has exceeded 4 million in about two years, but there have been calls for a credit card with a higher return rate and a higher price. In an age where one in five people choose gold cards, we added the gold card functionality, just like the features of Mercado that have been around up to now." News View current sales on Amazon

On March 17th, Merpay announced that it will offer the "Mercad Gold" gold card under the JCB brand from the same day on its credit card "Mercad Gold." The annual membership fee is 5,000 yen, and the usage limit is up to 3 million yen, and the service will be provided with bonus points and no annual fee depending on the amount you spend, as well as additional services. Essentially up to 2% return, with over 500,000 yen free annual fee Mercacat Gold will always receive 1-4% points when you purchase Mercari or Mercari Shops, and 1% points when you pay other than Mercari. In addition, up to 20,000 points will be awarded as bonus points, depending on the amount of annual usage, including purchases and sales on Mercari. For example, if you use 2 million yen per year by paying for a local store alone, you will receive 20,000 points per year, including a constant point redemption (1%) and a cumulative bonus points of 20,000 points, and a total of 20,000 points, which is essentially equivalent to up to 2%. In addition, if the annual usage amount, including Mercari's purchase and sales, exceeds 500,000 yen, the annual fee for the following year will be free. The annual usage limit will be increased from Mercado's maximum of 900,000 yen to 3 million yen. We utilize not only traditional attribute information, but also the operational performance of services using "trust" based on Mercari's usage history and AI technology. Taking into account information from CIC, a designated credit information agency that collects, manages and provides credit card credit information, the company will provide appropriate credit that suits the user's usage situation. Additional services include "Shopping Insurance," which covers up to 3 million yen in cases where a product purchased through Mercari or Mercari is damaged, malfunctioned or stolen, and "Smartphone Insurance," which covers repair costs such as screen cracking when you pay your smartphone's communication fees with Mercari Gold. Airport Lunge Services covers lounges within major domestic airports and at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. The amount sold will also be used annually. The biggest feature of Mercaca Gold is that not only is that the amount sold on Mercara is also subject to annual usage amounts. Kayano Oshu, head of Merpay Products, said, "We have been offering Mercado since November 2022, and the number of cards issued has exceeded 4 million in about two years, but there have been calls for a credit card with a higher return rate and a higher price. In an age where one in five people choose gold cards, we added the gold card functionality, just like the features of Mercado that have been around up to now." News View current sales on Amazon

Baidu, the Chinese technology giant, has announced the release of two advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models: ERNIE 4.5 (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) and ERNIE X1. The company also announced that its conversational AI platform, ERNIE Bot, is now freely accessible to all users - ahead of schedule. ERNIE 4.5 represents Baidu's latest advancement in multimodal AI modeling. The model integrates various data types — text, images, audio, and video — through joint modeling, enhancing its ability to comprehend and generate content across these modalities. This integration leads to improvements in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory capabilities. Notably, ERNIE 4.5 demonstrates significant enhancements in logical reasoning and coding abilities, addressing previous challenges in these areas. In internal evaluations, ERNIE 4.5 has shown performance on par with models like DeepSeek-R1, but at approximately half the deployment cost. This cost efficiency positions ERNIE 4.5 as a competitive option for enterprises seeking advanced AI capabilities without incurring substantial expenses. Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: Baidu) (Image credit: Baidu) ERNIE X1 is Baidu's first model specifically designed for reasoning-intensive tasks. It excels in logical inference, problem-solving, and structured decision-making, making it suitable for applications in finance, law, and data analysis. The model's architecture emphasizes understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution, aiming to provide robust reasoning capabilities while maintaining cost efficiency. Originally scheduled for a later release, Baidu's ERNIE Bot is now freely available to all users ahead of plan. This early rollout is attributed to improvements in production capacity and model optimization. By making ERNIE Bot accessible to a broader audience, Baidu aims to accelerate user engagement and gather feedback to improve its AI offerings. Introducing ERNIE 4.5 | Our New-Generation Native Multimodal Model - YouTube Watch On Baidu plans to integrate ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 across its product ecosystem, including Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app. This integration aims to enhance user experience by providing more versatile and advanced AI functionalities. For enterprise users and developers, ERNIE 4.5 is now accessible via APIs on Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform, with ERNIE X1 to follow soon. The release of ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 occurs amid increasing competition in the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek are continually advancing their AI models. Baidu's focus on cost-effective, high-performance models reflects its strategy to meet the growing demand for scalable AI solutions in various sectors.

Japan Airlines (JAL) and NEC will begin demonstration experiments of autonomous driving business systems and facial recognition riding systems on some sections of the business communication bus used by JAL Group employees to travel between related facilities. Image of a vehicle operating image of a vehicle operating image The implementation period is from March 17th to 24th. Some sections of the business communication bus operating in the Haneda Airport Development Area will be operated by autonomous "Level 2" driving assistance vehicles. This will verify whether drivers can automate and save on manpower such as riding confirmation and guidance, which are additional tasks other than driving that are currently responsible for other than driving. The vehicle used is the Tier Four's "Minibus." The process involves booking a ride using an application exclusively for JAL Group employees, and verifying the identity using facial recognition before boarding. In addition to using a facial recognition riding system that utilizes NEC's facial recognition technology, the company will also be verifying real-time driving conditions using a remote monitoring system, safety checks both inside and outside the bus, and "learning media transmission control technology" that supports advanced remote monitoring through AI. Face recognition image Face recognition image Flow of the demonstration experiment Flow of the demonstration experiment After the results of this demonstration experiment, the two companies will verify the provision of transportation methods that utilize the latest mobility technology. The company aims to achieve seamless travel through the use of autonomous driving technology in airport operations and system integration such as facial recognition.

Japan Airlines (JAL) and NEC will begin demonstration experiments of autonomous driving business systems and facial recognition riding systems on some sections of the business communication bus used by JAL Group employees to travel between related facilities. Image of a vehicle operating image of a vehicle operating image The implementation period is from March 17th to 24th. Some sections of the business communication bus operating in the Haneda Airport Development Area will be operated by autonomous "Level 2" driving assistance vehicles. This will verify whether drivers can automate and save on manpower such as riding confirmation and guidance, which are additional tasks other than driving that are currently responsible for other than driving. The vehicle used is the Tier Four's "Minibus." The process involves booking a ride using an application exclusively for JAL Group employees, and verifying the identity using facial recognition before boarding. In addition to using a facial recognition riding system that utilizes NEC's facial recognition technology, the company will also be verifying real-time driving conditions using a remote monitoring system, safety checks both inside and outside the bus, and "learning media transmission control technology" that supports advanced remote monitoring through AI. Face recognition image Face recognition image Flow of the demonstration experiment Flow of the demonstration experiment After the results of this demonstration experiment, the two companies will verify the provision of transportation methods that utilize the latest mobility technology. The company aims to achieve seamless travel through the use of autonomous driving technology in airport operations and system integration such as facial recognition.

Google Gemin 2.0 Flash's image generator in AI Studio can remove watermarks from images It seems to lack the guardrails found in the full Gemini app Gemini 2.0 Flash in AI Studio can also generate images of celebrities Google Gemini 2.0 Flash's new image generation capabilities enable it to remove watermarks from images so well that it could enable large scale copyright violation and that’s very concerning for all of us. Lots of users on the X platform have posted examples of how they’ve been able to use the AI tool to easily remove watermarks. New skill unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash model is really awesome at removing watermarks in images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCvMarch 15, 2025 Digital watermarks on images enable digital creators to show a preview of their work before somebody decides to purchase it, at which point the watermarks are removed. AI tools that remove watermarks on images for free are nothing new but are deeply unethical, and can land you in legal hot water if you use the stolen images they create in any way. Other users on X have noted that Gemini 2.0 Flash accessed via AI Studio can add celebrities into images, although in testing I found the results seem a little bit random, with Gemini often refusing the request. left: my deskright: elon musk sitting at my deskI usually tend to think worries re:photoshop etc are overblown, but goddam, the internet is about to get a lot weirder pic.twitter.com/O9gXBaWgkYMarch 14, 2025 The power of AI Studio Google recently released a new version of its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model that can generate its own images. This sounds slightly confusing when you realize that we’ve all been able to go to gemini.google.com or fire up the Gemini app and ask it to create an AI image for well over a year now. However, what the mobile app and browser-based versions of Gemini do is call upon Imagen 3, Google’s flagship AI image generator, to generate the image for them. Imagen 3 will not remove watermarks from images if asked. Recently Google has enabled Gemini 2.0 Flash to create and modify images itself. You can’t access the image generation power of Google 2.0 Flash from the regular Gemini interface, instead you need to access it via Google’s AI Studio, a developer-focussed interface for interacting with its latest AI models. Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors An image created using Gemini 2.0 Flash (with images) in AI Studio. (Image credit: Created with Google Gemini) Cause for concern AI Studio is free to access and just requires a normal Google account for registration. To test it out I uploaded a watermarked image and was able to easily remove the watermark. The results weren’t perfect - the image became slightly degraded and it added its own Gemini star logo to the bottom left corner, but what is especially concerning with the new Gemini 2.0 Flash watermark removal ability is how well it does it. It’s clearly not the purpose that Gemini 2.0 Flash was created for, but the fact that Google hasn’t put sufficient guardrails in place with its image generator is a concerning development and something that needs addressing urgently. TechRadar has reached out to Google for comment on this issue and will update this story when we hear back.

Since then, the chronicles tell that the law was used only on three occasions: during the war of 1812 and during the two world conflicts. During the Second World War, in particular, it was invoked to imprison people of Italian, German and Japanese descent. To the Asians (who had hit Pearl Harbor's Base, thus attacking the American power directly) went worse than everyone: it is estimated that there would be about 120 thousand the Japanese imprisoned, in those years, on the basis of the dictation, even among those who were in possession of American citizenship. On the basis, that is, of simple geniology. Because the Alien Enemies Act has been exhumed For years of "invasion" by illegal immigrants, Donald Trump has been talking about years of "invasion", and this is the prerequisite for which the exhumation of a desuetic disposition is based. The president tried to get a minimum shelter from attacks by satisfying the legal requirements in a way. As seen, the Alien Enemies Act requires that there is public communication, and Trump consequently externalized. In an intervention last Saturday the Tycoon said that the Gang Tren de Aragua is engaged in an "irregular war" against the US under the direction of the Venezuelan president Nicolàs Maduro. The attempt to justify the use of the ultrabicentenary law extending the concept of war to fray it is evident. A republican practice, which recalls the era of George W. Bush with his "war on terror" assumption of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the second, falsifying the evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that the Saddam Hussein regime would have possessed -. The tenant of the White House has also said that Tren de Aragua "is perpetrating, trying and threatening a predatory incursion in the territory of the United States". The lexicon, as can be observed, follows the dictation of the standard, in a clear attempt to establish a connection and, therefore, justify its use. Aspects that did not escape critics, who have underlined, first of all, the fact that the United States are not currently in war, less than less with Venezuela. Secondly, moreover, it is remarked that the Alien Enemies Act refers to war declarations and threats of invasion by foreign governments, and criminal organizations are not: these are non -state actors. The reference to the link with Maduro is the clumsy attempt to respect, at least formally, the forecasts of the text of the law: clumsy because the statement is difficult to demonstrate. And also because the Central American country does not enjoy international caliber such as to put the United States in difficulty in the case - probable - that it is an invention. Because the judge blocked the repatriations and stories of immigrants Trump's arguments did not convince the federal judge James Boasberg of the Federal District Court of Washington who temporarily prevented (for 14 days) to the government the use of the rules to repatriate the Venezuelans. A group of lawyers who agreed to lend their pro bono work to be used on behalf of some arrested. Chilling stories. One of the prisoners, indicated with the initials J.G.G., declares that he had been awakened at 2 am on the night of March 6 and induced to sign documents that, would have been told, they had to serve to renent their personal effects before issuing. The documents would have been subjected to him in English, an idiom that Venezuelan does not speak. But instead of being freed, J.G.G. He was brought to the prison of El Valle in Texas. On March 14, the man is awakened again in the night: the guards told him that he would be transferred elsewhere, but nothing was done because the plane was forced to stay on the ground for a breakdown. It could have been his salvation: in Venezuela the police would have already beaten and tortured him in the past. But the most alarming aspect of the story is that the only indication of its belonging to the Gang Tren de Aragua are two tattoos on the leg: a rose and a skull. Only on the basis of this would the police assume his affiliation. The man, however, offers a different explanation: a professional tattoo artist would be a job. And that tattoo, made for aesthetic reasons, for some time he would have liked to remove it. Planes already in flight The Court imposed a 14 -day suspension; But, despite the judge's order, the Trump administration would have also proceeded to some repatriations, with the president who showed off the result on his social network. A challenge to judicial power? Karoline Leavitt, spokesperson for the White House on Sunday 16 March: "The administration - he said - did not refuse to observe the order of the Court. The order, which has no legal bases, was issued after foreign members of the Tren de Aragua had already been removed from the American territory ". A blow to the circle, and one in the barrel. Until the next occasion.

Apple's AirPods Pro 2 is on sale on Amazon. The direct sales price at the Apple Store is 39,800 yen, but it's a great deal at 34,354 yen on Amazon. It's 5% cheaper than the average selling price on Amazon. The AirPods Pro 2 boasts a great sound that is popular with everyone and high noise cancelling performance, making it a bestseller of wireless earphones. I usually use an Android smartphone, but I can use the AirPods Pro 2 without any problems. If you're not in a hurry at all, you may also have the option to wait for the AirPods Pro 3 (tentative name), but it is unclear when it will appear. AirPods Pro 2 on sale (check the price on Amazon)

Apple's AirPods Pro 2 is on sale on Amazon. The direct sales price at the Apple Store is 39,800 yen, but it's a great deal at 34,354 yen on Amazon. It's 5% cheaper than the average selling price on Amazon. The AirPods Pro 2 boasts a great sound that is popular with everyone and high noise cancelling performance, making it a bestseller of wireless earphones. I usually use an Android smartphone, but I can use the AirPods Pro 2 without any problems. If you're not in a hurry at all, you may also have the option to wait for the AirPods Pro 3 (tentative name), but it is unclear when it will appear. AirPods Pro 2 on sale (check the price on Amazon)

Update 3/17 09:42 Raspberry Pi has confirmed that DigiKey and Mouser will be providing RP2350s to eager makers in the United States. Updated Article The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the Pico 2 W have been on sale for a number of months now, but the chip that powers it, the RP2350 has not been generally available. This has all changed with Raspberry Pi releasing the RP2350 for general sale for those eager to integrate the powerful microcontroller into their projects. If you want your own RP2350 for a project, then you can pick them up from approved Raspberry Pi resellers. Just visit the official page and click on the Buy Now button in the top right. UK reseller Pimoroni offers a bundle of 10 RP2350A chips for £8.80 ($9) and 10 RP2350B for £9.60 ($10). If you need a smaller amount, The Pi Hut is offering a five-pack of the RP2350A for £4.40 ($4.50) and a five-pack of RP2350B for £4.80 ($5). RP235X Packages Swipe to scroll horizontally Product Package Size Internal Flash GPIO Analog Inputs Price (single unit) Price per 3,400 unit 13 inch reel RP2350A QFN-60 7mm2 None 30 4 $1.10 $0.80 RP2350B QFN-80 10mm2 None 48 8 $1.20 $0.90 RP2354A QFN-60 7mm2 2MB 30 4 $1.30 $1 RP2354B QFN-80 10mm2 2MB 48 8 $1.50 $1.10 The RP235X comes in four different options, but at this time only the RP2350A and B will be going on general sale. The first is the $1.10 RP2350A. This is what we find on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W. The QFN-60 package has no internal flash, 30 GPIO pins, of which there are four analog inputs. The $1.20 RP2350B is a larger, QFN-80 package. There still isn't any onboard flash, but we do get more GPIO pins (48 in total) of which eight are analog inputs. We've got a full breakdown of all the RP235X models, their specs and a full list of GPIO pins in our handy guide. Note that the RP2354A and B are not on general sale. They should be on sale later this year. All the RP2350s come with the same Dual-Core Arm Cortex M33 and RISC-V Hazard3 CPUs running at 150 MHz, and we have 4MB of onboard SRAM to run our projects. If you are designing your own boards based on the RP2350, then you could add some PSRAM (Pseudo Static RAM) to give your projects extra space to run. Storage for the RP2350 boards is via an external QSPI chip. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors The choice of CPUs in the RP2350 is intriguing. The first is the traditional Dual-Core Arm Cortex M33 that has plenty of power to get the job done. But there is also a Dual-Core RISC-V Hazard3 CPU, marking the first time that a RISC-V chip has been integrated into a Raspberry Pi product. The chip was designed by Raspberry Pi's own Luke Wren, as a project in his spare time. The Hazard3 chip is a fork of the Hazard5, another Wren project, designed for the RISCboy open source Nintendo Game Boy Advance. Wren has been working on logic design since he was a student, and the fruits of his labor are now for all to see. Could we see more RISC-V chips baked into Raspberry Pi? Possibly, but the traditional Arm CPU used in the Raspberry Pi 5 will be here for some time to come. If you want to make your own RP2350-powered projects, but don't have the facilities to fabricate your own PCBs, Raspberry Pi has recently announced that JCLPCB are offering the RP230A and B for inclusion in your own projects. The RP2354A and B (with internal flash) will be available later this year. So now all you need to do is fire up your favorite EDA package and start designing your very own RP2350 projects.

On March 17, Hitachi (Hitachi) and IBM Japan announced that they will begin collaborating with Hitachi's loan DX service and IBM Japan's financial and digital service infrastructure. It will make lending operations at financial institutions one-flow and more efficient, helping them improve productivity and reduce costs. Specifically, Hitachi will link the "Lending DX Promotion Service for Financial Institutions" provided by Japan with the "Digital Services Platform for Financial Services (DSP)," a microservice platform provided by IBM Japan. This will include a process for enquiring customer information and credit, which financial institutions have accessed individual accounting systems in the past in a series of lending operations, as part of the expansion of the functions of the loan DX service. Hitachi, IBM Japan, and Amazon Web Services Japan (AWS Japan) have begun co-creation studies on DX promotion, aiming to improve value by solving problems for regional financial institutions and revitalize the region since September 2024. This expansion of the functionality of the lending DX service is part of this. Image of service collaboration (provided by Hitachi) Image of service collaboration (provided by Hitachi) Loan operations also play an important role in the operations of financial institutions, and there is an urgent need to digitalize contracts and shift to web channels. On the other hand, this process requires cooperation with accounting systems, making it difficult to deal with, and traditional business flows such as terminal operations and paper media remain. In addition, until now, financial institutions have closely linked various channel systems and external solutions to core accounting systems, and when new services are added, it has been an obstacle to timely service provision, as the accounting systems need to be renovated. With Loan DX Services, we have previously handled a series of operations, such as electronic contracts and transitioning to web channels, by linking with peripheral systems. With this expansion of functions, real-time data inquiry can be made possible by linking loan DX service and DSP to the business flow related to customer information and credit inquiries that exist within the accounting system. In addition, by linking the loan DX service and DSP on AWS' cloud services, the transaction menu and service provided will be expanded as a common cloud service, allowing each financial institution to choose a service that suits its bank's needs. In the future, Hitachi and IBM Japan will continue to work on improving the efficiency of loan application procedures, as well as changing the wide range of loan operations through collaboration between loan DX services and DSPs. The main themes are "expanding the scope of paperless work," "wide area utilization of generated AI," and "digital connections with stakeholders." In particular, regarding generation AI, we will consider applying it to automatic generation of loan agreements.

