Apple has announced the changes it’s making to the iOS App Store in Japan in order to comply with recent legislation in the country. It will allow third-party app stores and payment processing options, though is introducing new commission fees for those transactions. Developers in Japan will now be able to distribute apps on alternative […]
The Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman’s appointment as the head of NASA on Wednesday, a decision that comes just months after President Donald Trump pulled his nomination before picking him yet again in November, as reported earlier by CNBC. Isaacman, the founder and CEO of a payments platform called Shift4, has flown to space twice through […]
A defiant Brendan Carr testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday in his first public appearance before lawmakers since threatening broadcasters who aired comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Over the course of nearly three hours, the Federal Communications Commission chairman ping-ponged between heated exchanges with Democrats and largely muted questions from Republicans. But at least […]
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) fired off a letter on Tuesday to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and several major data center developers to investigate the impact they’re having on Americans’ utility bills. The move comes as rising electricity rates became an increasingly hot-button issue in the US, which […]
Sexual fetish content. How to light a match. Where to find knives in the home. These are all conversation topics that recently-recalled children’s toys – built atop AI chatbots like OpenAI’s GPT-4o – are capable of bringing up to children. On Tuesday, U.S. senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to […]
Tesla and other automakers working on Level 2 and higher driving systems would be required to restrict their vehicles to specific road types or clearly defined operational domains under a new bill introduced today by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey (D). Operational design domains, or ODDs, are a set of conditions, either geographic or weather-related, in […]
Wikipedia will be 25 years old in January. During that time, the encyclopedia has gone from a punchline about the unreliability of online information to the factual foundation of the web. The project’s status as a trusted source of facts has made it a target of authoritarian governments and powerful individuals, who are attempting to […]
2025 could have been a pretty disastrous year for Google. The company came in knowing it had three major legal battles to fight, increasing competition in the burgeoning AI market, and a new US president to adapt to. It looked possible – perhaps likely – that the company might be broken up and forced to […]
The year 2025 has been, to put it mildly, eventful. If you’re like me, you’ve felt as if it’s pretty much impossible to keep up with things; every day brings something new, much of it baffling or enraging. But that’s not the case for everything — and so, as with past years, we’re using this […]
Elon Musk, a billionaire who decimated the United States federal workforce using the Department of Government Efficiency, is not remembered fondly by the most powerful woman in Washington: Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and the gatekeeper to President Donald Trump. In several on-the-record interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple conducted over the past […]