Suno, the AI music startup being sued by the big three major labels, the RIAA, and even some indie acts for illegally training its model on copyrighted material, just raised $250 million (which might help pay its legal bills). What caught my eye in the Wall Street Journal article about the funding round and the […]
The details are fuzzy, but I think my husband and I downloaded the YouTube Kids app to our TV sometime in 2022, when between one and three members of the household came down with the flu at the same time. Like countless parents of toddlers before us, we needed something, anything, that would buy us […]
After one of the biggest telecom hacks in US history, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved to enforce strict standards on carriers’ cybersecurity measures. On Thursday, the agency is set to vote to roll back those requirements, arguing they were an unnecessary overstep of its authority. The China-linked Salt Typhoon hack revealed last year impacted […]
It’s finally happening. Three years after Matter launched, the interoperability standard now includes the most popular smart home devices: cameras. The Matter 1.5 spec, announced today, adds support for all types of video cameras – from indoor and outdoor, wired and battery-powered cameras, to video doorbells, baby monitors, pet cams, and more. Matter support should […]
Google has announced it’s testing a new AI-powered search tool, Scholar Labs, that’s designed to answer detailed research questions. But its demonstration highlighted a bigger question about finding “good” science studies. How much will scientists trust a tool that forgoes typical ways of gauging a study’s popularity with the scientific establishment in favor of reading […]
Tech critics’ least favorite law is under siege again, this time with a focus on its recommendation algorithms. On Wednesday Sens. John Curtis (R-UT) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) introduced the Algorithm Accountability Act, which amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make platforms responsible for preventing their recommendation systems from causing certain foreseeable […]
A college student recently told me about the latest tech designed to help students cheat – and it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was an actual, physical gadget marketed in YouTube ads as the workaround to physical, hardcopy tests, which are back in vogue now as AI tears through higher education like a tornado. (One example is […]
I was starting to doubt it would ever happen, but I finally found a regular, helpful use for AI: vanlife travel planner. I’m not a student and I don’t code. I am, however, on day 48 of my van tour through Europe with my wife and dog. We travel without a specific itinerary, chasing the […]
Epic Games is teaming up with arguably its biggest game development rival, Unity, to bring games made using Unity’s engine into Fortnite. The change will mean that Unity games could sit alongside Epic’s own suite of experiences as well as those created by third-party developers using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite — and it opens […]
Cloudflare has become the latest web infrastructure giant to collapse in the span of a month, replacing entire sites, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even the outage-tracking DownDetector, with an error message for hours this morning. It’s the latest in a string of outages that Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of the internet performance […]