On March 17, Hitachi (Hitachi) and IBM Japan announced that they will begin collaborating with Hitachi's loan DX service and IBM Japan's financial and digital service infrastructure. It will make lending operations at financial institutions one-flow and more efficient, helping them improve productivity and reduce costs. Specifically, Hitachi will link the "Lending DX Promotion Service for Financial Institutions" provided by Japan with the "Digital Services Platform for Financial Services (DSP)," a microservice platform provided by IBM Japan. This will include a process for enquiring customer information and credit, which financial institutions have accessed individual accounting systems in the past in a series of lending operations, as part of the expansion of the functions of the loan DX service. Hitachi, IBM Japan, and Amazon Web Services Japan (AWS Japan) have begun co-creation studies on DX promotion, aiming to improve value by solving problems for regional financial institutions and revitalize the region since September 2024. This expansion of the functionality of the lending DX service is part of this. Image of service collaboration (provided by Hitachi) Image of service collaboration (provided by Hitachi) Loan operations also play an important role in the operations of financial institutions, and there is an urgent need to digitalize contracts and shift to web channels. On the other hand, this process requires cooperation with accounting systems, making it difficult to deal with, and traditional business flows such as terminal operations and paper media remain. In addition, until now, financial institutions have closely linked various channel systems and external solutions to core accounting systems, and when new services are added, it has been an obstacle to timely service provision, as the accounting systems need to be renovated. With Loan DX Services, we have previously handled a series of operations, such as electronic contracts and transitioning to web channels, by linking with peripheral systems. With this expansion of functions, real-time data inquiry can be made possible by linking loan DX service and DSP to the business flow related to customer information and credit inquiries that exist within the accounting system. In addition, by linking the loan DX service and DSP on AWS' cloud services, the transaction menu and service provided will be expanded as a common cloud service, allowing each financial institution to choose a service that suits its bank's needs. In the future, Hitachi and IBM Japan will continue to work on improving the efficiency of loan application procedures, as well as changing the wide range of loan operations through collaboration between loan DX services and DSPs. The main themes are "expanding the scope of paperless work," "wide area utilization of generated AI," and "digital connections with stakeholders." In particular, regarding generation AI, we will consider applying it to automatic generation of loan agreements.

Cadillac provided flights from Los Angeles to San Fransisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the Escalade IQ. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. SAN FRANCISCO—Newsflash: The new electric Cadillac Escalade IQ weighs over 9,000 lbs, or a fair amount more than 4,000 kilograms. For context, that figure works out to almost exactly half again as much as the 682 hp (509 kW) Escalade V that comes equipped with a barking-mad 6.2 L supercharged V8. Yet the latest and supposedly greatest from Cadillac needed to weigh so very much to achieve a class-leading range target of 460 miles (740 km), thanks to a 205 kWh battery pack. The Escalade IQ shares a modular General Motors (formerly Ultium) chassis and battery pack with the gargantuan Hummer EV, and even more hardware with the Silverado and Sierra pickup truck siblings. As opposed to trying to attract rugged work truck and off-roading cred, though, for Cadillac that kind of range figure seemed necessary to appeal to a "no compromise" lifestyle that Escalade buyers might well expect while considering a switch to fully electric power. And the new IQ certainly puts down plenty of instantaneously available grunt, and despite its mass, it can punch out a 0–60 time in under five seconds with the Velocity Max button pushed, thanks to dual motors rated at 750 hp (560 kW) and 786 lb-ft (1,065 Nm). Credit: Michael Teo Van Runkle Three rows of seats will comfortably seat seven adults, and a forthcoming EQL variant stretches just over 4 inches longer with a higher roofline to create even more space in the third row. The rest of the interior, meanwhile, packs in all the tech possible: almost six feet of screens atop the dash, up to 42 speakers' worth of surround sound, optional Executive second-row seats with massaging function, hands-free Super Cruise partially automated driving, and the list goes on. We know by now that electrification fits well into the super-luxe ethos, because silent and smooth propulsion works better for shorter lifestyle drives. And yet, the sheer mass required to achieve those range and power figures—despite improved aero versus the ICE Escalade—unfortunately means that the laws of physics make no compromises, either. Specifically, the Escalade IQ rides on the same battery cradle, same suspension components, same 24-inch wheel size, and same Michelin Primacy LTX tires as the Silverado EV RST First Edition—a behemoth of a pickup truck that many journalists panned due to the baffling decision by General Motors to spec the largest wheels ever sold on a production vehicle. Even slightly smaller 22-inch wheels, as I can attest after driving a Silverado EV LT, help to reduce the crashy and clunky reverberations that ruined any semblance of passenger serenity.

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft’s Copilot app for Windows is being “unintentionally uninstalled” on some Windows 11 devices thanks to the latest monthly Windows update. The Patch Tuesday updates that started rolling out on March 11th have led to Copilot being unpinned from the taskbar and uninstalled. “We’re aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some devices,” admits Microsoft in a support document for the March update to Windows 11. Microsoft says it’s working on a fix for the issue, and that affected users can simply reinstall the Copilot app from the Microsoft Store and manually pin it to the taskbar in the meantime. While this is clearly a bug with the latest Windows update, some Windows 11 users who aren’t interested in Copilot will undoubtedly see it as a feature instead. Microsoft is in the middle of rolling out a native version of its Copilot for Windows app, nearly a year after turning it into a basic web app. The new Copilot app has an improved UI and is also getting a press-to-talk hotkey so you can talk to Microsoft’s AI assistant like you used to be able to do with Cortana in Windows 10. Microsoft is also working on additional updates to Copilot that it’s planning to unveil at a special 50th anniversary event on April 4th. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman will be on stage next month to announce new Copilot features, amid rumors that Microsoft is developing its own in-house AI reasoning models to compete with OpenAI.

Foam: These mattresses are often made of latex or memory foam and have no coils for support. Oftentimes, they begin with a cooling or super-soft contouring foam on top and move to a super-dense bottom foam for support. They contour to the body, providing pressure relief and good motion absorption. They are usually best for side sleepers and combination sleepers without back pain. Although not always, you can find many cheap mattresses primarily made of foam, but these can be heavy, not provide enough support for back sleepers or those with pain, and can be a hot sleep since there isn’t much airflow with the dense foams. Spring or coil: Often thought of as an old-school mattress style, this bed has a coil-based support system and is generally on the budget side. Springs often lack pressure relief, and aren’t recommended for sleepers with pain. Because of the coils, the bed is bouncier than other options and lacks motion isolation. Latex: All of the layers of this mattress are made with latex rubber, and because of that it’s bouncy and durable. Like memory foam, latex contours to the body, but because of its density, it isn’t the coolest option and they tend to be heavier. Natural and/or organic latex beds are generally more eco-conscious. The only all-latex organic mattress I’ve tested is the pricey Essentia Tatami Organic Mattress, which was comfortable and not too hot because of drilled air holes (which isn’t always the case), but it was super unstructured (floppy and couldn’t stand on its side without buckling), dense, and heavy (nearly 100 pounds). Hybrid: We at WIRED tend to think that, in general, hybrid beds are the best for most people. They combine the best elements of different beds—an innerspring support beneath a top foam for comfort (and often cooling). The top layers are super-comfy foam or latex, with coils (often individually wrapped) underneath for structure. All of my favorite mattresses have been hybrid—I find that the combination of top gel memory foams and wrapped coils beneath also help with airflow and have a cooler sleep. Plus, they can vastly vary on firmness to comfortably contour sleepers in most positions, and have a huge range in price (mid-$300s to thousands). Understand What Type of Sleeper You Are What type of sleeper you are affects what type of mattress you should buy. This may seem obvious, but it’s important to take into consideration sleeping type, budget, and what’s going to fit in your house and be easiest to move. I tend to go for more plush mattresses, but I’ve learned that beds get much softer over time. It's easier to add memory foam toppers to a firmer mattress than to be stuck with a soft mattress that turns saggy and causes lower back pain (been there). Side sleeper: The stats vary, but most people are side sleepers. Along with stomach sleepers, side sleepers need a little more give to their mattresses, with enough give to let your shoulder and hips sink to give spinal alignment, but not too much so that your spine (and limbs) are unsupported. If the bed is too firm or uses springs only, the less-distributed side weight can become a really painful position on a harder surface, even leading to limbs falling asleep (any side sleeper who has camped knows the feeling). Softer memory foam might seem like a good solution, but it can slowly but surely compress under you and become compacted and flat. Most often a hybrid mattress, using a combination of several layers of foam followed by coils or springs that let pressure points like hips and shoulders sink into the bed, work best. That’s why figuring out the best mattress for side sleepers is a bit like the Goldilocks parable—not too firm or too soft, but just right.

TensorWave, a cloud-platform for AI workloads powered by AMD's MI Instinct accelerators, is kicking off the Beyond CUDA Summit starting today. The event focuses on the concept of the 'CUDA moat,' and how developers can optimize their AI-centric workloads using other alternatives. Attendees can expect to see demonstrations, hot takes, panels, and expert opinions from influential leaders in the AI field including computer architect icons like Jim Keller and Raja Koduri. It's no secret that Nvidia-built GPUs constitute the majority of hardware in the AI space. Although AMD's Instinct accelerators offer performance comparable to Nvidia hardware, the already-established and mature CUDA ecosystem is indispensable to some users / organizations. Nvidia realized the potential of parallel computing on its GPUs early on and developed a proprietary platform dubbed CUDA, which is now the de facto standard for GPU-accelerated computing. Through continuous efforts, optimizations, and the sudden rise of AI which coincidentally is powered by GPUs, Nvidia has positioned itself as a leading solution provider. In fact, 90% of Nvidia's revenue is now driven by its data-center offerings, with CUDA being a central selling point. This creates a vendor lock-in situation, where CUDA (software) effectively confines the industry to Nvidia's hardware, limiting innovation and competition. The industry is shifting gears to a more open-source and hardware-agnostic future, but that's easier said than done. We have OpenCL, ROCm, oneAPI, and Vulkan as alternatives, however, each trails Nvidia in one or many aspects. Enter Beyond CUDA, where key figures in the AI field have rallied up to congregate and develop a more diverse and heterogeneous future. Hosted by TensorWave, the Beyond CUDA Summit will address the many challenges the AI computing industry faces, such as hardware flexibility, cost efficiency, and exploring the available alternatives to CUDA. Platforms like ROCm require significant developments to achieve parity with CUDA. Even now, ROCm only supports a small selection of modern GPUs while CUDA maintains compatibility with hardware dating back to 2006. AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs are still not officially supported by ROCm. Developers have long bemoaned AMD's slow adoption of new features and support on new hardware. On the positive side, Strix Halo is now ROCm-compatible, though only on Windows. If you live in San Jose, buckle up as the summit takes place at The Guildhouse, which is with notable irony just three blocks away from the McEnery Convention Center, the site of Nvidia's GTC, which also commences today. Participants have the opportunity to win an AMD Instinct MI210 GPU with 64GB of HBM2e memory. The event runs from 12 PM to 10 PM PDT, with four time slots for various sessions. You can learn more details about the summit here.

There are rumors that the "Pixel 9a" will be released in March. Previous A-Series devices have been released in conjunction with the developer conference "Google I/O" held every May, but this time it seems likely that it will be faster. There have also been many leaks and reports about the appearance and specifications, including a newly designed camera module and improved battery life. Of course, it is expected to have a wealth of new AI features. From here, we'll summarize the latest rumors and release dates for the Pixel 9a. What is the release date for the Pixel 9a? In 2024, Google released its flagship Pixel 9 series in August rather than the usual October. In response to this trend, the lower-priced model, the Pixel 9a, may also be released earlier, and according to Android Headlines, the most likely time will be mid-March. This is not surprising. This is because Google is turning Google I/O into a session that is mostly AI-focused, and it is barely covering hardware-related topics. In fact, the 2024 Pixel 8a was announced a week before the event. What is the price of the Pixel 9a? According to Android Headlines, the Pixel 9a is expected to cost $499 (approximately 74,000 yen) for the 128GB storage version, the same as the Pixel 8a. The 256GB version is reportedly worth $599 (approximately 89,000 yen). It is often advantageous to keep prices unchanged in a budget-oriented model. Considering that Apple's iPhone 16e is in a less wallet-friendly price range starting at $599, the Pixel 9a may have an advantage if it is lower than this. What will happen to the Pixel 9a design? According to leak information, the biggest change seems to be that there is no camera bar, which is a distinctive feature of the Pixel. According to Android Headlines, the Pixel 9a's wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle cameras seem to be almost flat on the back. The renderings published by Sudhanshu Ambhore on social media X also feature a more minimalist camera design, with two lenses being placed conservatively on the left side of the back. Google Pixel 9a renders thread (without watermark) pic.twitter.com/WpFU6MTeBe — Sudhanshu Ambhore (@Sudhanshu1414) February 17, 2025 The main camera is 48MP (down from 64M on the 8a), and the ultra-wide-angle camera and the front camera may have the same 13MP sensor as the 8a. Since pixel count is not everything, Google will explain that it has strengthened its camera in a different way this time (I personally think a lot of AI-based enhancements will be mentioned). According to the rendering, there are also new colors. The Pixel 9a is said to be in the lineup of porcelain (white), obsidian (black), peony (pink), and iris (purple). In the video of a device called the Pixel 9a, the sides and back look more flat. The volume buttons also seem to be modest. The screen size will expand to 6.3 inches (8a is 6.1 inches), and the main unit may be slightly thinner than the previous model. Processor, AI functions, battery If Google follows the trends so far, budget-oriented models should also have the same processor as the flagship. In other words, the Pixel 9a is expected to use the same "Tensor G4" chip as the Pixel 9. However, according to Android Authority, the same Exynos Modem 5300 as the Pixel 8 series could be used instead of the Exynos Modem 5400. While this will keep prices down, you may not be able to use the Pixel 9's flagship feature, "satellite SOS" (requires a 5400 modem). On the other hand, if you are equipped with a Tensor G4 chip, there is a high possibility that the same AI functions as the Pixel 9, such as "Photo Together" and "Pixel Studio" can be used on the 9a. It is now becoming common practice for budget-oriented models to include the latest AI functions, such as the iPhone 16e with Apple Intelligence and the Samsung's Galaxy S24 FE with the Galaxy AI. According to Android Headlines, the Pixel 9a's battery capacity is 5100mAh. This is an upgrade from the 8a's 4492mAh. If it is true that it will be thinner than the previous model, improving battery life will be even more appreciated. It is unclear how true these rumors will become, but they may be revealed surprisingly soon. Google's tablet "Pixel Tablet" (check price on Amazon)

He returned home with a titanium heart, waiting for an organ transplant. It is an Australian man, about 40 years old and with a severe heart failure, which has become the first person in the world to be able to leave the hospital with a similar device and to live with it for over 100 days. To date, in fact, no other patient had succeeded and this, therefore, could open the way to a potential swab solution for people with heart failure waiting for a heart donor. But how exactly does Titanium's heart work? The heart of titanium The heart of Titanium, called Bivacor Total Artificial Heart (TAH), was invented by the biomedical engineer Daniel Timms, founder of the Australian-Stantenese company who takes its name from this device, which we remember to be still in the experimentation phase. Built in titanium, it works like a continuous pump in which a rotor, kept in position by magnets, pushes blood to regular impulses throughout the body. A cable channeled under the skin connects the device to a portable external controller that works with batteries during the day and can be connected to the electricity grid at night. Unlike other devices, which have many parts that often spoil themselves, Bivacor has no valves or mechanical bearings has only a mobile part, and therefore, it could be less subject to problems of mechanical wear. The record As the doctors of St Vincent's Hospital Sydney, Australia, where the operations were performed, the patient lived with the heart of Titanium for more than three months (from November 2024) until he was subjected to surgery to receive a donated human heart has been performed. It is, in essence of the sixth person in the world to receive the device, but the first to live with us for more than a month. The patient, experts know, is taking back well and this last goal could help research better understand how people can live with this device in the real world and if, in the future, it can be used as a temporary measure. "This revolutionary procedure, performed at the end of last year, marks a new era in heart transplant and offers new hopes for patients with heart failure," commented the experts. According to some cardiologists, as reported by Nature, the heart of titanium could even become a permanent option for people not suitable for transplants due to age or other health conditions. Experiments The last Australian patient is part of the US experimentation, led by Joseph Rogers, a cardiologist specialized in cardiac failure and president of the Texas Heart Institute of Houston, in which five patients between forty and sixty years received a previous version of the bivacor last year. In these cases, the device supported patients up to a month in the hospital, but it was not however designed to allow them to return home. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now approved the extension of the experimentation to 15 other patients, even if a lot of work will still be needed before this Titanium heart becomes the type of treatment that the general public could have access.

Back when EV enthusiasm was higher, there were fits and starts of vehicle-to-home concepts and products. If EVs and their ginormous batteries are expensive, resource-intensive purchases, the thinking went, maybe we should get something more out of them than just groceries and school pick-ups. Maybe we could find other things for that huge battery to do during the 95 percent of time it spends parked in or near our homes. An EV powering your whole home, or even pushing power back to the grid, is something higher-end EVs might do at some point with some utilities. I have a Chevy Bolt, an EV that does not have even a three-prong 110 V plug on it, let alone power-your-home potential. If I wanted to keep the essentials running during an outage, it seemed like I needed to buy a fuel-based generator—or one of those big portable power stations. Or so I thought, until I came across inverter kits. Inverters take the direct current available from your vehicle's 12V battery—the lead-acid brick inside almost every car—and turns it into alternating current suitable for standard plugs. Inverters designed for car batteries have been around a long time, opening up both novel and emergency uses. The catch is that you have to start the car's gas engine often enough to keep the battery charged. What's different about this Bolt-specific kit is that the inverter pulls power from the 12 V battery, which in turn pulls from the car's larger battery, the high-voltage one that makes it actually drive. And given that it's an EV without emissions, it's OK to keep it running in the garage. It's by no means a whole-home solution—my kit maker, EV Extend, recommends drawing just 1,000 watts of continuous power so as not to drain the battery too far or damage the electronics. But it's certainly better than having only flashlights, USB battery packs, and the power utility's website open on your phone.

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Xiaomi Japan has released the "Smart Weight Scale S200." The price is 1,980 yen, but until April 1st, the price will be discounted to 1,680 yen. Xiaomi Smart Weight Scale S200 (Check the price on Amazon) The S200 Smart Weight Scale is a scale that connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. Measurement results are automatically recorded in the Xiaomi Home app on your smartphone. It also features a high-performance sensor that can be measured in 0.05kg increments. It is said to accurately detect daily weight changes and support effective weight measurements. The app also allows you to check the trend in weight fluctuations by week, month, or year. In addition to displaying indicators such as BMI, weight management advice reduces the health risks of unhealthy dieting and extreme weight loss. Furthermore, it is equipped with a balance test function, and when you stand on one foot on the scale and balance it, the Xiaomi Home app displays data on muscle coordination, stability, and reaction time. Although expensive smart scales are often rechargeable, this cheap unit has a simple configuration with three AAA batteries. Although it does not have the function of a body composition scale, it is a necessary and sufficient product for users who want to know their weight and want to digitally manage their long-term progression. How much does another company's smart scale cost? (Check it on Amazon) Xiaomi Smart Weight Scale S200 (Check the price on Amazon)

Hitachi (Hitachi) announced that it has developed a "deep insight estimation technology" to deal with supply chain disruptions caused by natural disasters and pandemics. This technology utilizes the generated AI to estimate the manufacturing bases of suppliers with high accuracy, allowing for quick responses when risks occur. This technology uses generated AI to collect and accumulate in-company and open data in real time, and associate and estimate it to extract insights that people cannot imagine. Part supply information such as part type name, material, and company name of the supplier, as well as company information published on the website, is input into the generation AI to estimate the manufacturing base information. A verification within the Hitachi Group confirmed that manufacturing base information can be estimated with an accuracy of over 85%. This technology can significantly reduce the huge amount of information collected and narrowing down by hand when a risk occurs, such as an earthquake or a typhoon. For example, in the event of an earthquake, it is possible to quickly identify manufacturing bases in areas with high shaking, and take measures such as increasing inventory and securing alternative sources. In the production base estimation work, first, the location and part information obtained from contract information at the time of procurement are converted into product codes and attached information using the product code system. The generated AI is then used to extract information that can be a manufacturing base from open data such as the official company website, ISO authentication information, and map information. Ultimately, the intermediate list created from the information obtained in the previous stage is processed to ensure consistency and accuracy, and estimate the supplier's manufacturing base at the latitude and longitude levels. According to Hitachi, the risks of impacting supply chains, such as natural disasters, pandemics and geopolitical conflicts, have increased in recent years. In particular, in manufacturing, which has a large number of suppliers, risk management and strengthening resilience are important issues. The company is working in collaboration with the University of Tokyo Digital Observership Research Promotion Agency to visualize procurement risks by capturing risks that will affect manufacturing. This will help to improve the efficiency of risk management and contribute to the strengthening of the supply chain of companies. In the future, we aim to visualize supply chain risk by integrating the technology with diverse risk information and signaling through joint research with the University of Tokyo. Furthermore, we will promote the social implementation of risk management systems/services through collaboration with government and partners.

Azilla announced that in cooperation with Tokyu, Tokyu Corporation and Tokyu Security, it has begun a "joint image analysis joint demonstration experiment using behavior recognition AI." In this demonstration experiment, footage of security cameras installed inside and at various Tokyu Railway stations is analyzed using the AI ​​security system "AI Security asilla," developed by Ajira, to detect abnormal behavior such as troubles and falls. AI Security asilla is a system equipped with Azilla's unique behavior recognition AI engine. It can be used simply by connecting it to an existing security camera. The AI ​​analyzes the video around the clock and notifies security guards of abnormal behavior or suspicious people when it detects them. This reduces the burden on security guards and allows for efficient and effective security systems to be established. Using the patented "discomfort detection," AI autonomously learns its actions from the images of each camera, and detects movements that are different from normal as "discomfort." AI constantly monitors the video, allowing users to detect and notify small movements that people may miss. The existing camera can be used as is, which reduces initial costs. A single server can process up to 50 camera images, allowing for low-cost operation even in large-scale facilities. Since it is completed within a local network, the risk of video leakage to the outside can be reduced. Azira has complied with the Personal Information Protection Act and related guidelines and has formulated a basic policy regarding the acquisition, use and storage of data. In principle, information obtained through AI Security Asilla is only images with posture and facial information removed, and does not include information that can identify a specific individual. Azilla plans to further updates to AI Security asilla, and will continue to improve its technology and expand its services.

Baidu, the Chinese company that holds the most used search engine in the country, joins the frenetic artificial intelligence race that also affects China. According to Reuters reported, yesterday the company announced the launch of two new models to: Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the model released about two years ago, and Ernie X1, the first Baidu model to be equipped with a reasoning capacity. On the occasion of the announcement, the company specified the characteristics of the new models arriving on the market, designed to compete in the best way with Deepseek, the Chinese startup that in recent months has fueled the race of the sector companies to the development of models to the advanced. To use Baidu's words, therefore, Ernie 4.5 stands out for "an excellent skill of multimodal understanding", "a more advanced linguistic capacity" than its predecessor and "understanding, generation, logic and memory" understanding "capacity". To this is also added a "high QE" - emotional quotient, the ability to discern emotions and similar - which allows it to understand the satirical memes and cartoons that circulate on the net. As for Ernie X1, however, the company has kept us to clarify that it is the first model equipped with a reasoning capacity capable of using the tools in an independent way. Compared to its predecessors, in fact, it boasts "greater understanding, planning, reflection and evolution", which makes it capable of offering "performance equal to Deepseek R1, at a halved price". In short, with this announcement Baidu returns to get noticed two years after the launch of his Ernie Bot, one of the first models to the launched by a Chinese company. Unfortunately, however, the chatbot never managed to conquer the hearts of users, although Baidu had ensured performances capable of competing with those of GPT-4 by Openai. An advertisement that has not served to make the Chinese model truly competitive on the market.

On March 17th, Mikitani Hiroshi of Rakuten Group updated X (formerly Twitter). He said that digital tariffs should be considered. Mikitani posted, with the US Trump administration in mind, "If you're going to impose tariffs on things, you should consider digital tariffs on digital too. By the way, most major US IT companies pay corporate taxes in Japan." In the previous section, he also wrote, "The United States no longer wants free trade, and the order of a free society centered on the US has become unclear. Apparently, Japanese people are responsible for 90% of US military bases, but I have no choice but to think about protecting myself." According to the Ministry of Finance's Balance of Payments, Japan's "digital deficit" in 2024 reached its record high of 6.4622 trillion yen. The scale is far from being able to cancel the surplus of travel income and expenditure (approximately 5.8 trillion yen) due to strong inbound tourism performance. View current sales on Amazon

Before he was abruptly fired last month, Derek Copeland worked as a trainer at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Dog Detection Training Center, preparing beagles and Labrador retrievers to sniff out plants and animals that are invasive or vectors for zoonotic diseases, like swine fever. Copeland estimates the NDDTC lost about a fifth of its trainers and a number of other support staff when 6,000 employees were let go at the USDA in February as part of a government-wide purge orchestrated by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Before he received his termination notice, he says, Copeland had just spent several months training the only dog stationed in Florida capable of detecting the Giant African land snail, an invasive mollusk that poses a significant threat to Florida agriculture. “We have dogs for spotted and lantern flies, Asian longhorn beetles,” he says, referring to two other non-native species. “I don’t think the American people realize how much crap that people bring into the United States.” Dog trainers are just one example of the kind of highly specialized USDA staff that have been removed from their stations in recent weeks. Teams devoted to inspecting plant and food imports have been hit especially hard by the recent cuts, including the Plant Protection and Quarantine program, which has lost hundreds of staffers alone. “It’s causing problems left and right,” says one current USDA worker, who like other federal employees in this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s basically a skeleton crew working now,” says another current USDA staffer, who noted that both they and most of their colleagues held advanced degrees and had many years of training to protect US food and agriculture supply chains from invasive pests. “It’s not something that is easily replaced by artificial intelligence.” “These aren’t your average people,” says Mike Lahar, the regulatory affairs manager at US customs broker behemoth Deringer. “These were highly trained individuals—inspectors, entomologists, taxonomists.” Lahar and other supply chain experts warn that the losses could cause food to go rotten while waiting in ports and could lead to even higher grocery prices, in addition to increasing the chances of potentially devastating invasive species getting into the country. These dangers are especially acute at a moment when US grocery supply chains are already reeling from other business disruptions such as bird flu and President Trump’s new tariffs. “If we're inspecting less food, the first basic thing that happens is some amount of that food we don't inspect is likely to go bad. We're going to end up losing resources,” says supply chain industry veteran and software CEO Joe Hudicka. Got a Tip? Are you a current or former government employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at Kateknibbs.09. The USDA cuts are being felt especially in coastal states home to major shipping ports. USDA sources who spoke to WIRED estimate that the Port of Los Angeles, one of the busiest in the US, lost around 35 percent of its total Plant Protection and Quarantine staff and 60 percent of its “smuggling and interdiction” employees, who are tasked with stopping illegal pests and goods from entering the country. The Port of Miami, which handles high volumes of US plant imports, lost about 35 percent of its plant inspectors.

There is growing concern about Chinese-made artificial intelligence (AI) models like DeepSeek, but there is a new study that suggests that the anxiety may be overstated, at least when it comes to data privacy. In fact, some popular US-based AI chatbots may collect user personal information more than DeepSeek. Data released in February 2025 by well-known VPN provider Surfshark has revealed that Google Gemini is the most data-intensive AI chat app. In contrast, DeepSeek ranked fifth out of the 10 popular apps surveyed. The research team analyzed detailed privacy-related information about Apple's top popular chatbots, ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, Jasper, Poe, Claude, and Pi. We then compared the types of data that each app collects, such as whether it collects data associated with users and whether it contains third-party advertisers in the app. This survey led to the determination that Google Gemini collects much more personal information than its competitors. Of the 35 types of user data, Gemini collects 22 types of data, including location data, user content, device contact information, and browsing history that require careful attention. This is significantly more than the data collected by other popular chatbots covered in the survey. Only Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity were collecting detailed location data, but about 30% of the chatbots surveyed shared sensitive user data, such as location information and browsing history, with third parties such as data brokers. Additionally, 30% of the chatbots surveyed track user data. In particular, Copilot, Poe and Jasper collect data to track users. This means that user data collected from the app is associated with third-party data for the purposes of targeting ads and ad metrics. Provided by: Surfshark Provided by: Surfshark According to the Surfshark research team, Copilot and Poe collect device IDs for tracking purposes, while Jasper collects not only device IDs, but product interaction data, advertising data and "other data about user activity in the app."

Light-based internet project Taara is exiting Alphabet’s “moonshot” incubator X, spinning off into an independent company. Taara’s tech uses lasers to transmit data, and is envisaged as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink when it comes to connecting rural areas to the internet. The Financial Times reports that Alphabet will retain a minority stake in Taara, which has also secured funding from Series X Capital. The company currently has two dozen employees and operates in 12 countries, working on everything from connecting the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo to augmenting the congested network at the 2024 Coachella festival. “We’ve realised over time that for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, X’s so-called captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors and generally be able to scale faster this way.” Taara’s current tech involves firing a narrow beam of light from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, with transmission of up to 20 gigabits per second over 20km (almost 12.5 miles) distances. The terminals can be mounted on towers, and are quicker and cheaper to install than laying fiber — especially when you need a signal to reach an island, cross a river, or arrive at some otherwise hard-to-reach location. Last month the company announced that it has condensed its tech into a much more compact chip, which it expects to launch in a product in 2026. While Taara’s tower-based optical technology works differently to Starlink’s satellites, it’s setting itself up as a rival in the business of connecting rural areas. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,” founder Mahesh Krishnaswamy told Wired. Taara itself has its origins in another X project, Loon, which imagined distributing data by shooting lasers around a network of 20-mile-high balloons. Believe it or not, that proved unfeasible in the end, and Loon was wound down in 2021 — just three years after it too “graduated” from Alphabet’s moonshot program. Loon’s lasers were repurposed into Taara’s towers by Krishnaswamy, though the tech also found a third home in Aalyria, another spin-off that focuses on coordinating satellite and airborne mesh networks, and has its own Tightbeam project that sounds similar to Taara.

Google's AI assistant, Google Assistant, will officially replace Gemini on most smartphones by the end of 2025. Google announced the change on March 14th, US time, and said it will also be switching to Gemini tablets, headphones, and smartwatches equipped with Google Assistant. Currently, many Android smartphones offer the option of Gemini and Google Assistant, which has been installed since 2016. After the migration, Google's senior director of Gemini apps will no longer be able to download Google Assistant from the app store. "We will upgrade our mobile device Google Assistant to Gemini over the next few months. By the end of the year, traditional Google Assistant will no longer be available on most mobile devices, and new downloads will no longer be possible from the mobile app store," he explained. According to the announcement, devices that do not meet the requirements for using the Gemini mobile app, specifically devices that have Androids that are older than Android 9, or devices with less than 2GB of memory, will not be eligible for this transition. Google said it will also bring "new experiences" with Gemini to smart home devices such as smart speakers, displays and televisions. Details will be announced in the coming months, and up until then, Google Assistant will continue to be available on these devices. This transition isn't surprising, and Google has put Gemini at the heart of many of the company's announcements. This can be seen from the multiple new demos that were shown at Mobile World Congress in early March, as well as the focused treatment at Google I/O in 2024. Google Assistant has been a central figure for many of the company's devices for nearly a decade. After it was introduced in the short-lived messaging app "Google Allo," it was installed as a default on Android smartphones and also offered as a mobile app for iOS. Starting with Google Home in 2016, it has become a feature of various smart home speakers. Google clearly states that these devices and services except Allo will continue to work, but the main way to use them will be Gemini. Google's tablet "Pixel Tablet" (check price on Amazon)

Google's AI assistant, Google Assistant, will officially replace Gemini on most smartphones by the end of 2025. Google announced the change on March 14th, US time, and said it will also be switching to Gemini tablets, headphones, and smartwatches equipped with Google Assistant. Currently, many Android smartphones offer the option of Gemini and Google Assistant, which has been installed since 2016. After the migration, Google's senior director of Gemini apps will no longer be able to download Google Assistant from the app store. "We will upgrade our mobile device Google Assistant to Gemini over the next few months. By the end of the year, traditional Google Assistant will no longer be available on most mobile devices, and new downloads will no longer be possible from the mobile app store," he explained. According to the announcement, devices that do not meet the requirements for using the Gemini mobile app, specifically devices that have Androids that are older than Android 9, or devices with less than 2GB of memory, will not be eligible for this transition. Google said it will also bring "new experiences" with Gemini to smart home devices such as smart speakers, displays and televisions. Details will be announced in the coming months, and up until then, Google Assistant will continue to be available on these devices. This transition isn't surprising, and Google has put Gemini at the heart of many of the company's announcements. This can be seen from the multiple new demos that were shown at Mobile World Congress in early March, as well as the focused treatment at Google I/O in 2024. Google Assistant has been a central figure for many of the company's devices for nearly a decade. After it was introduced in the short-lived messaging app "Google Allo," it was installed as a default on Android smartphones and also offered as a mobile app for iOS. Starting with Google Home in 2016, it has become a feature of various smart home speakers. Google clearly states that these devices and services except Allo will continue to work, but the main way to use them will be Gemini. Google's tablet "Pixel Tablet" (check price on Amazon)

Google's Gemini can now erase watermaks, and it's worryingly good at it Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser sustain the editorial team Read more Readers help support MSpoweruser. We may get a commission if you buy through our links. A week ago, Google released the new Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature. With this new addition, the model natively generates and edits image content, which is great for those looking for a more powerful image generator. But in the process, Google’s newest AI model seems to have received another unwanted side-feature: it can now remove watermarks from pictures, eliciting widespread alarm among content producers and copyright holders. Gemini flash does remove watermark nicely 🙂 pic.twitter.com/1Dz9Nlw1iU — Ajitesh (@ajiteshleo) March 17, 2025 People have demonstrated that if they upload a photo with a watermark into the Gemini 2.0 Flash model and instruct it to remove the watermark, the AI deletes the mark, most often without leaving any visible evidence of alteration. This feature has sparked debates on possible misuse, particularly of copyright violation and misuse of licensed materials. New skill unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash model is really awesome at removing watermarks in images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCv — Deedy (@deedydas) March 15, 2025 While this capacity illustrates AI’s sophisticated potential to handle image manipulation, it also reflects the ethical and legal concerns that accompany such technology. Intellectual property owners and sites relying on watermarks to protect their assets may have to reconsider their strategy in light of these developments. With the development of AI technology, developers, users, and policymakers must engage in discussions about responsible use and implications for safeguarding digital content.

When adolescence was announced on Netflix I thought, very superficially (now I realize it) that it was a thriller with the typical boy à la macaulay culkin in the innocence of the devil. The reassuring diabolical child of the films so exaggerated that he cannot look like any of the teenagers we know, including our children. The fact that it was a British series and that Stephen Graham had been half had to make me rise, is true, but I continued in my blessed ignorance until the moment of the miniseries exit on the platform. I was unable to see the episodes on the day of the release and the first thing I asked Lorenza Negri, author of the beautiful review, was it but so is it the story of a psychopathic boy? And she replied, no, she is a normal boy. It is probably the best series of the century and is a nightmare. He was perfectly right and I will focus on the second part of the sentence, that is, that the series is a breathless nightmare, from the first moment he does not discounts at the last moment, he leaves no spiral. Many (including me) have hoped for one of those saving finals that arrange everything and make us go to sleep peacefully. This is not the case, from the first episode we know very well that there is no escape. Jamie (Owen Cooper, of an impressive skill) killed Katie, his schoolmate. We still don't know the reason, but he did it, the rehearsals are overwhelming, they show us, we are there in the police station sitting together with Jamie and his father. In a corner of our mind remains that very small hope that they were wrong, that there is something, anything that can save us from this horror. Is not there. If in the second episode of the series we can vaguely distract us, the third arrives like a cleaver. The interview between Jamie and the psychologist Briony Ariston (the exceptional Erin Doherty, which you have already seen in The Crown) leaves you breathless. The deconstruction of Jamie, a piece by piece. The painful alternation between the moments in which the boy makes us an immense tenderness and those in which he is very afraid, the banality of evil in the gaze and gestures of a thirteen year old with a beautiful face and a voice that in some moments still brings traces of childhood (and this is truly a stab to the heart for anyone who has had to do with that strange and commented phase in which in the adolescent, the child was, the child who was, the child who was a few years old. Before). A 'normal' boy completely devoid of tools to manage emotion, with very serious consequences.

The Renault 5 Turbo 3e will enter history as the first of its kind: a compact supercar. And as such, all the others will be able to imitate at most. The definition just used must not be understood as an hyperbole spent in the literature to emphasize a concept, but a fact. Let's try to understand in detail why. Video of the Renault 5 Turbo 3E - Music by Anton_vlasov from Pixabay. Compact supercar Our first contact took place in Flins-Sur-Seine, a north-west location in Paris where Renault's Originals Meuseum is located, a hangar with all the models of the French house, from the Type A 1898 to the last car produced. A historical archive, for Renault designers and brand enthusiasts (only by invitation). All these cars have been the public at the launch of the new electron fireball. The Renault R5 Turbo 3E has the size of a compact car considered its 408 cm in length. But to make it supercar, already starting from the imprint on earth, is its width of 203 cm. The wording is confirmed is the engine. PowerTrain is made up of two electric engines installed right in the 20 "thumb wheels and capable of developing 540 horsepower and 4800 Nm. An important power that pushes the R5 Turbo 3E up to touch the 270 km/h of speed and to cover the detachment 0-100 km/h in less than 3.5 seconds. For overtaking, the steering wheel is equipped with a boost button to increase the power. To adjust the regenerative braking on four levels. Performance that are obtained thanks to the weight reduced to 1450 kg: the merit goes to the aluminum plate and the carbon fiber bodywork. To feed rear -wheel drive, like that of the past, it is a 70 kWh battery pack which thanks to 800 volt architecture, manages to absorb up to 350 kW of power for a recharging from 15 to 80% less than 15 minutes. WLTP autonomy declares is greater than 400 km. An electric with the turbo? Yes, the R5 Turbo 3E is a 100% electric car and so it will be forever because the platform on which it was built does not allow other forms of nutrition. So why the term turbo 3e? If it is true that the mechanical function of the turbo is to improve the performance of the thermal engines without significantly increasing the displacement, this electric sports derived from the Renault 5 E-Tech, recently presented, has all the hardware and software elements to represent the technological equivalent of the first two specimens. I speak of the Renault 5 Turbo of 1980 and the Turbo 2 of 1983.

Huawei will hold a global new product launch event, "Innovative Product Launch," in Malaysia in February. In addition to the global model of the world's first tri-fold smartphone, the Mate XT Ultimate Design, it has announced four new products: the HUAWEI MatePad Pro 13.2-inch 2025 tablet, the HUAWEI Band 10 smart band, and the FreeArc wireless earphones that have already been announced in Japan. New tablet "MatePad Pro 13.2-inch 2025" The HUAWEI MatePad Pro 13.2-inch 2025 is a 13.2-inch flexible OLED display with a height of approximately 196.1mm x width of 289.1mm x depth of 5.5mm, weight of approximately 580g, and can display 94% of the screen. The resolution is 2.8K (2880 x 1920), the peak brightness is up to 1,000 nits, and a model equipped with PaperMatte Display, which is characterized by its high anti-reflection performance. The OS is "HarmonyOS 4.0", and is equipped with the office app "WPS Office", the memo app "Huawei Notes", and the paint app "GoPaint". In addition to touch operations, it also supports keyboards and mice, so it can be used like a PC even though it is a tablet. The battery can be fully charged in 65 minutes at 11,100mAh, and a fingerprint sensor is also located on the side. The selling price is 1,049 euros for "12GB + 256GB + Keyboard" and 1,199 euros for "12GB + 512GB + Keyboard Paper Matte Edition". In Malaysia, all of them come with the HUAWEI Smart Magnetic Keyboard White (Inbox) and the HUAWEI M-Pencil 3rd Gen, which can protect the main unit and adjust the angle. "HUAWEI Band 10" compatible with QR code payment The HUAWEI Band 10 comes in seven colors: Green, Blue, Purple, White, Matte Black, which weighs approximately 15g, and Pink, and Black, which weighs 14g. Equipped with a 1.47-inch AMOLED display, it is compatible with Android 9.0 and iOS 13.0 and above. Although the price and release date have not yet been decided, it appears that payments using QR codes will be available in Malaysia. Huawei is focusing on Malaysia, and what is Japan's position -- is there any smartphone sales? Huawei will now hold a series of new product launches in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pavilion, an indoor shopping mall in the city, set up a week-long exhibition space, and large display advertisements were also being held. Furthermore, it appears that Malaysia will be viewed as an important hub for expanding Asia, not just this time. Meanwhile, US sanctions have constrained the deployment of products outside of China, and it has long been discontinued in Japan, where the company's smartphones are particularly affected, but when asked about the Japanese market, Alex Huang of CMO of HUAWEI Consumer Business Group said he intends to focus on it. In fact, FreeArc, the wireless earphones, which are one of the products announced this time, is the first product to be released globally in Japan. Although they avoided making explicit statements, there is a possibility that HUAWEI smartphones will re-arrival in the not too distant future. Interview cooperation: Huawei Japan (Huawei Japan) "HUAWEI FreeClip" shipped over 2 million units (check the price on Amazon)

Huawei will hold a global new product launch event, "Innovative Product Launch," in Malaysia in February. In addition to the global model of the world's first tri-fold smartphone, the Mate XT Ultimate Design, it has announced four new products: the HUAWEI MatePad Pro 13.2-inch 2025 tablet, the HUAWEI Band 10 smart band, and the FreeArc wireless earphones that have already been announced in Japan. New tablet "MatePad Pro 13.2-inch 2025" The HUAWEI MatePad Pro 13.2-inch 2025 is a 13.2-inch flexible OLED display with a height of approximately 196.1mm x width of 289.1mm x depth of 5.5mm, weight of approximately 580g, and can display 94% of the screen. The resolution is 2.8K (2880 x 1920), the peak brightness is up to 1,000 nits, and a model equipped with PaperMatte Display, which is characterized by its high anti-reflection performance. The OS is "HarmonyOS 4.0", and is equipped with the office app "WPS Office", the memo app "Huawei Notes", and the paint app "GoPaint". In addition to touch operations, it also supports keyboards and mice, so it can be used like a PC even though it is a tablet. The battery can be fully charged in 65 minutes at 11,100mAh, and a fingerprint sensor is also located on the side. The selling price is 1,049 euros for "12GB + 256GB + Keyboard" and 1,199 euros for "12GB + 512GB + Keyboard Paper Matte Edition". In Malaysia, all of them come with the HUAWEI Smart Magnetic Keyboard White (Inbox) and the HUAWEI M-Pencil 3rd Gen, which can protect the main unit and adjust the angle. "HUAWEI Band 10" compatible with QR code payment The HUAWEI Band 10 comes in seven colors: Green, Blue, Purple, White, Matte Black, which weighs approximately 15g, and Pink, and Black, which weighs 14g. Equipped with a 1.47-inch AMOLED display, it is compatible with Android 9.0 and iOS 13.0 and above. Although the price and release date have not yet been decided, it appears that payments using QR codes will be available in Malaysia. Huawei is focusing on Malaysia, and what is Japan's position -- is there any smartphone sales? Huawei will now hold a series of new product launches in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pavilion, an indoor shopping mall in the city, set up a week-long exhibition space, and large display advertisements were also being held. Furthermore, it appears that Malaysia will be viewed as an important hub for expanding Asia, not just this time. Meanwhile, US sanctions have constrained the deployment of products outside of China, and it has long been discontinued in Japan, where the company's smartphones are particularly affected, but when asked about the Japanese market, Alex Huang of CMO of HUAWEI Consumer Business Group said he intends to focus on it. In fact, FreeArc, the wireless earphones, which are one of the products announced this time, is the first product to be released globally in Japan. Although they avoided making explicit statements, there is a possibility that HUAWEI smartphones will re-arrival in the not too distant future. Interview cooperation: Huawei Japan (Huawei Japan) "HUAWEI FreeClip" shipped over 2 million units (check the price on Amazon)

Google’s latest AI innovation, the Gemini 2.0 Flash model, has ignited a firestorm of debate after users discovered its ability to remove watermarks from images, including those from prominent stock media providers like Getty Images. According to reports doing rounds on social media, the model’s image generation feature — rolled out last week as part of an expansion in Google’s developer-facing AI Studio — can not only strip watermarks but also fill in the resulting gaps with surprising accuracy. While labeled “experimental” and “not for production use,” the tool’s lack of restrictions has raised ethical and legal concerns, especially since it’s free to access. Social media platforms like X and Reddit have buzzed with user demonstrations of Gemini’s capabilities. One X user, George Arrowsmith, showcased the AI seamlessly erasing a watermark from a stock photo, while several Reddit threads praised its gap-filling prowess, though some noted its struggles with semi-transparent or sprawling watermarks. Unlike competitors such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o — which explicitly refuse such tasks, with Claude labeling watermark removal “unethical and potentially illegal” — Gemini 2.0 Flash operates with few guardrails, amplifying its controversial appeal. Under U.S. copyright law, removing watermarks without consent is generally illegal, barring rare exceptions, as outlined by legal experts. This has left copyright holders wary, especially given the tool’s potential to undermine protections for photographers, artists, and media companies. Google has yet to comment on the backlash, with inquiries sent outside normal business hours unanswered as of March 16, 2025. This development echoes broader concerns about AI ethics that have surfaced in recent months. In late 2023, OpenAI faced scrutiny when its DALL-E 3 model was found generating near-exact replicas of copyrighted artwork, prompting lawsuits from artists alleging intellectual property theft. Similarly, Anthropic’s Claude was criticized for inadvertently producing biased outputs in text generation, raising questions about accountability in AI deployment. Midjourney has also faced criticism of its own, and so have social media platforms like Instagram. These incidents highlight a recurring theme: as AI tools grow more powerful, their developers struggle to balance innovation with responsibility. Gemini’s watermark removal feature adds fuel to an already heated debate about AI’s role in creative industries. While some users celebrate the technology as a democratizing force, others see it as a threat to livelihoods dependent on copyright enforcement. The absence of robust restrictions in Gemini 2.0 Flash contrasts sharply with the cautious approaches of its rivals, positioning Google as an outlier in the race to define AI’s ethical boundaries. For now, the feature remains accessible in Google’s experimental sandbox, but its implications could ripple far beyond. As AI continues to blur the lines between creation and appropriation, regulators and creators alike may demand stricter oversight. Whether Google will impose limits or double down on its permissive stance remains unclear — but the conversation around AI’s power, and its pitfalls, is only growing louder.

In 2024, Apple announced support for Rich Communication Services (RCS). This allows for rich text messages to be exchanged with Android. However, these messages were not encrypted and there was a security risk. However, this problem is expected to be resolved soon. Apple said that it will support end-to-end encryption of RCS messages with its upcoming iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS updates. This means that rich text messages exchanged between Apple and Android users are automatically protected by the latest industry standards. End-to-end encryption for RCS On March 14th, the industry group GSM Association (GSMA) announced a new RCS specification that includes end-to-end encryption. With the new standard, RCS will become the first major messaging format to support encryption between different providers such as Apple and Google. The latest standard uses the "Messaging Layer Security" (MLS) protocol. This ensures confidentiality and security of RCS messages and their rich content when exchanged between devices. According to GSMA, by adding security features such as SIM-based authentication, end-to-end encryption helps maintain the privacy of RCS messages and protects against threats such as fraud and fraud. Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer said in a statement cited in media such as The Verge: "End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since its inception. We are pleased to support the industry-wide efforts to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile, which was released by GSMA." "In future software updates, we plan to add support for end-to-end encryption to iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS." How dangerous is unencrypted text messages? In December 2024, the Federal Investigation Agency (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommended that mobile users use messaging apps that have encryption enabled by default. This is due to cyberattacks from telecommunications companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies. The new end-to-end encryption is one of the features included in the large release of GSMA's RCS Universal Profile 3.0, and has been enhanced in addition to encryption. Specifically, it includes improved support for audio messaging, simplified subscription management, expanded spam detection, improved chatbot use, and more. iMessage, Apple's standard messaging service, has long been able to encrypt text messages. However, this is only valid for Apple users using iMessage. On the other hand, Google's messaging app also has the ability to encrypt text as standard, but this is also effective only among Android users. RCS is an alternative messaging standard for "Short Message Service" (SMS). Features such as attachment of larger files, high-resolution photos and videos, audio messages, read notifications, input indicators, a wide variety of emojis, and group chat can be used between iPhone and Android devices.

Vietnam's largest IT company, FPT Software, is putting even more effort into developing the Japanese market. Do Van Khac, president and CEO of FPT Japan Holdings, revealed in late February that Japan's sales grew at an average annual rate of over 30%, reaching approximately 72.8 billion yen in 2024. The company plans to grow 31% in fiscal 2025, aiming to join the top 20 sales companies in Japan. Do Van Khac, CEO of FPT Japan Holdings Do Van Khac, CEO of FPT Japan Holdings There are several policies that are growing. The first is geopolitical risk management. To put it simply, from the perspective of economic security, there is a movement to transfer software development outside of China, mainly Japanese financial institutions, due to the withdrawal of offshore development and shrinking the scale. "We'll help you do it smoothly," Khac said. The second is AI and GPU support. FPT Software has established a strong partnership relationship with NVIDIA in the US and provides cloud services and other services in Vietnam and other countries. As part of this, Japan has installed 127 GPUs, including the NVIDIA H100, which it has procured from a data center in Inzai City, Chiba Prefecture, and will begin providing cloud infrastructure and cloud services. Financial services SBI Holdings will invest in FPT Smart Cloud Japan, a subsidiary responsible for this, to meet the growing demand for AI and data centers. The third is the automotive business. Khac said he is working on developing a navigation app with Tier 1 automotive companies that handle direct transactions with automakers. In addition, in order to accommodate software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by Japanese car manufacturers, the company will establish bases in Nagoya, Tochigi, Gunma, Shizuoka, and other areas, aiming to achieve sales of 20 billion yen in Japan by fiscal 2025. The fourth is legacy migration. In March 2025, they launched COBOL PARK with SCSK, and a team of young FPT Software personnel and senior SCSK personnel will work on migrating the "COBOL" program that runs on the mainframe. They also use their own migration tools. In 2018, SCSK established a collaborative relationship in the IT services business in the Asia-Pacific region, and former SCSK president Tanihara Toru has served as chairman of the board of directors of the Japanese subsidiary. The fifth is going to be the ERP business. We will strengthen support for the implementation and customization of SAP's S/4 HANA and Microsoft's Dynamics 365. First, by 2027, we will have approximately 3,000 SAP engineers, 10 times the current number. As the 2027 issue, when maintenance support for "SAP ERP6.0" ends, is approaching, we are hoping for a great business opportunity to move to S/4 HANA. Acquiring and developing human resources is also essential to implementing these measures. The Japanese subsidiary will employ approximately 1,000 people per year, and by the end of fiscal year 2025, the number will be approximately 5,000 people. They work with over 100 recruitment agencies and send Vietnamese engineers to Japan. In fact, FPT University in Vietnam, run by FPT Software's Vietnam headquarters, produces approximately 10,000 graduates a year, with about 25% of whom joining group companies such as FPT Software. Among them, engineers who have acquired Japanese come to Japan and respond in Vietnam. Incidentally, there are currently about 1,300 Japanese people working in the Japanese subsidiary. Human resource acquisition and training measures include mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and launching joint ventures. Recently, NAC (NAC), which has approximately 120 employees working on contract development, has become a wholly owned subsidiary. They also create engineers from Japanese IT companies that have participated in capital and are also rekilled to acquire new technologies, such as using AI. Konica Minolta also established a copier software development company, and Oki Electric Industries (OKI) also took capital into a software development company run by FPT Software in China. In addition, we will also consider capital participation in infrastructure building companies with 100 to 500 employees and consulting companies that can respond to Japanese language. It is said that more than 20 Japanese partner companies will also be included. Khac, Senior Executive Vice President of FPT Software, is now in his fourth year as president of the Japanese corporation, and is looking to build a solid foundation of growth.

Salesforce Japan has released the "Trends Report for Medium-sized and Small Businesses" (6th edition). With the rapid development of autonomous AI agents, it has become clear how medium-sized and small and medium-sized enterprises aiming to grow are trying to utilize AI. The report is based on surveys conducted on 3,350 medium-sized and small business leaders in 26 countries, including 200 in Japan. The survey found that 75% of mid-sized and small businesses around the world are either experimenting with AI or already using it in earnest with the aim of improving profitability, improving productivity, and improving customer experience. The main uses of AI in medium-sized and small businesses in Japan include optimizing marketing campaigns, predicting marketing audiences, automating campaign analysis and generating new content. In addition, 88% of Japanese medium-sized and small businesses that have adopted AI responded that their revenues have increased. Meanwhile, 39% of leaders are concerned that they will fall behind in the competition to utilize AI. The top concerns regarding AI include poor data quality, security risks, and lack of strategies and use cases. We have collected articles that showcase the future of digital marketing for businesses, including AI.

Vietnam's largest IT company, FPT Software, is putting even more effort into developing the Japanese market. Do Van Khac, president and CEO of FPT Japan Holdings, revealed in late February that Japan's sales grew at an average annual rate of over 30%, reaching approximately 72.8 billion yen in 2024. The company plans to grow 31% in fiscal 2025, aiming to join the top 20 sales companies in Japan. Do Van Khac, CEO of FPT Japan Holdings Do Van Khac, CEO of FPT Japan Holdings There are several policies that are growing. The first is geopolitical risk management. To put it simply, from the perspective of economic security, there is a movement to transfer software development outside of China, mainly Japanese financial institutions, due to the withdrawal of offshore development and shrinking the scale. "We'll help you do it smoothly," Khac said. The second is AI and GPU support. FPT Software has established a strong partnership relationship with NVIDIA in the US and provides cloud services and other services in Vietnam and other countries. As part of this, Japan has installed 127 GPUs, including the NVIDIA H100, which it has procured from a data center in Inzai City, Chiba Prefecture, and will begin providing cloud infrastructure and cloud services. Financial services SBI Holdings will invest in FPT Smart Cloud Japan, a subsidiary responsible for this, to meet the growing demand for AI and data centers. The third is the automotive business. Khac said he is working on developing a navigation app with Tier 1 automotive companies that handle direct transactions with automakers. In addition, in order to accommodate software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by Japanese car manufacturers, the company will establish bases in Nagoya, Tochigi, Gunma, Shizuoka, and other areas, aiming to achieve sales of 20 billion yen in Japan by fiscal 2025. The fourth is legacy migration. In March 2025, they launched COBOL PARK with SCSK, and a team of young FPT Software personnel and senior SCSK personnel will work on migrating the "COBOL" program that runs on the mainframe. They also use their own migration tools. In 2018, SCSK established a collaborative relationship in the IT services business in the Asia-Pacific region, and former SCSK president Tanihara Toru has served as chairman of the board of directors of the Japanese subsidiary. The fifth is going to be the ERP business. We will strengthen support for the implementation and customization of SAP's S/4 HANA and Microsoft's Dynamics 365. First, by 2027, we will have approximately 3,000 SAP engineers, 10 times the current number. As the 2027 issue, when maintenance support for "SAP ERP6.0" ends, is approaching, we are hoping for a great business opportunity to move to S/4 HANA. Acquiring and developing human resources is also essential to implementing these measures. The Japanese subsidiary will employ approximately 1,000 people per year, and by the end of fiscal year 2025, the number will be approximately 5,000 people. They work with over 100 recruitment agencies and send Vietnamese engineers to Japan. In fact, FPT University in Vietnam, run by FPT Software's Vietnam headquarters, produces approximately 10,000 graduates a year, with about 25% of whom joining group companies such as FPT Software. Among them, engineers who have acquired Japanese come to Japan and respond in Vietnam. Incidentally, there are currently about 1,300 Japanese people working in the Japanese subsidiary. Human resource acquisition and training measures include mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and launching joint ventures. Recently, NAC (NAC), which has approximately 120 employees working on contract development, has become a wholly owned subsidiary. They also create engineers from Japanese IT companies that have participated in capital and are also rekilled to acquire new technologies, such as using AI. Konica Minolta also established a copier software development company, and Oki Electric Industries (OKI) also took capital into a software development company run by FPT Software in China. In addition, we will also consider capital participation in infrastructure building companies with 100 to 500 employees and consulting companies that can respond to Japanese language. It is said that more than 20 Japanese partner companies will also be included. Khac, Senior Executive Vice President of FPT Software, is now in his fourth year as president of the Japanese corporation, and is looking to build a solid foundation of growth.

Is Japan's digital transformation (DX) really achieving results? The analysis results of the 2024 DX Awareness Survey - IT Modernization Edition, published by PwC Consulting in December 2024 showed that only 41% of companies responded that "DX results are as expected or even greater." In other words, more than half of the companies have not yet achieved sufficient results. This series will resume with the aim of using the results of the latest research to find out the cause, focusing on the barriers faced in implementing DX and the situations that are likely to fall into, and providing readers with tips on how to overcome the current situation. Introduction Looking at the situation of clients we have supported so far, there are many cases where people in the IT department of Japanese companies are unable to reserve the time even if they want to acquire new technologies and knowledge. The aforementioned investigation also highlights the reality that Japanese companies are trying to advance DX, but "we are so busy with our daily work that we can't find time." Why is Japan's IT department so busy? We'll consider how we can get out of our busy schedule. IT development and operation is still being carried out by a lot of manual work There are many reasons why IT departments are busy every day, but the complicated management tasks and repetitive tasks in system operation are central factors. These tasks not only place a heavy burden on human resources when performed manually, but also increase the risk of human error. This is where automation is attracting attention. By utilizing automation technology, the efficiency of standard operations and the reduction of mistakes will be improved, creating an environment where IT staff can focus on more sophisticated and strategic issues. Below, we will explain in detail with specific examples. In recent years, public clouds (hereinafter referred to as clouds) have become the mainstream in system development. Unlike traditional on-premises, the cloud can technically create new environments and change resources in just a few minutes. However, in reality, it is not uncommon for developers to apply for new use of the environment, but it takes more than a few weeks for the actual product to be provided. When we explore the reasons for this, there are steps such as accepting applications, confirming parameters, checking consistency with internal security standards, checking settings and preparing work, building them, and finally, testing whether the settings are set as designed, and each step takes 2-3 days. The current situation is that what could normally be provided in just a few minutes has been spent incredible amounts of time by going through these steps. To overcome this situation, it is necessary to move away from manual work in infrastructure construction and operational work and promote automation as much as possible. As a specific step, first code the infrastructure settings like software (Infrastructure as Code: IaC) and prepare the necessary settings as a template. In this case, the base template is prepared in advance with settings that follow the company's internal security standards and authority policies, and tests are automated, making it possible to provide an environment that complies with the company's internal regulations at an early stage and without human intervention. As an example, the Digital Agency has prepared an automatic environmental provision template (IaC template) as part of its Government Cloud initiative, enabling the provision of a cloud environment in a short period of time. Please use this as a reference. The next step is to utilize continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools. CI/CD is becoming more familiar with application development, but by converting IaC in the infrastructure field, it also incorporates the CI/CD style, and like applications, tests are automatically performed when environment changes, and it is automatically provisioned at a time when quality is guaranteed. CI/CD reduces the number of manual tasks that were performed during conventional system updates, from checking the extent of impact to running tests and releasing to production environments. In this way, by utilizing IaC and CI/CD, we can expect not only to automate environment construction and operational operations, but also to significantly reduce lead times. In addition, automation will increase the number of work that can be handled per person, and even if new uses or changes are increased in the future, it will be possible to handle it with minimal personnel.

There aren’t many cars that are expected to sell out before anyone has even seen the interior, but the Renault 5 Turbo 3E could well be one of them. Three years on from the concept launch at the Paris Motorshow in 2022, the anticipated hyper-hatchback and the electric reboot of the iconic Renault 5 Turbo and Turbo 2 has now been revealed—at least partly. At a brand-hosted event at Renault HQ near Paris, the new hot hatch’s exterior was unveiled for the first time outside of renders, and, as seems to be increasingly the case with production versions of EV concepts, it looks every bit as bonkers as suggested—complete with the striking yellow and black livery of the 1982 Renault 5 Turbo rally model. Photograph: Malcolm Griffiths/Renault Renault has said this is its most powerful, most advanced car yet, going as far as to label it the world's first electric mini-supercar. With its prominent bumper and rear wing extensions, the design inspiration the compact hot-hatch has taken from its namesake is clear, but it also borrows several elements from the Renault 5 E-Tech electric, including the rear lights and wing mirrors. Unlike that car, though, the Turbo 5 3E is exclusively rear-wheel drive and is built on a new platform that moves the windscreen back and extends the wheelbase out, giving it the width of a supercar in the length of a city car. It uses rear in-wheel motors that, Renault says, will bring the Turbo 5 3E in line with the performance of supercars like the Ferrari Roma and McLaren Artura, delivering every bit of torque to the car’s 20-inch wheels immediately, with no loss and no lag time. The result? This car will not only be fast, it is apparently going to be a drifter’s dream. The specs are impressive: 540 hp, a maximum speed of 168 mph, and 0–60 mph in 3.5 seconds, all helped by a lightweight, carbon fiber body. Renault says the 5 Turbo 3E will be capable of DC fast charging up to 350 kW with an 800-volt architecture, which should take 15 minutes to charge from 15 to 80 percent with the right charger.

When it comes to the general proportion of women among the employees of German companies, less than half are female in 64 percent of companies. Another 19 percent have about the same shares of women and men in the workforce. Another 15 percent more women than men. These are the results of a study by the Digital Association Bitkom, for which more than 600 companies of all industries were interviewed. But it comes even thicker. According to the survey, no more women than men employs more women in IT and digital professions within the companies, for example in IT administration or software development, but also in departments for digital transformation or artificial intelligence. On the contrary: With 94 percent, less than half of the IT and digital areas are female in almost all German companies. In a further 4 percent, the gender share in these professions is about the same. Recruiting The economy would definitely like more women in these areas: a total of 37 percent of the companies surveyed have set internal goals in order to increase the proportion of women in particular in IT and digital professions. 2 percent of such goals have already achieved, another 5 percent have defined specific goals with a schedule and 30 percent have set the corresponding goals in general. Another 9 percent of the respondents are currently planning internal goals for more women in IT and digital professions, another 13 percent discuss it. On the other hand, such goals for 38 percent of companies are not an issue. As reasons to have not yet anchored any goals, most of these companies state that they do not have enough qualified applicants (68 percent) or other priorities (61 percent). “Women bring new perspectives and other experiences in companies. This diversity not only strengthens technological innovation and competitiveness. Winning more women for IT and digital professions is also a question of participation and equal participation in digitization, ”said Bitkom managing director Bernhard Rohleder. In order to gain more women especially for IT and digital professions, a majority of 60 percent of companies use targeted recruiting measures, the survey continued. Cooperations with universities and schools that already maintain 24 percent of companies are most widespread to win women for IT and digital professions. 19 percent offer special entry -level programs such as traineeships. 16 percent are active on women-specific career events or trade fairs, 15 percent use advertising or social media campaigns tailored to women. Hurd The reasons why the proportion of women in the IT and digital professions is not higher from the economy of the economy and often it is also up to the companies themselves: 59 percent of the companies surveyed see hurdles when re-entry as a reason, such as a lack of further training during parental leave, 53 percent traditional role models in the company, 52 percent missing networks for women. At the same time, half (50 percent) also says that a male-shaped culture in IT and digital professions is shocking women. For example, on the one hand, over two thirds (69 percent) of companies say that IT and digital professions have to be more attractive for women, but on the other hand, 39 percent also believe that men are more suitable for IT and digital professions. “Anyone who hangs up such a misconception must not be surprised about the shortage of skilled workers. Digitization and IT know no gender, ”says Rohleder. "Women should not be stopped by stereotypes, but should consciously use the career opportunities in these future professions." But also in the area of ​​politics and women themselves, reasons for the small proportion are located. Half (50 percent) of the respondents sees an insufficient qualification of applicants as a reason, 46 percent believe that it was due to the poorer self -marketing of women. In addition, 55 percent of companies see the lack of care infrastructure a reason for the small proportion of women in IT and digital professions. 52 percent observe hurdles when it comes to transition, for example, employment agencies would less often recommend an IT-specific further training. Almost every second company (46 percent) accounts for clichéd training or professional orientation in schools. More numbers 30 percent women's share in the IT industry (source: calculation based on data from the STBA, BNetza and BA 2024) 18 percent of women's proportion of IT specialists (source: Federal Employment Agency 2024) 21 percent women's share in computer science (share in interdisciplinary courses significantly higher, e.g. 44 percent in medical informatics or 37 percent in bioinformatics) (source: Genesis online, Federal Statistical Office 2023) 12 percent women's share in IT training (source: training market statistics, Federal Employment Agency 2024)

Old friendships have been feeling unstable lately, and this is forcing the EU to reconsider its reliance on non-European tech infrastructure. To get things moving, over 80 signatories representing around 100 organizations have signed an open letter to the president of the European Commission, urging the EU to increase support for local alternatives to big tech products, services, and infrastructure. So, what will happen if Europe decides to go self-sufficient on the tech front and create its own “Euro Stack“? How will it affect both Europeans and other people around the world? Well, they say competition is good for everyone, and I’m inclined to agree. More European tech would mean more competition for American tech, and more competition means better products for consumers. Recommended Videos You might think there are more tech products out there than we could possibly need, but the reality is a little more complicated. Take search engines, for example — we all know that Google and Bing are the most popular choices, but there are plenty of alternatives, right? Well, not really. Right now, just about every alternative search engine, from DuckDuckGo to Qwant, uses the search indexes from Google or Bing. This means that, if Google and Bing decided to stop sharing their search indexes, all of these alternative products would stop working. Initiatives to build new, independent search indexes have started — such as Brave Search or the new partnership between Qwant and Ecosia — but building a search index is a big project and it will take a lot of time to get the quality of these new products to where Google and Bing are now. There are plenty of other examples, too. All of the biggest map software apps are owned by big tech companies, as are most big AI models and LLM services, instant messaging apps, operating systems, browsers, social media platforms — and a lot more. When buying a new PC, most consumers have to choose between Windows devices or macOS devices — in other words, Microsoft or Apple. For phones, it’s Android or iOS — so Google or Apple. The main problems with current alternatives are that firstly, they’re too small. In most cases, you have to sacrifice functionality, features, and support to try out something new. Secondly, many are built on existing infrastructure from companies like Microsoft and Google. The point is — we don’t have enough choices. Availability, affordability, and convenience are always pushing us into the hands of American big tech companies. If the EU decides that its people and its organizations need to have access to homegrown alternatives — you can bet those alternatives will be available worldwide. That means more tech for everyone, and with the strict data laws in the EU, we would finally have a choice between selling our data and not selling it (instead of the choice we have now, which is just deciding who to sell it to).

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 for streamlining software available on the open source developer platform. Actions are a core means of implementing what's known as CI/CD, short for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous Delivery). Scraping server memory at scale On Friday or earlier, the source code for all versions of tj-actions/changed-files received unauthorized updates that changed the "tags" developers use to reference specific code versions. The tags pointed to a publicly available file that copies the internal memory of severs running it, searches for credentials, and writes them to a log. In the aftermath, many publicly accessible repositories running tj-actions ended up displaying their most sensitive credentials in logs anyone could view. "The scary part of actions is that they can often modify the source code of the repository that is using them and access any secret variables associated with a workflow," HD Moore, founder and CEO of runZero and an expert in open source security, said in an interview. "The most paranoid use of actions is to audit all of the source code, then pin the specific commit hash instead of the tag into the ... the workflow, but this is a hassle."

Table of Contents Table of Contents How are the results? What is the policy? A bit of interesting history The road ahead The rise of generative AI has been a fairly messy process, especially from fair usage ethics and copyright perspective. AI giants are inking deals with publishers to avoid legal hassles, while at the same time, they are embroiled in copyright tussles in courts in multiple countries. As the ravenous appetite for training AI on user data grows, we might be in for another ethical conundrum. Multiple users on X and Reddit have shared demonstrations of how Google’s latest Gemini 2.0 series AI model can remove watermarks from copyright-protected images. Recommended Videos Going by the before/after samples of images, it seems Gemini is doing a fairly good job of removing the watermarks. Notably, it’s not only erasing those banner-style watermarks, but also fairly complex overlays with design and stylized text elements. Gemini flash does remove watermark nicely :) pic.twitter.com/1Dz9Nlw1iU — Ajitesh (@ajiteshleo) March 17, 2025 The model in question is the Gemini 2.0 Flash, which was released earlier this year and got a reasoning upgrade, as well. It is worth noting here that you can not remove the watermark if you are using the mobile or desktop version of the Gemini 2.0 Flash model. Trying to do so returns a message like this: “Removing watermarks from images without the explicit permission of the copyright holder is illegal in most countries. It is important to respect the copyright laws and intellectual property rights. If you want to use an image with a watermark, you should contact the copyright holder and ask for permission.” You can, however, try and remove the watermark from images in the Google AI Studio. Digital Trends successfully removed watermarks from a variety of images using the Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental model. We strongly recommend that you don’t replicate these steps. It is a violation of local copyright laws and any usage of AI-modified material without due consent could land you in legal trouble. Moreover, it is a deeply unethical act, which is also why artists and authors are fighting in court over companies using their work to train AI models without duly compensating them or seeking their explicit nod. How are the results? A notable aspect is that the images produced by the AI are fairly high quality. Not only is it removing the watermark artifacts, but also fills the gap with intelligent pixel-level reconstruction. In its current iteration, it works somewhat like the Magic Eraser feature available in the Google Photos app for smartphones. Furthermore, if the input image is low quality, Gemini is not only wiping off the watermark details but also upscaling the overall picture. In my first attempt, the input image was 485 x 632 pixels, while the output picture was 783 x 1024 pixels. The output image, however, has its own Gemini watermark, which itself can be removed with a simple crop. There are a few minor differences in the final image produced by Gemini after its watermark removal process, such as slightly different color temperatures and fuzzy surface details in photorealistic shots. The degree of variation is not too deep, and any person with even basic skills in image editing can fix it and achieve results similar to the original copyright-protected image. Moreover, there are multiple third-party tools out there that can remove watermarks from AI-generated images, as well. What is the policy? In 2023, Google signed a pledge — alongside fellow AI companies including Meta, Anthropic, Amazon, and OpenAI — to implement a watermarking system in AI-generated material. The company made that commitment to the White House, as former President Joe Biden flagged risks such as deepfaked material. Earlier this year, Google added a system called SynthID digital watermarking for all photos that have been touched up using the AI Reimagine tool in the Photos app. The watermark is not visible and can’t be seen by human eyes, but machines can detect and verify their AI origins. The tech was created by Google DeepMind. Other AI companies have also taken an approach where they add AI disclosure to the metadata of images. Google will even show those details in Search. All that sounds like a fair disclosure move, but the implementation should be a two-way track. I tried removing the watermark from the set of images with other AI models, but Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT explicitly rejected the request, citing copyright laws and fair usage policies. Gemini, on the other hand, removed the watermarks and didn’t even provide a disclaimer or warning. A bit of interesting history Back in 2017, a team of Google researchers created an algorithm capable of removing stock and institutional watermarks from images. Their work, which essentially saw a pattern in watermarking habits, was detailed at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference. “We revealed a loophole in the way visible watermarks are used, which allows to automatically remove them and recover the original images with high accuracy,” says the research paper. “The attack exploits the coherency of the watermark across many images, and is not limited by the watermark’s complexity or its position in the images.” The tool was tested on images belonging to well-known stock photography databases across a wide range of categories such as food, nature, and fashion. The whole multi-stage system relied on detection, matting, reconstruction, decomposition, and blend factoring techniques. It is, however, worth noting that the algorithm was tested to highlight the flaws in existing watermarking practices prevalent in the industry. The idea was to stir a debate and improve watermark security. With Gemini, we are looking at a tool accessible to everyone without any coding or technical know-how required. The road ahead It goes without saying that removing watermarks from an image is a big no-no for a variety of reasons. Aside from violating local laws, it takes away from the hard work of artists and photographers, who are already facing an uphill battle because their material was used to train AI without their knowledge or paying them for it. But it’s not just the court battles that are of concern. Generative AI tools are being adopted widely, at the cost of human workers losing their livelihoods. For example, Marvel used AI imagery to create the opening credits sequence for the Secret Invasion TV show. Just over a month ago, Microsoft launched a tool called Muse AI that can generate gameplay clips. The company says Muse has been developed “to effectively support human creatives,” but we can’t quite see the human appeal in the whole pitch. We are not entirely sure whether Gemini removing watermarks from copyright-protected images is a bug. However, we do hope it’s a misstep and that the underlying image editing framework is fixed to ensure that it can even block workarounds. Digital Trends has reached out to Google for comments and will update this story when we hear back.

GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, begins Monday and runs till Friday in San Jose, with the biggest announcements probably coming Tuesday. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the news as it happens — and we’re expecting a healthy dose of announcements. And we’re making it easy for you to follow along. CEO Jensen Huang will give a keynote address at the SAP Center on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PT, focusing on — what else? — AI and accelerating computing technologies, according to Nvidia. The company is also teasing reveals related to robotics, sovereign AI, AI agents, and automotive — plus 1,000 sessions with 2,000 speakers and close to 400 exhibitors. Here’s how to watch the Nvidia GTC 2025 keynote online, along with many other sessions, talks, and panels. So what do we expect to see at GTC? Well, Nvidia typically reserves a big chunk of the conference for GPU-related debuts. A new, upgraded iteration of the company’s Blackwell chip lineup seems likely. During Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, Huang confirmed that the upcoming Blackwell B300 series, codenamed Blackwell Ultra, is slated for release in the second half of this year. In addition to higher computing performance, Blackwell Ultra cards pack more memory (288GB), an attractive feature for customers looking to run and train memory-hungry AI models. Rubin, Nvidia’s next-gen GPU series, is almost certain to get a mention at GTC alongside Blackwell Ultra. Due out in 2026, Rubin promises to deliver what Huang has described as a “big, big, huge step up” in computing power. Huang said during the aforementioned Nvidia earnings call that he’d talk about post-Rubin products at GTC, as well. That could be Rubin Ultra GPUs, or perhaps the GPU architecture that’ll come after the Rubin family. (The chips are named after Vera Rubin, the astronomer who discovered dark matter.) Beyond GPUs, Nvidia may illuminate its approach to recent quantum computing advancements. The company has scheduled a “quantum day” for GTC, during which it’ll host execs from prominent companies in the space to “[map] the path toward useful quantum applications.” One thing’s for sure: Nvidia could use a win. Early Blackwell cards reportedly suffered from severe overheating issues, causing customers to cut their orders. U.S. export controls and fears of tariffs have massively depressed Nvidia’s stock price in recent months. At the same time, the success of Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which developed efficient models competitive with models from leading AI labs, has prompted investors to worry about the demand for powerful GPUs like Blackwell. Huang has asserted that DeepSeek’s rise to prominence will in fact be a net positive for Nvidia because it’ll accelerate the broader adoption of AI technology. He has also pointed to the growth of power-hungry so-called “reasoning” models like OpenAI’s o1 as Nvidia’s next mountain to climb. To be clear, Nvidia isn’t exactly hurting. The company reported a record-breaking quarter in February, notching $39.3 billion in revenue and projecting $43 billion in revenue for the subsequent quarter. While rivals such as AMD have begun to encroach on the company’s territory, Nvidia still commands an estimated 82% of the GPU market. But Huang is reportedly feeling impatient to see AI applications that matter beyond the tech industry. This story originally published March 11.

Scores of European tech leaders have joined the call for the EU to become less reliant on overseas tech and pursue a strategy of independence, saying the bloc was in an “acute moment of crisis”. Aerospace giant Airbus, cloud storage firm Cubbit and lobby groups such as the European AI Forum and the European Startup Network are among the 100 or so signatories of an open letter to European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen. Signatories of the letter have called on the EU to create a sovereign infrastructure fund to galvanise investment in tech across the bloc, as part of a series of demands. The issue of European tech independence is a hot-button issue, as the bloc plays catch up to the US and China. The issue has become more pronounced amid faltering relations between the US and EU after a broadside by US vice president JD Vance, who questioned European values. The 2024 Draghi report highlighted that the EU needs more coordinated industrial policy, more rapid decisions and massive investment if it wants to keep pace economically with the US and China. The open letter says: "Europe needs to recover the initiative and become more technologically independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure: from logical Infrastructure - applications, platforms, media, AI frameworks and models - to physical infrastructure - chips, computing, storage and connectivity. "Europe’s current multiple dependencies create security and reliability risks, compromise our sovereignty and hurt our growth." It adds: "We call on your convening powers to mobilise industry to actively help coordinate and validate a continent-wide strategy to power a European digital sovereign effort. "To support Europe in this acute moment of crisis for our security and strategic autonomy, the Commission must urgently form and convene working groups with industry to transform its tech sovereignty ambition into concrete actions." As well as a call for an EU sovereign infrastructure fund, the letter also calls for the EU to prioritise services with strong adoption projects, such as those in cybersecurity and prioritising “result-oriented projects”. Signatories of the letter back the EuroStack initiative, which is championing EU digital sovereignty and calling for Europe to play a bigger role in digital supply chains. The letter adds:

A coalition of European tech leaders is sending a decisive message to the European Commission: Europe must take control of its digital infrastructure. In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sent on March 14, 2025, the EuroStack Initiative stresses that the continent can no longer afford to rely on non-European technologies. This warning comes amid growing concerns about the economic and security risks tied to Europe’s dependence on American and Chinese tech giants. Rethinking Europe’s Digital Strategy The group, which includes major tech companies, industry associations, and civil society organizations, is calling for a drastic overhaul of Europe’s digital policy. The core of their proposal is clear: Europe must reduce its reliance on foreign tech providers and invest in local solutions. “Europe cannot continue down the path of outsourcing its digital infrastructure to non-EU players,” the coalition declared. They argue that it’s time for the EU to build its own digital technologies that serve both economic and strategic interests. “It has been clear for some time that Europe cannot regulate itself out of its laggard position. It needs to take proactive industrial action: it has enormous talent, capabilities, assets and business record in the digital space, but the legacy of our structural fragmentation (as described in the Draghi report) have led our Continent to fall significantly behind the US and China. Even with the positive announcements at the Paris AI Action Summit, Europe will lose out on digital innovation and productivity growth without sweeping and urgent change – our reliance on non-European technologies will become almost complete in less than three years at current rates.” A key component of the coalition’s proposal is the establishment of a “Buy European” procurement policy, which would ensure that public sector spending supports European technology providers. This policy would aim to create demand for European-made digital solutions and encourage local innovation. The push for local sourcing aligns with EuroStack’s goals, which focus on developing sovereign, scalable digital infrastructure to reduce dependency on non-EU technologies. EuroStack emphasizes the creation of a competitive environment where European solutions are prioritized, leading to more sustainable growth in the digital sector. Creating Conditions for Local Investment The coalition is not just calling for a policy shift but for the creation of an investment ecosystem that can support this transition. The proposal for a Sovereign Infrastructure Fund is key in this regard. This fund would facilitate public and private investment in critical digital infrastructure, particularly in sectors such as chip manufacturing and quantum computing, which require significant capital. Without such investments, the coalition warns that Europe will remain at a disadvantage in the global race for digital dominance. This fund would target high-risk, high-reward areas, with the aim of creating a robust and competitive European tech industry that can stand on its own. “What business needs is a pragmatic industrial policy strategy to reduce our dependencies in critical technologies, while focusing on selected initiatives to overcome Europe’s structural challenges – fragmentation, suppression of local demand, focus on research rather than productization, lack of adequate capital – to promote productivity growth and security. Not just funding of R&D initiatives, but supporting European industry to gain relevance in supplying European (and global) needs,” the coalition’s letter emphasizes. The initiative reflects ealier recommendations of the EuroStack initiative, which advocates for pooling resources across industries to develop interoperable and scalable European digital solutions. EuroStack has highlighted the need for coordinated efforts between the public and private sectors to ensure that Europe’s digital infrastructure is both secure and competitive on the global stage. EuroStack Initiative: The Blueprint for Sovereign Digital Infrastructure The EuroStack initiative, launched in early 2025, serves as the primary framework for the coalition’s vision of digital sovereignty. EuroStack aims to build a sovereign, end-to-end digital infrastructure that integrates everything from hardware to software solutions. The ambitious initiative addresses Europe’s fragmented digital ecosystem by proposing a federated approach where resources from various industries are pooled together to create scalable, secure, and interoperable solutions. According to the initiative’s vision, Europe must focus on building a robust digital stack—ranging from data storage and cloud computing to higher-level applications such as AI and cybersecurity. By doing so, Europe can reduce its reliance on foreign technologies, particularly in critical sectors that underpin national security and economic stability. While EuroStack is focused on developing local infrastructure, it also remains open to collaboration with non-European companies. However, as the initiative stresses, the priority is ensuring that European companies can lead the development of digital solutions within Europe, establishing a foundation of self-reliance for the long term. Addressing Security and Data Sovereignty Concerns Digital sovereignty also has profound implications for Europe’s security. As the continent becomes more reliant on foreign cloud providers and AI platforms, concerns about data privacy and cybersecurity grow. The coalition’s letter calls for stronger safeguards to protect European data and prevent foreign interference in critical sectors. One of the key proposals is the establishment of a certification scheme for sovereign cloud services that comply with European standards for data protection and cybersecurity. The coalition argues that public and private sector organizations must have access to secure cloud services that meet Europe’s regulatory and security requirements, ensuring that Europe’s most sensitive data remains protected from external threats. The emphasis on data sovereignty also reflects growing concerns about the influence of non-EU actors over Europe’s digital future. As Europe faces increasing geopolitical risks, the coalition believes that developing sovereign cloud services and other essential infrastructure is necessary to ensure the continent’s security. The Road Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities Achieving digital sovereignty will not be without its challenges. One of the main obstacles is the fragmented nature of Europe’s tech sector, which has made it difficult to create unified, large-scale solutions. EuroStack’s proposal to pool resources from diverse industries aims to address this fragmentation and create a cohesive digital infrastructure that can support Europe’s future needs. Another significant challenge is the need for sufficient financial resources. The Sovereign Infrastructure Fund, which would require substantial public and private investment, must be established to support the development of critical digital technologies. The coalition argues that redirecting existing EU funds, such as those allocated under the Digital Decade initiative, could help ensure that Europe has the resources it needs to build a competitive digital economy. Despite these challenges, the coalition remains confident that Europe can regain control over its digital future. By fostering investment in local tech solutions, creating demand through procurement policies, and prioritizing European-led infrastructure, the coalition believes that Europe can reduce its reliance on foreign technologies and ensure its digital sovereignty.

A Group of Technology Companies and Lobbyists Want the European Commission (EC) to take action reduces the region's Reliance on Foreign-Owned Digital Services and Infrastructure. In an Open Letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-Represent for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, The Group of Nearly 100 Organizations proposed the creation of a Sovereign Infrastructure Fund to Invest in Key Technology and Lessen dependence on US Corporations. The Letter Points to Recent Events, Including the Farcical Munich Security Conference, as a sign of "The Geopolitical Stark Reality Europe Is Now Facing," and Says That Building Strategic Autonomy in Key Sectors Is Now An Urgent imperative for European Countries. Signatories include Aerospace Giant Airbus, France's Dassault Systèmes, European Cloud Operator Ovhcloud, Chip Designer Sipearl, Open Source Biz Next Nextcloud, and a Host of Others Including Organizations Such as The European Startup Network. Ovhcloud Said The Group was calling "for a collective industrial policy strategy to strengthen Europe's competitiveness and Strategic Autonomy. We are convinced this is the premise of what we shave Will Be a Larger Movement of the Entire Ecosystem." PROPOSALS INCLUDE THE SOVEREIGN INFRASTRULE FUND, WHICH WOULD BE AABLE TO SUPPORT PUBLES INVESTMENT, SPECIALLY IN CAPITAL-INTENSIVE SECTORS LIKE SEMICONDUCORTS, WITH "SIGNANT ADDITIONAL COMMITMENT OF FUNDS ALLOCATED AND/OR Underwritten" By The European Investment Bank (EIB) and National Public Funding Bodies. It also suggests there Should Be a Formal Requirement for the public sector to "Buy European" and source their it requires from European-Led and Assembred Solutions, While Collection that is injege May Involve Complex Supply Chains With Foreign Components. The Letter Warns That While The Region Has Great Talent and Capabilities in The Digital Space, Issues Such as Structural Fragmentation, as described in the draghi report on eu competitiveness, have led to the region failing significantly behind the us and China in Many Areas. This has led to multiple tech dependence that represent Security and Reliability Risks that "Commentise Our Savereignty," The Group Says, Calling for Action to Address The Problem. "We call on your agreementing powerrs to mobilize industry to actively helic coordination and validate to Continent-Wide Strategy to Power A European Digital Sovereign Effort," The Letter Urges. This isn't the first time that concerts about us hegemony in technology Have Been Raised. Recently, The Dare Project Launched to Develop Hardware and Software Based On The Open Risc-V Architecture, Backed by Eurohpc Ju Funding, While Fears Have Been Aired About the Dominance of American-Owned Cloud Companies in The European Market. Such Concerns Have Been Heightened by Recent Actions, Such as The Suggestion That The Us Might Cut Off Access to Starlink Internet Services in Ukraine As a Political Bargaining Strategy. Starlink Owner Elon Musk Later Denied That This Would Ever Happen. The Letter Notes thatSe Issues have Already Been Set Out by The Eurostack Initiative, Made Up of Many of the Companies That Signed The Letter To Ec President von der Leyen. The Register Asked The European Commission to Comment. On the other Side of the Pond, The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) Recently published a report Claiming that us companies Face "substantial Financial Burdens" Due to the European Union's Digital Regulations. It Says That Us Tech Companies are the "Billions" Through Having To Comply With Regulations Such As The Digital Markets Act (DMA), and Having to Obtain User User Consent for Their Data To Be used for advertising purpose. ®

I wonder how much corporate espionage there is? Like if you work in a high-touch, high-dollar sales business — enterprise software, investment banking, etc. — much of your time will be spent pitching new customers who are choosing between you and your competitors, or pitching customers who currently work with your competitors, or trying to retain customers who are thinking of switching to your competitors. If you knew what your competitors were up to, that would help. If you knew a competitor was coming into your customer’s office next week to try to steal them away from you, and if you saw your competitor’s pitch deck, you could take some actions. You could get to the customer first and offer a discount. You could see the arguments in the pitch deck and try to counter them. You could see what your competitor says about the features of its own product, and try to build those features into your product. It’s not a magic cheat code — you still need a competitive product and pricing and good salespeople and all that — but it surely helps. So, you know, find a salesperson at your competitor and recruit her. Not to quit your competitor and come work for you, but to stay at your competitor and spy for you. You give her quarterly bags of cash; she looks at your competitor’s pipeline and keeps you up to date on who it is pitching and what it is saying. Obviously this is not legal advice — it seems problematic in all sorts of ways — but surely people try it from time to time?

Spy accusations inflame an H.R. rivalry One of the most bitter rivalries in the world of H.R. service providers just took a turn that wouldn’t be out of place in a spy thriller. Rippling on Monday sued Deel, accusing its competitor of hiring a mole in its Dublin office to comb through Rippling’s trade secrets, a scheme that reached its rival’s highest ranks, DealBook’s Michael de la Merced reports. Rippling said it had uncovered the defector through a “honeypot” trap — a Slack channel set up specifically for the ruse that was mentioned in a letter to top Deel executives. “We’re all for healthy competition, but we won’t tolerate when a competitor breaks the law,” Vanessa Wu, Rippling’s general counsel, said in a statement. A Deel spokeswoman said in a statement, “Weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia and seeding falsehoods about Deel, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims. We deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims.” The back story: Both companies have turned the seemingly humdrum business of human resources into multibillion-dollar operations. Rippling was most recently valued at $13.5 billion, according to the data provider Pitchbook, while Deel was valued at more than $12 billion. Aggressiveness also runs in their DNA, especially at Rippling, whose co-founder and C.E.O., Parker Conrad, is known for an especially hard-charging managerial style.

Social media users have discovered a controversial application of Google's new AI model, Gemini 2.0 Flash. Apparently, it is capable of removing watermarks from images, including those from Getty Images, Shutterstock, and other popular photo stocks. This was reported by TechCrunch. Gemini 2.0 Flash causes copyright concerns Last week, Google expanded access to the image creation feature in the Gemini 2.0 Flash model, which allows not only creating, but also editing graphic content. However, this feature seems to have weak protection against misuse. Gemini 2.0 Flash does not hesitate to create images of celebrities and copyrighted characters and, as already mentioned, to remove watermarks. Image by X user George Arrowsmith As noted by X and Reddit users, the model not only removes watermarks, but also tries to fill the gaps left by the removal. How people are doing it? The process causes so much concern due to how easy it is to remove watermarks. All the user has to do is select Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental option in the model select, upload a picture to the chatbot and enter a prompt similar to "remove watermark from image." The AI responds to the request almost instantly. However, it does not always do this correctly: it has difficulty with translucent marks and watermarks that cover a large part of the image. Below is an example where the word 'Getty' was replaced with 'Geck' during processing. Image by X user Malhar Ujawane Other AI-based tools have similar capabilities, but Gemini 2.0 Flash is particularly adept at this and is also available for free. Nevertheless, AI models by Google's competitors, such as Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o, refuse to remove watermarks, claiming it is a copyright violation to do so without the owner's consent.

Elon Musk's Ai Company, lamb, you have acquired Hotshot, at startup working on a-powered video generation tools along the lines of Openai's Sora. Aakash Sastry, Hotshot's CEO and Co-Founder, Announed the News in a Post on X on Monday. "Over the past 2 Yars We've Built 3 Video Foundation Models AS A SMALL TEAM-Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot," Sastry Wrot. "Training these Models have given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and production are about to change in the coming yars. We're excited to continue scalar that efforts on the Largest Cluster in the world, Colossus, as well as a lamb! ” Hotshot, Which is Based in San Francisco, Was Founded Several Years Ago by Sastry and John Mullan. The startup Initially Focused on Developing Ai-Powered Photo Creation and Editing Tools, But eventually pivoted in favor of text-to-video ai models. Hotshot Managed to Attract Investments From VCS Including Lachy Groun, Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel Prior to Its Exit. The Company Never Publicly Disclosed The Size of Its Funding Rounds. Lamb's Acquisition of Hotshot Could Indicate That The Former Plans to Build Its Own Video Generation Models to Compete with the Likes of Sora, Google's Veo 2, and Other. Musk You have previously pre-educated that last lamb is developing video-generating models to add to its grok chatbot platform. During to LivesRaam in Januar, Musk Said That I expect to "Grok Video" Model to be released "In a few Months." Hotshot Said on it site that it began Sunsetting New Video Creation on March 14. Existing Customers Will Have UNDERIL 30 To Download Videos They Created Using The Platform, The Company Added. It was immediately the immediately the staff you are joining lamb. Sastry Decline to Comment.

On the heels of its IPO filing, Swedish fintech giant Klarna announced on Monday that it will exclusively provide buy now, pay later loans for Walmart. The partnership with Walmart is one that rival Affirm had previously owned. Klarna will provide the loans to Walmart customers through OnePay, a fintech startup in which it owns a majority stake and is also backed by Ribbit Capital. Klarna will take over providing the loans “later this year,” it said in a statement. San Francisco-based Affirm’s stock took a hit on the news, down 8% by early afternoon on Monday, trading at just over $46. The two companies have been rivals for years, although Affirm is more focused on the United States. It went public in 2021 and recently announced that it has achieved $80 million in GAAP net income. Klarna, after suffering a massive blow to its valuation, has made a comeback of sorts and reported a net profit of $21 million in 2024, a huge swing from a loss in 2023 of -$244 million. Last September Affirm CEO and co-founder Max Levchin told PaymentsDive that he wanted to differentiate his company from competitors, including Klarna. One way that it is doing that, he told a technology conference last year, is to focus on earning revenue from individual transactions. Klarna and others have pushed bringing in marketing revenue, he asserted. However, a Klarna spokesperson disputed that, telling the publication that “the bulk of Klarna’s revenue comes from transactions, with a smaller portion drawn from marketing.” Levchin went on to say that Affirm does not monetize transactions through advertising or marketing. “I’m not criticizing — it’s not my place to decide those are bad businesses,” he was quoted as saying. “But I love ours, and ours is built around the idea that, ultimately, every transaction needs to make sense financially.” Klarna’s reach is more global than Affirm’s but it has made a big push into the U.S., telling TechCrunch last April that the U.S. and Germany represented its largest markets but that the U.S. was “gaining all the time and is often largest on a quarterly basis.” Landing Walmart as a partner will no doubt only increase Klarna’s presence in the U.S. The retailer is the world’s largest by revenue — reporting $441.8 billion in the U.S. alone last year. Reporter’s note: A statistic about how much Walmart’s U.S. volume would boost Klarna’s total GMV was removed post-publication per the company’s request.

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, no longer has to stay in France. A source told AFP that the investigating judge in charge of Durov’s case has accepted a request to modify the conditions of his supervision. “As you may have heard, I’ve returned to Dubai after spending several months in France due to an investigation related to the activity of criminals on Telegram,” Durov wrote on Monday in a message posted to his Telegram channel. “The process is ongoing, but it feels great to be home.” Durov was arrested on August 24, 2024, after he stepped off a private jet at France’s Le Bourget Airport. He spent four days in police custody — leading to widespread coverage of his arrest. Shortly afterward, the Paris criminal court, which is in charge of the investigation, explained the reasons for his arrest. Most of the charges revolve around the Telegram founder allegedly being complicit in facilitating organized fraud, illegal transitions, and the sharing of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) on the messaging and social platform. At the time, Durov agreed to pay a €5 million bail ($5.5 million at current exchange rates) and to check in at a police station twice a week. He was also barred from leaving France during the investigation. But those conditions appear to have been modified now — enabling him to leave the country legally. The Paris court did not release a statement regarding the reasons for changes to Durov’s supervision conditions. A few days after his arrest, Telegram updated its website and app to explicitly allow users to report private chats to its moderators. Before the arrest, the company had said that it “[did] not process any requests related to [moderating chats and group chats].” Following this radical change of course, Telegram removed millions of groups and channels. In further remarks on Durov’s channel announcing his arrival in Dubai, the Telegram CEO wrote: “I want to thank the investigative judges for letting this happen, as well as my lawyers and team for their relentless efforts in demonstrating that, when it comes to moderation, cooperation, and fighting crime, for years Telegram not only met but exceeded its legal obligations.” Durov isn’t out of the woods just yet. Despite his cooperation, the investigation remains ongoing and it could still lead to a criminal trial in France. On the plus side, at least Durov won’t have to file his 2025 taxes in France.

In Brief Texas software developer Davis Lu faces up to 10 years in prison after a federal jury convicted him of “causing intentional damage” to his former employer’s network. According to the Justice Department, Lu, 55, began sabotaging his employer’s systems after a 2018 corporate restructuring left Lu with reduced responsibilities and system access. Lu is accused of creating and implementing a “kill switch” that would lock out all of the company’s employees from the network if Lu’s credentials were ever deactivated. Prosecutors say Lu named the kill switch code “IsDLEnabledinAD,” referring to whether Lu’s account is enabled in the company’s Active Directory. When Lu left the company on September 9, 2019, the kill switch activated, causing widespread system disruptions affecting thousands of employees globally. The Justice Department said Lu caused the company “hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.” Sentencing is set for June 23, according to the court’s docket.

Last week, at the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles, billionaire entrepreneur Travis Kalanick gave attendees a rare glimpse into his vision for the future of his newest company, CloudKitchens. While today the eight-year-old L.A.-based outfit is known for a growing real estate portfolio that it uses to it host – and set up – restaurants that use its kitchens to fulfill food deliveries, Kalanick hinted at a full-stack future. In fact, he appears to be aiming to eventually deliver AI-perfected meals directly to customers. Kalanick brought up the topic twice, in different contexts. First, during his informal sit-down with conference organizer Peter Diamandis, he drew parallels between CloudKitchens and earlier disruptions in other industries. He noted that taxi apps existed before Uber, but said their mistake was trying to take a “slice” of the existing market. That market, he explained, was both small and unreliable, as taxis could easily bypass the apps. Kalanick similarly referenced the gaming company Zynga, which initially built its business on Facebook’s platform, only to be later undermined by the social media giant. Turning to CloudKitchens, he pointed out that restaurants relying on Uber Eats or DoorDash face a similar challenge. “You’re getting yield optimization on a thing that’s built for something else,” he said. If you’re “on somebody else’s platform,” he warned, “they can squeeze you.” Later, when an audience member asked Kalanick about the future of CloudKitchens and its use of AI, Kalanick again hinted that CloudKitchens isn’t content to forever provide turn-key restaurant spaces. He talked, for example, about cooking-as-a-service — much like driving has become a service instead of something we all do for ourselves — and insisted that healthy meals will be made available to all and “not just the wealthy.” He also talked at a high level about AI’s role in transforming the physical world, distinguishing between ‘AI for bits’ (such as AI chatbots like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Grok) and what Kalanick called ‘atoms AI’, meaning AI that interacts with the physical world. Here, he referenced autonomous cars and humanoid robots, noting the “ball game” is changing. Unfortunately, instead of poke further, Diamandis moved onto the next attendee’s question. And Kalanick hasn’t yet responded to a request for more information. But if the ultimate idea is to deliver customers AI-optimized breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Kalanick isn’t the only billionaire trying: famed e-commerce entrepreneur Marc Lore has raised substantial funding for a venture, Wonder, which launched as a spiffed-up ghost kitchen but is steadily expanding its ambitions — and actively talking about it. Last November, when the New York-based outfit acquired the delivery service GrubHub, Lore told TechCrunch that Wonder is aiming to “put the pieces together to… manage what you eat and your health in a way that’s never been done before.” During that same in-person interview, Lore went into great detail, painting a future where AI-driven meal planning seamlessly integrates with a customer’s dietary preferences, health goals, and wearable device data. Describing an AI system that could tailor meal recommendations based on real-time health data, such as, say, blood test results indicating high mercury levels, he said that Wonder’s “big vision” is to be “the super app for mealtime.” It sounded at the time like fantasy, the idea of waking up to a personalized, health-focused meal plan designed by AI. Yet both Kalanick and Lore have track records of disrupting industries that didn’t seem vulnerable to disruption — Kalanick with Uber, and Lore with Jets.com. If they are targeting the same future – one where AI-driven food services fully replace traditional cooking – it adds credibility to the idea that this shift may not be a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’ Wonder has so far raised $1.6 billion from investors. CloudKitchens has reportedly raised a similar amount of funding, though it has been tighter-lipped about everything it’s doing to date.

A staffer working for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) broke Treasury policies by sending an email containing unencrypted personal information, according to testimony from a senior government cybersecurity official in a federal lawsuit. Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer working at the U.S. Treasury, emailed a spreadsheet with unencrypted personally identifiable information to two Trump administration officials prior to his resignation in early February after racist social media posts linked to Elez surfaced online. Details of the security lapse emerged in a court filing on Friday containing testimony by David Ambrose, the chief security and privacy officer at the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Services, the division of the Treasury that disburses some trillions of dollars in federal funds to American households every year. A coalition of U.S. attorneys general brought the lawsuit in an effort to block the Trump administration’s team of DOGE cost-cutters from accessing highly sensitive personal and financial data on millions of Americans held by the Treasury unit where Elez was posted. Per the court filing on Friday, Ambrose said the Treasury conducted a forensic analysis of Elez’s department-issued laptop following his resignation, which included a review of his Treasury email account revealing the security lapse. The filing did not say exactly what data was shared, but described the personal information as including a name (such as a person or entity), the type of transaction, and an amount of money. Ambrose said Elez acted “contrary to [the department’s] policies” because the data was not encrypted nor was the email approved before it was sent. Bloomberg was the first to report the court filing on Friday. Elez was rehired on February 18. He now works at the Social Security Administration, a person familiar with personnel matters told TechCrunch. In response to the filing, the coalition of U.S. attorneys general that brought the suit said on Friday that Ambrose’s declarations “do nothing to allay any of the concerns” that the states brought “about the rushed and chaotic nature of the Treasury DOGE Team onboarding process.” In a separate case, a federal court is also considering blocking DOGE from accessing systems at the Social Security Administration that hold sensitive information on Americans. Elez did not return TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model is facing criticism for enabling users to remove watermarks from copyrighted images, a feature that has stirred ethical debates and concerns about digital rights. The AI model, praised for its advanced image processing, is now under scrutiny for facilitating the erasure of visual copyright protections, leaving creators and rights holders questioning Google’s approach to safeguarding content integrity. Gemini’s Watermark Removal Skills Demonstrations from users on platforms like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) have shown that Gemini 2.0 Flash can not only erase watermarks but also generatively fill in the resulting gaps. The results, shared via screenshots and videos, depict images where the original watermark has been seamlessly replaced with AI-generated content. Gemini flash does remove watermark nicely 🙂 pic.twitter.com/1Dz9Nlw1iU — Ajitesh (@ajiteshleo) March 17, 2025 The functionality, while technically advanced, raises pressing questions about copyright infringement. Removing watermarks from protected images, especially those from stock photo agencies like Getty Images, typically violates intellectual property laws unless under specific legal exceptions. New skill unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash model is really awesome at removing watermarks in images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCv — Deedy (@deedydas) March 15, 2025 The ease with which Gemini performs this task has amplified fears that the tool could be used to bypass digital content protections, undermining the value and control of original creators. Gemini 2.0 Flash is accessible through the Google AI Studio, allowing users to interact with and test its image processing capabilities. The platform’s flexibility has contributed to its popularity but has also opened concerns regarding misuse. A Gap in AI Safeguards? Despite growing concern, Google has yet to release an official statement addressing Gemini 2.0 Flash’s watermark removal capabilities. This silence contrasts with the company’s stance on its Imagen 3 AI model, which incorporates SynthID—an invisible, cryptographic watermarking technology designed to ensure the authenticity of AI-generated images. SynthID embeds imperceptible digital markers that remain intact even after common image manipulations, helping creators and platforms verify content authenticity. While SynthID’s implementation showcases Google’s broader commitment to responsible AI development, the discrepancy between its models has raised questions about consistency in applying ethical standards. Notably, SynthID itself has limitations, as researchers have shown that sophisticated watermarking techniques can be bypassed or altered without significantly degrading image quality. Challenges of Watermarking and AI Misuse The issue of watermarking is a persistent challenge in AI development. While SynthID offers advanced protection for AI-generated images, its assumed absence or insufficient implementation in Gemini 2.0 Flash leaves room for misuse. The model’s ability to remove watermarks and generatively fill gaps raises questions about the effectiveness of AI safeguards and Google’s strategy for preventing misuse across its AI products. Other major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic have explicitly programmed their models—such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4o—to reject requests to remove watermarks. These refusal mechanisms are designed to curb misuse and uphold ethical boundaries. Legal Implications The legal implications of watermark removal are considerable. Under U.S. copyright law, removing watermarks from copyrighted content without the owner’s consent is generally prohibited, barring rare exceptions. Beyond legal considerations, the broader tech community is reacting with unease. Discussions on platforms like Reddit have highlighted not only Gemini’s technical prowess but also the ethical dilemmas it presents. As some users pointed out that while the AI effectively removes watermarks, the resulting images occasionally exhibit subtle alterations—such as color changes and unnatural textures—that could undermine their authenticity. The controversy over Gemini 2.0 Flash reflects the broader conversation about ethical AI development and corporate responsibility. As AI models become more advanced, the potential for misuse grows alongside the benefits they offer. While the ability to remove watermarks might support creative workflows in some scenarios, it also presents a serious risk to digital rights and content authenticity. Ultimately, the issue is not just about one model’s capabilities but about how companies like Google address unintended uses of their technology. The absence of consistent safeguards across AI models highlights an urgent need for clearer guidelines and more robust protections.

Creating a startup that competes with your former employer can be risky. Apple, for example, once sued a former chip design executive who founded his own chip startup in a case that was dropped in 2023. A recent case involving logistics unicorn Flexport and a new competitor formed by two former employees sheds light on those risks. Flexport is suing the pair alleging that they stole thousands of its documents along with its source code to create their own rival startup, Freightmate AI. Both startups use technology to automate complex logistics and shipping processes. Flexport says it believes Freightmate’s COO Yingwei Zhao downloaded over 70,000 confidential Flexport documents after he agreed to form Freightmate with now-CEO Bryan Lacaillade, Flexport said in the lawsuit, which was filed last week in a California court. Flexport claims that Zhao took steps to hide his tracks like using Incognito Mode on his browser to copy-paste a list of over 1,000 Flexport customers. The suit alleges that Zhao also downloaded Flexport’s source code from Github onto his USB drive. Freightmate admitted to being in possession of some files from Flexport but said the files were “inadvertently retained” and not accessed or used by Freightmate, according to the suit. Flexport declined to comment. Freightmate didn’t respond to a request for comment. Flexport claims recent growth touted by Freightmate would have been “virtually impossible” without information it insists was stolen. It is suing for unspecified damages and an injunction from the court, which could be used to stop Freightmate from using the allegedly stolen data. Flexport is based in San Francisco and was valued at $8 billion in a 2022 funding round. It most recently raised a $260 million round provided by Shopify at an undisclosed valuation in 2023. Freightmate is based near Seattle and raised a $5 million seed round in January 2025 led by Washington state VC firm Fuse Capital. Its pre-seed round, whose amount was undisclosed, was led by Winschoff Ventures.

Artificial intelligence continues stirring things up in chemistry. To wit: Y Combinator-backed Cambridge, U.K.-based ReactWise is using AI to speed up chemical manufacturing — a key step in bringing new drugs to market. Once a promising drug has been identified in the lab, pharma firms need to be able to produce much larger amounts of the material to run clinical trials. This is where ReactWise is offering to step in with its “AI copilot for chemical process optimization,” which it says accelerates by 30x the standard trial-and-error-based process of figuring out the best method for making a drug. “Making drugs is really like cooking,” said co-founder and CEO Alexander Pomberger (pictured above left, with co-founder and CTO Daniel Wigh) in a call with TechCrunch. “You need to find the best recipe to make a drug with a high purity and a high yield.” The industry has for years relied upon what boils down to either trial-and-error or staff expertise for this “process development,” he said. Adding automation into the mix offers a way to shrink how many iteration cycles are required to land on a solid recipe for manufacturing a drug. The startup thinks it will be able to deliver “one shot prediction” — where the AI will be able to “predict the ideal experiment” almost immediately, without the need for multiple iterations where data on each experiment is fed back in to further hone predictions — in the near future (“in two years,” is Pomberger’s bet). The startup’s machine learning AI models can still deliver major savings by reducing how much iteration is required to get past this bit of the drug development chain. Cutting through the tedium “The inspiration for this was: I’m a chemist by training, I worked in Big Pharma, and I saw how tedious and trial-and-error driven the whole industry is,” he said, adding that the business is essentially consolidating five years of academic research — his doctorate focused on “the automation of chemical synthesis driven by robotic workflow and AI” — into what he bills as “a simple software.” Underpinning ReactWise’s product are “thousands” of reactions that the startup has performed in its labs in order to capture data-points to feed its AI-driven predictions. Pomberger says the startup used a “high throughput screening” method in its lab, which allowed it to screen 300 reactions at a time, enabling it to speed up the process of capturing all this training data for its AI. “In pharma … there are one or two handfuls of reactions, reaction types, that are used over and over again,” he said. “What we are doing is we have a laboratory where we generate thousands of data points for these most relevant reactions, train foundational reactivity models on our side, and those models can fundamentally understand chemistry. And then when a client pharmaceutical company needs to develop a scalable process, they don’t need to start from scratch.” The startup commenced this process of capturing reaction types to train its AIs last August, and Pomberger said it will be completed by the summer. It’s working toward spanning 20,000 chemical data points to “cover the most important reactions.” “To get one single data point in a traditional manner it takes a chemist, typically, one to three days,” he said, adding: “So this is really, we call it, expensive to evaluate data. It’s very hard to get the single data points.” So far it’s focused on manufacturing processes for “small molecule drugs,” which Pomberger said can be used in medicines targeting all sorts of diseases. But he suggested that the technology could be applied in other disciplines, too, noting that the company is also working with two material manufacturers in polymer drug delivery development. ReactWise’s automation play also includes software that can interface with robotic lab equipment to further dial up precision manufacturing of drugs. Though, to be clear, it’s purely focused on selling software; it’s not a maker of robotic lab kit itself. Rather, it’s adding another string to its bow in being able to offer to drive robotic lab equipment if its customers have such kit to hand. The U.K. startup, which was founded in July 2024, has 12 pilot trials of its software up and running with pharma companies. Pomberger said they’re expecting the first conversions — into full-scale deployments of the subscription software — later this year. And while it isn’t yet revealing the names of all the firms it’s working with, ReactWise says these trials include some Big Pharma players. Pre-seed funding ReactWise is disclosing full details of its pre-seed raise, which totals $3.4 million, the startup exclusively told TechCrunch. The figure includes previously disclosed backing from YC ($500,000) and an Innovate U.K. grant of close to £1.2 million (around $1.6 million). The rest of the funding (around $1.5 million) is coming from unnamed venture capitalists and angel investors, who ReactWise says are “committed to advancing AI-driven, sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing.” While ReactWise is focusing, fairly narrowly, on a specific part of the drug development chain, Pomberger said acceleration here can make a meaningful difference in shrinking the time it takes to get new pharmaceuticals to patients. “Let’s look at a typical duration of a drug from start to launch: 10 to 12 years. Process development takes one to 1.5 to two years. And if we can basically speed up here the workflows — reduce it by an average of 60% — then we can get an idea of how much an effect it is,” he noted. Simultaneously, other startups are applying AI to different aspects of drug development, including identifying interesting chemicals in the first place, so there’s likely to be compounding effects as more automation innovations get folded in. But when it comes to drug manufacturing, specifically, Pomberger argues that ReactWise is ahead of the pack. “We were the first to actually tackle this,” he said. The startup competes with legacy software using statistical approaches, such as JMP. He also said that there are a few others applying AI to speed up drug manufacturing, but said that ReactWise’s access to high-quality datasets on chemical reactions gives it the competitive edge. “We are the only ones that have the capability of, and that are currently generating, these high-quality datasets in house,” he said. “Most of our competitors, they provide the software. The clients are basically prompted with instructions based on the inputs. “But, from our side of things, we offer these pretrained models — and those are extremely powerful because they fundamentally understand chemistry. And the idea is then to really have a client just say: ‘This is my reaction of interest, hit start, and we already give them process recommendations from the very first day, based on all the pre-work that we did in our laboratory. And that’s something nobody else does at the moment.”

The first satellite of the Google-backed FireSat constellation successfully made it to orbit over the weekend, kicking off what promises to be a new era in wildfire detection and monitoring. The constellation will keep a close eye on wildfires. When fully operational, the constellation’s more than 50 satellites will be able to image nearly all of Earth’s surface once every 20 minutes. The initial phase will consist of just three satellites, and it will revisit every point on the globe twice per day when it’s operational in 2026. The first satellite was built by Muon Space and launched aboard SpaceX’s Transporter 13 mission on March 14 from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The sensor suite consists of six-band multispectral infrared cameras, which are tuned to detect wildfires from a distance. Most wildfire tracking today uses aerial photography via airplanes or low-resolution satellite imagery that’s been repurposed for the task. The former is expensive, limiting how frequently it can be updated, while the latter suffers from low resolution and sensors not specifically tuned to wildfire detection. The FireSate constellation is designed to solve both of those problems. Its produces five-meter resolution imagery, and when the constellation is flying its full complement, it’ll provide firefighters with near real-time updates on a fire’s whereabouts and behavior. The constellation is a joint effort between Muon Space and the Earth Fire Alliance, a nonprofit supported by Google, Muon Space, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Minderoo Foundation.

TikTok is introducing a new “Security Checkup” tool that allows users to quickly review and update their account’s security settings from a single screen, the company announced on Monday. The feature is similar to Security Checkup tools offered by TikTok rival Instagram and tech giant Google. Users can access the new tool from their profile by selecting “Settings and privacy” and then tapping “Security and permissions.” Security Checkup offers users a step-by-step guide through the social network’s security features. The tool encourages users to enable more security features to make their accounts safer. Image Credits:TikTok Users can link their phone number and email address to the app to ensure that they have a backup login method in case they lose access to their account. Users can also enable two-step verification to add an extra layer of security when they access their account from an unfamiliar device. In addition, Security Checkup stresses the importance of regularly checking to see which devices are logged into the account and to remove any that are no longer in use or that the user doesn’t recognize. The tool will also suggest that users enable device-based authentication methods like Face ID or Touch Unlock for a secure and fast login experience. TikTok notes that it proactively monitors for unusual behavior and flags it in the “Security and permissions” settings for users to review. The launch of the new tool comes amid uncertainties regarding TikTok’s fate in the U.S., as President Donald Trump extended the TikTok ban’s deadline by 75 days back in January. Despite the uncertainty, the company has been continuously updating its app with new features, like new teen safety features, along with an updated desktop experience designed to take on YouTube.

Security researchers have observed hackers linked to the notorious LockBit gang exploiting a pair of Fortinet firewall vulnerabilities to deploy ransomware on several company networks. In a report published last week, security researchers at Forescout Research said a group it’s tracking dubbed “Mora_001” is exploiting the Fortinet firewalls, which sit on the edge of a company’s network and act as digital gatekeepers, to break in and deploy a custom ransomware strain they call “SuperBlack.” One of the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2024-55591, has been exploited in cyberattacks to breach the corporate networks of Fortinet customers since December 2024. Forescout says a second bug, tracked as CVE-2025-24472, is also being exploited by Mora_001 in attacks. Fortinet released patches for both bugs in January. Sai Molige, senior manager of threat hunting at Forescout, told TechCrunch that the cybersecurity firm has “investigated three events in different companies, but we believe there could be others.” In one confirmed intrusion, Forescout said it observed the attacker “selectively” encrypting file servers containing sensitive data. “The encryption was initiated only after data exfiltration, aligning with recent trends among ransomware operators who prioritize data theft over pure disruption,” said Molige. Forescout says the Mora_001 threat actor “exhibits a distinct operational signature,” which the firm says has “close ties” to the LockBit ransomware gang, which was last year disrupted by U.S. authorities. Molige said the SuperBlack ransomware is based on the leaked builder behind the malware used in LockBit 3.0 attacks, while a ransom note used by Mora_001 includes the same messaging address used by LockBit. “This connection could indicate that Mora_001 is either a current affiliate with unique operational methods or an associate group sharing communication channels,” Molige said. Stefan Hostetler, head of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, which previously observed exploitation of CVE-2024-55591, tells TechCrunch that Forescout’s findings suggest hackers are “going after the remaining organizations who were unable to apply the patch or harden their firewall configurations when the vulnerability was originally disclosed.” Hostetler says the ransom note used in these attacks bears similarities to that of other groups, such as the now-defunct ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang. Fortinet did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions.

We’ve been blown away by the overwhelming response to speak at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. After thorough consideration, we’ve selected six standout finalists. The power to choose who will take the stage and share their AI expertise with 1,200 AI leaders and enthusiasts is now in your hands! This Audience Choice voting will last until March 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT. You get one vote, one speaker — make it count! Meet the finalists Get to know the six exceptional Audience Choice finalists and their proposed sessions, and vote for the speaker you think should take the lead in their own breakout session.

TechCrunch All Stage (formerly Early Stage) returns to Boston on July 15, and the agenda for our tentpole East Coast founder event is almost complete. We’re excited to share this sneak peek at some of the fantastic speakers and sessions we have on tap. For builders who are just starting on their founder journey, our Foundation Stage is absolutely the place to be. We’re enlisting a stellar cast of leading investors and entrepreneurs to dig deep into founder-focused topics such as: All the Ways You Don’t Realize VCs Are Evaluating Your Company at Pre-Seed. MVP in the Age of AI: When to Bot and When to Not. The TAM Myth: How the Best Startups Reshape Markets. How to Craft a Killer Pitch Deck. New for 2025, we’re calling all growth-stage founders and startups for a full-day track dedicated to advice on how to scale your company from Series A and beyond. On the Scale Stage, you can check out: The Operator’s Playbook for Building and Scaling Sustainable Companies. How to Raise for Series C and Beyond. What to Know When Going Public. Scaling to $10M ARR. TC All Stage is unlike any other TechCrunch event. Instead of panels and fireside chats, speakers present their areas of expertise and then answer your questions. As always, all attendees get transcripts and visual assets from the presentations, so you can take what you learn with you! And if you’re the chatty type, you’ll enjoy the roundtable discussions and our networking platform Braindate for lots of time to mingle with other founders, builders, and investors. You have loads of founder questions, and we’ll have the answers for you. More topics will be announced soon. So come down and hang with us on July 15 in Boston and grab your early-bird pass to save up to $320. We’ll see you there! TechCrunch All Stage 2025 agenda sneak peek Foundation Stage All the Ways You Don’t Realize VCs Are Evaluating Your Company at Pre-Seed With Charles Hudson, Managing Partner and Founder, Precursor Ventures MVP in the Age of AI: When to Bot and When to Not With Chris Gardner, Partner, Underscore.vc The TAM Myth: How the Best Startups Reshape Markets With Jahanvi Sardana, Partner, Index Ventures How to Craft a Killer Pitch Deck With Tiffany Luck, Partner, NEA Precursor Ventures Managing Partner Charles Hudson. Image Credits:Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch / Getty Images So You Think You Can Pitch? Founders selected to take part in this session will have four minutes to wow a panel of judges, including leading VCs, who will then provide feedback. Check the event page soon for how to apply! Scale Stage The Operator’s Playbook for Building and Scaling Sustainable Companies With Jon McNeill, CEO and Co-Founder, DVx Ventures How to Raise for Series C and Beyond With Cathy Gao, Partner, Sapphire Ventures Cathy Gao, Partner at Sapphire Ventures, will speak on the Scale Stage at TechCrunch All Stage 2025 on July 15 in SoWa Power Station in Boston. Lock in your ticket before prices go up More agenda announcements are on the way, but the best way to experience TC All Stage is to be there in person. Whether you’re looking for hands-on founder insights or scouting the next big investment, this is the must-attend summit for founders and VCs of all stages. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston—register now and save up to $320 on select tickets! Want even more brand visibility at TC All Stage? Go beyond attending—exhibit your brand and innovation in front of 1,200 top AI minds. Space is limited, so don’t miss your chance to make an impact! Grab your exhibit table here before they run out. Or, explore sponsorship opportunities and activations at TC Sessions: AI. Get in touch with our team by filling out this form. Don’t miss out on the best deals for TechCrunch events Subscribe to the TechCrunch Events newsletter for early access to special deals and the latest event news.

GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, will return this week, with the biggest announcements probably coming Tuesday. If you can’t make it in person, don’t sweat it. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the major developments, and we’ve made it easy for you to follow along. Many of the biggest presentations, talks, and panels will be livestreamed as well. The conference starts Monday, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is scheduled to deliver a keynote from the SAP Center on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PT, which you’ll be able to stream and watch online at Nvidia.com without having to register, and on Nvidia’s YouTube channel. We’re expecting Huang to reveal more about Nvidia’s next flagship GPU series, Blackwell Ultra, and the next-gen Rubin chip architecture. Also likely on the agenda: automotive, robotics, and lots and lots of AI updates. Nvidia may also highlight its approach to recent quantum computing advancements; it even scheduled a “quantum day.” Nvidia.com is also where you’ll find a catalog of all the virtual and on-demand sessions at GTC, including workshops on efficient large language model customization, conversations on generative AI for core banking, and demos of datasets for specialized domains like biology. This story was originally published on March 11.

Bumble is finally catching up with competitor Tinder with a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures. In addition to ID verification, the company also released three more features, including a feature that flags inappropriate messages in chat before users hit send and the ability to share date details with friends. Bumble also launched a “Discover” page dedicated to helping users find matches with similar interests. Bumble’s new verification feature lets users submit a picture of a government-issued ID to authenticate their identity and earn a badge for their profile. This allows users to sort profiles according to those who are ID verified and also to ask their matches to complete the verification process. The feature is currently available in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Mexico, and New Zealand. It plans to expand to additional markets soon. Bumble’s ID verification badge comes as AI makes it harder to figure out which dating profiles are real or fake. It also comes as romance scams continue. Rival Tinder expanded its identity verification program last year to the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and Mexico. Image Credits:Bumble Additionally, a new “Share Date” feature allows Bumble users to share their date details — such as the person they’re meeting, the time, and location — with people they trust. If plans change, they can update their friends directly in the app. Tinder launched a “Share My Date” feature in April 2024. Another feature focused on safety, “Review Before You Send,” targets the messaging section, where users frequently encounter inappropriate messages. Initially introduced for the Compliments feature, Review Before You Send reminds senders to edit flagged messages before sending. Bumble’s new “Discover” experience offers a new way to find the most compatible people. Similar to Tinder’s “Explore” page, users can explore different categories to find people with shared dating intentions, similar interests, and communities. The profiles are refreshed daily. The feature announcements are part of Bumble’s attempt to restore growth to its dating app, following a 3.8% decline in quarterly app revenue to $212.4 million in the fourth quarter.

Discord on Monday announced the launch of its Discord Social SDK, a free toolkit that allows developers to leverage the platform’s social infrastructure to enhance their games’ social and multiplayer experiences. The toolkit allows developers to improve their in-game experiences, whether players have a Discord account or not. Social integrations include a unified friends list that allows players to access their Discord friends in-game and their in-game friends on Discord, making it easier to stay connected both in and out of the game. Plus, the SDK offers deep-linked game invites that enable players to invite their friends to directly join their party or lobby. Communication features include cross-platform messaging to allow players to keep conversing across desktop, console, and mobile. Other features include the ability to link in-game chats to specific Discord channels in their servers, and voice chat. Image Credits:Discord “For game creators from indie to AAA, Discord is where you can connect with the world’s largest and most engaged community of players to fuel the growth of your game before, during, and after launch,” Discord co-founder and CTO Stan Vishnevskiy, said in a press release. “Game discovery and retention have never been so critical, and we’re excited to help developers grow their games by reaching gamers where they are.” Discord says the toolkit is already being used by many developers, including Theorycraft Games, Facepunch Studios, 1047 Games, Scopely, Mainframe Industries, Elodie Games, Tencent Games, and others. Discord Social SDK is compatible with C++, Unreal Engine, and Unity, and supports Windows 11+ and macOS. Support for console and mobile is coming soon, the company says. The platform boasts more than 200 million monthly active users who spend a combined 1.5+ billion hours playing games each month on PC alone.

In Brief As duties under the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA) related to tackling illegal content came into force Monday, the internet watchdog, Ofcom, said it has launched a new enforcement program focused on online storage and file-sharing services. The regulator said its evidence shows that file-sharing and file-storage services are “particularly susceptible” to being used for the sharing of image-based child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The enforcement programme will assess safety measures they put in place that are aimed at preventing offenders from disseminating CSAM on their services. Ofcom added that it has written to “a number” of these services, without naming any of those involved. It has put them on notice that “formal information requests” will soon be sent regarding the measures they have already implemented or plan to implement to tackle CSAM. It will ask them to submit illegal harm risk assessments. Failure to comply with the OSA could lead to major penalties — of up to 10% of global annual turnover.

It’s only been around six months since Snap released the fifth generation of Spectacles, its AR glasses for developers, and the company is already enhancing its latest pair with new Lenses and platform features. Snap announced on Monday that it’s launching the ability to create Spectacles-focused Lenses that tap GPS, new hand-tracking capabilities, and more. Now, developers can build Lenses using GPS, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), compass heading, and custom locations, allowing them to access geo-location data and create things like AR walking courses. The update is primarily aimed at improving location-based experiences on Spectacles. Snap showcased a few examples that utilize the new capabilities, such as NavigatAR from Utopia Labs, which directs users with Snap Map Tiles by displaying glowing arrows to assist wearers in reaching their destinations. Other new platform features for Spectacles include the aforementioned hand-tracking capabilities, which detect grab gestures and when a user has a phone in their hands. Snap also now lets developers easily add a leaderboard to their Lenses for competition-focused experiences. Additionally, there’s a new AR keyboard. Image Credits:Snap Spectacles are currently accessible only through Snap’s developer program, which costs $99 per month. However, Snap recently introduced a 50% discount for educators and students, indicating that its long-term goal is to bring AR experiences to the masses while also helping it compete with tech giants like Apple, Google, and Meta. Alongside today’s announcement, Snap unveiled a series of challenges that will award $20,000 to Spectacles-owning developers who create the top 10 best Lenses each month. Called the “Spectacles Community Challenges,” the series begins April 1.

OpenAI will soon begin testing a way for business customers to connect apps like Slack and Google Drive to ChatGPT. OpenAI plans to start beta testing a new feature called ChatGPT Connectors, according to a document viewed by TechCrunch. ChatGPT Connectors will allow ChatGPT Team subscribers to link workspace Google Drive and Slack accounts to ChatGPT so the chatbot can answer questions informed by files, presentations, spreadsheets, and Slack conversations across those accounts. OpenAI plans to expand ChatGPT Connectors to other platforms, like Microsoft SharePoint and Box, in the future, according to the document. “This will allow employees using ChatGPT to easily make use of internal information similar to how they can use world knowledge via web search,” reads the document. ChatGPT Connectors is OpenAI’s latest attempt to make ChatGPT an indispensable part of businesses’ software toolkits. While some companies have expressed reservations about allowing ChatGPT to access sensitive business info, others have embraced the tech with open arms. ChatGPT Connectors could convince wary company executives to change their position — and present a formidable challenge to AI-powered enterprise search platforms like Glean. ChatGPT Connectors, which is launching in beta for select ChatGPT Team users, is powered by a version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o model that can refine its responses based on “internal [company] knowledge,” according to the document. All users in a participating ChatGPT Team workspace gain access to the model via OpenAI’s ChatGPT apps. The custom GPT-4o model searches and “reads” internal information possibly relevant to a query. To create a search index, OpenAI syncs an encrypted copy of company files and conversations on ChatGPT’s servers, per the document. “Additional related information which [sic] the model did not directly make use of is accessible by clicking on the sources button at the bottom of each response,” the document reads. “When appropriate, the model will directly respond with a list of relevant results.” Perhaps to assure customers that ChatGPT won’t leak their private data, the document highlights that Slack and Google Drive permissions are “fully respected” and “kept continuously up to date.” For example, ChatGPT Connector syncs Slack private channel memberships and Drive file permissions as well as directory information. Employees won’t be able to discover content via ChatGPT that they can’t access in Google Drive or Slack, according to the OpenAI document, and admins will have the ability to choose which Slack channels and Google Drive files are synced. As a slight downside, employees might get “substantially different” responses to the same ChatGPT prompts, OpenAI said in the document. There are technical limits to what ChatGPT Connector can access, as well. Images in Google Drive files (e.g. Google Docs, Google Slides, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and plain text) aren’t supported, according to the document, which noted that ChatGPT Connector can only “read” — not analyze — data in Sheets and Excel workbooks. ChatGPT Connector can’t retrieve Slack DMs or group messages, and it’ll ignore messages from Slack bots. Companies that wish to participate in the ChatGPT Connector beta are being asked to provide OpenAI with 100 documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and/or Slack channel conversations. The company said in the document it won’t directly train on the information, but may use them “as input to synthetic data generation” that might be used in its training. “No data synced from Google Drive or Slack will be used for training,” the document reads. OpenAI didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.